Ruth’s Journey Read online

  “Oh,” Solange said.

  The faint WHOOSH would be the sucarie’s Negroes fleeing through the uncut cane. “We will build anew,” Augustin said.

  Solange asked, “Do you think we can?” and rested her hand on his knee.

  Theirs. The shattered house, the burned sugar mill with its bent and broken axles, shafts, and gears—theirs. Plans excited their minds. They explored the undamaged Negro hamlet—theirs. Each worker’s reszide was protected by a bright green wall of interwoven ropy cacti—when Augustin put out a curious hand, he retracted it and sucked his finger while Solange giggled. Each reszide’s yard had been pounded hard as cement and swept. Augustin ducked to step into a dim interior. Solange coughed. Her husband’s head almost touched the smoke hole, which amused her. Tattered mats were rolled beside a large basket for collecting manioc. The kettle on the hearth had whitish foodstuff caked in the bottom. Augustin imagined himself instructing Negro children in the glories of French civilization. He anticipated their gratitude and joy. Solange picked up a well-turned porcelain bowl, but the edge was chipped so she tossed it away.

  Planter accounts had warned about gardens like the well-tended one behind this hut. Field hands would expend their energy on their gardens rather than their master’s work. Augustin announced a proprietor’s decision. “Our Negroes will complete their sugar work before this . . . frivolity!”

  Solange vaguely wondered if they’d also have a house in town.

  The sun smiled down on their life from today to forever. They—just the two of them—they could make something here. Theirs. Augustin swelled with pride. He would capture and return errant workers to the Sucarie du Jardin. Wasn’t it their home too? Wasn’t it as much their life as his? When a breeze ruffled the cane, the cane rattled. What a lovely sound!

  “The house . . .” he said. “I am glad the house is burned. It was too small. Unsatisfactory.”

  She said, “We will build a better one.”

  In the mansion’s neglected flower garden, Augustin spread his cape beside a rosebush whose husks whispered of possibilities. They would be rich. They would be good. They would be loved. They would do as they pleased. Solange opened herself to Augustin in the fine delirium of love.

  Alas, after the Negro governor-general was deported to France, fighting intensified, the countryside became unsafe, and the For­niers never again visited the sugar plantation which had embodied so many hopes. Solange’s husband no longer spoke of what he did when he was soldiering. He was promoted. He was promoted again but took no pride in it. Augustin no longer enjoyed balls or theater, and the most amiable witty conversation bored him. Captain For­nier stopped going out into society.

  With summer came the yellow fever.

  An odd theory was popular with credulous French officers: they were losing to unnatural forces. Many years ago, even before the Jacobins freed the slaves and long before Napoleon sent Leclerc to reenslave them, a voudou priest was burned in Cap-Français’s public square. Superstitious Negroes believed this particular priest could transform himself into an animal or insect and thus could not be killed. But ha, ha, monsieur: his fat bubbles like the other’s! Although the voudou priest’s ashes were scrubbed from the cobblestones, that summer saw an unusual infestation of mosquitoes and the first yellow fever epidemic.

  The fever burned. The sufferer gasped for water. Then his brain was squeezed as a strong man juices fruit. The condemned man remained clear-minded, so his dearest illusions were exposed as the lies they’d always been.

  Then surcease. Quiet. Ease. The fever departed and the head stopped throbbing. One drank cool water and lay back. A kindhearted soul washed the filthy sweat from one’s body. Many victims dared to hope.

  Some of the most devout lost their faith when the fever returned and black blood streamed from the nose and mouth and the black vomiting and the stream of filth.

  For Le Bon Dieu’s doubtless good reasons, He spared Augustin and Solange, but most of Napoleon’s expedition died faster than they could be buried. Though interred with more pomp and dignity than tens of thousands of his fellow soldiers, General Charles-­Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc was just as dead.

  The general’s wife departed on one of the last French ships to leave the small island, because one year after the French-British peace treaty was signed, it came unsigned and a British squadron blockaded the island.

