Mr. Clarinet

"One by one they made 'em kneel down on a vévé dedicated to Baron Samedi—that's the god of death and graveyards—and they slit their throats," the man said, drawing his finger across his throat and clucking his tongue as he completed the motion. "They drained their blood and made it into a potion, which they all drank. Then they put on the soldiers' uniforms, painted their faces and hands white—so's they'd fool anyone watching them from a distance—and they went on the rampage, killin', rapin', and torturin' every white man, woman, and child they found. Not one of them got so much as a scratch on him. When they was done and free, they all come back here and settled down."

Max looked at the trees and the ground where he stood, as if something about them could betray their history; then, finding nothing remarkable there, he and Chantale followed the bank until they found the raised stepping stones that led across the stream.

The man and his dogs came to meet them. Max put him at about his age, midforties, maybe a few years older. He had a dark moon face and small, sparkling eyes that were full of mirth, as if he'd just regained his composure after hearing the funniest joke ever told. His forehead was heavily lined and there were deep brackets around his ears, light furrows continuing the ends of his mouth, and a spray of silver stubble around his jaw. He looked strong and healthy, with thick arms and a barrel chest. He could have been a professional body-builder in his youth, and, Max imagined, he still worked out now, pumping serious iron a few times a week to keep his flame alive and the flab at bay. They'd never met before but Max already knew him—his posture, his build, and his stare gave him away: ex-con.

Max held out his hand and introduced himself and Chantale.

"The name's Philippe," the man said and laughed, flashing the best set of teeth Max had seen on a local. His voice was hoarse, not through shouting or any infection, Max reckoned, but through lack of use, no one to talk to, or not much worth saying to the ones he was with. "Come!" he said enthusiastically. "Let's go see the cemetery."

* * *

They crossed a field and another stream until they came to a wild orange grove whose powerful, heady smell had left its trace around the village. Philippe navigated his way through the trees, sidestepping piles of sweetly rotting fruit, naturally grouped into loose shapes, part-square, part-circle, where they'd dropped off the branches and bounced and rolled to a stop. The oranges were the biggest Max had ever seen, the same size as grapefruit or small honeydew melons, their skin thick and dull with a slight blush creeping out from the stem. Their insides, where they'd burst, were flecked with red. The orchard was buzzing with flies, all feasting on the abundance of putrefying sugar.

The cemetery was some way in, a large rectangle of tall, thick grass and headstones—ostentatious and modest, straight and crooked, enclosed by a waist-high metal-bar fence and entered through one of four gates at the side.

The soldiers were all buried side by side, sixty bodies in five rows of twelve, their resting places marked out by big, gray rocks of roughly the same size with smoothed-down surfaces and the surnames chiseled in deep, crude capitals.

"I didn't tell you everythin'," Philippe said, as he led them past the makeshift tombstones. "The slaves didn't just drink their blood and steal their uniforms, they took their names too. See?" he pointed out a rock with the name VALENTIN gouged into it. "Ask around town and every name you hear'll come right back to this place."

"Wasn't that a contradiction in terms?" Max asked. "If they wanted to be truly free, what would they want with the slave masters' names?"

"Contradiction?" Philippe smiled. "It was all about eradication."

"So why leave this behind? Why bury the bodies?" Max asked.

"Haitians are big on respect for the dead. Even white dead. Didn't want to get haunted by no French-speakin' ghosts." He smiled and looked at Max. On the walk over, Max had undone the trigger guard on his holster.

"Somethin' went wrong somewhere, though," Philippe said as he led them to a wide clearing that separated the soldiers' graves from the other tombstones in the cemetery. A single rock stood in the middle, marking out a plot of dry, bare, reddish-brown earth where no grass grew. No name was carved into it.

"Napoleon's army had a lot of boys in it—some as young as eight, orphans who got conscripted. The garrison here was real young. The commanding officer was twenty," Philippe said, looking down at the grave. "That there is where they buried the garrison's mascot—don't know how old he was, but he wasn't more'n a boy. Don't know his name neither. He used to play the clarinet to the slaves working these fields. They took care of him last.