"All Souls Rising," The Writer's Cut



Copyright Madison Smartt Bell

40

Continued ...


      The brand cracked across his shoulders. Arnaud ducked, came up again, once more he called her name. Her hair had burnt down almost to the scalp. She hissed and thrust the burning stake at him; he caught it firmly between his two bare palms and closed his grip. The shock of the pain slammed all the way into his shoulders, but he did not let go. Now he felt the very thing that she was feeling, and he saw, when he looked in her eyes, that she acknowledged this.
      Together they rolled down the steps, and as they did so, much of the fire about her was extinguished. With his blistered palms, Arnaud beat the flames down in the blackened stubble of her hair. When he was done, he saw that she had fainted. He picked her up and carried her back to the harbor, where a few boats were still plying, picking up the last survivors. The town was all in flames around them as they went, and by some freak, no one troubled or hindered them all of their way.

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      The doctor tried to secure a dampened cloth across the nose and mouth of the child, to protect him from the smoke and ash, but the contact troubled him and made him cry. Without it he was quiet, so the doctor gave it up. They began walking, generally in the direction of the Place d'Armes, although many detours were required because of the fires. A great number of bodies were scattered about-- soldiers and sailors and civilians, women and children mixed with them indiscriminately, some mauled and mutilated, others just dead. Many of the black invaders had also been killed. In one block they traversed, the corpses had been dragged out of the middle of the street and neatly arranged along the house walls, so that the doctor was moved to wonder what agent had accomplished this work and with what purpose.
      How exotic was this impulse to bring order into hell's worst chaos! As the doctor was contemplating this phenomenon, two gangs of hostile blacks appeared at opposite ends of the street they were traveling. As it happened, they were just by an alleyway that would have let them directly into Crozac's stableyard, but unfortunately this passage was sealed by walls of flame.
      The doctor returned the child to Claire and produced one of his pistols. Two men were rushing up in advance of the first group and one had painted designs on his face and chest with gouts of human blood. The doctor fired and brought him down and felled another with the second pistol, but Claire was not yet ready with the first; he had passed them both to her too quickly, and she was busy with the child. The blacks did not seem greatly dismayed in any case. There were so many corpses strewn over these streets that a couple more did not much matter.
      He aimed the rifle and pulled the trigger, but there was not even so much as a click; he had forgotten to reload it after it had accidently gone off in front of the Cigny house. The blacks on either side no longer seemed to hesitate. The doctor thought that maybe there was nothing for him to hope for at Crozac's-- the whole place might already be destroyed. Certainly the tavern where he'd once resided was already rising in a crackling cone of flame. But as they were without alternatives, he gathered Claire in the crook of his arm and rushed her into the burning alley.
      Through the fire's roaring came a hoarse scream that might have been either hers or his own; he could not tell. The carpet of coals they walked across was searing through his boot soles-- he could well imagine what it must be doing to the fragile shoes she wore. He felt himself coughing but could not hear the sound of it. The flames leaping in their faces refined themselves yellow to blue, next to a crystalline, piercing white, finally a single colorless blade of heat.
      Then they were through, stumbling into the stableyard. Tullius was running from stall to stall opening all the doors; the fire had already caught the stable roof though it had not yet burned through. The horses and mules all came out in a screaming terror. Tullius swung himself up onto a black stallion and reached to draw Marie-Fon up behind him. The fire flickered on the naked skins of them, and over the stallion's glossy back. The doctor was uncertain if Tullius had given him some peculiar salute of his fist as he rode away, or if he had not seen him at all. With the woman behind him, Tullius rode out the opposite corner of the yard, where there seemed to be no live fire but only smoldering, another unnumbered horseman of this apocalypse.
