Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [5]
The entire front of the two-story terraced house had collapsed. As some of her neighbors ventured into her yard, both happy and surprised to see her, she longed for the strength to dig beneath the rubble with her bare hands to find Rose. Instead, she climbed as close as she could to where she thought the kitchen was and sat there weeping, with the scalding sun beaming down her back.
“You can’t stay here alone,” a neighbor said, while handing her a small packet of crushed saltine crackers. “Come.”
And that’s how she let herself be led to the tent city closest to her house.
In the middle of the sweltering assemblage of human bodies, she sat under a sheet held up by sticks all day and unbraided her long salt-and-pepper hair, which she then covered with a dingy red satin head-wrap that someone had given her. She had also acquired, she did not know where, a polished pine stick with intricate carvings that she tapped while humming before she went to sleep. Despite the constant chatter of her fellow evacuees, the tapping made a persistent noise in the humid hot air that seemed intrusive to some and meditative to others. Eventually, she began to inspire gossip.
The gossip was a way to both pass the time and deflect resentment, which, without an identified target, would have reattached itself to its originator. Odette thus became an unwitting target over the next several weeks, as words traveled from mouths to ears to other mouths. Her tapping and ongoing conversations with herself were rumored to be a secret code, her red satin head-wrap proof of what many had heard for years: that she was such a lougawou, a wretched person, that even her own child had abandoned her. Many could now recall her predicting some horrible event that had actually taken place. A car accident. A coup d’état. A bad hurricane season.
“Why didn’t that old witch see this one coming?” they asked.
Rumor had it that Odette’s only child had died from an infection and loss of blood after she’d left her mother’s house and married a pastor.
“Even Jesus couldn’t save the child from that old witch,” they said.
People would have been happy to ask her about all of this, except Odette had not uttered an intelligible word since that horrible afternoon in January.
During the long sleepless nights of tent city life, gossip spread at a distorted speed, occasionally ricocheting past Odette’s ears. She knew the pain of those who even in their search for food and water found ways to invoke her name. She started crossing herself multiple times before falling asleep.
Every once in a while, Rose would appear to Odette in her sleep. The child would unwrap Odette’s head scarf and undo her gray tresses, then would braid them again and again. At night, the neighbors watched the old woman in silhouette as though she were the heroine of a silent film.
The less hostile ones sobbed, placing their hands over their mouths, as others continued to declare: “That woman is a witch!”
“I know one when I see one.”
“I’ve been waiting for someone else to realize it.”
“I don’t play games with witches.”
“In my old neighborhood, they never stayed around.”
The neighbor who had taken Odette to the tent city was among those who just watched and sobbed. Her young daughter, also killed in the earthquake, had been Rose’s best friend until the rumors had caught up with them. That neighbor appeared now and then with a plate of rice or some water for Odette. Otherwise, Odette would have died of hunger and thirst.
As she lay down in the dark one night, Odette heard the voices discussing her outside. Most of the talk was about her flying around in the dark, her being a witch. Closing her eyes, she longed for the clamoring of crickets, for the stillness of her old house, for the embraces of her daughter and granddaughter, for the breeziness of the beach. She had been living alone for so many years now that all this sudden company was agonizing.
An uneasy premonition was coming over her, an old sensation that she thought had long faded. Her hair stood up and her heart began to beat a