A Rendezvous in Haiti (12 page)

If they had meant to do her harm, they would have done it by now.

She believed that. She was still sleepy, and her head throbbed angrily, and the green morning was warm; she lay back, and hugged herself. She would not weep whatever happened.

Shortly she wept, and then drifted off.

Later she heard the swirl and gurgle of a flowing stream, and they turned off the trail, halting at a cluster of huts festooned with vines and blossoms. One of the Haitians called, “Ohé, la femme!” Already villagers had loomed in doorways. Naked children goggled or hid their faces. A stout woman emerged from one hut, folded her arms, and considered these signs and portents. She dismissed the Haitians and animals, concentrating on the two blancs. She wore a dark blue cotton tunic, and her breasts were huge.

“B'jou, maman,” said the rider, and dismounted. Creole flew past Caroline like a flock of doves; she grasped it on the wing, and understood a bit. “This woman must start the day, maman, even as you and I. Take her to the water, will you, and bring her back? We could use a meal, too. The sun is long up.”

“Slowly, slowly,” the woman said. Men emerged too, and gaped; other women, many children. A cock crowed. Caroline heard no drums; even in Port-au-Prince distant drums had pulsed; but this morning was cool and pleasant and silent, the hush so perfect that a drop of water falling on a stiff leaf echoed like a gunshot. The village stood in a long glade, and among the huts chickens pecked and jerked. The huts wore roughly conical roofs, and smoke hovered.

The stout woman advanced to the cart for a closer view of Caroline; she reached out to touch the pale cheek, and clucked.

Caroline slurred French: “Yes. Please take me to the stream.”

The woman said, “Eh! Who is this now? Was she talking about the stream?”

One of the muleteers said, “You heard, maman. She speaks white French.”

“I understood, I understood. And who are you all and why should we give you food?”

The white man said, “We'll pay. If one could get on with it, and talk later?”

“Ah, pay.”

“That's better,” a male villager said with stern dignity.

“Shut up,” the woman said. She smiled at Caroline, stretched forth a plump black hand and said, “Come with me now.”

Caroline rose carefully; her head no longer ached and none of her limbs was asleep, but she was dismayingly aware of her nightgown, purchased chez Worth, scooped low and ruffled at the neck, and cut daringly high at the hem, with an echo of the ruffle not more than four inches below the knee. Useful antidotes to fear: hunger and modesty. She clutched the gown properly to her, but disembarking from a wagon demanded exercise, even acrobatics, and she was light-headed.

For the first time, Caroline set a bare foot on Haitian soil. The ground was damp: a recent shower.

She shot a dark glance at the sombrero'd man: he was expressionless, emotionless, his eyes like blue crystal: he might have been blind. Again dread plucked at her, twanged. She descended, and took refuge with the stout, very black Haitian woman.

The woman's hair was short and woolly, her face fat and round, her small black eyes unreadable.

“Please,” Caroline whispered, “take me to the water,” and then she found herself, colonel's daughter or no, fighting tears, and tugging at her nightgown to wipe her running nose on a ruffle. She flinched when the woman raised a hand.

“Hey, hey, no one will hurt you,” said the Haitian woman. “Come with me now.” And she stretched forth a plump black hand, the palm pink.

Caroline clasped the hand, and followed.

They walked downstream along the bank, and at some way from the village the woman tapped herself, saying “Yolette,” and struggled out of her tunic, standing bulky and naked while she hung it from a branch.

Caroline said, “Yolette.”

The woman said, “Vee-olette. Yolette, moins. Ou? Z'appeller?”

“Caroline.”

Yolette was pleased. “Caroline.” She then ignored the blanche. She stepped into the stream, stirred up the water to no obvious purpose, and squatted. Caroline did not understand, and then she did understand.

She had been hearing little peeps, like chicks: these were tree frogs. A lizard scurried at her feet. Yolette walked upstream, to her thighs in the rush and gurgle; she turned and beckoned. A woman: breasts, haunches, the dense black brush between her legs, the roll of her heavy buttocks. Caroline found motion if not will: she peered about, saw no one else, in a dream drew the nightgown over her head, hung it from another branch, and hastened to the stream.

