The Farming of Bones (19 page)

35

The next afternoon, when I went back to Man Denise’s house, the doors were bolted shut and one of the girls who had been looking after her told me that Man Denise had buried some coffee beads in the yard and then returned to her people in Port-au-Prince.

“Do you know where in Port-au-Prince her people live?” I asked.

She shook her head no, turned her back to me, and looked towards the lime-colored hills on the other side of the house.

“Maybe she was tired of being told the same thing, in so many ways,” the girl said. “Might be she went someplace where only her children would find her if they come back.”

She was mending a blouse that didn’t need mending at all, something she was making smaller to fit her own body. I offered to fix the blouse for her, but she would not let it out of her hands. So I watched as she stitched her uneven seams and sewed it too narrow for her shape.

“Better you go,” she said. “She is never coming back to this house. Her people will travel from Port-au-Prince to sell the house, is what she said. But she herself will never set her foot here again.” The girl tore out the new seams she had sewn for the blouse and started making darts in the lining. I wished I could have been with Man Denise much longer. I wish I could have done more for her. But some sorrows were simply too individual to share.

“Better you go now,” the girl said.

So I went to the Cap’s cathedral, where a late afternoon Mass was being held. A group of consecrants lined up to accept the Eucharist at the feet of a giant crucifix that was bleeding crimson paint for blood.

I stood in the back near a slanted wall of votive candles and watched the whole assembly march to the altar and then back up again, crossing themselves and bowing to the crucifix one last time before they turned their backs to it.

A woman slipped in next to me with her hands outstretched towards the candles and a transparent window of La Vierge, whose dress was made of sun sieved through blue glass.

“No communion for you?” she asked, looking away from the Virgin’s downcast eyes.

“No communion,” I said.

“No confession?”

“No confession.”

“Even as you say one simple word,” she said, with an open-mouthed smile, “I know the sound of your talk. Did you just return?”

“Some time ago,” I said.

“Me too. Some time ago,” she said. “I used to have a little trade of my own, selling things there, but now I work for the priests here, cleaning the church, and cooking for them.”

I looked her over for a mark, a scar, some damage that I could see. She was looking at my legs, wondering perhaps if that was the only way in which I’d been hurt.

“Where did you live there?” she asked.

“Alegría,” I said.

“Never went there,” she said.

“Where did you live?” I asked her.

“Higüey,” she said. “Was it cane country where you were?”

“Small cane, small mills.”

“The place where you lived, is Alegría what it was called officially or did our people christen it this way?”

“I’ve always heard it called this,” I said.

“People I was with, they’d christen places. And the name they gave these places nobody outside knew. Was there much joy where you were, that they’d call it Alegría?”

For as long as I could remember, people had always called the cluster of rich homes and mountains, streams, and cane fields that surrounded Señora Valencia’s house, Alegría.

“Maybe the people who called it this were jesting,” I said.

She let out a laugh too noisy for any sacred place.

“You here to talk to the priests about the slaughter?” she asked. “Father Emil, he’s the one who listens to the stories.”

She pointed out Father Emil. He was the shorter and fatter of the two priests standing at the altar. The other one was older, French, and white, with hair like a mare’s forelock falling into his eyes.

“You will have to wait some,” she said, “until after the Mass and all the alms are given for the day.”

After the Mass, the priests went out on the steps in front of the cathedral and distributed bread to the poor waiting outside. The woman ran to a back room and came out with two rolls of bread. She placed them in my hand without a word so I would not be shamed by accepting them.

As the fathers walked past us on the way back inside, she grabbed Father Emil’s cassock and said, “Father, this one here has been waiting a long time to see you.”

Father Emil looked down at the bread in my hand and gave me a nod of pity. The woman pressed her hands against my back and shoved me towards him.

I followed him to a room behind the altar. The room had a wide desk, two cane-back chairs, a small cross on the wall, and a glass case full of books for the school the priests ran behind the church.

“You’ve come to talk about the slaughter?” he asked, offering me one of the fragile cane-back chairs. He slipped behind the desk and sat down. “To all those who tell us of lost relations, we can offer nothing, save for our prayers and perhaps a piece of bread. So we have stopped letting them tell us these terrible stories. It was taking all our time, and there is so much other work to be done.”

“Father, I have not come to tell you a tale,” I said. “And I’ve already received a piece of bread.”

“Then how can I be of service to you, my child?”

“I want to know if you have heard of Father Romain or Father Vargas, who lived and served on the other side of the river?”

He joined his hands together and pushed his body forward, towards my chair.

“In churches all over this land, we have prayed for them,” he said, glancing up at the simple cross on the wall behind me. “Word of their struggle has reached us through our other brothers in the faith.”

He seemed pleased that there was at least something he could do for me.

“So they are not dead?”

