All Souls' Rising (18 page)

Their boots thumped a rhythm on the hard-packed earth of the street. It occurred to the doctor that he might
bore
Captain Maillart into surrendering his project for the night.

“Have you considered,” he began, “that all provisions of
la bienfaisance
must be reciprocal?”

Captain Maillart groaned.

“So that,” the doctor continued, “if the Negro must needs be beaten, the master must have his equivalent need to beat someone. In a world of ideal arrangements, does it not seem a curious requirement?”

“I had
thought
,” the captain said, “that love itself might cure your obsession with philosophy.”

Forgetting that he had only intended to mount a diversion, the doctor stopped short and caught the captain’s sleeve. “Listen,” he said. “If you think of love, then think of this.” He was a head shorter than Maillart, who had to look down to meet his eyes. In his head rang a phrase of Monsieur Panon’s:
Je n’assimile le nègre ni au singe, ni à l’homme Européen
…

“If a man should copulate with a sheep or a duck,” the doctor said, “their union will be barren. So for all creatures—there is only fertility within their kind.”

“Yes, of course,” Maillart said, his eyes glazing over.

“Then if a white man and a black woman come together,” the doctor said, “what will you call their offspring? Is it something else or is it human?”

Restlessly the captain cleared his throat. “You didn’t ask that at the meeting?”

“If I had asked it,” the doctor said, dropping his eyes, “I believe the commotion would have awakened even you, my friend.”

Maillart nodded. “I see I mustn’t keep you,” he said. “It’s late and tomorrow you will have a long ride. Will I walk you to your lodgings?”

“No,” the doctor said. “I won’t take you so far out of your way.”

The captain took his hand. “Have a care, Antoine,” he said. “The road is uncertain, but no more than these streets. You can’t be frank with everyone you speak to.”

“I understand you,” the doctor said. He pressed the captain’s hand and let him go. But at the end of the block Maillart turned again and shouted cheerfully, “
Agrave; la rencontre, Antoine!
” At that, the doctor smiled as he went on his way.

In Nanon’s rooms the candles had burned low, grown fringes of lacy wax on their leeward sides. She rose a little sleepily to let him in. “They kept you long,” she said, in tones of sympathy for his inconvenience. She gave him wine and as he sipped she stood behind his chair, kneading his neck and shoulders with her slim strong fingers. Leaning back, he rested his head against her, feeling the warmth of her skin on his bald spot, through the silk. The robe opened to him and he put his hand inside, then followed with his lips and tongue.

Often she would lead him as an expert dancer leads without appearing to, creating subtle vacancies which suggest a step. So she’d encouraged tastes in him which now seemed to be his own, although before he’d never been aware of them. Tonight the hunger seemed more hers. She sucked his tongue half out of his head, wrapped herself around him like an anaconda. His conscience, consciousness, swirled out of him into the vortex. He passed out. Deep in the night she roused him again with a wild voracity. In the velvet dark he could not see her at all and she was silent as a succubus. The choral voice of the insects gave the music to their movement. Again he dropped out of his mind into a trancelike sleep. Near dawn they woke as if by mutual inspiration and coupled a third time.

Afterward she slept or seemed to, but the doctor could not, though he was drained and hollow as a gnawed-out melon rind. Hands behind his head on the pillow, he watched the rapid spread of light through the latticed windows onto the walls. In its cage the monkey turned and grumbled. He got up, staggering with a sudden dizziness, and fed it fruit from the bowl. Having washed himself carefully he took the pitcher to replenish it from the courtyard well, a parting courtesy. He would not wake her before he left. She lay on her back with the rug tight against the bottom of her chin, so perfectly still that an impulse led him to pass a finger under her nostrils to ensure that she still breathed. In this gentle sleep she looked childlike and unknowing. A whisper of an exhalation crossed his knuckle and he withdrew his hand. Already he could feel the suction that attached him to her tearing, as if he were already mounted and riding from the town. After all, it would be a relief in many ways to be free to inhabit himself completely once again.

N
ANON SLEPT TILL AFTERNOON
, then rose and bathed and dressed herself most opulently, although she did not intend to go out. A pastime, she had no other plans. A miniature Swiss clock ticked from her curio cabinet across the still room from her seat. Out from under the draped table, a scaly tail protruded, rigidly. Investigating, she discovered a large brown wharf rat, which must have eaten all of the poisoned fruit, as it was nowhere to be seen.

