Read Online A Rendezvous in Haiti by Stephen Becker - Free Book Online Page A

disembarked in San Domingo almost two years earlier, after a voyage of three weeks from Lisbon on a stinking rusty tramp, a sugar boat returning to San Domingo city half in ballast. He learned that raw sugar, pulped sugar, stank; not merely an odor but a nauseating odor, and the runoff was called bagasse and if all those ladies with their pinkie up could smell it once they would never again say, “Two, please.”
    He knew no Spanish, and soon boarded a coaster for Port-au-Prince; in Haiti his talents might be useful. His cabin-mate was a businessman, poisoner and pimp, Haitian-Jamaican, who talked forever about himself and Haiti in a bastard French that was not quite Creole. Blanchard did not like his cabin-mate and lost him upon arrival, but was grateful for the introduction to Haitian ways.
    He then spent three bizarre days on a new planet, after which he felt very much at home. Port-au-Prince embraced him. He came ashore amid the mingled aromas of hides and fish, on the dock, and blossoms, great banks of them halfway up the hill. Men and women smiled. Working men wore bald heads or narrow hedges of kinky black hair down the middle of the scalp. Working women wore kerchiefs. The bosses wore straw hats. These bosses were lighter in color and fanned themselves often with their hats. Some had wavy hair, glossy in the sunlight. People said hello as he passed; a woman would stop beating her child to say B’jou.
    Blanchard did not give a damn whether these people lived or died in poverty or wealth, but they were not measuring him, either for a swindle or for a coffin, and he appreciated that. He rarely spoke; he listened; when he did speak, it was good country French and soon a fair Creole. He was warm, and coughed less. The bread here was like French bread. He could not believe the prices. He was carrying eighty-five British pounds, some of it blood money, some stolen from corpses and some won at cards, and he reckoned it would last him a year and a half if he never earned another farthing.
    Soon he found women, and he found cockfights, and he found the kind of work he was trained to do. He was twenty-four years old, and he decided he would remain, until fate directed him elsewhere, in this land of cheap rum and cheap life. He could not understand why these people laughed so much and so happily, but perhaps time would teach him.
    So he did not make for the border after the ambush at Deux Rochers. He sat apart for a time and cleaned his weapons. He endured the fit of coughing that followed high emotion. He returned to his men for a cup of rum; he praised them. He enjoyed a grand dinner of roast goat, rice and beans, with pawpaw for dessert, and his men were exhilarated and soon blind drunk on clairin. They had earned their binge. He watched their teeth flash in the firelight and wondered what he might accomplish if faction ever ended, if the Haitians ever set aside their squabbles—families! color lines! blood feuds!—and gathered under his command. Let Martel be king, emperor, god, and let that Fleury be philosopher or treasurer or whatever, but let Blanchard be commander in chief. Today his men had fought with intelligence and discipline. But he would never be commander in chief and his men would, on another day, fight like cowardly squabbling bandits.
    In the morning he dispatched a runner with a verbal report to Martel and added that he was taking a week or two of leave. He made for Port-au-Prince, pushing along the hillsides, picking his way, hungry and pausing often for yams or cassava, or to hear the drums. On the ridges he would be noticeable, and in the valleys were villages and farms; the memory of roast goat made his mouth water, but he settled for a river fish. There was plenty of forage for his mount. Blanchard was now twenty-six, and owned four hundred and forty dollars in gold plus all that was on his and his horse’s backs. In a scabbard at his saddle he carried a Lee Enfield carbine; in a