The Farming of Bones (16 page)

The woman with the rope burns engraved on her neck asked if she could have my food. I nodded and went back to sleep.

When I woke up again, the nun with the square jaws was tapping her fingers against the itchy wound dressings on my head.

“Do you know how long it has been?” she asked.

I shook my head no.

“Three days,” she said. “You have slept for three days and three nights. You did not look bad as some, but you had such a fever, I was afraid you would die.”

I tried to part my lips and smile to show her that I was far from dead, that I didn’t want to die; Odette and Wilner had already died for me.

“Do you have a place to go to now?” she asked.

I shook my head no.

“Can you speak?” she asked.

No.

She motioned for me to open my mouth. I felt my face splitting apart as I did.

“What of the man who came, washed, and dressed you as you suffered through the worst of your fever?”

“Who?” I raised my eyebrows to ask.

“It must be someone you know.”

I felt the large veins in my neck rise, the air catching in large bubbles in my throat.
His name is Sebastien Onius.

“He said his name was Yves,” she remembered.

Yves came to see me what must have been a few days later. I wanted to thank him for caring for me during my fever. But how?

He looked better now except for shreds of gauze taped in odd shapes on different sections of his head. His hair had grown in tufts around the gauze. He saw me staring at the tufts and said, “I can’t yet shave my head.”

I wanted to tell him that he looked well. He didn’t need to have his head shaved. He seemed to be healing.

“I sleep outside with the moon,” he said. “It’s good unless it rains.”

Good. Good. I nodded.

“I’ve been looking every place I can for Sebastien and Mimi.” I could tell from the suddenly much graver expression on his face that he thought I was looking too hopeful. “The priests and the bishop try to question people and take their names. I have asked them about Sebastien and Mimi.”

And now? I raised my shoulders to ask. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. Maybe they passed through another border post. Maybe they were well enough to go directly to their mother’s house.”

In spite of my own wishes, I felt myself sliding back towards sleep. It was either cry or sleep. That’s all my body seemed to be able to do.

His visits were like one conversation carried out over many days. Some of them I remembered and others I didn’t.

“I’m going back to my land tomorrow,” he said when he came another time. A little more hair had grown around his bandages, which were smaller now. “Tell me with a nod if you would like to come with me.”

I tried to say yes, I would go with him. I would go with him wherever his home was, try to forget everything that had taken place on the journey, and wait for Mimi and Sebastien to return.

“Good,” he said. “We will let you sleep tonight, and I will come for you tomorrow.”

It rained all that night, and most of the people who were sleeping outside came running inside. The shutters above me were opened, letting a steady drizzle into the room. Someone finally woke up to close them, but by then I was drenched.

Yves made his way towards me and sat in the dark, with his back against a wooden beam nearby.

“I will take you to Sebastien’s house,” he said, “where you can sit with him and Mimi and his mother and talk about all this like a bad dream.”

“How long now since we have been here?” My throat felt like it was tearing from the effort of trying to speak.

“Six days,” he said.

“What did I do when I had the fever?” I asked.

“Sleep and wake, again and again,” he said. “But mostly sleep.”

“And you have been caring for me?”

He nodded.

“With the rain, the river will overflow,” I said. “And if Mimi and Sebastien are crossing, it will not be good.”

“They say the killing has stopped,” he said.

“There is a dream I have often,” I said, “of my parents in the river, in the rain.”

“Sebastien told me more than once about it,” he said.

Someone shouted from the other side of the room. It was the man who had woken up in the cadaver pit. He said he heard his woman calling him from the river, and he wanted to go save her.

While Yves and a few other men restrained him, the nuns awoke from their sleep and forced him to swallow a few spoonfuls of a syrup that along with his grief made him suckle his thumb and cradle his body like an infant for the rest of the night.

The next morning, Yves went along with the priests, the doctors, and the others whose work it was to collect corpses along the riverbank. The work took the whole morning, even though the nuns too told us that the killing had ceased and there were hardly any more corpses to bury.

The room was full beyond its measure now, with everyone seeking shelter from the mud outside.

I looked for my face in the tin ceiling above me as I waited for Yves to return. With everyone lying face up and with their bodies so close together, I couldn’t tell which face was mine.

The man from the cadaver pit lay on his mat all morning, mumbling his woman’s name. Nounoune, Nounoune. Next to him was a crippled Dominican who could console him only in Spanish.

“Calmate, hombre,” mumbled the Dominican. He was black like the nun who came to re-dress his wounds. He’d been mistaken for one of us and had received a machete blow across the back of his neck for it.

There were many like him in the room, I was told.