She threw the carcass out the back door, then walked to the well to wash her fingers. The sun was glowering down on the top of her head, and the air was still and humid. She walked gingerly back toward the house, saddle sore (as it were) from riding the doctor so hard all through the night. When she reentered she found the Sieur Maltrot standing on the carpet in the middle of her front room.

“I thought perhaps you were out,” he said, twirling his sword stick between his thumbs. “Though the door was open, as you see.”

Nanon curtsied, well across the room from him, trying to recall if he would still have a key to her front door, thinking it likely that he did. “Will you take coffee, sir?” she said as she rose from her obeisance.

“Oh, no need for such formality,” said the Sieur Maltrot, arching his brows with a contrived air of surprise. “Even if it has been, well…a longish separation.” As he spoke he crossed the room and made to embrace her.

“
Monsieur, je vous en prie
—” Nanon squeaked and twisted away, banging the point of her elbow into his ribs as she did so. Maltrot lost control of his stick and stooped to catch it with a jerk before it hit the floor. She scurried into the bedroom, dug among the flounces of her clothing on the racks. The contour of the arsenic vial felt hot and moist in her palm. She pushed it deep into the bodice of the dress she wore. From without, his voice called to her.

“Well, then, coffee—just as you like. Perhaps a taste of brandy too,
un soupçon
…”

When she brought in the coffee service he was lounging in the chair the doctor had preferred. “You’ve got new things,” he noted, glancing at the monkey’s cage, the newer mirror. “New friends as well, I may infer?”

Nanon seated herself in a chair on the opposite end of the room, turned her head aside and looked at him through her lashes. She knew he would have taken care to inform himself of her recent company before he ever came here. Slowly he stirred sugar into his coffee, to such a syrupy thickness that the spoon would almost stand, then topped it off with brandy from the bottle. He sipped, and set the cup aside while he indulged himself with snuff.

“Chess,” he said, sneezing and reaching with a languid finger to push over one of the men on the board. “I don’t think I approve. It brings out the intellectual faculty too strongly for a woman…not to say a woman of your type.”

She glanced at the floor where the rat’s tail had appeared. Without knowing when it had eaten the fruit she could not guess the speed of the poison’s action, but it seemed that the rat had died on the very spot where it had eaten, with no time to get away. Maltrot was upon her so quickly she could scarcely rise. This time he was prepared for her twist from him, and caught her under the arms so that she couldn’t reach him, drawing himself tight against her back-side. She dropped her head and he pressed his mouth on the exposed curve of her neck, then bit her painfully.

“
Laisse-moi tranquille
,” she said in a smothered shout. “
Je suis enceinte
.”

“Oh indeed?” Keeping his grip with one hand, Maltrot gathered her brocade skirt with the other and raised it high, to the bottoms of her breasts. He rotated her toward the mirror, so as to examine her reflected belly, whose curve to the puff of hair at its base seemed no greater than before.

“It doesn’t show,” he said. “But what fortunate man can claim the honor? Or do you know?” His regard was dispassionate, as if he were considering her for purchase. He dropped her skirt and let her go.

She moved off from him, adjusting herself. “You’ve torn my dress,” she sulked.

“Have I now?” The Sieur Maltrot raged into her bedroom, his sword stick suddenly bare in his hand. She followed only as far as the doorway, saw him slashing at her clothesrack with the point of the blade. “I paid for that one,” he hissed. “That one too.” He gored some gathers of blue fabric; the dress slipped to the floor.

She withdrew to the front room, knowing that if she showed no concern he would stop before he did much damage. In fact, it was only a moment before he rejoined her, taking her arm and twisting it experimentally, watching her face attentively as he did it. Her pain was something she could now deny him. The burn and blade scars scattered where they would not show had taught her that. She went numb, her skin chilled even to herself. “Do what you want,” she muttered, thinking of him stiff between her legs, dead uneven rat teeth pressed into the sheet from his petrified half-open jaw. Maltrot raised her arm and let it drop; the limb fell slack and rubbery against her side.

“You have become too subtle,” he said. “You’ve learned to frustrate better than you please.” He walked away from her and she sat down in the nearest chair.

“No, I don’t want you,” he said, and grinned. “But perhaps your child will be a daughter…
that
might interest me, in time.”

Nanon didn’t bother to turn her face from him. If he was left with only words to injure her, he would soon go. But not immediately. He hovered by the monkey’s cage, then reached to open it. She didn’t see exactly how it happened, but in a flash the monkey climbed his arm and as he pulled back it sank its teeth into his thumb. Maltrot cried out, a shrillness of real fear, but the monkey had wrapped its tail so cunningly around his forearm that no amount of flailing would shake it loose. He brought his hands together and there was a muted snapping sound. The monkey dropped to the floor, neck broken.

