The Farming of Bones (21 page)

40

This past is more like flesh than air; our stories testimonials like the ones never heard by the justice of the peace or the Generalissimo himself.

His name is Sebastien Onius and his story is like a fish with no tail, a dress with no hem, a drop with no fall, a body in the sunlight with no shadow.

His absence is my shadow; his breath my dreams. New dreams seem a waste, needless annoyances, too much to crowd into the tiny space that remains.

Still I think I want to find new manners of filling up my head, new visions for an old life, waterless rivers to cross and real waterfall caves to slip into over a hundred times each day.

His name is Sebastien Onius. Sometimes this is all I know. My back aches now in all those places that he claimed for himself, arches of bare skin that belonged to him, pockets where the flesh remains fragile, seared like unhealed burns where each fallen scab uncovers a deeper wound.

I wish at least that he was part of the air on this side of the river, a tiny morsel in the breeze that passes through my room in the night. I wish at least that some of the dust of his bones could trail me in the wind.

Men with names never truly die. It is only the nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air.

His name is Sebastien Onius. Seven years before his own death, he saw his father die. Death to Sebastien Onius was as immense as a tree-tossing beast of a raging hurricane. It was an event that split open the sky and cracked the ground, made the heavens wail and the clouds weep. It was not for one person to live alone.

Perhaps there was water to greet his last fall, to fold around him and embrace him like a feather-filled mattress. Perhaps there were ceremonial words recited in his ears: “Ale avek Bon Dye,” “Go with God,” “Go in peace,” a farewell not so solitary and abrupt, a parting like the dimming of the twilight, darkening the sky for shadows and stars at play.

His name is Sebastien Onius and his spirit must be inside the waterfall cave at the source of the stream where the cane workers bathe, the grotto of wet moss and chalk and luminous green fresco—the dark green of wet papaya leaves.

Sometimes I can make myself dream him out of the void to listen. A handsome, steel-bodied man, he carries a knapsack woven from palm leaves as he walks out of the cave into the room where I sleep.

“Amabelle, it is Sebastien, come to see you,” he says. “I have brought remedies for your wounds. I’ve brought citronella and cedarwood to keep the ants and mosquitoes from biting your skin, camphor, basil, and bitter oranges to reduce your fevers and keep your joints limber. I’ve brought ginger and celery, aniseed, and cinnamon for your digestion, turmeric for your teeth, and kowosol tea for pleasant dreams.”

He stands over my bed, fills his lungs with the cloud of lint in the room. I reach over and try to touch him, but he scatters with my reach, like a stream of dust caught in a strong beam of noontime sunlight.

I sense that we no longer know the same words, no longer speak the same language. There is water, wind, land, and mountains between us, a shroud of silence, a curtain of fate.

“Tell me, please, Sebastien,” I say. “I must know. Did you and Mimi suffer greatly?”

He breathes in more of the cloth dust in my room, as though he wants to inhale me and everything there too.

“Sebastien, the slaughter showed me that life can be a strange gift,” I say. “Breath, like glass is always in danger. I chose a living death because I am not brave. It takes patience, you used to say, to raise a setting sun. Two mountains can never meet, but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall.”

41

At first glance, the Massacre appeared like any of the three or four large rivers in the north of Haiti. On a busy market day, it was simply a lively throughway beneath a concrete bridge, where women sat on boulders at the water’s edge to pound their clothes clean, and mules and oxen stopped to diminish their thirst.

The tide was low for October. So low that when the washing women dipped in a bucket, they came up with half of it full of water and the other half full of red-brown sand.

“You see how the river looks now,” one of the women said as she threw a handful of sand back into the flow. “When the current rises, the water can kiss the bridge.”

On the bridge, young soldiers whose faces looked too youthful to hold a past marched back and forth, patrolling the line marked by a chain that separated our country from theirs. They wore dark green uniforms, carried their rifles on straps on their shoulders, and drummed the ground with their shin-stroking laced boots. Our soldiers stayed farther back, away from the bridge, in the customshouse near an open road, the better to watch for invaders.

The border had lost a number of its trees. Holes were still too evident where the trees had been plucked out and replaced with poles that held up doubled strands of barbed wire. All along the walls of spiked metal were signs that cautioned travelers not to cross anba fil, beneath the wires.

A tall, bowlegged old man with a tangled gray beard, wearing three layers of clothing padded with straw, walked up behind me. His clothes and hands were covered with dirt, but his face was clean, smelling of vanilla and coconut. His eyes seemed a bright cerise, lush and dense like velvet. The washing women called him “Pwofese” and cackled as he circled his arms around my waist.

“Where are you going, Pwofese?” they took turns asking, as though playing a game of chant.

“Grass won’t grow where I stand,” the professor whispered in my ears, in a voice that I could tell was rarely used, except perhaps on frolicsome occasions like this one. “I’m walking to the dawn.”