Other women joined them, first peeking shyly through the shrubs, then advancing naked and stately to enter the water. Little girls too, who were fascinated by her white skin. Perhaps they had never seen a white woman before. Surely not a white woman naked. This audience flustered Caroline; her hands covered her floating breasts, and she peered again into the forest for lurking men. The stream swirled and splashed; she rubbed herself with gritty sand from the bed, took a full breath, ducked her head, scrubbed her face with both hands and cleaned her teeth with a finger until one of the women handed her a split twig and demonstrated. Some of these women were flat-chested; it seemed a contradiction; but why, after all? Perhaps she was full of odd notions. They all carried little leather bags on thongs about the neck. She wondered what gods they worshipped.

Yolette was evidently struck by the absence of hair in Caroline's armpits. Caroline made snipping motions with two fingers and said, “Couper, pour …” but stopped right there. Pour … quoi? The manners and morals of modern youth: French, piano, watercolors, and couper pour … The women were laughing. Couper! Caroline too laughed, but the laughter caught in her throat and vanished in the horrible taste of dread. What was she being prepared for?

But among the women, in the early sunlight, the water clean and cool and her body too, she believed she might survive. When she flowed naked onto the bank, she even felt beautiful.

But once on the bank she was embarrassed and angry; she took refuge amid the women, dried herself on her ruffles and grew calmer when the girls giggled: they seemed obsessed by her white breasts and pink nipples. She slipped into the nightgown. Yolette, no longer a stranger, patted her own grand belly with groans of sad deprecation, like any matron gone to flesh. Caroline sympathized: “I am young and lucky.”

“So you are,” said Yolette, “as I was once. Time passes and the men make pigs of us, with their clairin and their bamboo. But that is life.”

Caroline wondered what bamboo had to do with this, but only asked, “Have you many children?”

“Nine,” said Yolette. “Six of them dead.”

In a clearing among the huts a cooking fire smoked. Caroline was permitted to eat fried plantain from a wooden plate with her fingers: it was manna. She took her turn at a stone jug, and sputtered and choked as it seared her belly. Women tittered, men crowed: “A little tot of rum to start the day,” Yolette said.

The men of the village were fascinated; they cocked their heads, murmured, laughed easily. Caroline's captors stood apart and did not laugh. She wanted to ask the blanc why she was here, but his eyes were empty and roamed beyond her. The two Haitians wore long knives; the blanc a pistol and a knife. She remembered a rifle in a scabbard at his saddle. Afoot he seemed smaller and less powerful. Bobby was taller and stronger. Bobby would hear; Bobby would come.

She asked Yolette: “Why have they brought me here?”

Yolette was amazed. “The blanc is not your man?”

Once the blanc looked directly at her, and she turned away, chilled to the heart. The two Haitians inspected her and made little jokes. The blanc contemplated them as if he planned to make them vanish: they subsided and seemed to shrink. One was too tall and the other too short. The taller wore dirty white cotton trousers and a white dress shirt with no collar and buttoned cuffs, as if he feared the sun; and he wore a gold ring, set with a sparkling gem; but he wore no hat. The shorter wore blue cotton trousers, no shirt, only the little leather bag like a pendant, and a grimy tan felt hat with the brim down. She saw now that their knives were not knives but machetes.

When the time came to leave, Caroline despaired; a sob gathered, and she fought it back. She stood before the blanc and said, “Who are you?”

“What difference would that make?”

“Then
what
are you?”

“Ah,” he said, and after a moment, “just a soldier.”

The taller Haitian stroked her cheek, considered the texture of her, said “Ha,” and stepped away. The blanc spoke one word. The tall Haitian spat. He sniggered, muttered to the little one, and walked a few steps so that he could swagger.

They were hotter now in the risen sun, and the day's aromas were rich: human sweat, the mule, woodsmoke, dung.

“I want men's clothes,” she said.

After a time the blanc shrugged. “Maman!” Yolette came to them, and he explained; Yolette approved, and bustled away. On one of the doorposts Caroline saw a crucifix: a fat metallic snake was twined about a wooden cross. The clothes were found: long blue trousers and a blue slipover shirt with loose sleeves to the elbow. They were clean; they smelled fresh. Caroline stepped behind the wagon and changed quickly. Only the blanc was shod, in low boots; Caroline did not ask for footwear. Should she offer the nightgown to maman? No.