Maltrot gasped. Blood was bubbling up from his thumb. When she made no move to help him, he wrapped the wound in his snuff-stained handkerchief and cradled it against his waistcoat. He had paled and was visibly trembling; it was fortunate, she realized, that he did not find his own pain especially erotic.

“My apologies,” he eventually said. “I’ll buy another, if you desire it—dirty creature.” He kicked at the monkey’s corpse with the toe of his gold-buckled shoe. Nanon said nothing. Maltrot folded his fingers over the hurt thumb and bloody handkerchief, picked up the sword stick with his unhurt hand, and flung out, leaving the door ajar.

Through the crack, she watched him down the street. Had he been found dead in her rooms here, she would more than likely have been burned alive in the Place de Clugny, which thought had deterred her from poisoning his cup. As for the monkey, she did not much regret it. It was half-wild still, and troublesome; another man would not like it. She did not really expect that she would ever see the doctor again.

Chapter Ten

“
D
OMINE, NON SUM DIGNUS
,” Père Bonne-chance intoned, kneeling before the altar of his church—no more, actually, than a bench of board which supported two planks nailed together for a cross. The cross was wrongly proportioned, closer to equilateral than it ought to have been, like a Maltese cross. Père Bonne-chance was an extraordinarily poor carpenter, though there was no reason to include this defect in his act of contrition, he did not think…

“
Seigneur, je n’suis pas digne
,” he muttered, and then in a somewhat clearer voice, “I am addicted to rum, and concupiscence. Cigars too. I am slothful as a hog.” He thought for a moment. “And not much cleaner. I am nothing but a little fat man after all. Gluttonous and malodorous to boot, O Lord, I am not worthy…My will is weak. Each day I break my vows to the Church, O Lord, and daily I affirm my faith in You.”

He fingered the rosary which depended from his belt, and which he used less to remember prayers than to enumerate his failings. “Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us.”

He stood up and turned to face the congregation, although as usual the tiny church was empty. The walls, made of split palmiste, were bare too, except for a random ornamentation of dirt-dauber nests molded from the pale natural clay. Through the palmiste walls came long irregular slices of the outdoor sunlight. Above, mice scrambled in the palm thatch, and a frond detached, sailing wing-like to the bare earth floor. But for its single Christian symbol, this room was no different from the
ajoupa
where Père Bonne-chance lived, beside it.

It was the norm for him to have no other celebrants at his service. Sometimes the outlying planters would send a string of
bossales
for baptism, those who did not care to let them go as far as Abbé Osmond’s church in the town of Ouanaminthe. The white families on the three plantations nearest by might sometimes appear at Sunday’s Mass, though not on major feast days, when they like others would go to the town. He did not know what moved them to make their rare appearances, some private spiritual quavering he could not guess, and which they did not confess to him. They all despised him because he was not chaste, and he accepted their contempt without resentment, as his due. For the most part he ministered only to the slaves of their plantations, whose motives were considerably more clear to him; he knew that they sought repeated baptisms in much the same spirit that they replaced the
macandals
and
ouangas
strung around their necks, but he saw no great harm in indulging them.

He stepped over the fallen scrap of thatch and bent his head to pass through the door, flinching a little as the gay, bright sunlight struck into his face. When he had awakened this morning he had thought as he sometimes did that perhaps he would not drink
at all
, this day. The stress of this conception was such that he already craved a drink, though usually he did not take one before noon, and often not until evening. With the desire upon him, he broke into a sweat. But then his youngest child came running up, all naked, his tawny skin shining and sweet. He smiled and raised his hands and Père Bonne-chance picked him up and kissed his face. Set down, the child scampered happily away and the priest stood admiring how miraculously well his limbs were hung together and how easily he used them, without thought.

His own sweat had an unpleasant scent of anxiety and alcohol, as he had mentioned in his prayer. The priest loosened his ceinture, thinking that he had as well go for a swim, to cleanse his body at the very least, and perhaps distract his mind. The River Massacre ran just behind the church and his
ajoupa
.

