The Farming of Bones (20 page)
The dead season is, for me, one never ending night.
I dream all the time of returning to give my testimony to the river, the waterfall, the justice of the peace, even to the Generalissimo himself.
A border is a veil not many people can wear. The valley is a daydream, the village, the people, and Joël, with a grave that only a broken-hearted old man would ever know how to find.
I would go back with Odette to say her “pesi” to the Generalissimo, for I would not know how to say it myself. My way of saying it would always be—however badly—“perejil.” For somewhere in me, I still believe that perhaps one simple word could have saved all our lives.
I had never desired to run away. I knew what was happening but I did not want to flee. “Where to?”, “Who to?”, was always chiming in my head.
Of all the people killed, I will wager that there were many asking like me “Who to?” Even when they were dying and the priests were standing over them reciting ceremonial farewells, they must have been asking themselves, “Go in peace. But where?”
Heaven—my heaven—is the veil of water that stands between my parents and me. To step across it and then come out is what makes me alive. Odette and Wilner not coming out is what makes them dead.
I was never naive, or blind. I knew. I knew that the death of many was coming. I knew that the streams and rivers would run with blood. I knew as well how to say “pesi” as to say “perejil.”
You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.
My dreams are now only visitations of my words for the absent justice of the peace, for the Generalissimo himself.
He asked for “perejil,” but there is much more we all knew how to say. Perhaps one simple word would not have saved our lives. Many more would have to and many more will.
The more days go by, the more I think of Joël’s grave. (Of Wilner’s, Odette’s, Mimi’s, and Sebastien’s too.) I could no more find these graves than the exact star that exploded and fell from the sky the night each of them perished.
The more I think about their graves, the more I see mine: a simple stone marker with written on it only my name and the day I die.
But it must be known that I understood. I saw things too. I just thought they would not see me. I just thought they would not find me. Only when Mimi and Sebastien were taken did I realize that the river of blood might come to my doorstep, that it had always been in our house, that it is in all our houses.
I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children’s inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.
I hear the weight of the river all the time. It creaks beneath the voices, like a wooden platform under a ton of mountain rocks. The river, it opens up to swallow all who step in it, men, women, and children alike, as if they had bellies full of stones.
It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.
The slaughter is the only thing that is mine enough to pass on. All I want to do is find a place to lay it down now and again, a safe nest where it will neither be scattered by the winds, nor remain forever buried beneath the sod.
I just need to lay it down sometimes. Even in the rare silence of the night, with no faces around.
I waited for Doctor Javier’s reply by watching Yves leave for the fields every morning to return home after dark. I waited for Doctor Javier’s reply by feeling my wider, heavier body slowly fold towards my feet, as though my bones were being deliberately pulled from their height towards the ground. I waited for Doctor Javier’s reply by sewing clothes for everyone who came with a piece of cloth and held it in front of me and for my effort offered a few gourdes, a plate of food, and sometimes nothing but a kind grin. Yes, I waited for Doctor Javier’s reply by growing old.
His sister had moved Father Romain to a hospital in Portau-Prince, so I didn’t see him again until May 1961, after the Generalissimo was killed in a monsoon of bullets as he was being driven out of the capital city on a highway named after him.
Father Romain was in the Cap then for a family event and came to stand out in the sun on the cathedral steps and watch a parade of survivors singing on the street:
Yo tiye kabrit la! Adye!
They killed the goat! Adye!
It was the first time since the crowds waiting for the justice of the peace that I had seen a group remembering, a strange celebration of the living and the dead, the children and grandchildren of the slaughter.
Father Romain had been forced to age faster than most of us, but I could tell under his hollowed cheekbones and high round bounty of salt-and-pepper hair that he was experiencing his own share of uncertain joy. He seemed like a different person, the older brother—no, the grandfather—of the man he once was, the man who had taught the children about the properties of the wind and the invisible substances in the air by flying kites.
I didn’t know where the sister was that day but she was not with him or with us, those of us who took to the once fire-engulfed streets of the Cap to clank pots and cans and sing to celebrate the Generalissimo’s passing.
Yves came home from the fields to wander in and out of the small crowd, nibbling at his lower lip as though he wanted to weep for every scream of our happiness.
Man Rapadou and I walked arm in arm, her body nimble and spry as she entered the last years of her eighth decade.
Man Rapadou had been essential to me in the simple routine of my life. We’d wake up together at the same time every morning after Yves had left for the fields and she would help me with my sewing. I treasured my sewing; I enjoyed feeling my index finger cramped inside the thimble, found many hours’ pleasure in watching the needle rise and fall, guarding the fragile thread with caution as it snaked through the cloth. I never used machines because that would have taken away a great part of the physical enjoyment.
