The Farming of Bones (5 page)
I am sick in bed with a fever that makes my body feel heavier than a steel drum filled with boiling tar. I sense myself getting larger and larger and at the same time more liquid, like all the teas and syrups my mother pours into me. My father says that I am in fact becoming smaller, shrinking closer to my bones, and there is little that is liquid in me that the fever does not dry up.
“It is a sickness we brought home to her from someone else,” my mother concludes while standing over me one day, her lips puckered, her mouth switching from side to side as it always did when she was in deep thought. “I suppose it might be the young girl we treated two weeks ago, you remember?”
My mother makes me a doll out of all my favorite things: strings of red satin ribbons sewn together into the skin, two pieces of corncob for the legs, a dried mango seed for the body frame, white chicken feathers for flesh, pieces of charcoal for the eyes, and cocoa brown embroidering thread for the hair.
There are times when I want to be a girl again, to touch this doll, because when I touch it, I feel nearer to my mother than when her flesh is stroking mine in the washbasin or in the stream, or even when she’s reaching down to plop down a compress heavy with aloe on my forehead.
As I lie in bed with my doll and my fever, during the few moments when I’m alone, the doll rises on her corncob feet, yanks several strands of her thread hairs and uses them to jump rope. She sings my favorite rope jumping songs, plays with my osles, and says, “You will be well again, ma belle Amabelle. I know this to be true.” Her voice is gentle, musical, but it echoes, like she’s speaking from inside a very tall bottle. “I am sure you will live to be a hundred years old, having come so close to death while young.”
While I am watching her play, I want to give the doll a name, but I don’t remember names other than my own, and that one only because I’ve just heard her say it while addressing me.
When I am well, like the doll said I would be, I ask my mother, “What name should I give to this doll who walked about the room and played for me, and looked after me when I was sick?”
“There is no such thing and no such doll,” my mother says. “The fever made you an imbecile.”
The sweet fleeting smell of lemongrass at dawn has always been my favorite scent. Standing at the top of the hill, I saw Luis in front of his house, using a flour-sack rag to wash Joel’s blood off one of the two automobiles owned by Señor Pico, Packards they called them, the type of vehicle the Generalissimo himself loved to be driven in at that time.
I walked to the stream behind the neighboring sugar mill where the cane workers bathed at daybreak, before heading out to the fields. It was the first day of a new cane harvest. The stream was already crowded, overflowing with men and women, separated by a thin veil of trees.
Everyone was unusually quiet, even in their whisperings. Instead of the regular loud morning chatter, there was only the sound of hummingbirds chirping, the water gurgling, circling around all the bodies crammed into its path.
I waved to Mimi, Sebastien’s younger sister. She slid her face in and out of the water, making bubbles with her mouth. Mimi had followed Sebastien to the valley when he’d moved here four years earlier. These days she worked as one of the maids of Doña Eva, the widowed mother of Doctor Javier and Beatriz.
“This afternoon Doña Eva is having a Mass and a sanco-cho for the anniversary of her birth,” Mimi announced. My feet floated above the warm pebbles at the bottom of the stream. It was as if nothing else of much importance had taken place, and for want of other information she had announcements from her mistress’ life to share. “The doña is fifty years old. Will your people be coming to her Mass?”
Mimi always called Señora Valencia and Señor Pico “moun ou yo,” my people, as though they worked for me. While pedaling in the stream, she ceremoniously raised her arms above the surface of the water and picked a small leaf off my nose. On her right hand, she had a bracelet made of coffee beans, painted in yellow gold and threaded on a string, just like Sebastien’s. It was something their mother had made them for safety and luck before they left her on the other side of the border after the hurricane had killed their father.
Thinking of the fiftieth anniversary of Doña Eva’s birth being on the first day since Joel’s death, and that perhaps I would never have a chance to utter a farewell to Joel’s closed eyes, I murmured to Mimi, “Do you think you and I will live long enough to be as old as Doña Eva?”
“I don’t want to live so long,” she answered in her usual abrupt manner. “I’d rather die young like Joel did.”
