Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [55]
Scratching his widow’s peak, my uncle replied, “He’s now one of the richest men in Haiti.”
“What about the Italian I worked for?”
“He went from selling shoes to somehow making them.”
Then glancing at me, my father asked my uncle, “Do you remember when you wrote me that letter saying that a boy had beaten Edwidge in school?”
Remembering neither beating nor boy, I asked, “When was that?”
“You must have been six,” my uncle said. “In primary school.”
“I was so mad,” my father said, turning over on his side on the bed, “I wanted to get on a plane right then and there, forget everything and go back home to my children.”
“That’s when I stopped reporting all their cuts and scrapes,” my uncle said.
More, please, I wanted to say. Please tell me more. Both of you, together, tell me more. About you. About me. About all of us. But my father began coughing, so my uncle leaned over and whispered, “Ush, Mira. Just rest.”
Every day at lunchtime, my father would leave his bed and venture downstairs, where he had a desk in a corner of the dining room. There he’d sit and sort through his mail and, whenever he was able to, return phone calls. My uncle would take advantage of this time to nap or walk around our neighborhood. My father would also make an effort to come down to the living room whenever his friends came by. Later, the trips downstairs, even the trips to the bathroom, would become too difficult, and he’d have no choice but to receive his guests in bed.
At five p.m. every day, my father would slowly make his way back upstairs. Sometimes he’d linger a bit longer to have an early dinner, but most often my mother brought supper to him in his room at around seven. Usually it was something light, steamed vegetables or a simple stew. Sometimes, however, he would get a craving for take-out fried chicken and plantains, and either Bob or Karl would stop at a nearby restaurant and pick them up for him before coming over to the house to help bathe him. After his bath and supper, he’d take his final round of medications for the day and then settle in for an evening of television watching.
Over the years my father had accumulated an extensive collection of Haitian-produced movies and professional wrestling tapes. He would watch his favorites of those over and over until he knew all the dialogue. Whenever I watched with him, whether it was a Haitian movie or wrestling, he’d brief me on the scenario, forgetting that he had done so many times before.
He did the same to my uncle whenever my uncle would sit with him in the evenings. My uncle, who never watched anything on television but a few minutes of the evening news, unsuccessfully feigned interest, but ended up grimacing disapprovingly as my father became lost in the spectacles.
In early September, my uncle began packing. School was starting in Haiti and he had to go back to his students and church.
One night after my father had fallen asleep, my uncle asked to speak to me alone in the guest room where he slept. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and as he raised the voice box to his neck, I could see the tracheotomy hole throb with every breath.
“I have a thought concerning your father,” he said. “I know a doctor in Haiti. He’s the head of the national sanatorium. I think he can help.”
Remembering the mountaintop national sanatorium as a place to which people, like Liline’s cousin Melina, were often exiled before their deaths, I answered defensively, “Papa doesn’t have tuberculosis.”
“I know,” he replied. “But this doctor has had to deal with all kinds of lung diseases. He can help. I’ve already discussed it with your father. He can’t go now. With the oxygen, it’s too much to manage. I’m thinking maybe you can pay for a plane ticket and a hotel for the doctor to come here to examine him.”
My father wanted none of it.
“I can’t bring that doctor here,” my father told me the next day. Though he seemed touched by my uncle’s suggestion, he also understood the futility of it. “It would be a waste of time and money.