Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [44]
That night after the fabric vendor left, colorful sparks rose up and filled the night sky before fading and plummeting into the sea. With cannonlike explosions, the mayor was celebrating his victory with fireworks. Still lying on her foam mattress as her father snored on his across the room, Claire couldn’t help but feel like she was the one who’d won.
The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned five was a Sunday, so she and Gaspard walked to the beach in the morning, watching a sandy pool that had formed, where a group of children splashed inside a ring of brown water then plunged into the sea to rinse themselves. Claire wore the pink muslin sundress, which Gaspard had ordered made for her in the same color and style but a slightly smaller size the year before. The afternoon air felt sticky on her skin as though they were trapped in one of the many humid air pockets where the sea breeze met the stifling heat of the town. Moving away from the beach, Gaspard motioned toward town. Even before they turned their backs to the sea, Claire knew that, just like the previous year, they’d be visiting her mother’s grave.
The main road was crowded with pedestrians either dodging or hailing moto taxis and tap taps. Gaspard held his nose up and sniffed the air, breathing in the scent of soft tar on an asphalted stretch. Raising his arm to respond to the occasional greeting, he kept walking at a steady clip, daring her to keep up. Passing a Vodou temple with pictures of Catholic saints doubling as lwas, he pointed out, just as he had many times, the glowing face of a pale Mater Dolorosa and said, “The goddess of love, èzili Freda, your mother liked her.”
Claire had never seen a picture of her mother. There were simply none. If not for the class portrait at the Protestant school, which her father had not purchased, there would be no pictures of her either.
Leaving the main road behind, they cut through a narrow dirt track with wooden houses enclosed by tall cactus fences. Claire trailed behind her father as he followed the smell of wet pine and burnt sugar in the air. A muddied rubber-booted man returning from the cane fields with an overburdened mule called out to them, “Paying a visit to the dead Mesye Gaspard and Manzè Claire?”
Gaspard nodded, as he did to everyone else who greeted him from then on.
The burial site was next to a cane field so vast that Claire couldn’t even see where it ended. Standing on the edge of the twenty or so cement crosses rising out of the hilly terra cotta earth, she forgot at first which one was her mother’s. Her father bent down and, using the end of his shirt, wiped a light coat of red mud off the letters of her mother’s name. She could only read the letters because she had just learned to write her name at school. Her mother’s name had also been Claire, Claire Narcis. Her father had decided to call her Claire Limyè Lanmè, Claire of the sea light, after her mother died.
Squatting there with one knee lodged in the moist earth, Gaspard spat on the end of his shirt, but could not produce enough saliva to further clean his wife’s headstone.
“Need some from you too,” he told his daughter, who at first hesitated then playfully obliged, digging deep into the back of her throat with adultlike grunts.
Next to her mother’s was a year-old grave with a polished gray cross that was smaller than the others. On the cross was a metal wreath, painted in pale blue and white with a brown angel carved on the front. It was the grave of a child.
This was one of many times that Claire wished she knew how to read and write more than her own name. Her father didn’t even know that much, so she couldn’t ask him to read the name for her, to tell her who the child was that her mother was now looking after in death.
Once her father was done wiping her mother’s headstone, covering the entire front of his shirt with the red earth, he sat down on the stone slab that in Claire’s mind