“Do you really want to end like that, in a ravine?” I whispered to her so the others would not hear.
“I’d rather have death surprise me,” she said loudly. “I don’t want to wait a long time for it to come find me.”
Mimi was at least four years younger than me and, not counting this sudden death she was saying she wanted, had more time ahead of her than I did. There were women in the stream who were ancient enough to be our great-grandmothers. Four of them were nearby, helping a few of the orphaned girls to wash themselves. Among the oldest women, one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.
The oldest cane-cutting women were now too sick, too weak, or too crippled to either cook or clean in a big house, work the harvest in the cane fields, or return to their old homes in Haiti. So they started off every morning bathing in the stream, and then spent the rest of the day digging for wild roots or waiting on the kindness of their good neighbors.
Mimi’s face grew sad and serious as she observed the other women, especially Félice, a young woman, the housemaid of Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine, a rich Haitian couple who lived among the valley’s well-to-do families. Félice had a hairy beet-colored birthmark like a mustache over her lip. She was reasonably pretty, but the birthmark was all you saw when you looked at her face.
Félice had been Joel’s woman for some time. Kongo, Joel’s father, had disapproved of the whole affair because he knew firsthand some of Félice’s family history. In a moment of desperate hunger during the first years of the Yanki occupation, Félice’s grandfather had stolen an old hen from the yard of Kongo’s mother in Haiti. He couldn’t bear having his son take up with a woman whose family had a thief for an ancestor, Kongo had said. There was always a risk that this type of thing could run in the blood. He didn’t want to take any chances with his only heir.
Now Kongo was bathing in the middle of the stream, scrubbing his body with a handful of wet parsley, while the sun climbed up in the sky above his silver-tipped hair.
We used pèsi, perejil, parsley, the damp summer morningness of it, the mingled sprigs, bristly and coarse, gentle and docile all at once, tasteless and bitter when chewed, a sweetened wind inside the mouth, the leaves a different taste than the stalk, all this we savored for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides of old aches and griefs, to shed a passing year’s dust as a new one dawned, to wash a new infant’s hair for the first time and—along with boiled orange leaves—a corpse’s remains one final time.
The other men stood apart, giving Kongo more space than usual. He moved slowly as he scrubbed his wide shoulders and contorted himself to allow the parsley to brush over the map of scars on his muscular back, all the while staring at the water’s surface, as though he could see more than his reflection there.
Sebastien and his friend Yves were standing closest to Kongo, nudging away those who wanted to pay their respects.
“I keep asking myself what Kongo’s done with Joel’s corpse,” Mimi muttered in my ear, leaning forward.
No one would dare dispute Kongo, no matter what he had done with his son’s body. He was the most respected elder among us. We all trusted him.
Kongo dropped the used parsley in the stream and raised his machete from the water. Holding his work tool up to the sun, he stroked the edge of the blade as though it were made of flesh. Kongo was still an active worker. He had toiled side by side with his son for more than a dozen cane harvests. Before the full harvest, during the dead season, Kongo, Joël, Sebastien, and his friend Yves had cleared tobacco fields together; on Sundays they cut down trees to make charcoal to sell.
“If one of our men had killed Kongo’s son, they’d expect to die,” Mimi said. “But since it’s one of them, there’s nothing we can do. Poor Kongo, this must be killing him inside. I say, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
A few more people arrived. They shed their clothes and squeezed into the spaces left in the water. Void of ceremony, this was a silent farewell to Joel, a quiet wake at dawn.
“Your people killed Joel rushing home to their twin babies, didn’t they?” Mimi asked. “I hear this is how it happened.”
“Yes. That’s how it was.”
“Beatriz thinks she’ll be the godmother of one of the twins.”
“The señor and the señora will decide.”
“What Beatriz wants, she is often given.”
“Do you always call her Beatriz?” I asked.
“I don’t have to christen her ‘Señorita’ in your presence, do I?”
I thought of Señora Valencia, whom I had known since she was eleven years old. I had called her Señorita as she grew from a child into a young woman. When she married the year before, I called her Señora. She on the other hand had always called me Amabelle.
