Master of the Crossroads (7 page)

The horse shied and bucked from the shot and the mulatto fell, but rose immediately, cursing but unhurt. Guiaou tore out his
coutelas,
but was undecided whether to attack the enemy before him or the man beside him who’d spoiled his shot and now seemed to be whispering in his ear.

“Leave this one—then we will kill them
all.
”

Guiaou was running again, following the other across the cotton—they were the last ones now in the retreat. A pistol ball hummed past him, not too near. Guiaou turned and did a mocking stiff-legged dance, waving his arms and sneering. Another of the mounted mulattoes was coming to ride him down, but at the last possible moment Guiaou broke to the side, slashing his blade at the rider’s calf above his boot top. He was running again, stumbling on the stones of the river gorge, with that other man just a pace or two ahead of him, breathless but also seeming to laugh, and he could feel the presence of the other men hidden in ambush all around him, though he could not see them.

He kept scrambling up the gorge, bending forward as the terrain grew steeper. The mulatto militiamen were excellent horsemen (experienced from the
maréchaussée,
no doubt) and managed to remain in the saddle, though their pace was slowed, while the English had all been obliged to dismount and proceed more slowly still. Guiaou dodged behind a boulder at the stream’s edge and reloaded his musket, then aimed again and shot the first mulatto out of the saddle. When the man had fallen, Guiaou jumped on top of the boulder, took down his trousers and bent over to waggle his bare buttocks at the enemy. Shots flattened on the rock below his heels and the pursuers howled with outrage. Guiaou did up his trousers and made ready to run again, but when he glanced back he saw that the trap had closed: the larger party under Vaublanc was firing from both rims of the gorge and men were already jumping down to dispatch the fallen with their knives.

Guiaou charged back down the path of his retreat, dragged forward by the rounded point of his
coutelas,
which slipped sweetly between the chest ribs of a colored militiaman, then twisted harshly to shatter the bones. And so with the next, and the next, and the next. At the bottom of the gorge where the ambush had cut off all retreat was an abattoir—the English had mostly already been killed, and the slaves were throwing down their weapons and crying for mercy. Guiaou reached a pair of English soldiers who were fighting back to back, quite skillfully, with their bayonets. His opponent was out of range of the
coutelas
but Guiaou paused a moment to judge the timing of the bayonet thrust, then swept his musket butt in an uppercut that stunned the Englishman. He pounced cat-like on the fallen soldier and opened his throat with the
coutelas
as one might let blood from a hog, then immediately turned the corpse face down and tore off the red coat before the blood could spoil it.

He stood up, panting, holding the coat by the shoulders. Everyone near him was dead or surrendered or of his own party. The stranger who had knocked down his gun barrel stood by watching him curiously.

“It looks that you don’t like the colored men,” he said.

“Sa,”
Guiaou said. “I don’t like them.” He looked at the other, a small, wiry man with springy clumps of muscle bunched under his velvety skin. “What is your name?”

“I am called Couachy—and you?”

Guiaou folded the coat under one arm and reached out to embrace Couachy—they were each a little sticky from the blood of their enemies, so their skins separated with a slight tacky feel.

“M rélé Guiaou,”
he said.

Before the end of that day they had reached Petite Rivière again, but they passed on without going into the village, marched an hour after darkness, and camped in the hills. Forty of the slaves who’d been armed by the English marched in the midst of their body, prisoners now. In the night some few of these slipped away and no one interfered with their escape, but on the next morning Moyse spoke to the ones who remained and said that if they would join the army of Toussaint they would be soldiers and free. A man named Jacquot, who seemed to be a leader among them, asked for what white nation or white general they would be fighting for then, and Moyse answered, for none; they would be fighting for their freedom and the freedom of other black people. Jacquot asked if their guns would be given back to them, and Moyse said that they would be given weapons after they had come to the main encampment in the north.

They went on. Guiaou began the day’s march wearing the red coat he had taken from the English soldier, but Moyse rode back down the line and ordered all the men wearing such plundered coats to take them off, so they should not be shot from a distance by others who might think that they were English invaders. Guiaou was not discontent—it was hot to wear such a coat and he had more weight to carry than before: the Englishman’s boots and his musket and the pistol he had worn in his belt.

