All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell Page B

little, snuffling against his mother’s side. Suzanne hushed him, turning to give him the breast, turning toward her husband as well, since the baby slept between them. The man lay so still that she did not disturb him with a word, though she didn’t believe he was sleeping. Two roosters were crowing, far apart, one in the barnyard and one in the hills, and Toussaint, who had wakened with the baby’s first cry, rested quietly on his back and listened to them. The young cock had trounced the old rooster the week before, flattened him in the dust and kicked him bloody with his spurs and driven him off into the jungle. Each time Toussaint heard the loopy lifting of his voice above the other jungle noise he was surprised to know he’d made it through another night.
    He groped with his left hand in the dark and stroked the narrow back of his youngest son, Saint-Jean, and rubbed the tight thin curls on top of his head. The baby pulled loose from the nipple and grazed his father’s arm with a small slack-fingered hand, humming a low note, just beginning to whimper. Suzanne murmured to him and guided him back to the breast. Toussaint folded his hands across his navel, let himself drift. When he next came to, Saint-Jean had fallen back to sleep and Suzanne had risen and gone for water. The baby wormed his way toward him on the pallet, searching in his sleep, and nuzzled along his ribs. Toussaint smiled at him in the dark, and disengaged himself carefully so Saint-Jean would not wake.
    He got up and crossed the room barefoot to wake his two older sons, Isaac and Placide, who were six and seven. The boys sat up at his first touch, quickly and silently, as he had taught them. Toussaint hustled them out the door, into the first gray twinge of light. Over at the main compound, the bell tolled to rouse the field slaves for the morning. Suzanne had returned with the water and she poured a generous measure on each of the boys, from a big clay urn. Isaac jumped giggling from one leg to the other as the water struck him, but Placide stood stiffly under the stream, legs apart, and only shook himself once, like a dog, before he scrubbed. The light was coming up suddenly, silvering the droplets as they flew. Toussaint washed himself, slowly and with greater care, after the others had gone back into the cabin.
    The light swelled. Already he could begin to feel the heat. Inside the cabin it was bright enough to read by the time he reentered. He put on his shirt and reached his Psalter down from the board above the door where it was kept with a few other books and sat down and opened it on the ribbon. When he signaled to the boys they came and stood at his either hand, not eagerly but with their smooth habitual obedience.
    “Save me, O God,” he read from the Sixty-ninth Psalm, “for the waters are come in, even unto my soul.

I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is, I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me .
I am weary of crying; my throat is dry; my sight faileth me for waiting so long upon my God .
They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of my head; they that are mine enemies, and would destroy me guiltless, are mighty …

    He read in a low voice, little better than a monotone, though he pronounced each word most clearly and went very slow, marking the page with the cracked yellow nail of his forefinger, so that Isaac and Placide could follow. Placide could, indeed, already read many of the words, and his eye went darting ahead on the page. Toussaint continued:

I am become a stranger to my brethren, even an alien unto my mother’s children .
For the zeal of thine house hath even eaten me; and the rebukes of them that rebuked thee are fallen upon me .
I wept, and chastened myself with fasting, and that was turned to my reproof .
I put on sackcloth also, and they jested upon me …

    Suzanne, too, sat in an attitude of reverence, but keeping her hands busy. She cut fruit for the family to eat