Every morning at dawn, Man Rapadou and some of the women from the yard would go to market and bring back fresh ingredients for a meal that wasn’t ready until late afternoon, closer to the time when Yves came home. Even though she knew he ate elsewhere, or maybe even had another woman looking after him, she still treated him like he was her helpless boy who had just enough strength to make his father’s land come alive.
As his fortune had grown, Yves had added four more rooms to the courtyard, two of them mine and mine alone. (His mother did not want to move elsewhere and leave her old relations and happy-sad memories behind.) There were times when I shut myself in those two rooms that were mine and took to bed for months, times when I had too much lint in my throat, or an aching arm that prevented me from sewing, when the joint of my knee would throb, and the ringing in my ears would chime without stop. Other than those moments, the Generalissimo’s death was the only reprieve from my routine of sewing and sleeping and having the same dreams every night.
“Oh, Man Amabelle, look at you doing the kalanda,” someone called out from the crowd in front of the cathedral.
I didn’t even realize I’d been dancing. Didn’t even know I could dance. Still, it wasn’t the compliment I heard but the title belonging to an elder—a “Man” like Man Irelle, Man Denise, or Man Rapadou—before my name.
I saw young men and women leaping with maracas and tambourines that day who were not yet born when I’d returned, and I felt time slither around me in a way it didn’t when I was alone with Man Rapadou and her people in the courtyard.
Yves walked ahead of all of us, staying out of the crowd spilling over into the shops. He seemed younger than he was; with a sunken chest and narrow waist, he looked like he had lived through one or two famines. He had gone back to shaving his head bowl-bald even though he no longer had any reason to fear collecting cane ticks in his hair.
He was not pleased with us for taking part in the instant parade; I could tell. He spoke so little now that I could read whole phrases on his sweaty knotted brows. The questions posed on his face that day were ones I was also asking myself.
How dare you dance on a day like this?
What could we do but dance?
It’s like dancing on all the graves.
There were no graves, no markers. If we tried to dance on graves, we would be dancing on air. Besides, this was a harmless, effortless dance, one our people knew well, the dance of farewell to a departed tyrant.
For twenty-four years all of my conversations with Yves had been restricted to necessary prattle. Good-morning. Good-night. What goes? Good-bye. The careful words exchanged between people whose mere presence reminds each other of a great betrayal.
I had often hoped that he would find a woman to love him and take him away from the courtyard. I couldn’t escape myself because I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t have the strength to travel in search of distant relations whose lives had gone well enough without me; I didn’t even know if they would recognize me if they saw me. Some of them might have come looking for me after my parents drowned, but maybe they thought I had drowned, too.
So in spite of the solemn expressions on many of the faces in the crowd, in spite of those who wept even as they were dancing, in spite of the dead whose absence trailed us as did the dust of their bones in the wind, even as our chances vanished of ever glaring and spitting into his eyes, we were still having a celebration, if only because the Generalissimo was dead and we had survived.
After the crowd had thinned out, I walked up the steps in front of the cathedral, leaving Man Rapadou and Yves to wait for me on the sidewalk. Father Romain was standing with a group of parishioners walking out of the cathedral.
“Mon pè, you are better?” I asked from the outer row of the group.
“By His grace, yes.” His voice was as tranquil as his eyes were suddenly attentive, the two most visible signs of the young man he had once been.
“I am Amabelle Désir, Father,” I said. “I came to see you when you were in Ouanaminthe. I lived in Alegría. How is your sister?”
“You knew my sister?” he asked.
“Yes. I saw her in your house in Ouanaminthe.”
“She still sings in nightclubs in Port-au-Prince.” He extended his right hand to me, watching it rise from his side as though his own flesh was a marvel to him still.
“Father, will you return to Alegría now?” someone asked.
He seemed surprised that so many others knew about Alegría. “Alegría, a name to evoke joy,” he said, his voice rising as if for a group before a pulpit. “Perhaps this is what its founders—those who named it—had in mind. Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.”
Yves and Man Rapadou climbed the steps and went to sit inside the cool cathedral. Yves did not even look at Father Romain as he walked by, supporting his mother’s steps by holding on to her elbow.
“Father, will you return to Alegría?” Another person asked the question again.
Father Romain looked down at our group as though we had just planted the seed of this idea in his head.
“Yes, I will return,” he said, “to help those of our people who are still there if I can.”
“When will you return, Father?” I asked.
“I am no longer a father,” he said, then corrected himself. “I am a father to three young boys. I am no longer with any order.”
“Why, Father?” the question escaped from an unguarded mouth.