All during their return they kept to the
mornes,
avoiding any passage across the open country of the plain. They kept away from any villages or other encampments that they passed, bivouacking in the bush and eating food they carried or could forage. The distance and difficulty of this route added a day’s time to their journey, but they went in great good cheer, and during the last afternoon before they came to Ennery, hunters went out and killed wild pigs and goats. That day they reached Habitation Thibodet in time to shelter from the rain beneath their own
ajoupas,
and when the rain had stopped, many fires were built and the air was soon full of the smell of roasting meat.

Moyse and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who remained in command during the absence of Toussaint, ordered an extra ration of
tafia
for the men who had been in the fighting. Guiaou sat with Quamba and Couachy and the new man, Jacquot, drinking his share of rum and eating goat meat hot from the
boucan.
He wondered where Toussaint had gone, since he had not returned to this encampment, but the thought did not really trouble him and after he had drunk more rum he forgot about it. For the first time he looked into the pockets of the red coat, where he found a thin gold ring which would just fit over the first joint of his smallest finger, and some folded papers with writing on them which he threw onto the
boucan
fire, and a gold case on a chain which looked like a watch but which when he opened it held a picture of a white woman instead. The Englishman’s musket seemed better to him than the one he had been given when he joined Toussaint, partly because of the bayonet attached to it, so he gave the other to Jacquot, who had no weapon otherwise.

As they finished eating they began to hear drumming higher up the hill and voices of women singing in the
hûnfor.
The talk among them stopped and for a time they listened, heads lowered and their faces turned away from one another. At last there was a general movement among them, with no word. Guiaou put the chain of the picture case around his neck, and he donned the red coat and walked with the three other men up a twisting path toward the sound of drums and voices. Within the torch-lit clearing the
hûngan
named Joaquim was now calling,
Attibon Legba . . . vini nou . . .
and the
hounsis,
swaying in a line before the drums, sang in response. Attibon Legba, come to us.

The
hûngan
Joaquim stood near a sword driven into the ground, shaking the
asson
to the beat of the deepest drum. With each snap of his wrist the bead chains rattled on the gourd, and Guiaou felt a shadow pass him, swooping, stooping like the small hawks of the mountains. The scream, wild and desperately inhuman, thrilled him with fear and anticipation. A pace away from Guiaou, Couachy had been struck by the god.
Loa
of the crossroads, Legba, had come, to open the way from the world of spirits and dead souls to the world of living people.

Legba kanpe nan baryè,
the
hounsis
sang. Legba is standing in the gate . . .

With others, Guiaou moved to support Couachy, who had been staggered by the shock of the descent. His eyes rolled back; when they reopened, the irises were ringed clear round with white—the fixed and alien glare of the possessed. He took a limping step toward the rattling
asson,
turning around the vertex of its sound. He limped because his joints were wracked and twisted; Legba had made of the body of Couachy the figure of a stooping, grizzled old man, weighed down by a long straw sack that dragged from his shoulder almost to the ground. The singing voices surrounded him.

Attibon Legba
Ouvri baryè pou nou
Attibon Legba
Kité nou pasé . . .

Guiaou’s hands hummed from his contact with the
loa,
and he felt that the front parts of his mind were darkening. But it was Jacquot, who had also moved to support Couachy, who was taken now, he who shuddered and was transformed.

Attibon Legba
Open the gate for us
Attibon Legba
Let us pass through . . .

The gate was open. Maît’ Kalfou had risen from beneath the waters to stand in the body of Jacquot: Master of the Crossroads. Between Legba and Kalfou the crossroads stood open now, and now Guiaou could feel that opened pathway rushing up his spine—passage from the Island Below Sea inhabited by
les Morts et les Mystères.
His hips melted into the movement of the drums, and the tails of the red coat swirled around his legs like feathers of a bird. With the other dancers he closed the small, tight circle around Legba and Kalfou, who faced each other as in a mirror: the shining surface of the waters, which divides the living from the dead. Kalfou’s bare muscled arms had raised in the form of the cross, and his head was lowered like a bull’s before a charge. He danced as though he swung suspended from ropes fastened to the dark night sky. The drums quickened and the
hounsis
sang.

