The Farming of Bones (13 page)

Doloritas swallowed a lump in her throat, removed the handkerchief from her face, and asked, “What do they call you?”

“They call me Amabelle,” I said.

“Ah, Amabelle, like a taste of cool water in a drought,” said Tibon.

“How long has your journey been?” the older sister asked in Spanish. The two sisters didn’t seem to speak any Kreyol.

“Only one day,” I said.

“The sisters have been with us three days,” Tibon said.

Doloritas covered her eyes with the handkerchief once more.

“Don’t cry so much, Doloritas,” Tibon said. “Save some of your tears to shed for joy when we find your man.”

Doloritas lowered the handkerchief from her face as she considered this. If Tibon, a cripple, had escaped, why not her man?

“We are Dominicanas,” Dolores explained.

“They took him,” Doloritas added. “They came in the night and took him from our bed.”

“We have yet to learn your language,” Dolores said.

“We are together six months, me and my man,” Doloritas said. “I told him I would learn Kreyol for when we visit his family in Haiti.”

“I know nothing,” Dolores said. “Doloritas was lost when they took him. She wanted to go to the border to look for him. I could not let her go alone in her state.”

“What is his name?” I asked, looking directly into Doloritas’ reddened eyes. “Your man, what is his name?”

“We called him He,” she said, pushing her wet handkerchief towards me to show the embroidering of his name. “He is a nickname for Ilestbien. He told me that it means ‘he is well.'”

We walked through the afternoon without resting. The sun teased us by occasionally seeking shelter behind a dense cloud, often for long periods of time.

The mountain air grew cooler as dusk approached. Our fatigue limited our desire for more talk. Besides, each person’s story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.

Now and then, Tibon would pierce the silence with his voice.

“Everyone says the Generalissimo is at the border now. Maybe he’s there, waiting to greet us.” He spat out his words, pausing for a reply, an agreement, or an argument.

Yves looked back to where I was walking next to the two Dominican women, with Tibon hobbling behind us. He had a sneer of disappointment on his face, as though he could not believe that I had forsaken him so early in our journey for newer company.

“They have so many of us here because our own country—our government—has forsaken us,” Tibon started again, but no one replied. “Poor people are sold to work in the cane fields so our own country can be free of them.”

The sun was setting, the valleys far below us fading into a void. The night brought with it a ghostly echo so that each time Tibon spoke it seemed as though you were hearing many people say the same thing at once.

“The ruin of the poor is their poverty,” Tibon went on. “The poor man, no matter who he is, is always despised by his neighbors. When you stay too long at a neighbor’s house, it’s only natural that he become weary of you and hate you.”

28

We found a point where the road widened into a broad level patch, and each person claimed the spot where he was standing when it was announced that we were stopping for the night. A few sheets were thrown open from the bundles, and we all fared well enough with something between us and the cool dirt and something else to throw over our bodies.

Wilner ordered us not to light any fires, which might make us discernible from a distance. Even a pipe, which Tibon desperately wanted to smoke, was not permitted.

There was a full moon overhead, but it was the stars that caught my attention. I had never seen them so massive and so close before. Every once in a while, one would plunge from the sky and crash someplace behind the mountains, fading from an explosion of fireballs into a hush of darkness.

Yves made his way towards me and offered two of the bananas he had bought on the road early that morning. He also gave me a block of coconut chunks, which I hadn’t seen him buy. I ate the coconut first and then one of the bananas. Putting the other one in my bundle, I saved it for later.

“If I doze, awaken me,” Yves whispered. “Don’t let me speak in my sleep.”

“Not all of us should sleep at the same time,” Wilner said as he crawled into the small space near Odette. “There should be watchers to wake the sleepers if need be.”

The three men divided among themselves the task of being sentinels. Yves was to watch during the last part of the night, into the next morning.

We all took turns sleeping and waking. Each time they woke up, the Dominican sisters had to remind themselves where they were, in murmurs, secret grunts, and mute conversations with each other.

I drifted off to sleep a few times myself, but when I woke up, it was so dark that if not for the coldness of the ground and the pebbles digging into my side, I still would have thought I was asleep.

Once when I woke up, I thought I felt the ground shaking. Powdered dust and pebbles sifted down from above us. I clung to the soil with my fingers. Then, realizing that this would be a cowardly way to die, I shook a mound of dirt off me and stood up.

Everyone rose and roamed in circles, trying to establish what was taking place. Then just as abruptly as it had started, the mountain’s shaking stopped.

The night was still after this. The fireflies disappeared from the air. Even the bats must have been stunned.