Before I could drag myself away, the professor planted a damp kiss on my lips. I scrubbed the kiss off, reaching into the river for a fistful of water to cleanse my mouth. The washing women threw their heads back, opening their mouths to the sky to laugh.

“The professor’s not been the same since the slaughter,” one of them said. “Don’t rub it off. Leave his kiss on your lips. Don’t you know that if you are kissed by a crazy man, it brings you luck?”

As the professor ran off into the open plains, I walked towards a bare-chested boy who was sitting on the riverbank scribbling in a small drawing book. I had been told that he could help me find someone who could take me across the edwidge danticat river. Squatting beside him, I dipped my feet in the water. The current bubbled, gently pulsing beneath my soles, like a baby’s fontanel.

“Do you know someone who can help me cross the border without papers?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the water. The boy said nothing until he finished writing a whole phrase in jumbled schoolboy lettering.

“If you want to cross the border without papers, it will have to be at night,” he whispered.

“Can it be tonight?”

“Perhaps,” he said.

That night, I was met on the road before the bridge by a man in a black jeep. The man, the sole driver and occupant, ran a lottery along the border area—at least that’s what the boy had told me. He wore a denim cap on his head and a red bandanna over half his face, starting at his nose.

Stepping out into the night, the man showed me the place he had reserved for me in the back of the car, a small hollow beneath a heavy blanket behind the front seat.

“They know me at the crossing,” he mumbled in Kreyol. “They won’t trouble with me.”

I squeezed myself into the cramped space, trying hard to ignore the stabs of pain coursing through my knee. Keeping my head down, I reached out and gave him the payment that he and the boy had agreed on. He eased the side door shut and we started on our way.

There was only a brief pause at the first border crossing. The driver slowed the car at the Haitian customshouse to deliver a bribe to the night guards.

We came to another stop at the Dominican post on the bridge. I heard voices, lifted the sheet, and raised my head to one of the side windows.

“Stay down,” the driver commanded.

In spite of what he said, I kept my eyes at the bottom edge of the window. The border guards expressed regret for the wait and quickly opened the car gates for the driver.

“Until tomorrow night,” the driver said as he handed the guards more money.

I slept through most of the military checkpoints leading towards Alegría. Sleep had been a comfort to me for the last two decades. It was as close to disappearing as I could come.

The sun had risen when I woke up. The car was speeding along a dirt road between two walls of violet cane. The driver had removed the red bandanna from his face, but still had the cap tilted on one side of his head. He was watching me through the raised mirror in front of him, and I in turn examined his eyes. They were deep set and far apart, the color of clouded amber.

When he saw me looking at him, he removed his cap and turned away. He was a young man, younger than Sebastien when he had disappeared. His hair was braided in long thin plaits, dropping over his ears.

“So it is fitting now,” I said in Kreyol, “for me to look at your face?”

“This is dangerous, what I am doing for you,” he said. His voice was jubilant and loud. “Even with the Generalissimo dead, things are still not tranquil here. There are protests and riots in the capital. I believe there’ll be another Yanki invasion soon.”

The cane fields stretched for some distance, the stalks all crammed together like a crowd at carnival. He stopped the jeep in the middle of the fields and motioned for me to move to the seat next to him. As I climbed in, he disappeared inside the cane, then came out pulling his pants up by the belt.

“Why are you making this journey?” he asked, speeding down the road again.

“Are you certain you know the road to Alegría?” I asked.

“I will meet you in the square there, to take you back this afternoon,” he said.

“And you? What will you do this morning?”

“I will not be in Alegría,” he said.

We came out of the cane onto an asphalt road that led to a closed park across from a yellow government edifice.

“Here it is, your joyful land.” He stopped in front of a cluster of frangipani with white and yellow blossoms, shading wooden benches at the entrance onto the square. “Wait for me here this afternoon. Try not to arrive early, or you might be mistaken for a beggar.”

He climbed back into the jeep and sped down a wide boulevard, keeping one hand out, waving until he turned a corner and disappeared.

The main avenue rose upward towards several narrow streets with rows of palm-shaded sidewalks. Alegría was now a closed town, a group of haciendas behind high walls cemented with metal spikes and broken bottles at the top. Flamboyants towered over these walls and old men crouching in cane-back chairs guarded the gates. Every house was a fortress, everyone an intruder.

As I walked back and forth along the cloistered cobble-stoned streets, in the shadow of these walls, I felt as though I was in a place I had never seen before. There were only a few markers I recognized: three giant kapok trees, which showed their age by their expanse, and the row of almond trees—but perhaps they were newer ones, on perhaps a newer almond road.

I stopped to rest my knees and watched the streets fill with schoolchildren and their parents, pantry maids starting out for fresh food, vendors marching up to the gates to tempt the gatekeepers, and husbands leaving in chauffeured automobiles with curtained back windows. I was lost. The park where the driver had left me was perhaps where Father Vargas and Father Romain’s church had been. The cane mills and compounds seemed to have vanished, and even after half a day’s wandering, and being too proud (and perhaps too frightened) to inquire about them, I couldn’t find either the stream or the waterfall.