“I don’t call her ‘Beatriz’ in her presence,” Mimi explained. “But what would be so terrible if we did say only their Christian names?”
“It would demonstrate a lack of respect,” I said. “The way you’d never call one of these old women by their names. You call them ‘Man’ even though they’re not your mother.”
Mimi flinched and looked down at her coffee bean bracelet. She seemed pained for a moment as she glanced at the old women, perhaps searching for her mother’s smile beneath their scowls.
“What does it matter if Beatriz and your lady become angry with us?” she said. “If they let us go, at least we’d have a few days of freedom before dying from hunger.”
“There is your brother who counts on you,” I said, wanting to halt this needless quarrel in light of the heavier pains in the air. “Even when he’s buried in debt, he can always secure a meal from you.”
“Or from you,” she insisted.
“But you are his blood,” I said. “With myself, if we quarrel, he won’t eat from me.”
“I thank you for reminding me why I’m so bound to the misery of that woman’s house,” she said. “When you and my brother set up house together, then perhaps I will be free.”
Everyone watched Kongo as he emerged from the stream. He walked off, leaning on a broken broom handle that served him as a cane. Sebastien and his friend Yves, who had also been on the road when Joel was killed, followed behind Kongo, ready to catch him if the broom handle failed. Yves had a shaved head that shimmered as bright as Kongo’s machete under the morning sun. He and Sebastien followed Kongo back to the compound.
“When will you and Sebastien start living in the same house together?” Mimi asked. “If my brother is too timid to ask, I can act as a go-between.”
“Yesterday Juana called me a nonbehever because I don’t normally pray to the saints,” I said. “She asked me if I believed in anything, and all I could think to say was Sebastien.”
“I’ll have to tell Sebastien.” Mimi splashed the water with her palms. The others turned to stare, cutting their eyes at her for seeming too joyful on such a day. She paddled the water with more force, making it rise up and shield her like a curtain of glass. She was like a naked statue in one of those fountains at the town square with water sprouting out of her navel and mouth.
“No sad faces,” she said. “Joel’s well enough where he is. He’d want us to be glad for him. We should give him a joyous wake to send his spirit on its way. He would want us to laugh and be grateful he’s not here now.”
Félice walked out of the stream and went to dress in the bushes. Mimi was one of the last people still left in the water.
“Mimi’s only a child,” I said, following Félice. “She didn’t know what she was saying.”
“This must be what it means to get old,” Félice said, in her usual urgent voice, which sometimes blurred the words when she was speaking. She covered the hairy birthmark with her hands as she chose her words and forced them out. “I could hate no one when I was young. Now I can and I do.”
Dropping her head onto my shoulder, she pressed her forearms into my ribs as she leaned against me. Her body felt heavy and limp; I was afraid she was going to faint and fall right there at my feet.
“Courage, dear one,” I said, trying to hold her up.
“He was too young,” she said, “and Kongo will not even let the others act in response to this.”
“What can be done?”
“An eye for an eye, as Mimi says.”
“No eye for no eye,” I said. “We cannot start a war here.”
“It would not be a war,” she said, “only something to teach them that our lives are precious too.”
“What will this do for Joel now?”
“Everything’s lost to Joel,” she said. “It’s too late for him. But we should do something to keep them from taking others.”
She pulled herself away from me, to stand on her own feet.
“We must leave it to Kongo,” I said. “It is his son who died. He will know best what to do.”
Every night Sebastien talks in his sleep.
“Do you know what I would like to do?” he asks one night.
“Tell me what you would like to do.” You feel masterful making a sleeping person respond while you, awake, question the person. In some ways it is a miracle, like being loved, or watching a parrot—such a small animal—repeat words that have just crossed human lips.
“I’d like to fly a kite,” Sebastien answers in his sleep when I ask what he would like to do.
“What manner of kite?”
“A piece of clear paper over a bamboo spine, a girl’s red satin ribbon for the tail.”
“If I offer you my red satin ribbon?”
He turns over and buries his head in the pillow.
If I offer him my red satin ribbon?
No retort.