Haiti Fever: A Tale of Murder Most Tropical

Murder? Well, yes; there could have been no question, ultimately, that my friend Mattison was murdered.

His death has stayed sadly in my mind these 20 years, which surely makes that long-ago journey into the tropics enduringly memorable for me.

I mean to say, a “memorable vacation” isn’t necessarily a thing of jolly times on a white-sand beach with a lot of girls in vegetable skirts, you agree?

I think emphatically not. My most memorable vacation, just 20 years ago this year, had to do with the island of Haiti, with unforgettable people named Solange, and dear Madame Jugie, and Caleb Cadwallader Mattison (of the Carolina Mattisons), plus a German doctor named Lemke, surely the most talented physician in all of Port-au-Prince at that time.

I knew Haiti pretty well, back then; I’d spent a number of vacations there, along the coast and in the mountains too, up in the high cool region called the Pine Forest, where the wild horses roam.

Close Haitian Friends

I had made a few really close Haitian friends, and learned, too, a fair bit of the patois called Creole, a blending of French and African, mostly under tutelage by a wonderful French woman, a Parisian by birth, who owned and operated the Hotel de France in downtown Port-au-Prince, close by the wharf and the sea.

Madame Jugie was a charmer, a great cook, with a handsome husband who played cutthroat chess and, in his spare time, kept the hotel accounts.

The Jugies were much fun to stay with. Madame always reserved for me an airy chamber, top floor, flowerpots along my balcony wall, a majestic view on the wide bright-blue bay stretching west almost, you’d think, to Cuba.

I have to start by saying that Caleb Cadwallader Mattison of South Carolina turned up one morning 20 years ago and sweet-talked Madame Jugie into giving him one of her nicest rooms, a room with a sea view, almost as nice as mine. Madame listened to him and liked him; he had competent-looking hands and a wealth of walnut-brown hair.

Also, he played chess beyond the average and once almost won a match from Monsieur Jugie, which endeared him to all the hotel staff. He was very much a man, Mattison.

In due course he rented a house of his own, an almost native house, grass roof and wattle walls, in the hills above the Riviere Froide (meaning Cold River) a dozen lonely miles upcountry from the city. Included was a patchwork garden featuring two grapefruit trees, one oranger , a lemon and a lime, all great for mixing a rum drink or two at sundown. He planned, Mattison said, to stay a while.

He invited me, early on, to pay him and his new country seat a visit, and one afternoon I did, riding horseback. We took a skinny-dip in the swift-running cold river. He insisted that I stay for a drink. I didn’t mind.

A Real Find

His housemaid, Solange, mixed the rum punches and carried them to us on the terrace. A very pretty native girl, medium-tall, slender, with a coffee-and-cream complexion. Mattison was picking up the patois from her; he called her a real find.

But about the two lazy yard boys he’d hired to keep his garden flourishing, he made a mild scoffing, and he scoffed too, at first, about the manifold superstitions of the natives. “They see black magic--voodoo--in absolutely everything,” he said, and snorted good-naturedly.

On another afternoon--again we’d been for a swim in the river and were climbing the hill toward his house--I sidestepped like a jack rabbit when my eye caught a sudden dead-white gleam in the path. A roar of laughter exploded behind me.

“But you jumped!” Mattison hooted. “I tell you, man, you’re as far gone in the black arts as the idiot son of my cook. . . .”

I glanced again toward the faintly ash-blond object in the path--a bone, a stick, nothing more. And yet the hill people believe that any old bone or twist of paper or white rag planted in the center of a trail may be a mumbo-jumbo trick of the devil to snare the unwary. You have only to step on it and your leg blackens and maybe drops off.

People believe this. Myself, how do I know? So I laughed uncertainly, perhaps self-consciously. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Thing like that could be a snake, you know. I’m careful where I tread in these hills.”

“Sure, sure,” he said, and we marched silently up the path toward the house and toward his bi jou rum cocktails.

Time passed. Maybe, thinking back, it was a full three weeks before I got round to calling again on Mattison. His cook had stirred up a fish-head soup for dinner, a kind of Caribbean bouillabaisse, so of course I hung around.

Slapping the Mosquitoes

With coffee we moved onto the terrace, eyeing the yellow moon that tiptoed above the hills, talking casually about the new revolution in Haitian painting, about Haiti’s music, all the while slapping the Haitian mosquitoes, persistent little bastards.

“How’s about a nightcap?” Mattison volunteered.

I said, “Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Solange is somewhere around.” He called her name.

She came, soundlessly, the pretty Solange, and stood beside his chair. He spoke to her in the patois, smiling, ordering the drinks. It seemed to me that there was a faint note of familiarity in Mattison’s voice, maybe even flirtation, but I put the impression aside.