“They suffered much in prison, but they are still alive. Some members of the church approached the Generalissimo on their behalf and they were both liberated. After he was released, Father Romain was asked to leave the other side, even though he wanted to stay and help those of our people who have remained there.”

I reached across the desk and squeezed his joined hands.

“Did you know them?” he asked.

“I did know them, yes.”

“Father Romain is living near the border, in Ouanammthe, in a tiny shack with his younger sister, not a nun, a blood sister.” He smiled. “A singer. The house is near an old grange where a clinic was erected during the crisis. He wanted to be as close to his old parish as possible.”

“You are a miracle, Father,” I said, kissing the still warm rolls of bread rather than him.

36

That night, I wrote a simple note to give to Father Romain if I saw him. My words were written for Doctor Javier, who, if he was not still in prison, might visit Father Romain at the border.

Por favor—Doctor Javier,

I would be most grateful for your guidance

as to where to find Michehne Onius and

Sebastien Onius, who are said to have

perished in Santiago at the time of

the slaughter. Desiring to know if you

have seen and know this to be true.

Signed,

Amabelle Désir

I added the location of Man Rapadou’s house, along with the street number of the merchant on the quay who sold us most of our sugar and flour. If Doctor Javier was ever handed my note, he would know where to find me.

When Yves came to bed that night, he kept himself on the far end of the mattress and took great pains for our skins not to touch. Before he fell asleep, I told him I would be going to the border the next day to visit Father Romain.

The following morning, he started early for the fields, but left ten gourdes with his mother, some of it for me to pay for the camión to take me there.

During the journey back to the border, I was struck by the size and beauty of the mountains, their hiplike shapes becoming clearer as we drove alongside them.

The camión stopped in front of a field of dust-feathered grass surrounding the grange where the old makeshift clinic had been. As I approached the grounds where the dead and wounded had lain, I thought of Odette and my stomach churned.

The ground was slipping beneath my feet; the sun seemed to be moving closer until I felt like it was stationed next to my face, melting my skin and blinding my eyes. The rocks on the ground become as large as pillows and finally I fell, making of the earth a warm bed.

I knew I should call for help, but there was no one coming and going, alive or dead. Besides, I felt so rested, I did not want to be disturbed. Above me spun a sky full of grass and the planks nailed in twos across the grange door.

I remembered once, when I was a girl, watching an infant boy my mother and father had midwifed into this world. A month later, the mother left the boy with us when she went to market. While he was sleeping, he rolled himself into a ball and spun around on the bed. I watched him do this for some time before I called for my father, who was cutting wood outside, and my mother, who was washing clothes behind the house.

“I think this baby has the evil in him,” I told them.

My father laughed and slapped the little boy’s bottom, which made him stop his spasms. Then he explained, my father, that sometimes in the first year, babies remembered their births with their bodies and had to repeat it many times before they could forget. When they did this, you were to help them recollect the whole thing, especially their coming out, by tapping them on their bottom as had been done to them after their birth.

Some time later, I woke up and stumbled to my feet. Miraculously, I had not hurt myself. I wiped my face with the back of both hands and walked to a limestone house in the distance, a solitary lodging in a large open field. An old woman sat crouched in the doorway, shelling peas on her lap. Her thumbs dashed in and out of the soft green pods, thrusting out perfectly round green peas into a half filled bowl.

“I’ve come to see Father Romain,” I said.

She pointed down the field to a boxlike clapboard shack with a zinc roof.

The front door was open, but I knocked anyway. A young woman came to the door, wearing a flowered sundress, the top of which barely covered her small flat breasts. She was fanning her face with two long flame tree pods that made a haphazard melody as she waved them back and forth.

“Is Father Romain here?” I asked.

“Who wants him?” She continued to swing the pods, making it hard for me to hear her voice above the clatter.

“They call me Amabelle,” I said. “I knew him in Alegría.”

Swinging the pods even harder, she said, “I do this when I’m not in view of my brother so he knows where I am. It comforts him.”

Stepping out of the doorway, she motioned for me to walk inside.

“Do not be saddened if he does not remember you,” she said. “So many people have come to him asking about their relations, but when he was arrested, he was always kept with the other priest, Father Vargas. He was never with the Haitian prisoners.”

She stopped the rattling and led me through a bare room, then out to the yard, where Father Romain was sitting on a rocker beneath a cluster of mango trees.

“Jacques!” she shouted. “You have a visitor, someone who knew you in Alegría.”

Father Romain was wearing a straw hat that covered most of his face. A thicket of sable hair peeped through the open collar of his long roomy shirt. His hands trembled as he squinted, fumbling to tie a piece of thin orange paper around the skeleton of a small kite. When his jaws quivered, he reached up and stroked his cheek to control the twitching.