When he saw her dressed the blanc said, “Good. We may have to leave the cart, and put you on the mule. Can you ride?”

“Oh yes, I can ride,” Caroline said, “astride; and I can take a five-foot jump.”

“It will be a rare sight,” he said. “The mule can't.”

She looked for the man behind the flat blind blue eyes, but found no one.

Time moves slower through a thick cold medium like fear; by nightfall Caroline had been a month on the trail. The blanc never spoke; the Haitians glanced hungrily or with contempt—why?—at their huddled captive. They passed villages, and children lined the path in naked ranks, wide-eyed and silent, then giggling and joking. Their elders joined them. The cart groaned along: Caroline said “B'jou” to the Haitians and scattered answers comforted her. The villagers were of many shades, and she recalled Father Scarron: one hundred and twenty-eight, he had joked. She prayed aloud, as if in conversation: “Ah God: help me. Tell me where I am and why.” She begged the blanc: “Will you please tell me why?”

He made no answer, only rode along behind her like a zombie: no smile and no frown, no chat, never spat or blew his nose. He rode down a narrow side trail once. She waited in rising fear, and he returned in two or three minutes.

Another village, more Haitians. Long headed, round headed, great flashing mouthfuls of teeth and also toothless elders. Some noses round and some sharp, and in one clearing a mustachioed man with his trousers stuffed into boots, a Spanish look about him, a horseman. She could not be more than twenty or twenty-five miles from Port-au-Prince with its ministries and markets and docks; she might have been in the heart of Africa, or South America. Once they heard the buzz of an aircraft, like the whining drone of an angry dragonfly; the blanc spoke, the wagon trundled off the trail, and they paused in welcome shade until the hum faded and vanished.

Caroline was allowed some minutes' privacy in the evening, and when she woke beneath the stars and peered over the side of the cart, the blanc nodded briefly, sitting with his back to a tree, his sombrero on the ground beside him. She asked quietly, “You never sleep?”

And again he made no answer.

The villages were not all alike. She saw clusters of shacks in lowland clearings, near fields of scraggly parched greens. She saw huts all but hidden in rain forest and foliage. Again at sunrise she was permitted to join the women—in the same stream? another? A woman shouted toward the bank, and several made angry faces; bushes trembled, and the women scoffed. A watcher: this outlandish white animal: what man would not peep? Would Bobby peep? Perhaps, and then turn away ashamed, a solemn lusty gentleman and hypocrite. Oh God, Bobby! She contracted in pain.

Caroline ate plantain, beans, sweet gourd, dried goat. She drank fresh water and fresh rum, and hid her grief—fears, rising tears. Later that morning she and her captors halted before a grave. It was marked by a great flat rock, as if to forestall any sudden resurrection, and there were two crosses: one painted white on the rock and one of wood planted in the earth. On the rock were small wooden plates of rice and greens, with small yellow-and-black birds fluttering among them; and a cup, empty. A tumbled flowery vine embellished the grave. “Petraea,” she murmured.

“Liane Saint-Jean, they call it.” It was the blanc; she gasped.

“How odd,” she managed. “Peter becomes John. Why the food and drink?”

“For the dead,” he said. “In time it is all eaten, so they set out more.”

“Please,” she said. “What do you want with me?”

A hummingbird hovered and darted. Sunlight snaked through branches and dappled the grave.

That day the two Haitians pricked out their clothing and hair with bits of red cloth and thread. So they were Cacos. And the blanc? Were there white Cacos?

She asked him. “Are you a Caco?”

“Oh yes,” he said. His voice was American, not British; northern; she remembered hard
r
's.

They were traveling just below a ridge, so the sun set too soon but the light lingered. The evening cooled quickly and the men cheered up; the Haitians shared a canteen, and fumes of clairin wafted back to Caroline. The canteen cover was olive drab. By now she was facing the Caco blanc and traveling backward, talking at him over the tailgate. “It's inhuman not to tell me.” She wondered: he might be silent not merely by custom or malevolence but because the game amused him. So she played. “Are you afraid I'll kill myself? How? What do you suppose they're saying in Port-au-Prince?” He had uttered few words, but each was a plus: when he did speak she was a woman and not a piece of merchandise. Baggage. Bobby had called her a scheming baggage, and had kissed her soundly.