Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste : Father and Mother, First and Last

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Chapter One

PART THE FIRST

The Garden of Fishes

* * *

MY MASTER'S TEMPER were by spasms choleric, the spasms exacerbated by trespass, real or fancied, of his slaves, all of whom had had occasion to beg their fellows daub their backs with salve of rum and lard. Yet Dufay had raised up drivers to lash the hands to work, drivers on whom he palmed off most of the stewardship, that he might dedicate himself to advancement of universal knowledge. Far from the carries where his hands labored, he tramped in sun and rain, peering under leaves, down burrows, and up into nests to discover and name what creatures inhabited the wilderness parts of his domain.

    An excellent draftsman, he delighted in sketching particulars of feather, fur, and scale; the curve of claws, of teeth and beaks; the depths of eyes; the stretch and shove of limbs. On sketching expeditions to the rockiest, most surf-pounded tips of Saint-Michel, he spied from blinds he had had constructed on narrow ledges, to watch the sea birds fighting and fishing and rutting. (Some said he spied on the slaves, yes, on his own wife and children, in like manner, but I never saw him loiter in the shadows of human habitation.)

    From the age of five, I, whom the whites called Goody, had been laboring in the carries, coughing from the fire that burned off the leaves, stepping and stooping to chop the canes and singing between my gritted teeth to keep the bone-grinding pace. One day, M'sieu was riding his mare past the gang, his cockaded hat abob on Yolande's trot as he passed on his way to more tangled parts of our isle to sketch. His old servant trotted behind, one Christophe, called Long-Shanks, carrying the tools of his master's art. Alas, this worn-out soul, Christophe, keeled over; without further adieu, he gave up the ghost and died.

    "Hop! Hop! Hop! Do not leave Long-Shanks asprawl to be chewed by dogs," said M'sieu to his driver. "Yet pick out a sturdy young boy to wait on me at once! Not again a scrawny dotard too worn-out to lift." And, rueful-ironic, he doffed his hat to Christophe.

Pierre was called from the gang then, to lay down his bill and serve the master as porter. Wriggling joyful I was, who had no notion what a world of fetching made a BODY SERVANT'S WORK! Though I was then a strapping youth of ten, they had not yet given me a pair of pants. So, on the first day I turned my eyes from cane to follow Yolande's tail, I did not look around me much, but only mulled over the question: Would I get a pair of drawers? And when I did, that very eve, and not coarse Osnaberg, but silk, however faded, I strutted like a cock, and capered to the piping of the cane flute, the first capers I had cut in a very long time, for my smock had ceased to cover my privates, and I had learnt to shrink over Johnny Fish.

    Yet the drawers they had given me were pantaloons from years before, very baggy and covered with tufted ribbon loops. And these stale fancies gave great merriment to Pamphile, the master's son, and his stepmother, who swore they would grow my frizz to a full-bottom--"he would need no curling iron, and nits would lose themselves in the maze"--and send me over the seas to court, to wait on the jades that yawned around the King. And they conceived a plot, to give me a name from antiquity, like a hero's in a tragedy, but M'sieu stamped his foot and swore, "I'll be damned if I learn a new name I must cry in the bush when I call for a snare set."

    At night, in the dark, I lay with the fancy pants in my hammock. With my fingers I tugged at the falls, so they tore, and, when I donned the pantaloons, revealed Johnny Fish to the company.

    "The stuff be so old it has rotted," I allowed.

    So they gave me some drawers more plain and recent.

Once decently covered, I straightened my back and willingly shouldered THE MASTER'S EASEL. I looked about me smartly, as he enjoined me over Yolande's withers: "Observe the curious cunning with which Nature has devised the creatures."

    Dutifully at first I gaped at the mole, all fur and snout, with shovelly hands, that blindly hunches and wriggles a path like an endless pant leg to inhabit. How came he to Saint-Michel? Did he tunnel under the sea? Or was he pushing like a hungry root at Creation?