“It took more than prayers to heal me after the slaughter,” he said with a sadness that he was too distraught to show when I first saw him at the border. “It took holding a pretty and gentle wife and three new lives against my chest. I wept so much when they arrested me. I wept all the time I was in prison. I wept at the border. I wept for everyone who was touched, beaten, or killed. It took a love closer to the earth, closer to my own body, to stop my tears. Perhaps I have lost, but I have also gained an even greater understanding of things both godly and earthly.”
That night, I watched from my front room as Yves sat under a newer, almost grown traveler’s palm, which he had brought there and planted himself in the same spot as the old one that had withered and died. He was reclining on a rocking chair with a bottle of rum in his hand, looking ahead at nothing in particular except maybe the fireflies that lit themselves in unison as they circled him. The slaughter had affected him in certain special ways: He detested the smell of sugarcane (except the way it disappeared in rum) and loathed the taste of parsley; he could not swim in rivers; the sound of Spanish being spoken—even by Haitians—made his eyes widen, his breath quicken, his face cloud with terror, his lips unable to part one from the other and speak.
Over the years, his father’s land had grown into more than two dozen acres of bean fields. The more he produced, the more land he bought. His family now owned rice paddies, sorghum and wheat plots, coffee, cacao, and yam lots. He had also built himself a cinder-block workhouse near a creek where he consulted with his workers, ate his midday meals, and took siestas during the late afternoons. The creek itself was surrounded with mango, avocado, and papaya trees, under which roamed guinea fowls and wild pigeons that everyone in the area was free to hunt, just as they were to help themselves to the ripening fruits on all of Yves’ trees. In his mother’s old rocker, though, he was simply a poor man alone, sipping from a bottle of the Gardere family’s Reserve du Domaine and dozing off now and again between glances at the sky. Before swallowing a mouthful, he would spill the costly rum on the ground, forming a circle of bubbled dust for the ones we don’t see, the untouchables, the invisibles.
He and I both had chosen a life of work to console us after the slaughter. We had too many phantoms to crowd those quiet moments when every ghost could appear in its true form and refuse to go away.
As I sat on a white plastic bucket and watched him from my doorway, I regretted that we hadn’t found more comfort in each other. After I realized that Sebastien was not coming back, I wanted to find someone who would both help me forget him and mourn him with me. Perhaps this was too great a gift to ask of a man who was in search of the same thing for himself.
The plastic bucket slipped out from beneath me as I got up. Yves turned around and watched me stumble, trying to maintain my balance on my bad knee. By the time he reached me, I was already on my feet. He let go of my hand and walked back to the rocking chair, picked up the bottle of rum, and went into his room.
Once he went, Man Rapadou crossed the yard and came to my sewing room. She had a cold compress on her forehead and was trying to keep drips of water from sliding into her eyes. She dropped her wide body down on a long skirt to which I was adding some last pleats before going to bed.
“Man Rapadou, you are not sleeping well?” I asked.
“It’s all this walking in the sun today,” she said. “I should not have walked so long in the sun today.”
“Are you sick?”
“Not sick, but very tired.” She lay back on my bed, which was a plain cotton mattress kept purposely low, close to the ground.
“Amabelle, my life, like yours, has always been rich with dreams,” she said. “My head barely touches the pillow at night when I dream that I’m falling.”
“Falling?”
“I dream often that I am falling,” she said. “And they get bigger, the things I’m falling from. First I am an infant falling out of my mother’s body. Then I’m falling off my mother and father’s house, a wooden house in the middle of a coffee grove. Then it’s the house of Yves’ father I’m falling from. Then I’m falling off little hills and cliffs. Then it’s mountains; I’m falling off mountains. The next thing to fall from after mountain is the clouds, non?”
“When you fall, where do you come to land?” I asked. Perhaps it was an unnecessary question, but one I needed an answer to, to prepare myself for the time when I would be having these same kinds of dreams myself.
“I always wake up before I come to land,” she said, “even if I see myself getting closer to the ground every day.”
“What do you make of this type of dream?”
“When I was a girl,” she said, searching with her coarse bent fingers for the contour of her own face, now buried under many layers of crow’s feet and wrinkles, “my skin was so dry that sometimes it peeled off in scabs pink with blood, like fish scales. I was very clumsy because my feet were weak, but I knew how to slip into a fall, how to not fight the force of the earth pulling me down. When I became a young woman, somehow my feet got stronger and I never thought about falling again, until now.”
I tried to gather her into my arms, which was impossible to do, given the breadth of her figure, so I patted the flesh on her back, between her neck and her waist as if burping a growing child.
“It’s a hard thing to know that life will go on one day without you,” she said.
