The Farming of Bones (23 page)

“When I didn’t see you, I always knew where to find you, peeking into some current, looking for your face. Since then I can’t tell you how many streams and rivers and waterfalls I have been to, looking for you.”

We watched the pool until it was a perfect mirror of the sky, where the sun was about to set. Sylvie cleared her throat several times, a signal, perhaps, that she thought it was time for us to leave. When we didn’t move, the anxious frown became more pronounced on her face; she wiped her sweaty palms on her lap and tried to temper the audible racing of her breath.

“What is it, Sylvie?” asked the señora. “Are you ill?”

Sylvie’s upper lip was sweating, turning darker, and for a moment the outline of her face reminded me of Joel’s lover, Félice, who’d had a beet-colored birthmark where she would have had a mustache had she been born a man.

“A question,” Sylvie said, her voice rising and falling quickly, beyond her control. “If I could ask a question?”

The señora reached for a handkerchief from one of the hidden compartments in the automobile and handed it to Sylvie to wipe her face.

“What is your question, Sylvie?” she asked. “Please, calm yourself.”

Sylvie took a few deep long breaths as she used the señora’s handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from her upper lip.

“Why parsley?” asked Sylvie.

“What?” responded the señora.

“Why did they choose parsley?”

For some reason, it had escaped me before, I hadn’t noticed, how young Sylvie was. She must have been just a child when the señora borrowed her from the slaughter.

The señora turned to me and raised her eyebrows. She tried to smile, but an uneasy expression kept creeping back into her face. “Do you know, Amabelle, that we have never spoken before of these things, Sylvie and me?”

Sylvie lowered her head, and rocked it back and forth.

“There are many stories. This is only one,” the señora said, turning her eyes back to the waterfall. “I’ve heard that when the Generalissimo was a young man, he worked as a field guard in the cane fields. One day one of his Haitian workers escaped into a nearby field where many things were growing, among them, wheat and parsley. So the Generalissimo would not see him, the Haitian worker crawled through those fields to hide. After the Generalissimo grew tired of chasing him, he called out to the Haitian man, ‘If you tell me where you are, I’ll let you live, but if you make me find you, I’ll take your life.’ The man must not have trusted the Generalissimo, so he kept crawling, but he took the Generalissimo seriously enough to cry out the names of the fields as he passed through them. In the wheat, he called out ‘twigo’ for trigo. And in the parsley he said ‘pewegil’ for perejil. The Generalissimo had him in plain sight and could have shot him in the parsley, but he did not because the Generalissimo had a realization. Your people did not trill their
r
the way we do, or pronounce the jota. ‘You can never hide as long as there is parsley nearby,’ the Generalissimo is believed to have said. On this island, you walk too far and people speak a different language. Their own words reveal who belongs on what side.”

She concluded almost too abruptly. Sylvie was still shaking her head, apparently not satisfied with the señora’s explanation. Perhaps there was no story that could truly satisfy. I myself didn’t know if that story was true or even possible, but as the señora had said, there are many stories. And mine too is only one.

“Come back to the house with us and stay tonight, Amabelle,” the señora offered.

Sylvie raised her head and wiped the tears from her eyes. “I have always wished, Madame,” she said to me, “for an answer.”

“I must go back to the square in town,” I said. I didn’t want the young man to leave without me.

“Amabelle, can you not stay longer?” the señora asked.

“I cannot stay at all,” I said. “Someone is waiting for me.”

She drove very quickly back to the square, where the young man was waiting. While he waved his arms over his head, motioning for me to hurry, we sat there unmoving in the silence of the señora’s daughter’s automobile.

“You will come again, Amabelle?” the señora asked.

I did not want to part with a lie. We left it simply at a clumsy awkward handshake, which, after a moment, she embellished with a fast kiss on my left cheek. I opened the car door and stepped out.

“Amabelle, it was generous of you to visit,” the señora said.

“Go in peace, Sylvie, Señora,” I said.

The young man offered me his hand to help me into his jeep. The señora stepped out too and leaned on the front door of her daughter’s car and waved. With a distant gaze, Sylvie stood devotedly at her side. And in Sylvie’s eyes was a longing I knew very well, from the memory of it as it was once carved into my younger face: I will bear anything, carry any load, suffer any shame, walk with eyes to the ground, if only for the very small chance that one day our fates might come to being somewhat closer and I would be granted for all my years of travail and duty an honestly gained life that in some extremely modest way would begin to resemble hers.