      When the doctor pried the child's head away from Claire's bosom, he straightaway began to howl, an excellent sign he had not been seriously injured. Relieved, the doctor sat down on the ground and began reloading all the guns. At Claire's desperate shriek he jumped up with a pistol in either hand. One of the blacks had been frenzied enough to follow them through the fire after all, but before he had quite emerged from the alley, the doctor shot him through the forehead and he toppled over backward into the bed of multicolored flames.
      The child was sobbing quietly now, exhausted from his screaming. Claire opened the bodice of her gown and gave him suck to comfort him. Her head was bare now, hair all scorched and singed; she'd lost her bundle in their passage through the fire.
      The doctor reloaded his pistol and walked over to peer in the open door of Crozac's living quarters. The dead farrier lay in a scorching pool of his own blood; all around him, fire was gnawing through the floorboards.
      "Don't look," the doctor said to Claire, and all at once was racked with laughter. The idea she should be disturbed by the sight of a dead body.... Tears spurted from his eyes; his sobs were like vomiting. She remained ice-white, ice-calm before him, as if she were walking in her sleep. Or was it really vomiting? really mal de Siam, au fin? he was on his hands and knees, her hands on his shoulders, pressing to soothe him. At length he composed himself enough to stand.
      He had brought them there in hope of finding a horse, but they had all stampeded off when Tullius let them go. The doctor walked along the row of empty stalls. In the last but one, there was a mule; the stall was open like the others but for some reason the mule had been tied to the feedbox. The doctor slipped to its head and undid the lead and brought it out. Seeing the flames, the mule began to jerk its ax-shaped head and scream. It took all the doctor's remaining strength to keep control of it.
      The animal was too panicky for Claire to mount, and because the tack room was fully on fire there was no question of bridle or saddle. They left the stableyard still on foot, following in the direction Tullius had taken. The northern quarters of the town were already burnt almost to rubble, and the marauders who still frolicked among these ruins were too engaged in their own ecstasies to notice the pilgrims who crept by with their half- mad mule.
      From La Fossette a pestilent fog was boiling, cool and full of mosquitoes and of mauvais humeurs. A single light burned near Bonneau's hut, but soon the fog obscured it. The doctor was glad of this thickening of the darkness. Now the mule had calmed enough for Claire to mount, first slashing a vertical rip in her long skirt so she could straddle the animal. The doctor handed the child up to her, noticing then that her light satin shoe was burnt to a rag around her ankle. The sole of her foot was horribly blistered; he lowered his head and kissed the air above it.
      He led the mule around the lower curve of Morne du Cap and on into the jungle. Maybe he had at last become familiar with the ways and byways, or maybe it was the gruesome pain in his head that that led him onward like a beacon, but whatever the cause he seemed able to choose their direction without hesitating. They went on.
      It seemed to him that it was day again and that he was slumped over the mule's back, Claire leading it and also carrying the child, and while he tried to protest she insisted he must ride and rest. Again, some other time, another night, Claire was feeding him a paste of mashed bananas she must have foraged somewhere, but he could not swallow it and he signalled her that she must give it all to the child instead. His fever no longer abated with daylight; instead it seemed to worsen. Now he could not even keep down water. He crawled away from the trail on hands and knees, puking a black stinking bile he knew was his own rotten blood. Another time, lying on his back, he saw some sprigs of herbs he thought might help him, and he motioned Claire to pluck them and put them in his mouth to chew. The leaves could not be brewed, for out of all that fire and destruction they'd brought away no means to strike a light of their own.
      They went on, through dark to light to dark again. The doctor chewed his bitter herbs, which won him no remission. How greatly he had deluded himself with his belief he would not die of fever. The pain was extraordinary, like a nail through his skull, and he heard himself repeating the phrase aloud: Comme cloué, Comme cloué. Then, No, another voice answered, you are not nailed. Claire's hand upon his forehead was now Toussaint's, but he had to tell this darker man that he was surely dying. Then Toussaint said that he would not die yet, that there was still a use for him upon the earth. At this the doctor choked on a cry and protested that he lately killed more men than he'd had the leisure to count and that he was not a healer but a murderer. Toussaint smiled and stroked his burning brow and said that out of all this death and ruin it would still be possible for them to work a healing.