I didn’t know what Señora Valencia’s life situation was, save for what I had heard from a woman I’d sewn a dress for, one who traveled back and forth across the border to peddle her wares, that both the señora and her husband were still alive. Her husband was now an official in the government. He was mostly in the capital, but she stayed in Alegría with her daughter. Though still married, the señora and her husband were living their own lives, the way things had always been. In any case, when I couldn’t find the stream and the waterfall, I decided to test the señora’s promise to stay in Alegría, near the graves of her mother and son, bound as we are to the places where our dead are lain.

After mistakenly appearing at more than two dozen gates, I finally found a house that looked like the one I’d been told belonged to Señora Valencia now. A large wrought-iron gate had been erected where Juana and Luis’ house might once have stood. A cobbled drive wound its way up through a new stone-studded garden towards a pink washed patio.

A little girl in a brown school uniform ran up to the gate as soon as I got there.

“Are you the egg woman?” she asked.

“The egg woman?”

“My mami told me to watch for the egg woman.”

“Who is your mami?”

“Mami.”

“Who is the egg woman?”

“You are.” The girl smiled; she was missing four of her front teeth, two at the top, and two at the bottom. By the time an older boy arrived, she had already lifted the latch and opened the gate for me. The young man rushed forward to undo what she had done, but I had already stepped into the garden.

“She is the egg woman,” the girl said, smiling up at him. He tousled her hair and looked me up and down, searching for an egg basket.

“Is Señora Valencia still living here?” I asked. “My name is Amabelle Désir.”

After all those years, I was surprised that my Spanish was still understandable.

The young man swayed nervously and shifted his weight from foot to foot. We had four more spectators now: three gardeners and a housemaid with a folded sheet pressed against her chest. The young man lowered his head, then looked to the others as if for help.

“I knew the señora for a very long time before I went away,” I tried to assure him.

“They have a new house.”

“I will show you.” The little girl skipped out before they could stop her. The young man trailed behind her.

The new house was only a few kilometers from the old one, in a more protected area. You had to walk through a guava field before seeing the entrance. It was a large hacienda, four residences joined by a breezeway with a sun parlor and a vast garden on the side. I wrapped my fingers around one of the heart shapes in the grillwork of the gate and peeked at a row of wicker banquettes between the flame trees in the garden, which was filled with twice as many species of orchids as Papi had ever grown.

The girl rattled the gate playfully until a woman walked out on one of the front galleries and peered down at the entrance. The woman had a meaty dimpled face with round shoulders and a fleshy build. She was wearing a sand-colored uniform with a piece of faded matching cloth on her head. She called out for a manservant, but when the manservant did not come, she walked down to us herself, the dust rag still in her hand.

“What do you want?” she asked abruptly in Kreyòl-accented Spanish. Her jaws were tightly drawn, forming a perfect sorrowful ring with the rest of her face. Her voice squeaked one moment and was hoarse the next, as though she risked running out of breath at any time. She gave the girl and older boy a nod of recognition, then kept her eyes on the path behind us, as if waiting for someone to ambush her through the grill in the gate. When she stretched her neck, I saw that she had rope burns above her collarbone. They were even deeper and more pronounced than those on the woman at the border clinic, a deeply furrowed field.

“I would like to see la duefia, Señora Valencia,” I said.

“Why?” she asked, pausing for a breath. “What do you want with her?”

“My name is Amabelle Désir,” I said. “She will want to see me.”

“You can go,” she told the girl and the young man.

The young man dragged the girl away. The woman walked up the drive to the patio, with the haste of those afraid to displease at every moment of their day. Working for others, you were always rushing to or away from them.

She was out of breath and visibly uncomfortable when she returned to unlock the gate and motion for me to follow her up the drive, through a rock garden under the guava trees.

As I followed the handmaid down the long corridors inside the house, a surprising feeling of joy took hold of my body. I was beginning to feel glad that I had come, happy that I was going to see the señora again.

The place was airy, spacious, a breeze blowing in from the open terraces. Everything was polished and luminous: from the beveled brass staircase railings, to the old-fashioned chandeliers dangling from the ceilings. The woman led me through the pantry on the way to the parlor. In the center of the pantry stood a marble-topped cooking table. I slid my hand over the cooking table as I went by to wipe the dust and sweat from my palms. The table surface felt pleasantly cold, like the water in the old stream before dawn.

The parlor itself was in the middle of the house, with arches dividing it into several sections, four fans circling from the ceiling, and staircases with metal banisters leading to the top part of the house. The walls were covered with photographs of the señora and her family. I slowed my steps to gaze at them, trying to learn as much as I could before I saw her, in order to avoid any inevitably painful inquiries about those who were no longer in existence or who were no longer considered members of the family. All of her husband’s pictures were taken in his uniform. The medals had grown larger and more numerous on his chest. Time had fattened him up, softened his youthful scowl. From frame to gilded frame, he had slowly turned into an old man.