Chapter Eighteen
WHEN DAWN’S LIGHT FIRST BEGAN TO RISE, the priest was once again revealed, a pace or two ahead of the staggering Arnaud, the pale skin of his back looking speckled under its mat of bristles, his hairy buttocks jiggling with his steps. The road they were taking passed between cane fields that had been put to the torch and because of the smoke the morning light was unusually slow to penetrate. When they once could see each other plainly, the priest stopped and resumed his damp brown habit. Arnaud sat down and pulled off his riding boots. His feet were covered with watery blisters from rubbing against the wet leather, and as they walked on the blisters tore open and he saw that he was leaving dim smudges of blood on the dust with every step. He would have liked to moan or weep but before the barefoot priest he was ashamed to.
The two huts of the priest’s compound were as silent and deserted looking as they’d been when Arnaud had passed that way with his pack train the afternoon before. But when Père Bonne-chance swung open the door of his ajoupa, Arnaud saw over his shoulder that his family had returned there, the mulattress Fontelle sitting motionless on a stool and an indeterminate number of children huddled along the wall behind her, all quiet as kittens or puppies surprised in a warm den. The children looked at Arnaud speechlessly, their eyes shining. Père Bonne-chance pushed the other stool toward him and he collapsed onto it helplessly.
Arnaud was face to face with the mulatto woman, who regarded him, as crisply still as a snake. The light coming in through the cracks in the palmiste wall laid grayish stripes along her turban and her cheek. Her nose was long and crooked and her teeth were snaggly in her lantern jaw, but with his connoisseur’s eye Arnaud discerned that she was also high-breasted and slender, though full in the hips, and he recognized that the priest had a good thing in her, at least in this wise. Using his hands, he lifted one of his feet to the opposite knee, and now he finally did groan aloud, more from the revolting appearance of the blood-encrusted sores than from the pain itself, to which he’d partly become inured.
Fontelle reached out and took his ankle and raised the foot onto her lap. She looked at the sole of it critically, twisting the ankle this way and that. At her short command one of the children went out with a clay jug and returned with it full of river water. When Fontelle lifted his other foot to her knees, Arnaud was unbalanced on the stool and his head and shoulders went lolling back against the fragile wall. The woman washed his feet one after the other and packed them in a poultice of crushed aloe leaves. At her first touches a weird sensation shot through the marrow of Arnaud’s bones, first an exquisite pain and then a soporific numbness. His face turned against the slats of the wall and he gave up his consciousness.
When he awoke it was night and the room was redolent with a green soup thickened and sweetened with coconut, which Fontelle was ladling into bowls. Arnaud accepted his portion and ate it wordlessly as the others; no one spoke. He lay down on the floor and slept again. Sometime during the night he woke to find that one of the little boys had rolled against him in his sleep. Arnaud let him remain there, smelling the sour-sweet odor of his breath; the child’s arm shivered against his ribs in the nervousness of some dream. On the opposite side of the ajoupa the priest was snoring loudly. Arnaud thought of his wife by her name, Claudine, and wondered what their lives might have become if she had borne him any children. When he next came to himself it was dawn again and Fontelle was shaking him by the shoulder.
He got up with less pain than he’d expected and followed the woman out of doors. While he slept she had bundled his feet into makeshift moccasins made of rags, and his steps brought him no more than a dull discomfort through this padding. He walked behind Fontelle who walked behind the priest. The children followed them like a string of chicks or ducklings, each carrying a pack of clothes or a couple of gourds or cooking pans. Arnaud had been given a pack himself, with his riding boots tied across the top of it. When they had walked a mile or so, he asked Père Bonne-chance where they were bound, and when the priest asked if there were anywhere he wished to go, Arnaud said that he would like if possible to return to his own plantation.
Because of the children their pace was slow, and Arnaud, with his tender feet, was grateful for its languor. He watched the priest’s bare toes splaying out over the gravel of the roadbed with as much amazement as if he were watching someone walk on water. The first night they stopped in the provision ground of a plantation that had been sacked. The provisions had been looted too but not completely, and Fontelle found a stalk of good bananas and sent the children to dig dasheen. They roasted bananas in their skins over an open fire and ate without conversation and slept and in the morning they rose and went on.
The way they took led through a stand of coconut trees with the ground between them razed and burned—not to destroy them this time but only to clear the undergrowth. The priest gathered coconuts and husked them where they were and gave a pair to each child to carry. In leaving the grove they came upon a starveling milk cow trailing a lead rope and the children ran after her, but the cow bellowed and bolted and would not be caught.
They were crossing open country, dry flats never yet scored with irrigation ditches. Behind them the green tufts of the coconuts receded and in the farther distance the mountains beyond the River Massacre had gone ghostly in the distance, under the purpling clouds that crowned their heights. Ahead was more jungle, then mountains again, a lower range but steep enough. They reached the tree line before night and made a camp, where they supped on coconut milk and slices of the meat. In the plump darkness Arnaud slept uneasily, waking to pinch at mosquitoes or to listen to the low liquid calling of the siffleur montagne. Next morning he rose with the others and they continued their way.
