The Farming of Bones (15 page)

“You should sit,” Odette told Wilner when he began pacing again. “Alberto said they would not look for anyone here tonight.”

“I will have to find a good crossing place tomorrow,” Wilner said, “a place where we can avoid the soldiers at the bridge.”

“Do you know that you can trust him who offered this place to you?” Yves asked Wilner and Odette. He was lisping heavily himself, his enlarged tongue pushed out between his bloated lips. “How do you know he will not bring the soldiers here?”

“I paid him for this,” Wilner replied.

“Even then?” persisted Yves.

“We’ve never lived lives of certainty,” Odette said.

“Tell me, why don’t our people go to war because of this?” Yves seemed to be asking this as much of himself as of them. “Why won’t our president fight?”

Wilner did not have the answer right then, but he grunted as though he would come up with it if he had the time.

Yves, Wilner, and Odette stopped talking and listened to the night. I could still hear people squealing and laughing, the Guardia sending the drunken home. Footsteps glided through the narrow spaces between the houses. We waited for the footsteps to get louder and then quickly fade away like so many others had before.

There was a knock at the door, the knock of a fist.

“It is Alberto,” a voice whispered through the crack that introduced a tiny sliver of moonlight into the room. “The Guardia is coming this way.”

Wilner stumbled across the room and opened the door. The man on the other side of the threshold was carrying a kerosene lamp, which he pushed inside. The room was suddenly full of light, like an abruptly sunny day. Wilner thanked the man with the lamp and bid him good-night. The light disappeared from the doorway as the man took off running.

I could hear the soldiers at a distance chatting among themselves, the shrieking laughter of women they were lingering to tease, the loud kisses the women were blowing back at them.

Wilner jumped outside and held the door ajar for Odette. Yves limped out after her, then offered his hand to guide me over the threshold. Once outside, I clung to her shoulder as though it were a walking stick.

The voices of the soldiers died down with the humming of trucks out in the square. Wilner led us in a circle down a narrow alley around a string of half-finished cement houses. I heard the soldiers pounding on the doors of the houses farther out on the square. We hurried to a soccer field, bordered with a cinder-block wall. Wilner kept turning around to glimpse the open spaces behind us, to make certain that no one was following.

In a clearing, cows crouched, asleep. A few of them hastily stumbled to their feet as we hobbled past them. The scattered trees and shrubs of the savanna led into a grove of tall coconut palms, which whistled in a breeze I could not feel. Perhaps my whole body was beyond feeling now, beyond healing.

“I think we left them behind,” Wilner announced.

I couldn’t make myself look back. The palms offered enough protection now. Even if they came, we could scatter far enough to delay their search. They would not find all of us.

“Where to find Sebastien and Mimi? Where is it?” I mumbled slowly so they all would understand.

“Does she know the other one is dead?” Wilner asked.

“She knows,” Odette answered for me. “Don’t you know, cherished one? You know Tibon died, don’t you? The dead cannot always come with us on such long journeys.”

I tried to explain. I wanted to go to the fortaleza where I thought they might be holding Mimi and Sebastien. My words ran together, blurred and incomprehensible. They stopped listening, perhaps thinking that each attempt at a phrase was a complaint about leaving Tibon behind.

As we walked out of the palm grove, we found a tree-arched path leading down to the river. From a distance, the water looked deep and black, the bank much steeper than I remembered. Chin-high grass surrounded the spot Wilner chose for our crossing. The bridge lay far ahead, the curve of its iron girders dotted with night lights. The lamps moved from one end of the bridge to the next, making the distant sentinels seem like giant fireflies.

We waited for some time to see if some guards would be coming that way. There were none in sight except for the sentinels at the bridge.

“We can perhaps cross now,” Wilner said.

There was a splash from upstream; something had dropped from the bridge.

“They are throwing corpses into the water,” Odette whispered.

“Don’t listen,” responded Wilner. “We need only look for the guards on patrol. I will go in last.”

