Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [51]
As we edged into the busy traffic with the coffin and its occupant roped to the roof of the car, my father, still shocked, whispered to my cousin, “No hearse?”
He couldn’t get one in time, my cousin explained, and for such a long trip. But he assured us that Tante Denise would have one for her journey to the cemetery.
I could imagine what my father was thinking. It was a hot day. Won’t the sun spoil the corpse? I, in turn, was worried about the coffin slipping through the ropes and the body falling on the ground and my cousin having to pick it up and put it back and in his haste not removing every speck of dust from the old man, adding to his family’s anguish at the viewing. But the old man stayed put through the ninety-minute journey and we arrived in Grand-Goâve without incident.
After he’d dropped the body off at the church, Richard took us to the house of a female colleague for lunch. As they discussed cooperative business under a giant avocado tree in the cactus-fence yard behind her house, I realized that Richard was not just an undertaker but also an aspiring politician, whose work was indirectly connected to President Aristide.
After leaving office in 1996, the former priest had won a second term in 2000, in an election whose results were contested by a coalition of opposition parties. Three years later, in 2003, with international funds still frozen over the outcome of the elections, there were massive demonstrations demanding his resignation. His supporters, a large number of them from Bel Air, also rallied in huge numbers, sometimes resulting in deadly clashes between the two groups. An active member of several anti-Aristide groups, Richard, like most future politicians, was hoping to barter for goodwill with good works. This put him in direct conflict with some of the pro-Aristide gangs in Bel Air, many of whom, Richard casually noted to his colleague, wanted him dead.
There were signs, though, that things might be turning around for him, Richard explained. A few weeks back he was coming home late one night when someone flagged down his car, ordered him to roll down the window and pressed a gun to his temple. He heard the slow clicking of the trigger and quickly identified himself. When he heard Richard’s name, his would-be assassin begged his forgiveness saying, “Chief, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you. You buried my mother a few months back.”
Through the entire funeral service for the old man in Grand-Goâve, with family members crying and wailing around him, Richard, who had told the story of his near assassination in such a calm, even amused voice, sat with my father and me in the last pew and with his head leaning against the wall, he slept. Afterward he drove us back to Bel Air at breakneck speed so he could make it to his house before the gangs had a chance to ambush us in the dark.
There was no wake for Tante Denise. Fearing that some of the neighborhood gangs might take advantage of a wake to storm the house, Uncle Joseph sent all his visitors home at eight o’clock and locked his doors.
After everyone left, my father and I stayed up with Léone and Tante Denise’s brothers, George and Bosi. They passed around a few pictures of Tante Denise looking stylish in many of the dresses she’d sewn herself over the years. My father, Léone, and Bosi and George looked at these pictures and reminisced late into the night about Tante Denise’s love of clothes and her making her own, rather badly sometimes when she was in a hurry.
As I dozed off, their laughter startled me again and again.
“Denise, that old goat,” Léone said and laughed. “She was a stubborn one.”
The morning of Tante Denise’s funeral, I took a few pictures of my father and Uncle Joseph getting dressed