“It’s only the mountain settling,” Wilner said, breaking the silence with his voice.

“Let it not settle on top of my head,” Tibon said. Odette laughed and I was calmed.

We stayed awake for some time, waiting for the mountain to stir again. The stars stopped falling and slowly disappeared from the sky. We returned to our places, and perhaps because our bodies demanded it, most of us fell asleep.

Yves was the only one who did not sleep. Towards dawn, I saw him sitting on the edge of the hill with his body facing the road ahead. He was playing a game in which he buried a stick in a pile of dirt and then scooped away the soil until the stick was standing straight up in the least amount of dirt. When the stick fell, he would lose to himself and start the game again.

Over his shoulder, a funnel of dark charcoal smoke was rising from one of the small villages we’d left behind. Yves had become accustomed enough to the sight that he kept playing the game, only occasionally glancing in the direction the smoke was drifting before it rose high enough to thin out and become part of the air.

I tried not to wake anyone as I stood, but my movements caused more activity. Wilner’s woman, Odette, woke up, then Wilner, followed by the Dominican sisters, then Tibon. By the time I reached Yves, everyone was awake and watching the fire burning through a village a few tiers below.

There was no mistaking the stench rising towards us. It was the smell of blood sizzling, of flesh melting to the last bone, a bonfire of corpses, like the one the Generalissimo had ordered at the Plaza Colombina to avoid the spreading of disease among the living after the last great hurricane.

Yves placed the machete on his back. He tugged on the game stick, ignoring the splinters stabbing at his fingertips. Odette raised her hands over her nose. Circling her frame with his embrace, Wilner rocked Odette’s body back and forth in his arms. I felt Tibon shiver and then realized I was holding his skeletal hand.

Tibon leaned towards my left ear and whispered, “I almost kill a Dominican boy when I’m ten. I see him coming along the road in front of the mill one day and I decide to beat him to make him say that even if he’s living in a big house and I’m living in the mill, he’s no better than me.”

I pulled my hand from Tibon’s long delicate fingers. His voice grew louder as he continued. “I grab the boy by the neck. I beat him until I’m tired and he’s biting the back of my hand and he’s running. I still have the scar where he bit me. Do you want to see?”

He tried to show the scar on his normal-sized forearm, but no one looked.

“He never tells his family it’s me beating him every day. I warn him ‘I beat you worse if you tell.’ He won’t say what I want him to say, that we’re the same, me and him, flesh like flesh, blood like blood.”

“The mountains are dangerous for us now,” Wilner announced, interrupting Tibon. “I say we follow this trail down and, soon as we can, go through the forest to a place where we can cross the river to the other side.”

“We can get lost in the forest,” Yves said, “walk the same path a hundred times and not know it.”

“‘You
can get lost in there,” Wilner said. “Not me. I have two good eyes.”

Wilner turned to the Dominican sisters who were still watching the smoke and addressed them in Spanish. “You will travel with us no more,” he said.

“We cannot leave them here alone,” Tibon protested.

“They are not good for us,” Wilner said, as if the sisters had already disappeared from our presence. “I will not be roasted like lechon for them. This is their country. Let them find the border themselves. They can go to any village in these mountains, and the people will welcome them.”

“What if they betray us?” Odette asked. “What if they send their people after us?”

“They will not betray us,” Tibon said. “I can sense this.”

“We will let you choose your road, and we will choose ours,” Dolontas spoke up. “And we’ll go on to Dajabón and I’ll find Ilestbien.”

Dajabón was a place I remembered as a barely developed town, a place I had not seen since I was a child. Now I imagined it full of people like us, searching for loved ones, mistaking the living for the dead.

As we walked away from them, I wanted to argue for allowing the sisters to come with us, but the fires down below made too strong a demonstration of the danger. Besides, the sisters would not have as many obstacles as we would in Dajabón. If they were asked to say “perejil,” they could say it with ease. In most of our mouths, their names would be tinged with or even translated into Kreyol, the way the name of Doloritas’ man slid towards the Spanish each time she evoked him. Perhaps if we addressed the sisters publicly in Dajabón, someone might hear and at that moment decide that we should die.

I lingered and offered the sisters my remaining banana. They refused it, pushing my hand away. When Yves beckoned for me to hurry, I was surprised that I could yield so fast and leave them behind. But the most important task, I told myself, was to find Mimi and Sebastien.

We followed the mountain trail down, away from the fires. The sun was fully up now. And going down into the woods seemed like a prudent idea. There were many more trees to cover us there, more places to hide, probably a creek or two to drink from.