The marshlands led abruptly to the water’s edge. The river reached up to our chests when Odette and I slipped in together. Odette turned her face back to the bank where Yves was still feeling his way in and to Wilner who was still watching the bridge.

A strong scent of wet grass and manure wafted through the current as we forded farther in. I tried to find footholds in the sand, wedges to anchor my feet. The water was so deep that it was like trying to walk on air.

When we were nearly submerged in the current, I yanked my hand from Odette’s. I heard her sniffle, perhaps fearful and shocked. But I was only thinking of one thing: If I drowned, I wanted to drown alone, with nobody else’s life to be responsible for.

An empty black dress buoyed past us, inflated by air, floating upon the water. It was followed by a clump of tree branches and three empty sisal knapsacks. A man floated past us, face down. I swam towards him and moved his head to the side.

Sebastien?

No.

I turned the head down again, wishing I knew a ceremonial prayer to recite over the body.

The water guided Odette downstream. She was not paddling or swimming but simply letting herself be cradled by the current; her head dipped under now and then, and when it came up again, she opened her mouth wide to gulp in the air.

I swam after her, grabbed her waist with one hand, and fended my way across with the other. When she raised her face above the current, she looked frightened, but stifled her coughs as the water spilled out of her mouth.

Behind us on the shore, someone was calling to Wilner, “¡He! ¡He!”

We stopped our struggles immediately, letting the current carry us downstream.

I reached for Odette’s mouth and sealed it with both my hands when the shot rang out. Wilner did not even have time to reply.

During the dull silence after the shot, the soldier called out to his friends not to fret, that it was him, Segundo, and he, Segundo, was fine. Odette bit deep into my palm, scraping the inside flesh with her top and bottom teeth.

It is the way you try to stun a half-dead bird still waving its wings, a headless chicken courageously racing down a dirt road. I kept one hand on her mouth and moved the other one to her nose and pressed down hard for her own good, for our own good. She did not struggle but abandoned her body to the water and the lack of air.

The soldier who had shot Wilner continued marching upstream. Perhaps if he had wanted to, he could have seen us, but maybe the river itself, though good for discarding the corpses, was considered not favorable for shootings.

I covered Odette’s body with mine and framed her in my arms as Yves and I continued swimming towards the shore.

Yves was the first to land on a sandbar on the other side of the river. He crawled back on his belly and pulled Odette away from my chest. Taking hold of a boulder, I eased myself out of the current.

We lay Odette facedown. Even though she was still breathing, she would not gain consciousness. It was as though she had already made her choice. She was not going on the rest of the journey with us.

All I had wanted was for her to be still, to do her part in helping us live.

Yves was staring down at Odette as though our futures were written in those eyes that she refused to open. She had saved us at the square, so we wanted to save her too.

He picked her up and carried her onto the dusky plains in the dark. Following the track inland, we approached a cluster of parrot trees whose furry leaves looked like soft hands reaching down from some higher place, encouraging us to pause once again and rest.

As we sat there with Odette under a canopy of trees in the middle of a grassy field, she spat up the chest full of water she had collected in the river. “With her parting breath, she mouthed in Kreyol “pesi,” not calmly and slowly as if she were asking for it at a roadside garden or open market, not questioning as if demanding of the face of Heaven the greater meaning of senseless acts, no effort to say “perejil” as if pleading for her life. Que diga amor? Love? Hate? Speak to me of things the world has yet to truly understand, of the instant meaning of each bird’s call, of a child’s secret thoughts in her mother’s womb, of the measured rhythmical time of every man and woman’s breath, of the true colors of the inside of the moon, of the larger miracles in small things, the deeper mysteries. But parsley? Was it because it was so used, so commonplace, so abundantly at hand that everyone who desired a sprig could find one? We used parsley for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides. Perhaps the Generalissimo in some larger order was trying to do the same for his country.

The Generalissimo’s mind was surely as dark as death, but if he had heard Odette’s “pesi,” it might have startled him, not the tears and supplications he would have expected, no shriek from unbound fear, but a provocation, a challenge, a dare. To the devil with your world, your grass, your wind, your water, your air, your words. You ask for perejil, I give you more.