Go in peace, Señora.

The driver started back to the border at great speed. He had a rendezvous and wanted to arrive before morning. He knew how to avoid the military checkpoints, he said, to save time.

I closed my eyes during the whole journey. I could still hear the thunderous waterfall crashing down inside my head, feel the spray against my face, even though we never got out of the car. Sebastien, I didn’t find. He didn’t come out and show himself. He stayed inside the waterfall.

After some time, the young man tapped my shoulder and asked, “Are you dead there? You can’t be dead. It will not be good for me if you are dead.”

I could smell Presidente beer and chewing tobacco on his breath. Without opening my eyes, I said, “No son, I am not dead.”

“Why do you sleep so much?” he asked. I could tell he desired some conversation, a voice to help keep him awake and in control of the car. “Did you not find the people you went to see?”

We drove in silence for some time until his fingernails drummed my shoulder again.

“It’s the middle of the night now,” he said. “You can open your eyes and not see anything.”

“Are we far from the border?” I asked.

“Not far,” he said.

“What work do you do?” I closed my eyes again. “You do more than lottery, do you not?”

“I help bring workers into La Romana for the sugarcane,” he said.

“Why do you do this?” I asked.

“The people here need their sugarcane and other things cut,” he said, “and people suffer for lack of work in our country.”

“Do you know of the big slaughter some years ago?” I asked.

“My mother ran from it with me when I was a baby,” he said. “My father died in it.”

“So you lived it?”

“If that is what you want to say.”

We said nothing more until we were at the bridge crossing. The guards did not even glance at me as we drove through the gate. I tried, in vain, to catch a glimpse of the river, a sliver of moonlight flashing on the surface of the water, a reduced shadow of the sky.

I asked him to let me out before we reached the Haitian customshouse and the open road. He stopped the car and turned off the lights. “Just leave you here? I cannot do that,” he said. “I know it’s the same time of year as when the kout kouto happened. If you want to stop for a moment, say a prayer, and light a candle, I will wait for you, but not for long because I have an important rendezvous.”

“I want you to go now,” I said.

“What will you do here?”

“My man is coming for me,” I lied. “If he’s not waiting at the customshouse now, he will be there soon, and even if he does not come, the guards will let me sleep out front. Besides, it is not long until dawn.”

Perhaps pretending to believe me eased his conscience. He was in a hurry and did not want to argue with me any longer. Maybe he was even afraid of ghosts. Every now and then, I’m told, a swimmer finds a set of white spongy bones, a skeleton, thinned by time and being buried too long in the riverbed.

“You are certain you want to stay here all night?” the young man asked.

“Certain,” I said.

He spat a clump of chewing tobacco out of the side of his mouth as he considered this. “You are a crazy one,” he said.

As he drove off in his car, I walked down to the bank of the river, trying not to trip over my own feet. In the coal black darkness of a night like this, unless you are near it, the river ceases to exist, allowing you to imagine just for a moment that all of them—my mother and father, Wilner, Odette, and the thousands whose graves are here—died natural deaths, peaceful deaths, deaths filled with moments of reflection, with pauses and some regret, the kind of death where there is time to think of what we are leaving behind and what better things may lie ahead.

The day my parents drowned, I watched their faces as they bobbed up and down, in and out of the crest of the river. Together they were both trying to signal a message to me, but the force of the water would not let them. My mother, before she sank, raised her arm high, far above the pinnacle of the flood. The gesture was so desperate that it was hard to tell whether she wanted me to jump in with them or move farther away.

I thought that if I relived the moment often enough, the answer would become clear, that they had wanted either for us all to die together or for me to go on living, even if by myself. I also thought that if I came to the river on the right day, at the right hour, the surface of the water might provide the answer: a clearer sense of the moment, a stronger memory. But nature has no memory. And soon, perhaps, neither will I.

I heard something flap out of the water, like rice rising and falling on a winnowing tray, the tiny husks separating from the grains. A shadow slipped out of the stretch of water before me, a ghost with a smile on his face, his cheeks grainy from the red-brown sand, his eyes bright red like the inside of a flame.