One of the houseboys brought the drinks. I did not see the girl again that evening, nor, for that matter, till a fortnight after.

Out riding one day on one of the Jugie nags, I turned up the Riviere Froide trail and reined in at Mattison’s place to say bonjour . A houseboy lounged on the terrace. He answered my question by saying M’sieur Mattison was in bed.

In bed, sick.

Inside the bedroom a curtain was drawn but I could see Mattison and he looked terrible. His face was wan and drawn and his eyes, as he opened them, yellow. His hand, when I took it up, was burning. No question about what was wrong with him.

He muttered of nausea, headache, stabbing pains in his legs. He said his head was a triphammer. “Old boy,” I said, “you’ve got a dose of malaria. No doubt about it. Look here, I’m riding into town. I’ll find a doctor, the best, we’ll be back before nightfall. . . .”

Mattison snapped at me. “Damn doctors! Get this: I’ve been taking 30 grains of quinine a day, seven days now. Enough to break fever if it was malaria!”

“Sure,” I said. “You take it easy. I’ll be back fast as we can make it.”

Mattison raised himself weakly. Pitiful. He whispered, “You know what I’m suppose to believe?”

I sat on the edge of the bed. “Tell me,” I said.

“I’m supposed to believe I’m bewitched, I’m possessed.”

“Who says so?”

“Yard boy. Pepe.”

“Come on, man,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Somebody put the voodoo on me. Wanga , Pepe says. It’s the poupee blanche , white doll, West African magic, came to the island with the first boatload of slaves.”

Mattison choked, slipped back on his pillow. “Y’ understand! Somewhere hidden around this house a dirty white doll wears pants like mine, dirty white shirt like mine, maybe couple of my own hairs wound around its damned head, piece of my fingernail paring stitched down where the mouth should be. It’s me, you understand! The damned doll’s me. . . .”

Cord Around His Neck

His hand fluttered in the air, groping. I caught it in both my hands. “Easy!” I said. “Don’t work yourself up, man. I’ve heard about these silly dolls, they can’t. . . .”

He didn’t hear me. His fingers clutched mine. “Every day--a cord around the neck, pulled a little tighter, every day. . . .”

“Mattison! Who’s doing this?”

I could scarcely hear him. What he said was a slurred and muted syllable. “Girl.”

“Why?”

But I knew why, the old story. Mattison had ceased to be amused by her. Poor primitive girl cooked up desperate dark thoughts. And then came la poupee blanche . The hill people, some of them, put their belief in a slowly strangled toy doll, the image of the now hated one, a strand of hair, a paring of fingernail.

“You sleep,” I said. “I’ll be back fast with help.”

This time, clearly, he didn’t hear me at all. His eyes had glazed over, he seemed to be looking down a long corridor of time.

He began to sob, weakly, and I left, rounding the veranda toward my horse. It was then I thought I saw the girl’s figure in the shadows.

We were back around 10, Dr. Lemke and I. Mattison was deep in coma; he died before midnight.

“I am so sorry,” Lemke said as he came out to join me on the veranda. His eyebrows were drawn together in a single line. “Do you know someone called Solange? He seemed to be muttering the name.”

“A peasant girl. She worked for Mattison. I think you know the superstition of la poupee blanche .”

“Yes. Wanga business.”

“But Mattison is dead!”

“Of malaria,” the doctor said sharply. “A malignant hill type. . . .”

“But his body was saturated with quinine.”

Lemke shrugged. Under the lamp he opened his hand to show me several capsules. “These were by the bedside,” he said, “in a box labeled quinine.” He broke one open. “Taste,” he said. “Ground sugar, a little salt, perhaps some bitter white root. But not quinine.”

“This Solange,” I said. “She’ll be gone now, of course. Into the hills.”

A Form of Murder

“It is a form of murder,” the doctor said. “Naturally his death has nothing to do with a white doll.”

“Naturally not,” I said. “Except perhaps in the mind, doctor? In the mind of my friend Mattison?”

The doctor looked for a moment at the little capsules of salt and sugar gleaming in his palm, then threw them over the veranda rail into the high grass. “Who knows anything about the mind?” he said, and gave me no answer.

Madame Jugie handled arrangements for the funeral. When it was all over, the Jugies and Lemke and I sat in the shadows on the hotel’s upper terrace, and looked out over the dark sea, and drank a few rounds of the Jugie punch. The talk was about Mattison, of course.

“Damned sad, this thing,” Jugie said. “He was quite a fair chess player.”

“He was too new in these parts to understand the native ways,” the doctor said.

“No,” Madame Jugie said softly. “He just didn’t understand women. That was at the heart of the matter.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “But whatever it was, I’ll never forget it.”

And I haven’t.