The land was full of small roving bands of rebel slaves, and often the priest and his companions had to leave the road to avoid them. In the heat of each afternoon they rested under cover, and when the heat had abated in the evening, they came out of the jungle to walk a couple of miles more. They changed course so many times to keep away from the brigands that soon they had departed from any way familiar to Arnaud. By the third day he had lost all sense of their position in the country.
The third night they spent in a banana grove above a small stream that ran along the edge of a burned cane field. In the early morning of the twelfth day the priest went down to the stream for water and came back hurriedly, his face leaching alarm.
“What is it?” Arnaud said.
His viscera clenched and then went watery, as if he didn’t need to ask. But the priest beckoned him to the grove’s ragged edge and pressed on his shoulder so that he knelt, the priest crouching beside him. A half mile distant a dull cloud of ash had been raised on the incinerated plain by the feet of a hundred or more blacks coming their way. An indistinct mass, they moved in quick rushes broken by sudden halts; when they stopped they shouted loudly to the devils they worshiped and thrust makeshift spears into the air above their heads. A large man in their forefront swung a bull’s tail around his head, snapping it like a whip to urge them on.
“They saw me when I went to the stream,” Père Bonne-chance muttered. Arnaud watched the blacks advancing, half mesmerized by the odd rhythm of their stops and starts.
“You must go on alone,” the priest said. “If you cross this mountain you will find your own place in the plain on the far side.”
“I would not leave you,” Arnaud said, surprised to feel that what he said was true.
“Well, they have seen me,” the priest said. “We could not outrun them in the mountains with the children. Or without them for that matter, I expect…”
Arnaud hesitated. The blacks were near enough now so he could pick out individual forms among them. They were singing, chanting rather.
“What do they say?” he asked the priest, as if he would know better.
“Vod?n,” the priest said. “Never mind—I have a better vod?n of my own. No doubt I’ve baptised some of them, besides—on more than one occasion. Je saurai comment ménager tout ?a.”
Arnaud kept staring. His mouth hung slackly open; the inner membranes had gone dry.
“You must go quickly,” the priest said, without moving or raising his voice. “As you are a grand blanc they will certainly murder you, and I think it will go worse with the rest of us if they find us together.”
Arnaud stood up abruptly and followed the priest back to the blackened circle of last night’s campfire. Fontelle had already detached his boots from the bundle he’d been carrying, and one of the children was stuffing the uppers of them with bananas and some of the tubers they’d dug the night before. Arnaud pinched the boot tops closed and swung them together over his shoulder. The priest accompanied him a few paces into the jungle.
“You have only to go up that way.” Père Bonne-chance waved indiscriminately at a mass of bamboo laced together with vine. “And down the other side…”
Arnaud, all unsure of his intentions, dropped onto one knee. He took hold of the priest’s thick spade-shaped hand and began kissing the hair-matted backs of his fingers. “Father,” he said. He repeated the word. In the stiffening of his wrist he felt the priest’s embarrassment. Père Bonne-chance pulled his hand free and laid it on Arnaud’s head, but he said nothing. After a moment he touched Arnaud with both his hands, rubbing his ears as he might a hound’s. Then he broke the contact and swung away, back to where Fontelle and the children were waiting.
Arnaud began climbing but it was impossible to make much haste. His feet were healed considerably, but the unwieldy moccasin-bundles gave him no traction on the difficult slope. He zigzagged, of necessity, there was no other way. The noise of his own poor progress alarmed him and he stopped, hearing the sound of many feet splashing through the stream below.
In the place where he had halted there was a break in the jungle cover and Arnaud overlooked the grove. The priest and his family were seated on their haunches some thirty yards below, breakfasting on dasheen and fruit as if unaware of the shouts and pounding feet approaching them. The leader flung into the clearing, his bull’s tail brandished at arm’s length. Père Bonne-chance looked at him in the manner of a host receiving an invited guest.
“The Lord be with you,” the priest said. He picked up a banana and broke the peel and offered it. The leader’s hand loosened and the bull’s tail slipped slackly from it.
Arnaud began climbing again, holding his boots in one hand and clinging to bamboo and saplings to support himself with the other. He went as quietly as he could, abandoning any attempt at speed. The priest’s voice carried well in the humid air, and Arnaud heard him repeating the same phrase, each time another man reached him he supposed: Domine vobiscum, as if he were confident of a response according to the litany.
