American Gothic by Michael Romkey Page B

turned up the lane to Fairweather House.
    A man carrying a machete walked toward him on the side of the sandy road, nodding to Lavalle as he trotted past. It was one of Helen’s servants. She had done a marvelous job of managing after Sir Graham’s death. The locals were not famous for their devotion to hard labor, but Lady Fairweather had gotten in her first coca crop as well as her husband ever had.
    Something slammed into Lavalle’s back with such startling unexpectedness that the doctor’s first thought when he found himself looking up at the sky’s ragged black belly was that he had been shot. The doctor slowly sat up, looking down at himself, taking stock. Except for a slight concussion, he seemed uninjured. The man with the machete was coming toward him, holding Lavalle’s horse by its reins. He must have caught the animal after it bolted. The man no longer held the machete beside his leg at the end of a long, loose arm, but upward, in an attitude of self-defense.
    Lavalle got to his feet, wondering what had happened. He wasn’t the world’s greatest horseman, but it had been a long time since he’d been thrown. His throbbing shoulder helped him remember the blow that had felled him.
    “Did you see what hit me?”
    The man nodded. Lavalle could see that he was afraid. He took the reins from the peasant and prodded him for more information. The man said “something” had come out of the scrub palms low and fast, flying from the bushes to knock Dr. Lavalle off his horse. Whatever it was, it did not stop but kept going.
    “A man?”
    “Je ne sais pas ce que c’était,”
the man said.
“Quelque type d’animal, un tigre peut-être.”
    “There are no tigers in Haiti,” Lavalle said.
    The man was already backing away. Whatever he’d seen, Lavalle would get no more out of him.
    He climbed back on the horse and nudged it into a walk, still a little disoriented. A glass of brandy would brace him up. Fortunately, he was almost at Fairweather House. The lane turned to the right, opening dramatically for the last quarter mile to the white-pillared Palladian mansion.
    A woman was lying athwart the road just beyond the curve, her throat torn out.
    Even before Lavalle got off his horse, he knew she was dead.

14
    The American
    I WAS TWO weeks before Dr. Lavalle’s busy schedule afforded him the opportunity to visit the new master of Maison de la Falaise. Jean-Pierre Toussaint, the local prefect of police, had already confirmed the physician’s deduction that an American had bought the plantation. Toussaint made it his business to know such things.
    As a consciously methodical person, Lavalle was deeply committed to his routines. Every morning he attended to rounds at Hospital St. Jude. At noon, he walked home, ate a light lunch, and took a brief siesta. An early afternoon rest was the custom in Cap Misère, and the doctor found it a sensible one: no one in his right mind would go about his business while the fierce tropical sun was high in the sky. At three every day, Lavalle saw patients at his office in the hospital. Every other day—more often, if there were emergencies—the porter brought Lavalle’s stolid gray saddle horse, Napoleon, to the hospital in the late afternoon, and he called on patients in the surrounding countryside.
    The rich lowlands around the island’s capital supported sugarcane plantations, but along the southern coast there was little arable soil between the mountains and sea. That part of the island was dotted with tiny settlements of a few wretched huts, the malnourished peasantry scratching out enough food from subsistence plots and fishing to maintain a tenuous hold on existence. The mountainsides along the coast were ideal for coffee and coca planta-tions, but large-scale operations requiring money and managerial skills had abandoned Haiti after the slave revolts a century earlier. Still, there were a few places left where the island’s idyllic possibilities were realized,