It was the professor, with his three layers of clothing padded with drenched straw, the river dripping from him as he stopped for a moment and stared blankly at my face. He sucked in his breath through his nose, perhaps taking in a few tiny sand grains with the night air as he did. He scratched his tangled beard, then continued down the riverbank, his foam sandals flopping between the sand and the soles of his feet.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the fog, the dense mist of sadness inside his head. Would the slaughter—the river—one day surrender to him his sanity the same way it had once snatched it away?

I wanted to call him, but only by his proper name, not by the nickname, Pwofese, the replacement for “crazy man,” that he had been given. I wanted to ask him, please, to gently raise my body and carry me into the river, into Sebastien’s cave, my father’s laughter, my mother’s eternity. But he was gone now, disappeared into the night.

I removed my dress, folding it piece by piece and laying it on a large boulder on the riverbank. Unclothed, I slipped into the current.

The water was warm for October, warm and shallow, so shallow that I could he on my back in it with my shoulders only half submerged, the current floating over me in a less than gentle caress, the pebbles in the riverbed scouring my back.

I looked to my dreams for softness, for a gentler embrace, for relief from the fear of mudslides and blood bubbling out of the riverbed, where it is said the dead add their tears to the river flow.

The professor returned to look down at me lying there, cradled by the current, paddling like a newborn in a washbasin. He turned around and walked away, his sandals flapping like two large birds fluttering damp wings, not so much to fly as to preen themselves.

He, like me, was looking for the dawn.

Acknowledgements

Mesi Anpil, Mucho Gracias, Thank You Very Much …

This book is a work of fiction based on historical events. Many dates have been changed, some events altered for narrative flow. Most of the inaccuracies or other place and time inconsistencies can be explained in that fashion. As to any others, please forgive the reach of my artistic license.

I am extremely grateful to the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund for the great honor, and support of its writer’s award, which allowed me the time to write. The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and The Barnard College Alumnae Association for the travel grants that got my research started. To Ledig House International Writer’s Colony for a month’s shelter. To Julia Alvarez, so generous with time and directions, to Lionel Legros (and SELA) for source suggestions and documents, to Jonathan Demme for the gift of many out-of-print books and papers. And to Archibald Lawless for the ongoing loan of an amazing office and a precious heart, I will always be grateful.

My most heartfelt thanks to Ambassador Bernardo Vega, Madame Jeanne Alexandre, Nicole Aragi, Myriam Augustin, Patricia Benoit, David Berry, Joanne Cams, Angie Cruz, Francis Cruz, Jacqueline Celestin-Fils-Aime, the late Jean Desquiron, Junot Diaz, Pierre Domond, Lionel Eliel, Jean Paul Fils-Aime, Melanie Fleishman, Laura Hruska, Juris Jurjevics, Michele Marcehn, Caroline Marshall, Sheila Murphy, Kareen Obydol, pigeon voyageur, and Dr. Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

To my manman, my muse, who taught me all about pèsi and other mysteries. Yes, I do always remember that these stories—and all the others—are yours to tell and not mine. To Jacques Stephen Alexis, for Compere General Soleil. One. Always.

The following works were also helpful in my research: Suzy Castor’s
he Massacre de 1937 et les Relations Haitiano-Dommicaines,
Bernard Diederich’s
Trujillo, the Death of the Dictator,
Rita Dove’s wonderful poem, “Parsley,”
Blood in the Streets
by Albert C. Hicks, His Excellency Bernardo Vega’s
Trujillo y Haiti,
as well as the pamphlet “Beyond the Bateyes: Haitian Immigrants in the Dominican Republic,” written by Patrick Gavigan and published by the National Coalition of Haitian Rights. President Stenio Vincent’s letter, which appears on the endpapers, was found among the papers of Sumner Welles in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library by Ambassador Bernardo Vega. The words of Rafael Trujillo’s speeches were quoted and paraphrased from
Chapter 21
of the book
President Truijllo, His Work and the Dominican Republic,
written by Lawrence De Besault and published in Santiago in the Dominican Republic by Editorial El Diario in 1941.

And the very last words, last on the page but always first in my memory, must be offered to those who died in the massacre of 1937, to those who survived to testify, and to the constant struggle of those who still toil in the cane fields.