    The island had not the variety of creatures, allowed M'sieu, that are known on the continents; yet creatures there were sufficient to preoccupy an inquiring philosopher, most particularly the varieties of lizard and bird. And soon enough Pierre began to observe for the pleasure of the scrutiny. There very greatly charmed him the red-and-green throat of one small lizard, puffed like a lady's coyly dropped handkerchief as the creature took the sun. All languor he lolled till he cast his tongue to snag a fly! Servant no less than master marveled at the parakeets, their feathers brighter than flowers, cleaning themselves with their toes and hooking with their beaks the mites, smaller than lice, that inhabited their feathers' underbrush.

    And the white egret, and in season, the blue heron.

    Then there were fishes, more multivarious than birds, a garden of flesh in the waters, impossible to catch and hold, their form their movement, their movement one with the water they had their being in, the salty tear-drenched garden of the dead my godmothers had told me of, where I did not want to linger, though I ate any fish my elders caught, for I knew they took the fish with gratitude, and were forgiven.

    The master did not trust the waters any more than I, though his dead slept beneath the earth, patient as seeds, waiting their time. Yet Dufay would not take off his shoes to wet his feet in the sea, let alone remove his clothes to wet his person. He did not like it, that was all; he did not care for it, so he said. 'Twas a slimy, endless chaos; he did not want it to impinge on his person.

    Still, he must have fish to sketch and paint if his natural history were to be complete. So it fell to me to catch these fish, yet without spoiling their form. So I must into the sea. If I would not do it, he would send me back to the fields. Yet I knew not how to comport myself in the sea, nor did my master. Yet he would teach me by hypothesis, trying one expedient then another.

First, he had me dangled as bait on a rope he tied to a pole held by two big men. And he lowered me choking and bellowing into the sea, till I learned to hold my breath. And he bade me agitate my arms and legs, like a human mill, and thus make myself an engine for motion in the sea. And when he saw my terrors had eased, he bade the two men throw me in, without the rope or the pole, so I must save myself with the motions I had learned. And in this manner I was trained to be nimble in the sea, to capture the fishes Dufay would sketch.

    As I must paddle about with a spear in one hand, so I must keep the other, and both my legs, in motion, as an ox on a treadmill, to churn myself afloat. Yet--could I quiet my heart that pounded loud in my ears as depths rose to claim me, could I bring myself to open my eyes--then I saw, not the flesh-shrouded bones of the dead, but a paradise shimmering in veils of light. Surely the dead must be at peace in their garden of fish. I prayed I would be forgiven for plucking blossoms of flesh, not to eat, but for M'sieu to paint. Yet the longer I spent in the garden of the dead, the less fearsome seemed the prospect of death. Was I not floating in a bliss that laved me, luxuriant and enjoyable? So Pierre splashed among his ancestors' souls, visible only as movement in water. He celebrated their sweet repose, free of the whites who feared to set foot in their domain. Seeing how Pierre smiled when he rose for breath, the master clapped his hands and patted his slaveman's head.

    "Good Goody," he said. "Good boy. Do you fetch me the fish, one by one, I will capture their likenesses."

    Alas! Though I popped to the surface with a spear-dead fish for him to sketch, or even a live one, squirming to escape and smothering in air, there was no way to capture the gracile essence save by immersion. So much the worse for M'sieu, his knowledge and his art. He did not revere the fish, and his stiff fillets, dull eyes already rotting, were not his truest portraits. He never even saw the hermaphrodite plants, with thick stalks and bright-petaled flowers, yet with roots emerging from the calyx, squirming and grasping at tiny fish, which they did feed into the calyx as hands would stuff a mouth. For M'sieu did not believe Pierre when Pierre spoke of them, and offered to bring one up, though it might be a pet of the dead. M'sieu did not believe a slaveman could discover creatures a master had not, "Tut tut!" he said.

    'Twere not merely underwater creatures M'sieu so blindly eschewed. For he took apoplectic fits at the sight of certain vermin, viz., the legions of rats that encamped in his fields to commandeer cane. M'sieu refused to limn them, though most assuredly they be "principal fauna." And I do suspect they are as dear to their Creator as any other creature.

