The Farming of Bones (18 page)

“These are mine,” she said, closing her hand around them, “from my own bracelet, which broke long ago. I made one bracelet for each of my children and one for myself, but when I was anxious over the children, I tugged too hard at the bracelet and the thread broke. This is all I have left of the beads from my bracelet.”

I wanted her to let me touch the beads again. She reached into the pocket of her dress and lay them there.

“Sit for a moment,” she said.

I moved closer and sat on the edge of her bed.

“So you knew my Micheline?” she asked.

“I did.”

“She was always untamed for a young girl,” she smiled. “Her father gave her the name Micheline. Did she ever tell you this?”

“No,” I said. “She never did.”

“But Sebastien, you knew more about him? You knew him well.”

“Very well,” I said.

She smiled a knowing smile, Sebastien’s smile, her cheeks ballooning, then caving down on the sides of her lips.

“I named him Sebastien myself,” she said, “after the saint. You know of Saint Sebastien, who died not once, but twice.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“The first time, soldiers shot arrows at his body and left him for dead. A widow found him and saw he was alive. The widow carried him to her house and treated his wounds. When he was healed, Saint Sebastien went back to the soldiers to show them the miracle of love that was his life; this time the soldiers beat him with sticks until he was truly dead.”

She held her head between her hands as though it were an unfamiliar thing, a load now too heavy for her. Reclining, she clutched the pillow under her head.

“I named him Sebastien,” she said, “because I knew it would be wise if a man could have two deaths. The first one comes quick enough, so it’s good to have another one in reserve.”

I moved towards her and adjusted the pillow beneath her head. I pressed my palm down on her forehead as she looked up, staring directly into my eyes. I could tell that she trusted something about me, even though she herself might not have known what it was.

“A young man came here to see me some days past.” She reached up and pressed down hard on my hand as it was resting on her forehead. “He came here to see me on his way to Port-au-Prince. He said he saw my children killed, in a courtyard, between two government edifices there, in a place he called Santiago. He said he saw them herd my children with a group, make them lie face down on the ground, and shoot them with rifles.”

I felt my fingers stick to her forehead as she pressed down harder on my hand. Her body was shaking, but she was not crying.

“In my place, would you believe this?” she asked.

“No, I would not believe this,” I said. But in my heart I kept thinking, how could I not? Wouldn’t Sebastien have come home already if he was still alive?

“You knew my Micheline. You knew my Sebastien. Do you believe it for yourself?” she insisted.

“No, I do not believe it for myself,” I said.

But I did. I believed it because of what I had seen, in Dajabón, because of what I had heard of La Romana, because of what the people said in the clinic that day about those who’d died in Santiago.

“Leave me, please,” she said, releasing my hand.

“I wish to stay,” I said.

“Leave me.”

As I was going, she stopped me in the doorway and asked, “Did you ever see my children wearing these bracelets I made for them?”

“They were never without them,” I said.

“This is what they say, the people who come here to bring the word to me. It is not just one traveler, but many. They say that my children died with my bracelets on their wrists.”

Pushing her hand inside her pocket, she pressed the beads against the side of her thigh.

“Those who die young, they are cheated,” she said. “Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they’re cheated because they don’t know it’s coming. They don’t have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young, even when you break them, you don’t believe you have them. But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no?”

I nodded yes. Mostly because I knew she wanted me to.

“I wish people would stop coming to tell me they saw my children die,” she said. “I wish I had my hopes that they were living someplace, even if they never did come back to see me again.”

“Maybe those who came with the word, maybe they are mistaken.”

“They are always strangers, the people who come,” she said. “They do not know me. Before they died, either alone or together, my son and daughter told them to come here and tell me about their fates.”

She pushed her hands into her pocket and pressed them down on the beads.

“Leave me now,” she said. “I’m going to dream up my children.”

I strolled like a ghost through the waking life of the Cap, wondering whenever I saw people with deformities—anything from a broken nose to crippled legs—had they been there?

I followed the road from Man Denise’s house out to the quay, where ships entered the harbor with horns blaring while others were being unloaded as they wobbled against the piers. The sacks of rice, beans, and sugar were being distributed among the merchants as a line of bare-chested young men waited with wheelbarrows to carry the stacks off for them. These men, with more than the weight of their bodies in sugar on their heads, shouted in an uneven chorus of rage in order to be allowed to pass through the streets.