31

The sky was smeared with gray—gray like the inside of a broiled fish—when Yves and I finally left the clinic in a camión one afternoon. In that part of the country, the indigo mountains, cactus trees, large egrets and flamingos were great spectacles for the eyes, visions that made the people feel obligated to twist and contort their hurt bodies to peer outside and shiver with gratitude for having survived to see their native land.

Yves and I were pressed into a corner near the back of a crammed row; I knew my knee was pressing into his side, but I could find no room to shift into. Yves had not found Mimi and Sebastien that morning, and for this he was regretful. For this he was silent, watching his own twirling fingers with downcast eyes and grimacing, but not complaining, each time my knee rammed into his side during a sudden stop. Perhaps he thought I hated him and was tormenting him for being there instead of Sebastien; maybe he even thought that he deserved some kind of punishment for not being his friend.

The Cap was still an old new city when we returned to it, a city burnt to the ground many times for its own salvation. These were tales that all the local children knew, for proof was sometimes found buried in their land: a gold coin, a silver saucer, which the ground would vomit up when it rained, like the bones of those laid to rest without caskets in shallow ground. The dream was to find a ja, a chest full of gold that a French plantation owner had buried along with the slaves he had killed and interred next to it so the slaves’ souls could be the guardians of the treasure.

To the French generals who returned in fleets to reclaim these treasures and the souls of their slaves, Henry I had said, “I will not surrender the Cap until it’s in ashes. And even then I will continue to fight on these ashes.” He had given the signal to start the fires by torching his own house first.

The houses that were now built along the Place Toussaint Louverture—under a statue of Toussaint, where the camión left us—the houses of the Cap were now less grand, two stories at best, with wooden railings, double doors, and galleries on top. Not like the old vast plantations that were meant to last for centuries.

As soon as we descended from the camión, Yves parted from all the others. I followed him, looking up and searching the sky.

The giant citadel, Henry I’s treasure, was leaning down towards the city from inside a wreath of sun-filled clouds. I wondered if Yves thought about such things. Or if he even noticed what was inside the shops as we ventured along the cleanly paved streets among small groups of men and women ambling past the shoe and fabric shops on the Rue du Quai. I was trailing far behind him with my face to the skies, trying to ignore the throbbing in my knees. The small bones of my bare feet were grating each other raw. Every movement required a pause, a thought to what I was doing, where my legs were going as opposed to where they were supposed to be.

Some of the merchants and shopkeepers and their workers moaned as we moved among them. They recognized us without knowing us. We were
those
people, the nearly dead, the ones who had escaped from the other side of the river.

I dragged my feet along, feeling now and then like other people were standing on them, people whose eyes were only a flutter away from mine, whose hands and fingers wandered freely towards me, whose lips shouted, “Podyab, poor devil,” in my ear.

“Come, come,” Yves called as we walked past the trellised doors of the old Hotel New York, and then past a sidewalk where someone was demonstrating the use of a phonograph and a sewing machine from a shop on La Rue A. Yves seemed to be searching for some place to enter while walking in circles as if he was lost and didn’t even know it.

On La Rue B, he stood in the middle of an open tourist market, scratching the scabs on his unshaven head as he waited for me to catch up. When I reached him, he asked me to stand there, holding on to the front post of a pharmacy as he ran inside and bought a pack of La Nationale cigarettes. He smoked nearly the whole pack by the time we reached the cathedral.

In front of the cathedral, a woman moved so close to me that I could smell the chewing tobacco on her breath, the sweat that dried and then poured out again from her forehead, and the bitter thick-skinned oranges piled in a basket standing by itself on her head. Without looking where her hand was going, she reached up and pulled an orange from the basket and gave it to me.

“You warm this orange on an open fire,” she said, “Let it burn until the skin turns black.”

“I thank you,” I said.

“I am not finished,” she said. “When the skin turns all black, you know it’s ready. Then you cut it open while the juice is still hot, slap the insides against your flesh, then you take a warm bath and wash the orange flesh away. All your cuts will heal. Your bone aching will stop.”

I grasped the orange tightly so it would not fall. She walked behind me, then gave another orange and the same commands to someone else.

Yves was now keeping pace beside me. A few people recognized him as we walked down a gravel road, away from the commercial area. A man with a pile of embroidered tourist shirts on his arm followed us and announced to the people living in the small crowded limestone houses along the gravel road, “It’s Man Rapadou’s boy, Yves. He’s returned from over there.”

The man poked his hand out from underneath the heap of shirts he was carrying and gave Yves a joyous handshake.