      On his fire-blistered feet the doctor staggered through mountain passes always leading the mule where Toussaint, dressed in his green coat and knotted headcloth and carrying his bag of herbs across his knees, seemed to have replaced Claire and the child. As he had sometimes done before, Toussaint quizzed him about European politics and science and asked him his interpretation of all he recently had witnessed.
      Tell me, Toussaint said. Tell me all you think of what you've seen. Let me know the reasons that you'd give for it.
      Well I don't know, the doctor said. But there must be some reason.
      Why must there? Toussaint said. Give me the reason of it. What does it mean?
      The doctor's back was to Toussaint on the mule but still he heard him well enough and felt the old man's foxy smile.
      I can't tell you. But it does mean something. It must mean something. It can't mean nothing. It cannot.
      That night he slept beside the trail full of a confidence that the world was as sensible as he'd declared it was, even if he'd never grasp the sense of it. When he woke, an hour before dawn, his fever had completely broken. At first light they continued their way. He was visited by no more hallucinations and whenever he looked back he recognized it was Claire astride the mule with the child on her lap looking about with calm alert interest at everything they passed. The distance still to go was less than he'd supposed and the sunrise was just clearing the mountains when they came into the groves of coffee above Habitation Thibodet.
      If his head still hurt the pain was comfort, now an aspect of the clarity he had regained-- he contained it rather than it surrounding him. There was order in the world spread out below him. In the camp of Toussaint's six hundred, they were just extinguishing their breakfast fires. From the quarters, the slaves came marching in a double column toward the cane, Delsart directing them and their commandeur counting cadence while the rest of them all sang cheerfully enough. The doctor looked up at Claire, who returned his smile, gazing at him dreamily. He snapped the lead rope and led the mule down past the coffee trees and through the cane fields into the yard.
      There was someone on the grand'case gallery, a total stranger, though he did not seem unfriendly. He had on a loose white shirt and long dark hair gathered loosely at the back and he was cleaning his nails with an enormous knife. He looked up at them with some considerable surprise, then turned to shout a word into the house, perhaps a name.
      What a sight they must present, indeed. The doctor felt like laughing. He took the child from Claire and set him down. A semicircular area of grass had been maintained just in front of the gallery, and now the doctor noticed that some flowers had been freshly planted round the border. He offered his hand to help Claire get down. When she had dismounted, he noticed for the first time that the mule was a dark whiskey color and that there was a blue cross over its shoulders and down its spine.
      Up the hill among the coffee trees there was still a late cock crowing, though now the sun's round was fully in the sky. The child sat crosslegged in the grass, chuckling and fingering the blades; some of them were still damp with the dew. He was too young yet to stand unsupported, though he might pull himself on the edge of a table or a chair.
      A door clapped inside the house, and in his inner ear the doctor heard the name that man had called. Elise. It was not his sister though, who first appeared, but a little girl in a blue-printed dress, running barefoot down the steps toward them. Her eyes were only for the baby, the doctor saw. She ran toward where he sat in the damp grass, waving her arms in winglike sweeps and shaking dark ringlets back from her face. But when she had come almost within reach of them she stopped and stood abashed.
      The doctor looked toward the grand'case. Now Elise had appeared on the gallery; she froze for an instant, then drew in her breath and came forward again, walking down the steps toward him. Her robe was somewhat overlong so that he couldn't see her feet, so that she seemed to float. After all, he could not absolutely meet her eyes. He looked down. The baby had scooted on his bottom, nearer to the little girl, and he was reaching both arms up to her, wanting to touch the pattern of her dress, or possibly to raise himself on her. The little girl looked up at the doctor uncertainly.
      "Yes," the doctor said. "He is your cousin. You may take his hands."


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