34

When I went back to Yves’ house, he had already left for the fields. I sat in the yard with my arms around the traveler’s tree, trying not to pound my head against it.

Man Rapadou came out to the courtyard in her nightdress, smiling. She carried a low chair from her room and sat down next to me.

“You don’t need the justice of the peace,” she said. “You don’t need a confessor. I, Man Rapadou, I know your tale.” She pressed her face close to mine and whispered so the others in the courtyard couldn’t hear. “I asked my son why there is no love between you and him, and he told me about Sebastien.”

As I watched her flawless smile grow wider on her face—which should have been a lot sadder than it was—I stroked the traveler’s tree, not sure what else to do with my hands. I reached up and touched the frilled yellow-green palmetto branches; the narrow stems had woven themselves together like the inside of an enormous wicker basket. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I wanted to scream, but summoning the will to do it already made me feel weak.

“When my son left here, I planted this traveler’s tree, and now look how it’s grown,” Man Rapadou said. “Yves told me you can make dresses and help give birth to children. Since I’m not to have children anymore, maybe you can make me a dress.”

Kindness prevailed on Man Rapadou to let me spend the rest of the day inside, in her son’s bed, by myself. She did not call me to eat, even when the mid-afternoon meal was ready. Instead, she whispered from outside the door that she was saving a plate of food for me to have whenever my stomach felt at ample ease.

As I lay in bed with my arms and legs coiled around myself, I ached inside in places I could neither name nor touch. I could not accept that I’d never see Sebastien again, even though I knew it was possible, just as I would never see my mother and father again, no matter how many times I called them forth both with my own loud voice and the timid one inside my head. When it came to my parents, the older I became, the more they were fading from me, until all I could see were the last few moments spent with them by the river. The rest blended together like the ingredients in a too-long-simmered stew: reveries and dreams, wishes, fantasies. Is that what it would also come to with Sebastien?

I feigned sleep when Yves came to bed that night, but unlike the other times he was not convinced by my frozen pose.

“My beans have sprouted,” he announced. “Looks like I’ll see a harvest.”

I did not want to move. Perhaps he didn’t know about Mimi and Sebastien, and I wasn’t certain how to tell him.

“I hear,” he said, “that the priests at the cathedral listen and mark down testimonials of the slaughter.” This was his gift to me, like the gift the earth had given him in pushing his beans back up in a different form.

“They don’t promise you money.” His voice staggered between high and low, as though he were beginning to think that I might really be asleep. “They’re collecting tales for newspapers and radio men. The Generalissimo has found ways to buy and sell the ones here. Even this region has been corrupted with his money.”

I turned on my back, opened my eyes, and tried to find the silvery lines of rusting tin on the ceiling.

“Will you go yourself to see these priests?” I asked.

“I know what will happen,” he said. “You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours.”

“Will you go?”

“I have already gone and they looked in their books. Their names are not there. There are good days now waiting for me in the fields. This means we will start to have money. You can buy cloth and thread, sew for people, and make money on your own.”

At that moment the future seemed a lot more frightening than the past. Perhaps working the earth, making beans sprout out of dry hard seeds and dust, could make him believe that he had forgotten. But I couldn’t trust time or money to make me forget.

Sometimes I conjured up the group from the border clinic, especially Nounoune’s man, who had woken up in the cadaver pit, and the woman with the large appetite and the rope burns on her neck. I imagined them going forward in their lives, cultivating their gardens, taking their animals to the stream, skipping out of the road to avoid speeding trucks, calling their children in for an evening wash, making love to the people they’d been reunited with.

I wanted to bring them out of my visions into my life, to tell them how glad I was that they had been able to walk into the future, but most important to ask them how it was that they could be so strong, what their secret was, how they could wash their lives clean, if only for brief moments, from the past.

“How did you keep on with the planting, even when nothing was growing?” I asked Yves.

I could hear him breathing loudly, tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to find the right phrasing for his answer. “Empty houses and empty fields make me sad,” he said. “They are both too calm, like the dead season.”

He pushed his body down, farther into the mattress, as though our speaking together had made him feel like he was more entitled to do so.

After a long silence, he added, “The night when Joel was hit by the automobile, it was almost me who died.”

“I think Sebastien felt like this, too,” I said.