  With the British came news that Napoleon had sold the Louisiana Territory to the Americans. French survivors on the small island knew Napoleon had sold them too.

  After General Rochambeau took command of the besieged French forces, a febrile gaiety descended on the capital. Abandoned by their nation and their Emperor, officers, planters, wives, and Creole mistresses frolicked at nightly balls. Though The Marriage of Figaro was just a memory, popular entertainments filled a theater whose broken roof was open to the night sky. Bats swooping through the roof beams alarmed women in the audience.

  Solange wasn’t naturally sociable, but she understood that in these circumstances to be disconnected was to die. Although she’d rather be walking the beach alone, she ignored her inclination and attended nightly balls or the theater. When Augustin no longer ­accompanied her, her faithful escort was Major Alexandre Brissot, an unusually handsome officer a year or so older than she. Since he was General Rochambeau’s nephew, Major Brissot offered protection above his rank, and though Solange might have permitted certain liberties, he never asked for them.

  Solange was a realist. Whatever Brissot might be, she was grateful for his protection. Back home, Solange’s expectations had been what was due every Escarlette: a modestly successful, mostly faithful husband with an adequate competence and respectable position. Nothing in Saint-Malo had prepared her for unburied fever victims changing shape on the street or the greasy tang that rose up in her throat. Her imaginings hadn’t included choking smoke snaking through the streets of a besieged city or a plantation they owned but daren’t visit ever. Her husband’s eyes were so strange! Her husband, the man she lay down beside!

  ———

  After twenty-eight months, six days, and twelve hours in Hell, Captain Augustin Fornier had seen and done worse than his nightmares. Augustin had spurned too many mercies and shut his ears to too many piteous pleas. His ordinary French forefinger had pulled the trigger, and his own awkward hands had adjusted the nooses.

  His own wife said, “When we defeat these rebels, they must put everything back as it was. Exactly as it was!”

  He agreed knowing nothing could be put back, nothing was as it had been.

  As his father suggested, Augustin would have made a good priest. These days, he didn’t know which of his mortal sins would damn him.

  Today’s patrol was a fool’s mission: pursuing an escaped slave, one Joli, body servant to General Rochambeau’s nephew Alexandre Brissot. This pursuit made no sense. Slaves ran away every day, dozens, hundreds, thousands of them.

  Perhaps it was the horse Joli stole. Perhaps the horse was valuable. Augustin obeyed orders. What was proper to a soldier and proper to an executioner was no longer a meaningful distinction.

  For some reason the general wanted Joli’s head. Despite the slenderness of human necks, removing the head is no easy matter. Unless the saber strikes just so, where two vertebrae meet, the blade hangs up in bone while severed arteries spout blood over one’s white pantaloons.

  Joli’s hoofprints switchbacked through abandoned coffee plantations along the mountain above the Plaine-du-Nord.

  Augustin and his sergeant rode mules. Ordinary soldiers caught their breath when they could. In far-off Saint-Malo it would be fall. Cool, agreeable fall.

  Terraces opened between rows of coffee trees far above that gentle promise, the amiable blue sea. The British squadron didn’t try to conceal themselves: three frigates (one would have sufficed) sailed lazily to and fro. A child’
s toys. What did they know, those bored English officers with glasses trained on ruined Cap-Français and Morne Jean looming over the city? How Augustin envied those officers.

  The incline became too steep for coffee growing, and the cart lane narrowed to a footpath and finally a track for the island’s huge rodents and wild boars. Augustin dismounted and led his mule. Sweat poured into his eyes. Pulling, climbing, hacking, lunging through brush that clung to them like rejected lovers, some soldiers cursed, others murmured prayers they’d learned as children. The most optimistic French soldier did not believe he’d ever see France again. Every man knew he was mort, décédé, défunt. Sometimes they sang a cheerful song about Monsieur Mort, what a good fellow he was.

  Mort oui, but not just now! Not this morning, not as long as dew clung to these un-French leaves and odd insects celebrated their insignificant lives and an ungrateful sun blistered their foreheads. Tomorrow, Monsieur Mort, we shall rendezvous. As you wish. But not today!

