All Souls' Rising Read Free Page A

amoni
—B OUKMAN E KSPERYANS

Chapter One
    Y OU COULD NOT CALL IT an actual crucifixion, Doctor Hébert thought, because it was not actually a cross. Only a pole, or a log rather, with the bark still on it and scars on the bark toward the top, from the chain that had dragged it to this place, undoubtedly. A foot or eighteen inches below the mark of the chain, the woman’s hands had been affixed to the wood by means of a large square-cut nail. The left hand was nailed over the right, palms forward. There had been some bleeding from the punctures and the runnels of blood along her inner forearms had hardened and cracked in the dry heat, from which the doctor concluded that she must have been there for several hours at the least. Surprising, then, that she was still alive.
    Pulling against the vertex of the nail, her pectoral musculature had lifted her breasts, which were taut, with large aureoles, nipples distended. Although her weight must have pulled her diaphragm tight, the skin around her abdomen hung comparatively slack. At her pudenda appeared a membranous extrusion from which Doctor Hébert averted his eye. Her feet were transfixed one over the other by the same sort of homemade nail as held her hands.
    Sitting his horse, Doctor Hébert was at a level with her navel. He raised his head. Her skin was a deep, luminous black; he had become somewhat familiar with the shade since he had been in the country, but was not knowledgeable enough to place her origin from it. Her hair was cut close to the skull, which had the catlike angularity which the doctor, from the sculptural point of view, found rather beautiful. Her large lips were turned out and cracking in the heat, falling a little away from her teeth, and the look of them made the doctor’s own considerable thirst seem temporarily irrelevant. When he had first ridden up, her eyes had shown only crescents of white, but now the lids pulled farther back and he knew that she was seeing him.
    The cat-shaped head hung over on her shoulder, twisting the cords of her neck up and out. He could see the big artery bumping slowly there. Her eyes moved, narrowing a little, at their sideways angle. She saw him, but was indifferent to what she saw. The doctor’s tongue passed across his upper lip, once, twice, stiff as a file. He turned in the saddle and looked back into the long allée down which he had come. This avenue ran east to west for almost a mile, bordered by citrus trees whose branches had laced to the density of a thick hedge. From the far end of the allée , the pole had first appeared to him centered like the bead in a gun sight. Now the red round of the sun was dropping quickly into the notch where he had first entered, and the glare of it forced him to squint his eyes. He had gone astray some time that morning and had ridden through the afternoon over ill-made roads, if they were roads at all, without meeting anyone. When at last he came to the edge of the cane fields, he had called out to the cultivators there, but had not been able to understand what they said in reply.
    Night came quickly in these parts. It might be dark before he could retrace his way to the other end of the allée . Doctor Hébert pressed a heel into his horse’s flank and rode around the pole. The citrus trees, more sparsely set, fanned out around the edges of the compound as though they had meant to encircle it but failed. What vegetation there was looked completely untrained and much of the yard was full of dust. From one of the scattered outbuildings, a deep-voiced dog was barking. The doctor rode within a few yards of the long low building which was the grand’case , dismounted and walked the remaining distance to the pair of wooden steps to the gallery, where a white woman in déshabille was sitting in a wooden chair with her head sunk down on her chest.
    “Your pardon,” Doctor Hébert said, mounting the first step.
    The woman raised her head and rearranged her hands in her lap. In one