“They didn’t take you, eh,” he said. “They couldn’t take you. No more than the Yankis could take me.”

The man with the tourist shirts talked endlessly about events that had taken place since Yves had left, how the Yankis had gone back to their country three years before, how Yves’ mother was well, though always heart-crushed, anxious for him.

The house was one of many constructed from mismatched pieces of timber and rusting tin. Yves leaped towards a low step that led to his mother’s front door. A large woman was standing on the doorstep, struggling to push her arms through the short sleeves of her rainbow-striped blouse. Her fingers were snarled in the fabric and she tore at it fiercely to free herself. Her chest was bare, the skin of her breasts the color of molasses. She was about to step into the road without the blouse when Yves jumped in front of her. He guided her clenched fists through the sleeves and calmly buttoned the blouse for her. She watched as he did this and rocked herself all the while, saying his name. When he was done, she grabbed his head and pressed it against her neck, then wept into the scabs on his scalp.

The woman did not see me standing there on the edge of a growing crowd of curious onlookers. I spun the orange in my hand and tried not to squeeze it too hard from anxiety.

“Man Rapadou, you’re so happy to see your son, no?” said the man with the pile of tourist shirts in his arms.

Yves walked over, took my hand, and brought me out of the crowd.

“You have a woman. This is your woman?” his mother asked.

“Don’t be so rash, Man Rapadou,” Yves said.

The mother opened her arms and nodded her head, beckoning to me. I wasn’t certain how to respond, so I stood there next to Yves, pretending I didn’t understand what she’d said. She yanked my hand and pulled me into her arms. The gathering of observers laughed. The mother waved them off with a turn of her face.

“Her name is Amabelle,” Yves said. Hearing him say it, listening to the mother repeat it, made me feel welcomed.

“Inside now,” the mother said, waving good-bye to the onlookers. She was wearing one shoe on her foot. The other she had left inside in her haste to run out and greet her son.

We were in the first room of the house. The back room led to a courtyard shared among many families. It reminded me of the compound at Don Carlos’ mill.

Yves went out to greet his relations who lived around the courtyard. They brought a chair out for him to sit in beneath a tree in the middle of the yard, a tall, vibrantly green traveler’s tree with the palmetto branches spread out like the fingers on a hand.

The mother served us a hot cup of salted coffee. The inside of my mouth was scalded as I sipped, but I struggled not to spit it out because the saline taste washed out the taint of parsley and blood that had been on my tongue since the beating at the square.

Yves’ relations from the yard put together and cooked a large meal for him. They fried and stewed all his favorite foods: goat meat and eggplants, watercress in codfish sauce, corn mush, and black beans.

Yves ate everything placed in front of him. Now and again his mother would interrupt his eating to tell a story about how much he had eaten as a boy, not only food and sweets, but also moist dirt from bean plant roots, which he liked to rub against his gums until they bled.

Yves stopped to listen to his mother’s stories as though he too was hearing them for the first time. The mother was telling her tales, I realized, to stop him from eating too quickly, to force him to rest his mouth and stomach.

“Remember a man who was put in prison.” The mother stood in a corner rubbing her large belly. “After nothing but bread and water for thirty days, they let him out of prison and he brought himself home. First thing I do is cook him all the rich food he had dreams about in prison. He ate until he fell over on his plate in the middle of eating. He died eating,” she told the relations with a deep long laugh. “Please, don’t kill my son. A man can die of hunger, but a man can also die over a plate of food.”

Yves put his spoon down and pushed his plate away. His mother chortled, even though no one was cackling along with her. She seemed to be the only one who could laugh out of sadness, a sadness that made the laughter deeper and louder still, like the echo of a scream from the bottom of a well.

The mother stroked her hairy chin with her long thick fingers, still laughing. She reminded me of the old women at the cane mill with their cheeks split in half, the flesh healed because it had to but never sealed in the same way again.

I remembered what my father used to say as he would hurry off with a knapsack of bottles filled with leaves and warm rum, as he raced to a birth or to a death, thinking of ways to encourage or halt the event. “Misery won’t touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.”

The mother looked liked she’d had her own share of misery. The only thing it hadn’t touched was a mouth full of perfect white teeth, curved like the round edges of an enamel cup, none of them her own.

My own mouth was still too bruised for hard foods. A full plate of fried goat meat remained on my lap. Yves’ mother walked over to me and asked, “Some soup for you? It won’t be too hot or too thick.”

She took the full plate from my lap and came back with a small bowl of pumpkin soup. While the others watched, she fed me the soup with a tiny spoon as though I were a sick, bedridden child.