    Some other planters would eat the rats--oh, not when friends came to dine, but for a family dinner. Why not? The creatures have fed on sugar; their flesh is sweet. And as they eat so much of our crop, to eat them in turn is a sensible economy. Yet our M'sieu forbore this dainty for himself and his; the old mistress--the first one, the haughty and pious--sent the slave-children into the fields, to hunt and catch the rats, that at very little cost to the whites we slaves might daily dine on flesh, and so keep up our strength, without our sweat smelling fishy, or any expense for pork or beef. At the same time, we would help to save the crop.

    This scheme fermented among us great bubbles of resentment--we to eat what the whites refuse as unfit? Our people left the vermin corpses for pigs, preferring to feed our strength with fish leaping fresh to the net, the gift of death to life, and so much the better if our sweat stank. Come Mardi Gras we hung that mistress in effigy, her figure sewed of sacking stuff, a block of wood for a missal in her paw. This straw mistress we roasted above our bonfire. When she burned, she gave out a satisfying, piteous plaint, for we had filled her body with rats and mice.

    No more than PILFERING VERMIN or INVADING INSECTS were we slaves to be discovered in M'sieu's chaste pencil-and-chalks or his fastidious ink-washes, unless we be those dim, tiny, bent figures seen from afar in rippling fields of cane. Front and center the feathered creatures, most especially those of a gaudy and brilliant plumage and distinguished profile, with warrior's crest and aquiline beak. Dearer to Pierre the drab pelican, its beak a belly of fish, and after the pelican, among featherless creatures, the crab that skulked in the brush, till, spying an enshelled slime shuck off his outgrown house, Sergeant Crab nipped in to occupy. How quaint to see patrolling crabs reconnoiter tunnelish paths through the brush, a rag-tag army in purloined uniforms. Were these the army of maroons, the runaway slaves, my godmothers spoke of in whispers?

In time the habits of pirate crabs seemed no less strange than the CHARACTER OF M'SIEU himself. For though he deemed himself a well-bred man, he observed no niceties of deportment or dress. Indeed, by the time he threw me his breeches, they were out at the knee, his coat tattered streamers; I would rather get my clothes, of lesser stuff, from the captain of the drivers, Master Squint, of whom more later. But as for M'sieu, he forgot to close up his falls when he pissed. When his servant was slow, and he took a fit of pique and dressed himself, he rolled one stocking over his breeches, buckled his cuff over the other. He consistently forgot to wind the watch he carried on a chain, and he ignored the beating of the dinner gong.

    Once, when his brother's agents came from France, he bade me shave his head, though I had not the knack of the razor and nicked him more than once. He would not pay a barber, you see. Yet over his wounds, his full-bottom snugged his head most accommodating, so he might have cut a good figure had he not dragged from his fraying cuff a huge nasty rag to wipe his nose after pinching snuff. Those come from France remarked, he had lost the habit of bowing, though surely he had had it once.

    He never took a man's hand nor kissed a lady's, but only nodded absently when presented--did I say "kiss a lady"? When sober, he fondled neither maids nor men and eschewed intrigues, though when he had drunk himself sodden amidst a crush of planters he indulged in the jovial pinch. And now and then took a woman without ceremony, as a dog smelling rut, and so had fathered a brat or two in the yard.

    His visitors returned to France, his wig gathered dust on a stand, the hair of his head pushed in tufts around his bald pate, like the tonsure of a depraved monk, so devilish wild he must wear a nightcap so as not to fright the maids. Yet there were worse.

    Had he kept his counsel, he might have been a tolerable master, save he exacted from those he lorded it over punctilios he himself forswore. Madame, his second young wife--the first had died in a fluxy sweat--he bade dress and speak as a queen, though she minced through the pantry fearful of scorpions. Badgering the maids to scrape the mold off hanging meat, she must wear three sleeve flounces, & a sack, & a useless apron of lace, & a pinner with trailing lappets. She must be rouged and powdered, and patched and plucked, and teeter on high heels, her head dressed out with false curls. She must embroider perfect lilies on the household linens and read the scriptures every day as befitted a lady who, though born in these islands, had been schooled in a convent in France. M'sieu flew into fits of pique did he catch her with her sleeves rolled, calling her "Rogue" and lambasting her as a slavey.