30

We were found the next morning, at dawn, by a priest and a young doctor who were walking the savannas, looking for survivors. Yves had carried Odette’s body some distance from the riverbank in the dark, far enough that we could no longer see the river and the bridge.

The priest called for help, and suddenly we were surrounded by men and women in different stages of hurt and healing, asking where we were from, had we seen this and that person from this or that campo or this or that mill.

Someone took Odette from Yves without questioning us. She seemed small and pliable, weightless in the stranger’s arms.

We followed the one carrying her to another field dotted with large tents. Yves limped onward, his eyes fixed on Odette.

“What was her name?” asked the tired-looking priest with an open notebook in his hand. He wiped his mouth with a white handkerchief, the whitest thing I had seen since the lace covering the statue of La Virgen on the road up the mountain.

Yves said, “Odette, but we do not know her surname.”

“Her relations?” asked the priest.

“We do not know where they are from.”

The man with Odette in his arms was walking on the side of the road where the corpses had been hauled and laid out in rows. Priests and a bishop in full dress performed the last rites for each of the dead. We did not ask where Odette would be buried, for we knew she would likely have to share her grave with all the others there. Besides, the priest had already moved on to someone else.

I took one last look at Odette’s face. There was a stillness to it I nearly envied. She did not look like someone death had taken by surprise; her body had very hastily eased into it: her open hands, her bent knees, the relaxed face.

I must have been standing over her body for several hours. Wherever I go, I will always be standing over her body.

No farewell could be enough.

All I had wanted was for her to be still.

Yves took my hand and pulled me away from the body into one of the large tent clinics where people were squeezed together on benches and clustered on blankets on the floor. Two nuns greeted us from behind a small table.

“You don’t look as bad as some,” a nun with a manly, square-jawed, chocolat-au-lait face said to me in Kreyol.

Two doctors were working behind wooden dividers inside the tents. Yves and I were crowded on a long school bench with many others and told to wait our turn.

We tried not to look at the people around us, especially those whose bodies were bared, as if giving you permission to gape deep inside them.

As we waited, many of them called the nuns’ attention to their wounds.

“Sister, some cool water, please.”

“Sister, don’t you forget me.”

“Sister, I feel so dead.”

“Sister, has he come, my son? Have they come, my daughter, my man, my woman, my mother, my father?”

Their cries rose above the groans of others who like me were unable to speak their desires.

It must have been some hours before the nun with the square jaws finally came to fetch me.

“You don’t look bad as some. You look rather well,” she repeated.

Leaving Yves behind, I was taken past a line of people with burns that had destroyed most of their skin, men and women charred into awkward poses, arms and legs frozen in mid-air, like tree trunks long separated from their branches.

Behind the wooden screen, one doctor was seeing to many people lying on a row of jointed tables. Next to me was a woman with her leg dangling by a fragile bend of her right knee. The woman bounced her head up and down as she mumbled something to herself, a plea to keep her whole leg, a supplication to the doctor not to make her incomplete, to allow her to go into the next world the same way she had come into this one.

Another doctor came in with a small saw. The woman kept her eyes on the poles and ropes that formed the tent’s frame and the tiny canvas windows with mosquito webbing above her head.

I saw my doctor’s eyes peeking over the top of his soiled white mask. There was an urgency to everything he did. He stole glances at the other woman as he tore open my tattered dress. One hand turned my face away from the woman’s operation, and the other hand raised my legs as he inspected my stomach for cuts. His eyes stood frozen for a single moment as the woman had her leg disjoined, as she gyrated in shock, making the other doctor’s tasks difficult, as the blood shot from what was left of her thigh, a drop landing on my eyelids, as the other doctor stopped to announce, “She’s not going to live,” and as I closed my eyes against her blood, thinking this would be the last time I would see someone dying, so sure was I that when the doctor said, “She’s not going to live,” he was also talking about me.