“No, no,” he said. “Joel, Sebastien, and me, we were walking on the road together. Joel was in the middle, and Sebastien and me, we were on either side of him. I was on the side closest to the road. We saw the light and heard the automobile in the same instant. By the time we turned around, it was almost on my neck. Joel pushed me aside, so he had no time to run himself. He was struck and thrown into the ravine.”

I listened for signs that Man Rapadou was in a deep sleep in the next room, her loud snoring and occasional shifts on the bed.

“Then the automobile stopped and the people came out,” he said. “I didn’t see Sebastien. I didn’t know where he was. I thought he was hit, too. I ran off to hide behind a tree in the dark. The old man wanted to stay and look for us, but the other one, the son-in-law, was in a great haste.”

I wanted to tell him that he was right to run, brave even, that perhaps it was Joel’s day to die, that there might have even been a worse death waiting for Joel in the slaughter. I wanted to say most of those things that never comfort the person hearing them, but only the one saying them.

“It could have been me too at the church with Mimi and Sebastien if I hadn’t gone to sell the wood.” He continued. “Yes, I saw them put Sebastien and Mimi and all the others on a truck. I saw it all from the road. They made them stand in groups of six and then forced them to climb. The priests asked to stay with the people, but they took the priests separately, and then they took the doctor and the people together. If he wanted to be a Haitian, they told Doctor Javier, they would treat him like a Haitian. I saw Mimi climb when her turn came. Sebastien was in line behind her. Her knees went weak when she was climbing, and she almost fell. The doctor offered his hand to her, and Sebastien supported her from the rear. I saw all this from the road where I was hiding. I wanted to do for them what Joël had done for me, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Even in the river, with Wilner, I couldn’t. The thought came to me that I should swim across the river again, collect his body to be buried on this side. All the soldiers. All the guns. I couldn’t. I have not been able to do for anyone what Joël did for me. And I never will. No. Never. Because the more I see people die, the more I want to guard my own life.”

I reached over and placed my hand on his sweaty trembling leg, to keep him quiet, to keep him still. My fingers crept up his thighs with his hands guiding mine. I felt for his face in the dark and touched his large Adam’s apple, which bobbed up and down as though about to slide out of his mouth.

He turned over on his side and slipped my nightdress off my shoulders. For a while we both lay on our backs staring at the darkness above us. What now? What then? Who else did we know to turn to?

“It could have been me too at the church with Mimi and Sebastien,” I said. “If I hadn’t noticed two bloody spots on the back of the señora’s dress and stayed a while longer with her. And maybe Odette died in the river because I pressed down on her nose too hard, though this was not my intention.”

“Odette died when Wilner died,” he said. “They killed her when they killed him.”

And for this I was grateful. More grateful than he knew.

His body immediately leaped up to meet mine when I climbed on top of him. I was probably lighter than he expected, bonier and smaller framed than he’d thought. For a while I felt as though he was carrying me, the way Señora Valencia had carried her son and daughter in her womb, the way Kongo might have carried his son Joël, after he’d died, the way first he and then the stranger had carried Odette. Then it was me carrying him. After a while it was as though we were both afloat at the same time, joined in a way that we could never be speaking together, or even crying together.

For several months, as I’d imagined Sebastien’s return, I’d wondered whether my flesh could feel anything but pain. Perhaps Yves had wondered the same about his own.

His breathing was loud and fast like the vapor raising the lid off a steaming pot. Then his body froze abruptly and became heavier and I thought that his heart had stopped, that he had died right there on top of me. He ground his teeth and mumbled to himself, trying to push out everything that wanted to remain safely hidden in him. In the end, all he let out was a flash flood of tears, tears that rolled down my forehead, stung my eyes, made me sneeze when they slipped into my nostrils, and tasted like my own when they fell on my tongue.

As he rolled back on his side of the bed, I felt an even larger void in the aching pit of my stomach. I put on my nightdress and slipped under the sheets. He stepped off the bed, put on his pants, and went outside, leaving the door half open. Sitting under the traveler’s tree, he examined the sky and opened a new pack of La Nationale cigarettes.

In the moonlight, I could almost see the silhouette of bones pushing themselves out in his back. After smoking a few of the cigarettes, he threw the rest of the pack against the side of the house and came back inside. When he climbed onto the bed, I pretended to be asleep—or even dead.