“I didn’t know that,” Madame Legrand said.
The morgue attendant scratched at the paper, wrote some more.
“You can’t leave him here,” he said.
“It’s the first child I lost,” she explained.
“You’ll lose them all.”
“All of them?”
“Even if you have ten, they’ll all come here.”
“All ten?”
“A good funeral’s what you need.”
“Did you lose your children?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Who killed my child?”
Madame Legrand took a step toward the morgue attendant. I guess the numbers were getting somewhere, because it took him a couple of minutes before he answered.
“I didn’t see, I didn’t hear.”
Madame Legrand said, “It’s not my child who’s dead. Don’t you tell me my child is dead.”
He looked up, looked down again at his papers. “Madame, you go see. It’s you who tells me your child is lying there.”
“It’s not Toussaint. It’s not Toussaint who’s lying there.”
She was angry now. But the morgue attendant only said, “Go see. I got work to do.”
Madame Legrand went back into the morgue. I was still standing there when we heard her cry out. The morgue attendant just kept adding up rows and rows of numbers, crossing some out, subtracting others.
* * *
There was to have been a celebration for the judge on the Place Dumas when he came back into town, but with Toussaint dead, that had been canceled. In any case, Toussaint would have organized it and hired the paid supporters, who would have cheered and danced until the judge rolled up his shirtsleeves and gave a speech.
The judge, Terry, and Nadia rolled into town late that evening, all three exhausted. The road had been brutal. A bus had broken an axle near the Rivière Glace, where the route was narrow, and they’d had to sit by the side of the car until a mechanic from Les Cayes could weld the axle in place, four hours of waiting in the hot sun. Then, an hour later, their own car had a flat. Terry had fixed it, cursing under his breath, while Nadia and Johel sat side by side on a rock, staring at him.
Back in the car, not even the judge wanted to talk. Terry could hear him muttering under his breath.
“What are you saying?” Terry finally asked.
The judge looked at Terry, startled. “Who?”
“You. You’ve been talking to yourself for an hour.”
The judge smiled. “He told me he wanted to be a poet.”
After a minute Terry said, “What he told me was that he was going to be a neurosurgeon.”
It didn’t seem right to the judge to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself.
The sound of the men’s laughter irritated Nadia. She wanted to tell them to be quiet, but her own voice wouldn’t come. She had met Toussaint only once. He had come by the house to drop off the judge’s motorcycle at the conclusion of one of his scouting missions, and they had ended up talking for an afternoon. When he learned that she sang with Galaxy and had sung with a famous band like Erzulie L’Amour, he admitted his own ambition, to one day be a musician himself. He knew the region, if not the village, that she came from, and they were able to exchange stories about a dozen or more local personages. Toussaint reminded Nadia of her own older brother, another skinny layabout big talker with a charming smile. She had wanted that afternoon to warn Toussaint. She had wanted to tell him to stay away from the judge.
It was a moonless night. The headlights of the car lit up only the short stretch of bad road ahead, and looking out the window, Nadia could see nothing of the hills through which they traveled. She had never lost her girlhood fear of the dark. Soon she was aware that she was hardly breathing. She had heard stories as a child of the loup-garou: the neighbor who shed his humanity at sunset to steal a feast of children. The loup-garou might be your neighbor, your friend. The loup-garou had come for Toussaint.
She could hear the judge’s voice and then Terry’s. It occurred to her that she and the baby she carried were at their mercy. She imagined them looking back at her, their eyes bright red, fangs elongated; she wondered how she would defend herself if they came for her. She felt the child inside her, still not strong enough to kick, but rolling weight. Nadia felt her body pitch forward and sway backward. They were descending the final hills before the bridge over the Grand’Anse. Now they were in Jérémie.
PART SEVEN
1
On his first morning back from Port-au-Prince, the judge called his staff one by one, asking them to meet him at his campaign headquarters. There had been some doubt the night before whether he would even continue the campaign in Toussaint’s absence. Johel himself had considered dropping out of the race.
But that morning, still sore from the road, he had awoken early and sat on his back porch as the first sun lit up the town. He heard a chorus of children singing at the Baptist church, their song faint at first, and then louder as the music caught on the wind and echoed through the town’s bowls and canyons. He had never heard singing at this early hour, and he sat up straighter in his chair. Soon the choir sang the Haitian national anthem. It was vigorous music, expressing all the martial energy of a great warrior people. “Marchons unis, marchons unis,” the choir sang. For a moment Johel imagined his enslaved forebears rising up to fight the blan, dying, and with each death encouraging a dozen like-minded patriot souls. The swelling of young voices in the apricot light of dawn stiffened his resolve.
Later that morning, when his campaign staff was assembled, Johel told the crew of students, professionals, and lawyers of his emotions as he listened to the stirring verse. His obvious sincerity inspired in his staff similar feelings. Even Terry, who did not understand the lyrics of the song, was moved, and he rose with everyone else when the judge suggested that they sing the anthem in Toussaint’s honor. Toussaint’s friends and colleagues placed their hands over their hearts and promised to form ranks for the country and the flag. The anthem had a special meaning to each of them that day. There was no thought of retreat. They sang, “Mourir est beau, mourir est beau / Pour le Drapeau, pour la Patrie.” When they were finished, the room was silent, as if they had all taken a solemn oath.
Then Nadia spoke. She had surprised her husband, who had supposed that she would be intimidated by this crowd of fast-talking, educated young people, by insisting on attending the strategy session. Then she surprised him still more.
“We have to bury him right,” she said. “We won’t get another moment like this one.”
Nadia understood that the way to win a heart was to tell a story, and that the funeral was like a stage that would attract an audience of ten thousand or more, all of them eager to see the patriot’s body. She told the men that Toussaint’s flag-draped coffin could say more than the judge’s words and that in each of Madame Legrand’s tears there would be a thousand votes.
The suggestion shocked the judge.
“Should I take his shirt and pants too?” the judge said. “The boy is dead. Let’s bury him in peace.”
“You don’t understand how a dead man thinks,” Nadia said.
“And you do?”
“I know he fought for you when he was alive, and you won’t fight for him when he’s dead.”
“What does his mother want?” asked the judge.
“She wants to bury him right.”
That afternoon Nadia went to sit beside Marie Legrand in the bereft woman’s hut. Nadia rocked her body in sympathetic rhythm to Madame Legrand, the women crying together. Nadia told Madame Legrand that the judge wanted to put Toussaint in the ground with all due respect.