  * * *

  Augustin Fornier’s life might have been different. If only Fortune had smiled—just a modest smile, Fortune’s knowing wink . . . Ah, bien.

  And in Saint-Malo he had thought himself unhappy! What a child! What a spoiled foolish child! Yes, Augustin’s father was demanding, but had he asked more of his sons than other self-made men? True, Augustin’s prospects had been inferior—his older brother, Leo, would inherit Agence Maritime du Fornier—but at least Augustin had had prospects!

  How happy he had been!

  Brush snatched Augustin’s coat and sword belt and plucked his tricorner hat off his head so regularly he carried it in his hand.

  A red cap clung to the spikes of a thorn tree; a bonnet rouge, one of those “liberty caps” Jacobins had favored and Napoleon detested. The silk twill seemed too fine for a runaway body servant. Perhaps Solange could make something of it.

  Augustin clambered onto a clearing on a narrow terrace. A tethered brown and black goat bawled as soon as the patrol appeared.

  The door flap of the small reszide had been a carpet which might have come from a grand house. The fronds of the hut’s roof were tied with strips from the same carpet.

  His sergeant cocked his musket, and the others followed suit.

  It was cool here, so high above the plain. A waterfall trickled down a mossy cliff face and splashed into a washtub-size pool.

  The goat complained, a green parrot chattered like a wooden mallet tapping a log. A breeze tickled Augustin’s neck hair. It must have been pleasant high above the bloody conflict. It must have seemed safe.

  The dead girl beside the door hadn’t been dead long enough for her blood to blacken. Augustin didn’t look at her face. He had too many faces to forget.

  Augustin drew his pistol. When he jerked the carpet door aside, death air washed him dirty. Before his nerve failed, Captain Fornier stepped inside.

  The old woman had been partially beheaded, and the baby’s brains were splashed like red-gray smut across the hearth. The baby’s tiny clenched hands might have been a small marsupial’s. “We humans are not human,” Augustin mused. Vaguely he wondered who’d done it. Maroons? Insurrectionists? Another patrol?

  The murderers had overturned, emptied, and scattered, seeking the family’s poor valuables.

  Augustin hoped the blood he was standing in hadn’t got into his boot uppers. Once blood stained the stitching, it couldn’t be got out.

  The upside-down manioc basket hadn’t been disturbed. The marauders had searched, strewn, and tossed away, but they had not overturned the manioc basket, though that basket might have concealed everything they were looking for. The basket was untouched: a smug household god.

  When Augustin kicked it, it rolled into a corner.

  Revealing an erect, smiling, naked, very black girl four or five years old. The child’s feet were blood dipped, as were her knees where she’d knelt beside her slaughtered family. At his stare, she hid her gory hands behind her back and curtsied. “Ki kote pitit-la?” she said in Creole. In French she added, “Welcome to our home, sirs. Our goat Héloïse has good milk. Can you hear Héloïse bawling? I would be happy to milk her for you.”

  Captain Augustin Fornier, who had seen it all, gaped.

  The child repeated, “You must be hungry. I would milk her for you.”

  Augustin crossed himself.

  Her smile was illuminated with a child’s buoyant charm. “Will you take me with you?”

  He did.

  PART TWO

  The Low Country

  Refugees

  WHEN AUGUSTIN PRESENTED the solemn, beautiful child to his wife, the angels held their breath until Solange smiled.

  Such a smile! Augustin would have given his life for that smile.

  “You are perfect,” Solange said. “Aren’t you.”

  The child nodded gravely.

  After due consideration Solange said, “We shall name you Ruth.”

  * * *

  Solange had never wanted a baby. She accepted her duty to bear children (as it was Augustin’s failed duty to initiate them), and with enough wet nurses and servants to cope with infant disagreeableness, Solange would rear the heirs the Forniers and Escarlettes expected.

  But as a child, while her sisters happily advised, reproved, and dressed blank-eyed porcelain dolls, Solange dressed and advised only herself. She thought her sisters too willingly accepted Eve’s portion of that primordial curse.