Kalfou sé Kalfou ou yé
Kalfou ouvri rout la
pou moin pasé . . .

Guiaou circulated among the dancers, losing his companions, until he stood before the dancing line of
hounsis,
watching the woman he had watched before, Merbillay, who had served him coffee. He could feel the nearness of his own spirit, the
loa
who was the master of his head. The front of his mind grew more and more dark, and a heavy wing seemed to pass before his eyes with a strong beating movement. With one beat he might find himself looking at some tableau from his past (such as that moment when he stood fixed at the desert crossroads, before he found Toussaint, not knowing which road he must take to pass it), and with the next he would again see what was actually before him.

Kalfou, you are Kalfou indeed
Kalfou, open the road
that I may pass . . .

Behind the
hounsis
were the
petite
and
seconde
Rada drums and between them the big-bellied
maman tambour,
whose player struck it with small mallets, his face fixed and sweat-gleaming. Guiaou saw the flashing of the mallets, a pulse behind his eyes, and the drumming was a pulse in two places where his skull was joined to his neck: Marassa, the divine twins dividing in him, tearing the personal self who was Guiaou from the other that belonged to his
maît’têt,
the
loa
Agwé. The tearing sensation was both painful and pleasant, as a snake might feel ripping out of its skin, but at the same time he wanted to remain in his own senses and to look at Merbillay.

Guiaou was fixed on the crossroads once more, looking down one road and the other, setting his foot forward upon neither. He felt Merbillay’s awareness, though she did not look at him. The circle of dancers around Legba and Kalfou blew toward the line of
hounsis
like a hurricane blowing in on a coast. Away from the other women, Merbillay was drawn into its eye, her left arm lifting by the wrist toward Kalfou’s outstretched arms. The left hand hung like a chicken claw, slack and will-less, and a flash of alarm passed though Guiaou’s whirling head: it was hazardous to give oneself over to Maît’ Kalfou, whose intentions were twisted and unknowable. As Kalfou took the proffered wrist, a movement swelled up from the drums through the tightening circle of dancers, through Legba and Kalfou to stop upon Merbillay as if she were the tip of a whip cracking. The whiplash flung her against the ring of dancers; her eyes rolled back suddenly white in her head as she fell backward, legs kicking and arms jerking like the body of a decapitated chicken. The other
hounsis
caught her before she hit the ground, sustained her in a hammock of their arms, and Joaquim came to her and whispered in her ear and rubbed her head with a stiff urgent hand. When she stood again, her eyes were hard and glassy because she had become Ghede.

Ghede stood stiff and erect in the body of Merbillay, upright and rigid as a French
grand blanc,
rigorous even as a corpse (for he was Lord of the Dead, Ghede). Joaquim shook his gourd rattle
asson
behind the ear of Ghede, while one of the
hounsis
tore open a murderously hot pepper and placed a seed from it in the corner of Ghede’s eye. Ghede accepted the burn without flinching, without even a blink, though any mortal being would have screamed and collapsed from the pain and fire of it, and so it really was Ghede, Baron Samedi, who called now for his special
clairin,
which was so hotly spiced with pepper too that an ordinary person could not swallow it. But Ghede drank deeply of this rum, then shook off his supporters and looked about himself.

Around the
loa
there was quiet, with here and there an uneasy smile, though farther back the drums were still traveling and the
hounsis
swayed in their line, but in silence. Ghede walked with a high, rubbery goose-stepping gait, looking at one person, then another. His stone-shiny eye was caught by the glitter of the picture case around the neck of Guiaou—he snapped it open and peered at the image of the white woman, then laughed and thrust out his tongue and turned away. Stamping his feet, Ghede turned in a circle, approaching others that hesitated in his area, while Guiaou circulated in an opposite direction, the picture case still dangling open on his bare chest, until Ghede faced him once again. The
loa
reached out to try the fabric of his coat lapel between thumb and forefinger, tugged a little, and fixed Guiaou with his stone eye.