At the point where he undressed, a few trees stood, enough to give him a measure of privacy, though most of the riverbank here at the French side of the elbow was cleared. He left his Dominican habit hanging on a low limb to air and waded out into the water, knee-deep. The water was quite cold, running clear from its mountain source. If he looked down he could see his hairy toes curling to grip the gravelly silt of the bottom, a little magnified and distorted by the water. The cold spread up his spine and pained him in his back teeth. He patted the surface of the water with the flats of his meaty hair-backed hands and looked up and down the river carefully for caymans, which were not unknown here, though the temperature this far up the Massacre did not really agree with them.

He walked waist-deep into the water and suddenly flung himself forward upon it, sending up a glistening wave as he submerged for an instant. Then he bobbed back up. He swam in a splayed crawling stroke at an angle against the current of the river. When he first struck the water the cold had made his vitals shrink but with the exercise he soon became fairly comfortable. He was very buoyant because of his fat although the shape of his stomach made it awkward for him to swim belly-down. To compensate, he had developed a powerful backstroke and now he resorted to this, swimming diagonally toward the middle of the river.

The sky above was a faultless blue, curving unlimited down into the cleared western bank. On the far side, the Spanish shore, it cut off at the treetops along the sharply rising mountain range. Along these peaks the sky was flocked with cloud. The verdure on those wrinkled slopes was unbroken, bearing no visible trace of any human passage. At the farthest distance the jungle green smoked into a slate-blue haze.

Père Bonne-chance stopped swimming and floated idly on his back. His legs dragged sideways in the current, and, peering around the mounded contour of his stomach, he could see his own compound, such as it was. The voices of his children came toward him thinly as they chased each other over the hard-packed earth between the small thatched squares of the church and the
ajoupa
. The boys wore only tattered trousers, ragged to the knee, the girls hemless cotton shifts, much the same garb as the slaves on the neighboring plantations, though they were free. At the corner of the
ajoupa
was tethered a dun cow and the woman—he could not call her wife—was balanced on a one-legged stool to milk. Fontelle. Her head was bound in a tall turban of multicolored scarves, funicular, like a beehive. The priest watched as she finished the task. Balancing the milk pail on her head, she unleashed the cow and sent her away to graze with a slap on her skinny hindquarters. Fontelle had aged, bearing the numerous children of Père Bonne-chance, but she still had her height and grace of movement. Her nose was exceedingly long and had two peculiar swerves along the length of it; she was snaggle-toothed, with a weak chin. He knew most men would find her ugly—let them think so.

He rolled onto his side to inspect the river surface. A way upstream from him something lifted briefly; he couldn’t make it out entirely in the water’s reflected glare, but it seemed about the size of a cayman’s eyes and snout. He swam a little nearer his home shore, watching. Whatever it was dipped up and down in a lifelike manner, but perhaps the movement was a little too regular. When it floated nearer he saw it was only a crook of a floating branch which had deceived him.

He rolled onto his back again and relaxed into the water. With his ears submerged the shouts and whistles of the children were cut off. He might even have dozed. But suddenly a flight of doves splintered in all directions across his tranquil sky, as if something had startled them. He swung himself to the vertical and trod water, turning his bullet head to and fro. A white man on horseback was riding up toward the compound from the direction of Ouanaminthe, abreast of a slave who rode a mule. A
nègre chasseur
, the priest thought he must be, since he carried a long-barreled fowling piece crossways over his saddle.

In the still air he could hear their voices plainly, though the riders were still several hundred yards off. The white man pointed to a tree. “
Orion
,” he cried, “
Là, voila
.” The priest watched the black take his aim. The several species of
ramier
in this area were so seldom hunted they were virtually tame. At the shot, two fell, and the rest of the covey rose in nervous flight and circled the tree and lit again. A pair of white goats which had been grazing near the trail picked up their heads and moved farther off.

Orion, the
nègre chasseur
, hopped down from the mule and ran to collect the fallen birds. One was not completely killed and he wrung its neck and scurried back to remount. The children, mean-while, had bunched up like a flock of sheep. They hid behind the church in a cluster, giggling and whispering and peering around the fraying palmiste corner of the building. The men passed them, riding up to the
ajoupa
. Fontelle came out and answered some question the white man put too low for the priest to overhear. Her turban switched back and forth like a rudder as she gestured with her head.

The two men rode toward the grove of trees where Père Bonne-chance had left his garments. He saw that infallibly they must reach it before he could, though their pace was leisurely. Still, he flopped forward and swam as briskly as he might—in his labored crawl, feeling that his backstroke would be unseemly before such an audience. When it was shallow enough for him to touch his foot, he stood up and began to wade out. The strangers had pulled their mounts up near the bank and were waiting.