  Ruth was perfect: old enough to care for herself and appreciate her betters without asking too much of them. Malleable and willing, Ruth brightened Solange’s days. She wasn’t the precious, awful burden an Escarlette baby would be. If Ruth disappointed, there were buyers.

  Solange dressed Ruth as her sisters had dressed their dolls. Although lace was scarce, Ruth’s hems were fringed with Antwerp’s finest. Ruth’s pretty silk cap was as lustrous brown as the child’s eyes.

  Since Ruth spoke French, Solange supposed her family had included house servants. Solange never asked: her Ruth was born, as if in her own bed, the day Solange named her.

  One quiet evening, before Solange closed the shutters against the night air, a pensive Ruth sat at the window overlooking the city. In that dim, forgiving light, she was a small black African as mysterious as that savage continent and just as assured as one of its queens.

  “Ruth, chérie!”

  “Oui, madame!”

  Instantly so agreeable, so grateful to be Solange’s companion. Ruth admired those characteristics Solange most admired in herself. Ruth accompanied her mistress to the balls and theater, curling up somewhere until Solange was ready to go home.

  Assuaging Solange’s grave loneliness, Ruth sat silently on the floor pressed against her mistress’s legs. Sometimes Solange thought the child could see through her heart to the Saint-Malo seashore she loved: the rocky beaches and impregnable seawall protecting its citizens from winter storms.

  With Ruth, Solange could drop her guard. She could be afraid. She could weep. She could even indulge the weak woman’s prayer that somehow, no matter what, everything would turn out all right.

  She read fashionable novels. Like the sensitive young novelists, Solange understood what had been lost in this modern 19th century was more precious than what remained, that human civilization had passed its high point, that today was no different from yesterday, that her soul was scuffed and diminished by banal people, banal conversation, and the myriad offenses of life. The daily privations of a besieged city were no less banal for being fatal.

  Captain Fornier was stationed at Fort Vilier, the largest of the forts ringing the city. The insurgents often tried and as often, with terrible losses, failed to penetrate the French forts’ interlocking cannon fire. Sometimes Captain Fornier stayed at the fort, sometimes at home. The flavor of his bitterness lingered after he departed. Solange
would have comforted Augustin if she could without surrendering anything important.

  Nothing in Saint-Domingue was solid. Everything teetered on its last legs or was already half swallowed by the island’s dusty vines.

  There’d be no French fleet fighting their way through the British squadron. No reinforcements, no more cannon or muskets or rations or powder or ball. Without a murmur the Pearl of the Antilles faded into myth. Patriotic dodderers urged uncompromising warfare while Napoleon’s soldiers deserted to the rebels or tried to survive another day.

  As their dominion shrank, the French declared carnival: a spate of balls, theatrical performances, concerts, and assignations defied the rebels at the gate. Military bands serenaded General Rochambeau’s Creole mistresses, and a popular ballad celebrated his ability to drink lesser men under the table.

  American ships that slipped through the blockade sold cargoes of cigars and champagne and departed with desperate military dispatches and Rochambeau’s booty. Smoke rolled in from the countryside to choke the city until dusk, when it was dispersed by the sea breeze and the hum of clouds of mosquitoes. It rained. Great crashing rains overflowed gutters and drove humans and dogs to shelter.

  Solange forbade Ruth to speak Creole. “We must cling to what civilization we can, yes?” When their cook ran off and Augustin could not secure another, Ruth made fish soups and fried plantain, while Solange perched on a tall stool, reading to her.

  High officers sent officers on desperate missions in order to comfort their widows.

  In Saint-Louis Square, General Rochambeau burned three Negroes alive. In an ironical moment he crucified others on the beach at Monticristi Bay.

  Every morning, Solange and Ruth strolled the oceanfront. One morning, the quay was packed with chained Negroes. “Madame, we are loyal French colonial troops,” one black man shouted. Why tell her?

  Ruth wanted to speak, so Solange hurried her along.