Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [50]
Reaching into his shirt pocket, my uncle pulled out his voice box and said, as if we were learning this for the first time, “Mira, Edwidge, you heard? Madam mwen mouri.” My wife is dead.
During the ride into Bel Air, we were stopped at a roadblock by two policemen with Uzis, who scolded the taxi driver for having an outdated driver’s license but released him for a bribe of twenty Haitian dollars, which the cabdriver told us, rather forcefully, would have to be added to the fare. My uncle and Tante Zi said they wouldn’t pay the bribe, but before the driver could ask us to step out, my father agreed. The ride was already costing us so little, my father said. The policeman probably would not have stopped the driver had he not noticed that he was carrying people from abroad.
I have rarely had these types of encounters outside of Bel Air, outside of Port-au-Prince, I told my father.
Nowhere are these types of things more likely to happen than in Bel Air, Tante Zi echoed.
“My wife just died,” Uncle Joseph told the driver when he dropped us off in front of his church. My uncle wanted the policeman’s voluntary consideration, the driver’s sympathy. He wanted to believe that his loss could change the way others acted toward him.
“My condolences,” replied the driver as he accepted double the fare plus the bribe money.
My father was rarely on the other end of this type of exchange. He was usually the driver, not the one being driven. It occurred to me that perhaps he felt he had to make up with this one man for some of the wrongs that had been done to him at the wheel of his cab.
My father was staying with my uncle in his room, sleeping on a cot near the wide platform bed that my uncle and Tante Denise had often shared. I would sleep in a room off the kitchen, not far from theirs.
Soon after we arrived, my father accompanied my uncle to the cemetery to have the family mausoleum cleaned, to the florist to order the wreaths, to the photocopier to have the funeral programs printed. And of course I followed them both everywhere. My father was just beginning to show signs of shortness of breath, which we took to be an allergic reaction to the dust in Port-au-Prince, panting every now and then as we zigzagged through the sweltering, jam-packed streets. But as each errand brought my uncle closer to his final farewell to his wife, it was he who often stopped to rest. Finding a lamppost on the occasional street corner, he would wrap his arms around it and weep.
Tante Denise had died the week before Haiti’s national carnival would begin. On the eve of carnival celebrations, her neighborhood, her city, was loud and boisterous, with carnival tunes blaring from nearly every other house but hers. We were still two days from Tante Denise’s funeral when, wanting a bit of peace and quiet, my father decided to accompany Tante Zi’s son, my cousin Richard, the director of the funeral cooperative in charge of Tante Denise’s burial, to another funeral in Grand-Goâve, a small town south of Port-au-Prince. I offered to go with them.
I didn’t realize how complicated the Grand-Goâve burial would be until we went to pick up the coffin. After parking the car on a pebbly and hilly street and walking down a damp, slippery alley, then climbing a wobbly ladder up to a second-story workshop, we found the coffin maker putting the last touches on a cedar casket, stapling a piece of white cloth to the inner lining and adding a velvet-draped sponge to serve as a pillow. As soon as the casket was done, Richard climbed down to the ground floor and the coffin maker and his apprentice lowered the cedar coffin down to him, carefully balanced on ropes.
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