Naked, Père Bonne-chance came out of the river, water streaming from the hair that covered him. He was pelted front and back like an ape or a small black bear. He smiled at the visitors. The black looked away, out of discretion. From the pommel of his saddle hung a string of birds, and a thin trickle of blood stained the mule’s forequarter.

“You are prolific,” Arnaud said, gazing frankly at the crook in Père Bonne-chance’s organ of generation, “for a priest.”

“Oh sir,” said Père Bonne-chance, smiling still more brightly at his guest. “You must have come a long way to pay me such a compliment.”

Arnaud’s plump lips formed a sort of heart-shaped smile. Slowly he turned his head to examine the priest’s old Dominican robe where it swung idly from its branch. Père Bonne-chance’s skin prickled, hairs lifting on their follicles. Arnaud looked knowing, as if he could somehow discern, seeing the priest shucked bare of his costume, that it was only a disguise for Père Bonne-chance, who had stayed in the colony unlawfully after the expulsion of the Jesuit order. Though in fairness one could hardly say that he was truly a Jesuit any longer, yet certainly he had never been a Dominican either. For an instant he was frozen. But there was no real penetration in Arnaud’s look, it was only the Creole aristocrat’s reflexive sneer. Besides he was not much the sort of gentleman to interest himself in sectarian differences among monks and priests.

“Not only for that,” Arnaud said, “dear Father. Not only for that. I’m told there is a passable ford somewhere in this vicinity?”

“At Ouanaminthe, do you mean?” Père Bonne-chance said, full of false malicious innocence, for he had seen very well that Arnaud had come from the direction of the town.

“
Non, quand même
,” Arnaud snapped. “Is there not another farther up the river?”

“
Justement
,” said Père Bonne-chance, unkindly smiling still. “Past that bend there,” he stretched his arm, “and then it’s not more than a mile, perhaps three-quarters. On the Spanish shore,” he said, “you’ll see a bare cleft rock, and on our bank a tree stump,
acajou
. You must head your horses strictly on a line between these marks, because the way is narrow and the current is strong.”

Arnaud nodded and laid a finger against the broad brim of his hat as a mocking salute. He scanned Père Bonne-chance ironically from head to foot once more and without thanks or any other word spurred his horse and trotted away up the riverbank. Orion pulled the mule around to follow.

Père Bonne-chance assumed once more his musty habit. The exhilaration of his swim had rather faded from him. Watching the horse’s tail switching at flies as Arnaud receded, he half-attentively apologized to God for needling the man about the ford. This had been deliberately unpleasant of him, since he knew Arnaud must be engaged in smuggling. If he had been interested in any sort of legitimate commerce he would much more conveniently have crossed the river at Ouanaminthe to the Spanish town of Da-jabón—like any other trader.

He returned to the
ajoupa
, where Fontelle had prepared for him hot cassava and a bowl of milk fresh foaming from the cow. After he had eaten he lit a thin cigar and went out into the yard to gather such of his children who could be found and give them a lesson in the writing of French. They sat upon the earth to scratch in the dust with sticks for styluses. The priest had no books suitable for this instruction, only some volumes in Latin and a few French novels whose content was wholly inappropriate, he recognized, even for such children as his. Indeed, now that his older daughters were semiliterate he kept the French books hidden. There were some old newspapers from Le Cap and from France which he had carefully saved to read and reread during these sessions, but by now their news was very cold.

The cigar at least was excellent, having come from the Spanish side. As Père Bonne-chance savored the smoke it came to him that Arnaud must be going after guns. There was no other commodity that would require his surreptitious route, not even slaves. Regardless of whatever proclamations might obtain, anything and everything else was freely traded between Ouanaminthe and Dajabón.

The idea brought him only a heaviness, however. When the children had wandered away from the lesson he stubbed his cigar out on the ground and went into the
ajoupa
to seek his pallet there. With a dim sense of satisfaction he realized that by diversion he’d managed to elude his wish to drink.

It was late by the time he awoke, as he could see by the deepening color of the light dropping through the
ajoupa
’s open doorway. He dipped water from the pail by the door and took a sip and splashed the rest of the gourd against his face to rouse himself. With the trickles drying on his throat he stood in the door and watched the light’s shade muting on the surface of the river. As they would each evening, the doves were calling loudly all around, as if the morning’s slaughter made no difference to them. Again the sound of hooves was somewhere on the trail.