When I came to, I was in a large room with wooden walls and a tin roof like the face of a dirty mirror. The midday heat burned through the ceiling, as if trying to set us all on fire. People fanned themselves for relief and to frighten the flies and ants away from their wounds.

I was lying on a thin blanket, next to a splintered post that held up most of the ceiling. Above me were two shutters; between them a breeze streamed in from outside.

My knees were bandaged, and so was my head. The house uniform was gone. I was wearing a different dress from the one I’d arrived in, a frock in faded denim made for a woman with a much longer and wider body than mine.

To distract myself, I pushed my hands in and out of the empty pockets. A whiff of wet pine breezed past my nose. I heard the moan of a man trying not to scream, saw Odette’s dying face, and drifted back to sleep.

In my sleep, I see my mother rising, like the mother spirit of the rivers, above the current that drowned her.

She is wearing a dress of glass, fashioned out of the hardened clarity of the river, and this dress flows like raised dust behind her as she runs towards me and enfolds me in her smoke-light arms. Her face is like mine is now, in fact it is the exact same long, three-different-shades-of-night face, and she is smiling a both-rows-of-teeth revealing smile.

“I was saving my smile for when you needed it,” she says, in a cheerful voice I do not remember, for she had always spoken so briefly and so sternly. “I didn’t want you to think that love was not scarce because it is, that it flowed freely from everywhere, or that it was something you could expect without price from everyone.”

“And what of that time when I was dying and the doll came?” I ask her. “Why did you not love me then?”

“You were never truly dying, my precious imbecile,” she says. “You were unbalanced in the head, as you are now. Your heart was racing and your blood was on fire, as it is now. So you felt like you were dying but you were not. It was never as hot as you remember. It could not have been. I would not have let it be.”

“I will never be a whole woman,” I say, “for the absence of your face.”

“Your mother was never as far from you as you supposed,” she says. “You were like my shadow. Always fled when I came to you and only followed when I left you alone. You will be well again, ma belle, Amabelle. I know this to be true. And how can you have ever doubted my love? You, my eternity.”

I couldn’t remember how long I had been asleep. But when I woke up this time, the nuns came through the room and handed out plates of corn mush with black bean sauce and a slice of avocado. I refused by shaking my head, but they left the plate near me anyway.

As they ate, people gathered in a group to talk. Taking turns, they exchanged tales quickly, the haste in their voices sometimes blurring the words, for greater than their desire to be heard was the hunger to tell. One could hear it in the fervor of the declarations, the obscenities shouted when something could not be remembered fast enough, when a stutter allowed another speaker to race into his own account without the stutterer having completed his.

“It was Monday, the last two days in September,” a man began, as though giving an account to a justice of the peace. “I went to the fields in the early morning. When I came home at noontime, the Guardia was in my house. I’d heard talk, rumors of all these happenings at night. I took precautions not to lag outside. But this was the daytime. The soldiers came, picked out some chickens in my yard, and told me I was a thief. I tell you many a man was taken falsely as a thief.”

Another group of voices argued for the right to speak next, as if their owners had been biting their tongues while this last man was speaking.

“Only a few paces from me,” shouted a woman, “they had them tied in ropes and Don Jose, who has known me my whole life, went at them with his machete, first my son, then my father, then my sister.”

My skin felt prickly, as if my blood had been put in a pot to boil and then poured back into me. Or maybe the tin roof was melting and streaming down on me in a light silver rain.

A man who had taken a bullet in the stomach told how he had run for half a day, not realizing he’d been shot. He thought a bullet, especially one from a rifle like the Krag, would hurt worse. He was lucky to have been shot from a distance, he said. At first it felt like an insect sting, a bee sting, not even a wasp bite, which can be deadly to some people.

Another man spoke of how he was hiding behind a tree when a group of soldiers stormed a horse farm. They were so angry not to have found any Haitians there that they shot all the horses.

