Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat [36]
"As soon as the little girl got on the bird's back, the bird said to the girl, I didn't tell you this because it was a small thing, but in the land I am taking you to, there is a king there who will die if he does not have a little girl's heart. The girl she said, I didn't tell you this because it was a small thing, but little girls, they leave their hearts at home when they walk outside. Hearts are so precious. They don't want to lose them. The bird, clever as it was, it said to the girl, You might want to return to your home and pick up your heart. It is a small matter, but you may need it. So the girl, she said, Okay, let us go back and get my heart. The bird took her home and put her down on the ground. He told her he would wait for her to come back with her heart. The girl ran and ran all the way to her family village and never did she come back to the bird. If you see a handsome lark in a tree, you had better know that he is waiting for a very very pretty little girl who will never come back to him."
The boys cheered and applauded the pretty little girl's cleverness.
"Is your story true?" they cried in unison.
"As true as this old woman's hair is blue," answered my grandmother.
They pleaded for another story, but she told them to go home before the werewolf on the sugar cane cart came out, the one who could smell you from miles away and would come and kill you, unless you ran in a rage through the fields and hollered a list of all his crimes.
Tante Atie's feet pounded the porch a few minutes later.
"Would you read me something?" asked my grandmother.
"I am empty, old woman," she said. "As empty as a dry calabash."
Chapter 19
Tante Atie was very cheerful as she stood in my doorway the next morning.
"Did you sleep all right?" she asked.
She was wearing her i LOVE NEW YORK T-shirt, this time with a long white skirt. Her hair was brushed back and tied in a tiny bun, resting like a porcupine on the back of her neck.
"Are you going somewhere?" I asked.
"Atie speaks to city folks today," she said. "Louise asked me to go with her to have her name put on the archives as having lived in this valley."
My grandmother crept up behind her, gently brushing a broom across the cement.
"What's the use her getting registered?" asked my grandmother. "She is leaving soon, non?"
"Her name can be on some piece of paper for future generations," said Tante Atie. "If people come and they want to know, they will know she lived here."
"People don't need their names on a piece of paper for that," said my grandmother.
"I will list my name too," Tante Atie said.
"If a woman is worth remembering," said my grandmother, "there is no need to have her name carved in letters."
Louise hollered Tante Atie's name from the road.
"That child has lungs like mountain echoes," said my grandmother.
"You have lungs like mountains echoes," she shouted from the house.
Tante Atie rushed out to the porch. My grandmother followed closely behind her. I watched through the window, while Brigitte moved her head in all directions, trying to figure out what all the commotion was about.
Louise was standing in the middle of the road, waiting for Tante Atie. She had on a crisp lavender dress with a butterfly collar. "Atie, you come now," she shouted, ignoring stares from the men on their way to the fields.
"Atie, can't the girl walk up to the house?" asked my grandmother. "We're not a spectacle. You tell her to come to the house. She's frightening the leaves off the trees."
Tante Atie motioned for Louise to come. Louise dashed