Short Story: The Baron
1747
Saint-Dominigue, Haiti
Emilien Desmaris was four months old, and he was dying. There was nothing out of the ordinary about this. A lot of babies died.
That didn’t make it any easier, though.
Abayomi sat emptily by Emilien’s cradle. She had spent every waking second since her son’s birth whispering hollow prayers to anyone who would listen. She had turned to the Loa, offering angry tears to the death spirits and their cohorts. She called upon Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte, and upon Papa Ghede, who is said to protect the little ones of this world, and she begged them to watch over her mewling son.
They had ignored her.
And so she sat, empty and silent and alone.
Her father had been a French cavalry officer and her mother an African slave, taken as a young child from the desert planes of Nigeria. The capitaine was found dead in an alleyway shortly after Abayomi’s sixteenth birthday, his face smudged with dry blood, and his wife died soon after. There didn’t seem much point in living without him, she had said absent-mindedly, and so she didn’t. They left what money they had to the eldest son, Robert, who squandered it on beer and women and fell off a cliff before he realised his mistake, and left Abayomi the family’s little town house, plus strict instructions to find a nice husband to look after her. She courted a red-faced wine merchant and two months later they were married. He moved in to her little house, taking his modest wealth and violent temperament with him. She was seventeen; he was thirty-six.
She hadn’t seen her husband for three days, and didn’t suppose she ever would again.
The day before yesterday, she had begged a young one-armed slave, a priest, to come to her house to do what he could for her son, and he had consented. His name was Francois, and he was a houngan, chosen by the Loa to guide their sons and daughters in the ways of the Ancestors.
Gently, he approached the cradle and observed the little boy with a curious look on his face. He sang a song to Papa Ghede and set up all of the ancient charms and idols to ward off evil spirits and to protect the babe. Abayomi stood at the doorway of the small bedroom, blinking tears from her eyes, mouthing silent prayers to the Gud Barons, willing them to listen, to save her baby
And then, after what had seemed like a lifetime, the houngan rose to his feet and shook his head sadly.
‘He will die shortly,’ he said. ‘I am sorry,’ and he sounded it. He scratched the stump of his left arm, lost in a farming accident many years ago. ‘The Ancestors are unhappy. Your mother married a white man. So did you.’ He scowled. ‘They owe you nothing.’
And Abayomi wailed.
And Monsieur Desmaris returned from the tavern, stinking of beer, and he bellowed in outrage to see the heathen charms dotted around his house and a slave in his son’s room, and he raised a pink hand to strike his wife, and the houngan, very leisurely and very calmly, drove his knuckles into the merchant’s jaw.
Desmaris left then, swearing and bleeding, and he never came back. He left without kissing his son goodbye. Francois left a short while later; she didn’t even hear him leave.
When Emilien’s little heart eventually gave out, and the little boy cried no more, the grief destroyed his mother. But she still sat by the empty cradle and still stared at the bedroom wall.
Perhaps if she’d shifted her gaze and perhaps if her world wasn’t all blurred and abstract with tears, perhaps she would have seen him, in his tuxedo and dark glasses and theatrical black hat. Perhaps she would have seen him approach the baby’s body, singing him a lullaby, the sweetest and most tender in the world, the words of which only he knows, and has no intention of sharing. Perhaps she would have seen him cradle the tiny ghost in his arms, kiss it gently, bow low and walk out into the Haitian night. Perhaps she would have seen Baron Samedi.
But she didn’t.
Image: Keene and Cheshire County