    POOR MADAME! She struck false notes on the pianoforte, the keys of which the air's moistness had swollen from tune. Her thread often tangled as she passed and repassed her needle. M'sieu then pined for a wife who knew what to do with the keys at her waist. Indeed children tittered in their sleeves as she passed with her nose in the air. And though she would crack those keys on a servant's skull, the smell of meat that had hung too long could not be masked with spice and wine. Yet again the bread was not too stale for willful jaw to crack! It is true the stuffing poked from the chairs, but M'sieu himself had scored the silk with the rowels of his spurs, neglecting to call for his boots taken off.

    If M'sieu's wife were buffeted by his fits of discontent, consider: his slaves were entirely at his mercy. Pierre who had been trained to catch a bird unharmed with his hands did marvel at his master's alternation between three states: the first, a profound, faithful, & innocent regard for the animals he observed; the second, an absent-minded, brisk accord with his fellow human beings, including myself; the third, a sudden & violent animosity toward all Creation, which consumed his bandy-legged, potbellied person and laid waste roundabout. Was the tyrant who snapped his quills and tore his paper the same who stood so still to lure a lizard the tomtits lit on his head? In his rages he caned me and whipped me, yet still I pitied him. For, though a slave, I did live within myself a free man, master; M'sieu the converse.

    Yet HIS DRAWINGS were all control, more exact than Nature herself had been, so scrupulously did he render the shape of each lineament, each color shade or tint, each hillock and valley of musculature and quirk of physiognomy, so exactly did he capture the needle-prick stare of the hawk and the desperate trembling gaze of the mouse, for whose delicate and whiskery deliberations he forgave its resemblance to the loathed rat.

    Yes, and the thorny brush, the bent of which reveals the wind; the smoke tree's haze of ground twigs; the monstrous hairy sour-sap fruit; the manchineel with its blistering milk, its horrible charmy apples--ah, First Woman!--the amaranth, center stalks a fountain of blood; the rocks and the stones, earth with its packings and crumblings--yes, so truly did M'sieu draw all these, so meticulously paint, with such accurately mixt colors, one might have thought him a devil, tempting poor sinners, take one hesitant, fateful step into the world of his creation, a world seeming purer than our own, in which each creature, nay each rock, turns always for inspection, if not its best side, then at least that side most expressing its essence.

    The purity came from this effect: though M'sieu did limn the animals precisely in all proportions and attributes, he refused to draw the shadows that, contrasting with the dapple of light, revealed and covered them. Were I to judge from the plates in books, the rendering of shadow, velvet and dense or hazy and dim, does give to the painted world its appearance of movement, suggesting alternation of day and night, and hence the round of seasons, the progress through shift and transformation to death, and thence to life again, from which no man can escape. Yet in the works of M'sieu, Creation is suffused in a pure, bright, even light, as if all creatures were caught in the terrible stillness before the palsy strikes, the storm breaks, the lava flows, caught in this moment as in Eternity, not the eternity of Paradise, earned by the good, but a terrible stasis, the paralysis of Sun's merciless glare. Ah, what be any man but damned who casts no shadow? Shadow, shadow, the dark blot of being, stain of the blood waters, deep and heavy and old, mark of suffering, God's fiery tears, trail of ashes drenching our bones. He who casts no shadow, is he not unquiet in quiet forever, dead in life and live in death?