“Who has come?” he muttered. Spittle was glistening from either side of his mouth. Though still young, he had the look of those who no longer recognized anything, people for whom life was blending into one large shadow, their vision clouding over as they surrendered their sight to very old age.

The sister left the yard, went into the room, and brought out another set of chairs. Father Romain’s eyes traveled up and down, from the trunk of the mango trees and then back to his sister, before he saw me.

“Speak loudly and tell him what you must tell him,” she said. “His mind wanders.”

“Father, my name is Amabelle Désir,” I said.

“Yes, Amabelle Désir.” His voice was a distant mumble as he held the kite up to his face.

“Father, do you recognize me?”

He shook his head from side to side.

“You don’t remember me?”

“No,” he said.

“Father, I need to know if perhaps you encountered Mimi and Sebastien Onius before or after you were in prison.”

The priest shook his head from behind the kite. “Prison? Wi. Wi. I encountered many people in prison.”

“See how they aged him in prison,” his sister said.

“Our country is the proudest birthright I can leave them,” babbled Father Romain. He was staring up blankly at his sister as if trying with all his powers of understanding to make out her words and mine too.

“They forced him to say these things that he says now whenever his mind wanders,” she explained.

“On this island, walk too far in either direction and people speak a different language,” continued Father Romain with aimless determination. “Our motherland is Spain; theirs is darkest Africa, you understand? They once came here only to cut sugarcane, but now there are more of them than there will ever be cane to cut, you understand? Our problem is one of dominion. Tell me, does anyone like to have their house flooded with visitors, to the point that the visitors replace their own children? How can a country be ours if we are m smaller numbers than the outsiders? Those of us who love our country are taking measures to keep it our own.”

“I cannot stop him once he begins,” the sister said, using her bare fingers to wipe the growing puddle of drool on either side of her brother’s chin.

“Sometimes I cannot believe that this one island produced two such different peoples,” Father Romain continued like a badly wound machine. “We, as Dominicans, must have our separate traditions and our own ways of living. If not, in less then three generations, we will all be Haitians. In three generations, our children and grandchildren will have their blood completely tainted unless we defend ourselves now, you understand?”

Perhaps finally tired of talking, he stopped and lowered his face, his chin down to his chest.

“He was beaten badly every day,” the sister said, stroking his shoulder. “When he first came, he told me they’d tied a rope around his head and twisted it so tight that sometimes he felt like he was going mad. They offered him nothing to drink but his own piss. Sometimes he remembers everything. Sometimes, he forgets all of it, everything, even me.”

“Forget,” mumbled Father Romain. He went back to concentrating on improving his kite. With more strength than I’d expect his trembling hands to have, he ripped a piece off the front end of his shirt to make a longer tail for the kite.

“Non, Jacques,” his sister scolded, like a young mother correcting an errant child. “He’s ruined many of his shirts this way,” she said, turning back to me.

“Did you know Doctor Javier at all?” I asked the sister.

“Jacques, do you remember a Doctor Javier?” she asked.

Father Romain tied the strip of cloth from his shirt to the end of his kite and said nothing.

“I didn’t know all of Jacques’ friends,” the sister said. “He is a priest. I am a singer and not a singer of religious songs.”

“How long will you stay here?” I asked her.

“As long as he wants to be here,” she said. “Where do you live?”

“In Cap Harden,” I said, “at the house of a woman they call Man Rapadou.”

“Our family has a fine house in Cap Haitien, near the cathedral,” she said. “I hope he will let me take him there soon. Even in this state, Jacques still wants to go back across the border to find the people he served in that little valley town, but he will be killed if he crosses again.”

The sister shook the flame tree pods once more. Father Romain looked up, his eyes suddenly gleaming like a hungry dog being called to a long-awaited meal.

When I said good-bye to him, he greeted me again as though he were seeing me for the first time.

I pressed my missive into his sister’s hands. “Please give this to him during one of those times when he remembers,” I said.

As I left his house, I wanted, but could not bring myself, to visit the river. Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside, with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before.

That night in bed, I told Yves that I had seen Father Romain at the border.

“Don’t you think I have gone there too?” he asked. “Don’t you think I have seen him, the poor bekeke?”

“Please don’t call him that,” I said.

“Did you see what state he was in, talking, talking like that without stopping? His sister was the one who told me first that all the killings were meant to look as if they had been done by farmers with machetes; no rifles were ever intended to be fired as was done with Wilner.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you had gone to see him? Do you know that Man Denise is gone, that people have been coming to tell her that Mimi and Sebastien are dead?”

“I don’t always tell you what I know or where I go,” he said.

His silence before he fell asleep was weighted with rage and guilt. Like Sebastien, he had always lived for work. The two most important cycles of their lives were the cane harvest and the dead season. Now all he could do was plant and sow to avoid the dead season.