I too felt and lived my own body’s sadness more and more every day. The old and new sorrows were suddenly inconsolable, and I knew that the brief moments of joy would not last forever. When I saw a beautiful young man I tried to pair him up with my younger self. I dreamed of the life without pain that he might have brought me, the tidy parlor and spotless furnishings that our young children would not be allowed to touch, except to dust off on Saturdays.
“Old age is not meant to be survived alone,” Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. “Death should come gently, slowly, like a man’s hand approaching your body. There can be joy in impatience if there is time to find the joy.”
“How long has it been, Man Rapadou, since a man touched your big belly?” I asked, to make her laugh.
“Not as long as since one had touched yours,” she said, measuring the length of her own smile with the edge of her fingertips. “From time to time, life takes you by surprise. You sit in your lakou eating mangoes. You let the mango seeds fall where they may, and one day you wake up and there’s a mango tree in your yard.”
I knew she meant this as a compliment to me, a kind word for my sudden arrival at her house some years before.
“I have not told this to anyone,” she said, her hands patting her too wide hips, “but I believe there are many who suspect, even my son. The Yankis had poisoned Yves’ father’s mind when he was in their prisons here; he was going to spy on others for Yanki money after he left their jail. Many people who were against the Yankis being here were going to die because of his betrayal. And so I cooked his favorite foods for him and filled them with flour-fine glass and rat poison. I poisoned him. Maybe this is why I am falling in all my dreams. I’m going to him soon and I’m afraid. What will I say to him in the life after? ‘Love is only pleasure; honor is duty.’ I cannot simply say this thing that I told myself then. It is not enough now. I should not tell you this about me. You might do the same to my son. But then you do not love him like I did Yves’ father, but greater than my love for this man was love for my country. I could not let him trade us all, sell us to the Yankis.
“I often hear that silence is holiness, and still I’m not holy,” she said, wiping a tear from the side of her face. “I believed then that fortune would favor the brave. How young I was. There are cures for everything except death. I wish the sun had set on my days when I was still a young, happy woman whose man was by her side, with joy in his eyes and honor in his heart.”
The next morning, I left Man Rapadou asleep, with her sorrows, in my bed, to go climb up to the uneven cobblestone road that led to the citadel. There, on the outer galleries, I walked among a group of tourists who were wandering through, photographing the barracks, the stone walls, the rusting artillery, and the vaulted ceilings.
Using broken phrases in various tongues, local boys offered themselves as guides for individual tours through the interior corridors. One of the special guides was a very large Haitian man wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a black tie. He was leading a group of twelve young white foreigners in beach attire.
With a sweep of his fingers, the man guided his group to the edge of a low wall to show them the ruins of the Palais Sans Souci, the king’s old official residence down below.
Pointing to the goat-grazed hills of reddish grass in the direction where my parents’ house used to stand, he said, “It was not unusual for people to live here, before the constant earthquakes drove most of them away. You could feel even the smallest earthquake in those hills.” I couldn’t recognize anymore any place that resembled where our house had been, nor did I want to. Land is something you care about only when you have heirs. All my heirs would be like my ancestors: revenants, shadows, ghosts.
I wasn’t certain why I had picked that particular group of white foreigners and Haitian guide to follow until I realized that both the guide’s talk and the things that members of the group were whispering to one another were m Spanish.
I trailed them to the open courtyard on one of the top tiers of the citadel. It was a place I had always avoided going as a child. In the middle was a raised block of concrete shaped like a coffin, a place sometimes believed to be the grave of Henry I.
As the group circled the concrete block, the guide told the story of Henry I.
“Henry Christophe was at first a foreigner here,” he said. “He was born a slave in the Windward Islands and during his life made himself a king here.” The large man tugged at the end of his tie as he spoke. Then either to caution his young charges against vainglory—or to be fair to history—he added, “The king was sometimes cruel. He used to march battalions of soldiers off the mountain, ordering them to plunge to their deaths as a disciplinary example to the others. Thousands of our people died constructing what you see here. But this is not singular to him. All monuments of this great size are built with human blood.”
To make clear his sentiment, he tapped the mortar pile with his fists, reminding the group of the most unforgivable weaknesses of the dead: their absence and their silence.
“When the king was fifty-three years old,” he continued, “he had a sudden apoplexy, which left him paralyzed. His enemies organized a revolt against him, and, rather than surrender, he shot himself with what some say was either a silver or a gold bullet. It is said that he was buried in this palace, many believe in this spot, but there is some mystery as to whether or not he is really under here. He could be anywhere in this palace or nowhere here at all.”
As they moved away from the mortar, the man inspected the faces in the group to determine that everyone was still there with him. “Famous men never truly die,” he added. “It is only those nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air.”