“I was there in Santiago,” a voice shouted from the other side of the room, “when they shut seven hundred souls into a courtyard behind two government houses. They made them lie facedown in the red dirt and shot them in the back of the head with rifles.”

In the heat’s haze, the ceiling seemed to split in two, the pieces rising on silver wings to the sky, except there was no sky above, just a daytime darkness where a sun should have been.

“I was there,” echoed a young woman with three rings of rope burns carved into her neck, “when they forced more than two hundred off the pier in Monte Cristi.”

I felt my breath racing as if everything inside me was boiling, even though my body was still. Perhaps I had a fever, like my childhood fevers, but if I did have a fever, would the back of my hot hand know to discern its own heat from that of my forehead?

The next man who spoke had been struck with a machete on the shoulder and left for dead. When he awoke the next morning, he found himself in a pit surrounded by corpses.

“I felt like my woman on our first night together,” he said. “She woke up in the middle of the night and started screaming. I said to her, ‘Am I so ugly that you should scream so loud the first night you are with me?’ She looked at me hard and said this was her first night outside her mother’s bed and she’d plain forgotten where she was.”

The group grew impatient with that one. He took too long to arrive at the center of his tale.

“I thought of my woman when I woke up that morning in that pit with all the dead faces around me and all the vultures overhead,” he said.

“Oh, the vultures,” everyone chimed in. They could not get enough, those vultures, covering the daytime sky like a midnight cloud. If you were not walking fast enough, they would try for your eyes, those vultures. It was as if they could sniff the scent of death on you, those vultures.

“It wasn’t always just the vultures,” someone added, “the ‘good birds’ became man-eaters too: the swallows, the warblers, even the tiny hummingbirds, they all wanted the taste of flesh.”

“Waking up among the dead, I started screaming,” the man from the cadaver pit went on. “And then I thought of my woman and our first night together, and in spite of all the corpses, I smiled.”

The people around him smiled, too, at the beauty of such an innocent moment, when a young woman wakes up in her new man’s bed for the first time and forgets how she came to be there. Had there ever been a time when such a thing as being a stranger in someone’s bed could startle a person?

“Where is your woman now?” someone asked.

The man clapped his hands together and shrugged, a gesture of not knowing.

“It would take too much to kill me,” bragged the next speaker. “I’m one of those trees whose roots reach the bottom of the earth. They can cut down my branches, but they will never uproot the tree. The roots are too strong, and there are too many.”

“Who said this?” someone asked. “Wasn’t it General Toussaint Louverture?”

“A smart man,” someone said. “In those times we had respect. When Dessalines, Toussaint, Henry, when those men walked the earth, we were a strong nation. Those men would go to war to defend our blood. In all this, our so-called president says nothing, our Papa Vincent—our poet—he says nothing at all to this affront to the children of Dessalines, the children of Toussaint, the children of Henry; he shouts nothing across this river of our blood.”

A woman was singing, calling on the old dead fathers of our independence. Papa Dessalines, where have you left us? Papa Toussaint, what have you left us to? Papa Henry, have you forsaken us?

“Freedom is a passing thing,” a man said. “Someone can always come and snatch it away.”

They went on to debate the wisdom of having traveled the forested valleys rather than the mountain roads. They wondered what would happen to their relations who had disappeared. Some had traveled in large groups and the nearly dead had to be left behind. They looked back and reordered the moments—second vision, hindsight. What could have been done differently? Whatever became of our national creed, “L’ union fait la force”? Where was our unity? Where was our strength? And how can we not hate ourselves for the people we left behind?

At the same time, they dreamed of the first meals their mothers and sisters, who they had not seen for many years, would cook for them. They dictated step by step what the first domino games and cockfights with their fathers and compadres would be like, the first embraces given to lovers and children.

“It all makes you understand that the flesh is like everything else,” the man who had been in the pit with the cadavers said. “It is no different, the flesh, than fruit or anything that rots. It’s not magic, not holy. It can shrink, burn, and like amber it can melt in fire. It is nothing. We are nothing.”