    In one other more mundane particular the art of M'sieu lacks verisimilitude: in the vine-swagged jungles that climb the mountain sides; in the groves of mango and orange trees, flaunting their gauds of fruit; among the tidy coffee trees; the cutlass-leaved bananas; the feathery palms; deep in the cane carries' green and land-locked sea, the island of Saint-Michel, like this, where abides Pierre, be festooned with a florid plant called orchid , which displays itself in sun and shade, windward and leeward, high and low. M'sieu would not draw the brown-bagged blossoms, and cursed and stamped if he found but a grain of the pollen on his sleeve, calling for me to brush from him the devil-take-the-stinking-fish-hole crumbs. AH! If Buffon had come out from France, he would have seen in what respects his histoire of these islands be incomplete. Yet many an artful work was sent to France for engraving, and Pierre vaunted himself he served a worthwhile master, though sorely the master tried his servant.

Those of HIS FINISHED WORKS M'sieu cherished too greatly to send forth, he locked in his old campaign chest with several tattered standards and a sword he had worn in battles with Protestants before he came out to the Anduves. There in his chest he supposed his oeuvre would be safe from theft or spite or the depredations of rats or of armies. Alas! The chest was not close-fitted. In the leathern interior damp took hold and bred up slimes to soften the paper, spoil the colors, and blur the exact outlines of the images. This I discovered one evening in a damp season when the company sat till midnight smoking pipes and drinking toasts from a bowl of fired brandy. Forsooth, I was ashamed to see M'sieu debauch himself among idlers. To cool the rebellious heat that rose in my head with the fumes of the burnt brandy the dissipates imbibed, I ventured into the keeping room, to pick the lock of the campaign chest, as oft I did, for the sole purpose of examining, however furtively and briefly, the pictures and notes stored within, to renew my sense of my master's worth.

    What a PUTREFACTION did I spy and smell! From the pigments on his pages there bloomed a terrible colony of proliferating, stunted monsters, regiments of blue & green & white spoilers, obliterating the limpid symmetries of M'sieu's vision, as if creatures of shadow and orchid-dust mites, obscure, hot vermin and hermaphrodite flora-fauna he had refused to draw, had vengefully mingled their juices and their rage and given birth to generations of vileness so wicked their stench was worse than death. All was rotting, beyond rotting, and would soon be lost altogether, as I pray my own pages, in their careful confinement, will not. Indeed, I did not like to think what life might fly from his trunk into the world, a greater plague than Pandora set free (though of course I did not yet know of her), without any mitigating hope.

    To stifle the slimy creatures, I hastily doused the oeuvre in a dusty particulate reserved for the wigs, which did whiten those heads and smother nits and might, the Gods be willing, sweeten the moldering pages in the chest. This good powder did possess a most pleasing scent, mixed of many magical essences of the several flowers of France, compounded with musk and orris root. It did indeed seem to stifle the odor like rancid cheese and stale piss that soured the chest. Yet before the slimes could flee the carnage, Pierre relocked the chest. He sat by it then, guarding against any seepage from under the lid. And he listened for the master's call.

    As he sat, he composed on his breath a secret anonymous missive to the very esteemed and revered Monsieur de Buffon. And later, when opportunity presented itself, Pierre copied out his letter, accusing his master of indolence & sloth & wasting his talents & spoiling the pictures destined for the Natural History in preparation across the sea, moreover accusing him of capricious and scandalous disregard of fishes & orchids, vermin & shadows & slaves, aspects of the world and its history to which a disinterested philosopher ought to pay attention. I slipped the wily Squint my hordings of coin, comprising three quarter bits, to see my letter safely on a ship to Buffon.

    When no letter from France came for M'sieu by the next packet, I most cynically supposed myself abused. Would I be caught and whipped with Stinger? A boat came over, and again, and again. Stretched till I pull apart? Yet in time, the redoubtable Sage wrote my master an elegant reproof, entreating him to "take measures, Dear Sir!" Whether this ploy succeeded in saving the pictures, you may discover yourself. I am ignorant of their powdered fate, for I am here and they are where they are. Yet in time I will relate what I have heard. But e'en so much of my tale as I have told I pull ahead of myself in telling, as you have yet to hear of my schooling, the font of my learning, and thus, of my TESTAMENT.

Copyright © 1999 Patricia Eakins. All rights reserved.