It was late morning, and something reminded me that it was Saturday. I thought of past Saturdays spent sitting in the house with Señora Valencia, sewing baby clothes, going through the market stands with Juana, helping Papi in his flower garden, visiting Sebastien at the mill—even after long days when he had to do extra work outside the cane to earn a few more pesos to pay his debts. For so long this had been my life, but it was all the past. Now we all had to try and find the future.

I knew precisely what I would do when I crossed the border. I’d exchange the pesos for gourdes and look for a little house to rent on the citadel road, where I had lived as a child. I wondered who had our house now and if I could still claim the land as my inheritance. I had no papers to show, but it was probably recorded some place that the land was once my father’s and mother’s and—even though I hadn’t been there for a long time—was still my birthright.

Tibon became as quiet as everyone else after we left the sisters. We were going down a steep part of the mountain, which required a lot of concentration from all of us but most especially from him because of his limp and wounded ankle. The grade was steep and we could easily trip, stumbling down the incline into a rough-edged gorge crowded with kapok trees whose branches rose as high as the hills and whose roots stuck out of the ground like the entrails of crushed animals.

We reached the foot of the mountain by mid-afternoon. At the mouth of the forest was a small deserted settlement of thatched huts and wood cabins with long vines of tobacco leaves drying in roped layers around them.

Tibon limped to the first of five doorways lined up in a short row.

“No one here,” he called as he moved on to the next. Wilner and Odette rushed ahead of him. There was no one in any of the four other houses either, they discovered.

“Maybe the owners are out planting more tobacco,” Wilner called. “Or maybe they’ve gone selling.”

Wilner dashed in and out of the cabins, separating from his woman and then joining up with her again. He found bundles of corn and a water well with a bucket suspended from a rope. Odette discovered a few wooden bowls and distributed some water among us.

“When you’re thirsty,” Odette said, “no matter how much water you drink afterwards, nothing ever tastes like the first drop.”

“I wonder why more people didn’t travel the same way we did across the mountains,” Wilner commented before drinking his water.

“It’s a big mountain,” Tibon said.

“Perhaps it was the fire,” offered Odette.

“Some could have crossed before the fire,” Wilner argued.

“Maybe there are no people left,” Odette said. She splashed the rest of the water on her face, washing her armpits and the space between her breasts. Wilner wandered in and out of the huts, to see what other treasures could be found.

He ran out with a pile of land papers in his hand. “Look, this was under one of the mattresses,” he said. “They are traders, Haitian traders. A big family.”

“They were not poor.” Tibon untied his shirt from his head and put it on. He fished a wooden pipe out of his pants pocket and crammed it with a piece from a tobacco leaf that still looked too damp for smoking. Puffing at the unlit pipe, he moaned after each smokeless draw. For the first time since we’d left the sisters, it seemed as though his guilt was waning.

At this moment we were all certain that chance had blessed us, that if these people came back, they would invite us to stay for the night and their presence would protect us. Each of us must have thought this, all except Yves.

Yves stood alone, far away from the others. He was leaning against the largest tree in the yard, holding a dusty brown sandal he had picked up from the dirt. He kept looking up, as if to find a patch of the sky between the tiny spaces left open by the wide kapok branches.

I moved towards him, wanting to say something quickwitted, like what a marvel it was that we not so long ago were looking down at these same trees and now were standing beneath their branches.

He looked up again, in spite of himself, it seemed. I followed the rise of his face. At first I couldn’t tell what they were, these giant presences, which cast no shadows on the ground. They were dangling at the end of bullwhip ropes: feet, legs, arms, twelve pairs of legs, as far as I could count. Their inflated faces kept the nooses from releasing them. Three men. Five women. And two young boys.

A brown leather sandal was suspended, close to falling, from one of the feet, a man’s foot. Yves had the other sandal in his hand.

I slapped the back of my neck where an insect—or a whole group of them—stung me. I cringed from the bruise of my own blow. Yves dropped the sandal on the ground.

“We must go,” he said, moving towards the cabins. “If we go now, we reach Dajabón by nightfall.”

It took some time to gather everyone.

“Why not stay here for the night?” Tibon asked when we found him. Well-lit now, his pipe stuck out between his lips.

“What if these people were chased away?” Yves said. “Those who frightened them will surely return tonight for all this tobacco. And the people who set the fires in the mountain villages, they may come this way, too.”

Everyone agreed then that we should leave.

“I have people in Dajabón who may receive us,” Yves said, as we entered the woods.

“We do, also,” Odette said.