Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [64]
My uncle was completely surrounded, but no one was touching him. Everyone was heading farther into the compound, toward his apartment, the church. From where he was standing, totally frozen in a spot near a small outdoor grill that Maxo’s wife sometimes used to cook their meals, he could see many of his neighbors scurrying off with his things: Nana, an old woman limping with a cane, carrying some of his dinner plates, Danielle, a small girl whose mother sold water to him now and then, joining strangers as they walked by with a handful of Maxo’s children’s clothes. He could now see the navy blue cotton and Lycra suit he’d worn to his wife’s funeral, the one in which he wanted to be buried, walking away on some boy’s arms. As the crowd rushed back and forth around him—there went the charcoal grill and his windup alarm clock—he did not dare move to the other side of the courtyard, where a plume of smoke was rising outside the church.
They’re burning the altar of the church, someone yelled, and some of the direksyon, that is, the school principal’s office.
The crowd began heading that way, but he remained in place, not moving. He wanted to go to the church, to see it, to defend it, to reclaim the altar. But what if the crowd decided at that moment to burn him too?
What he couldn’t see was the pews and altar being dragged into the middle of the street and set on fire. Part of his office, which was directly beneath the church, was also burned, his papers, including the dozens of notepads in which he’d jotted down words and sentences, his observations about the neighborhood, in good times and bad, they were all scattered now, all over the streets, being trampled, carried away, or burned.
The courtyard was nearly empty now, with everyone’s focus shifted to the church. The few people who were still milling about shamefully avoided his eyes as they walked by, one with a handful of new toothbrushes that he’d kept on the night table in his bedroom upstairs.
He had to get out now, finally leave the neighborhood for good. But how would he get through the barricades, where surely the dreads had people waiting, watching for him? As he moved toward the gate, he spotted Anne, the niece of his old friend Ferna, standing there across the alley, watching him. Had she turned against him too? Had her aunt? Anne held out her empty hands, showing that she was carrying nothing. She had not stolen from him.
“Vini,” she said. Come.
He went without thinking, letting her drag him by the hand. Walking the slippery incline that separated his house from another small courtyard, he kept his face down, his chin as close as he could to his chest without blocking his tracheotomy hole. He did not dare look back toward the church as a new wave of looters brushed past him, heading there. He might have been tempted to follow them, to try to stop them, reason with them. He thought about all the wounded who might be lying somewhere dying. He thought of their mothers, fathers, standing over them unable to do anything but watch. The country was once again losing a generation of young people, some violent, some bystanders, but all in the line of fire, dying.
The courtyard he and Anne stepped into led to a series of narrow alleyways, some haphazardly paved in slippery concrete, some packed with dirt and mud and others dotted with pools of stagnant dirty water. The neighborhood’s labyrinth of corridor-sized alleys was like tunnels, leading everywhere, but alas, only within the neighborhood. He was not too familiar with the path Anne was leading him on now. New houses, shacks, were being built all the time, creating newer and narrower trails. Finally, she opened a corrugated iron gate, pasted together from several rusting pieces, and stepped inside.
The yard was only