At dusk of that day Arnaud crossed the mountain’s backbone somewhere short of the peak and made it a little distance down the other side before nightfall stopped him. He groped dasheen and bananas from his boot and ate in the heavy dark. The rattle of a stream through a gorge somewhere below was a torment to him, for he had not thought to make his way to water, and now he was afraid to climb down in the dark, knowing he might fall and break a leg, if not his neck. The image of the horse he’d so wantonly destroyed on the mountain was present to his mind; in dream he saw the animal as it would look now, swollen with the death-bloat and legs stiffly projecting from its foul belly. Sometime during the night it rained a little and he could lick some moisture from the leaves. When the rain had stopped the siffleur montagne took up its mournful song again, but tonight it irritated Arnaud more than it soothed him.
The descent was slower and more arduous than the climb, though he began it early. Near noon he came unexpectedly into a clearing, a bare trodden area circling a single peeled tree trunk at its center. Painted on the stripped wood were images of two serpents entwined together and nearby on the ground there lay a broken gourd strung with cracked clay beads: a rattle abandoned by the dancers who’d been here. It occurred to Arnaud that this must be where his own slaves came for their calendas, though weeds were sprouting from the track and it seemed no one had been there for some time.
In twenty minutes more he’d cleared the jungle and could see. All the fields that had been his cane were burned to nothing. In his compound, only one hut remained standing, a row of vultures perching on the rooftree. He went down toward it. The citrus hedge had been scorched but not consumed. Arnaud plucked a shriveled orange and ate it for its juice.
His stone cane mill had been broken down by hammers, as it looked. Standing in the litter of smashed vats, Arnaud was aghast at the sheer labor this destruction must have taken. Three of the walls had been battered to rubble, and about half of the fourth was still standing, lianas working their tendrils into cracks in the mortar. His stable and the grand’case, which were built of wood, had both been burned to the ground. The only surviving building was the shed where he had kept his dog. Arnaud walked toward it with a dragging step.
The door was open—from it issued a vague putrid smell. This odor had drawn the vultures, undoubtedly. Arnaud stooped and picked up a stick of charcoal and whipped it side-arm at the three who sat on the roof, but the vultures only shifted their feet and looked back at him. He stopped at the threshold and peered in.
Vultures and insects had done most of the work. It was a skeleton that hung from the wall, clothed in rags and a few strips of rotten desiccated flesh, its bone wrists casually aloft in loose loops of cord. And yet it moved, or something moved about it. Arnaud squinted into the dim. A metallic sectioned thing with many legs came crawling out of one eyehole and crept into the other.
He was stumbling across the packed ground toward the black hole that had been his house. The thing in the shed was peculiarly addressed to him, he knew; it was a message, personal, as if someone had come in the night and nailed a crow to his front door. He fell on his all-fours and vomited into the ashes of his dwelling and stayed there with his head dizzily drooping, strings of spittle hanging from his lower lip. Something was gouging into his palm; he sat back on his heels and lifted the object to examine it. A silver fork, fire-blackened, melted and twisted into a new shape of deformity.
He stood up and flung the fork away. In the ashes a few yards away, a glint of something caught his attention, a surface reflecting a section of the sky like a still pool or a well brimful. Thirst drew him to it, but he found nothing but a mirror, the gilt frame burned away. Crouching over it, he saw a face, filthy and bloodshot and roughened with beard, unknowable to him. After a time he worked his fingers on the ground and began methodically to darken his cheeks with ash.
He took to wandering, in and out of the fringes of the jungle and the slopes that bordered the plain. At first he’d thought of going to Le Cap but he was afraid to expose himself on the wide waste open spaces that lay between him and the town. Eventually the logic drained away from the fear and it became a simple animal aversion. The ruined landscape was now so featureless to him that he did not know how to place himself within it.
His feet healed, toughened to a horny gloss. He would not wear his boots, but carried them strapped to his waist with a rag of his discarded shirt, as panniers for the food he was able to forage. He ate wild fruit, or raided abandoned provision grounds at dusk. Wild goats and wild hogs sometimes passed, but he was never able to run one down. Once he found a stand of mushrooms and ate them greedily, but they made him violently ill and sent him into delirious dreams. Whenever he came near other men he fled from them, because they were not of his own kind. He coated his body and face with mud, to guard him from the sun, and from others’ sight. At one point he began scoring the leather of his boots with sticks or stones to mark the days, but too much time had passed for him to reckon before he began the habit and, after making some thirty such scratches, he gave it over.
A day came when he’d left a jungle trail to hide himself from something he heard coming. Horsemen, twenty or more in single file. A few regular army dragoons and the rest militia, these were the first white men he’d seen. He watched them with mere curiosity from a rock above the path, until their captain’s voice broke the air.
Arnaud came scrambling down then, willy-nilly, spooking the captain’s horse so that it reared. The captain struggled to bring his mount under control, and Arnaud waited meekly as the animal shivered and snorted and rolled its eyes. He’d known this officer once by name: it was M—, M—, Maillart. Who watched him with an utter lack of comprehension.
“Do you not know me?” Arnaud croaked. Getting no answer, he crumbled some of the mud from his chest, scraping the skin to bare it further to the captain’s eye. “It is white, do you not see? I am like you.”