Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [96]
Oh no. Not that.
It was all over in less than a second. Blood gushed from its severed head, and the rooster’s feet seemed to tremble and kick in her hands. The crowd let out a collective groan with hands over mouths. The gods ride the possessed like horses, Monsieur Duval had explained, and of course they demand sacrifices. The rooster’s lifeless corpse was laid to rest on the vèvè by the fire.
I had always been the squeamish one, letting Philippe hack the family of snakes in our rose garden with a hoe, or drown my mouse Ivory, white like that rooster, in a jar of alcohol when it grew a huge tumor in its neck. Later I would laugh and pretend I’d never been scared. I stared at the ground to the stop the awful rollercoaster in my stomach. If only I could manage not to throw up. By the time I realized Philippe was nudging me, it was too late. Here she was. The possessed woman’s mouth was splattered with blood and soot. She was looking right at me, still holding a charred piece of wood from the fire.
The audience was quiet, the drums muted. She stood in silence in front of me, as if she could hear my heart pounding. She took my right hand. Her eyes were strange, like a tunnel of darkness, but suddenly I wasn’t afraid anymore because it felt like I had stepped out of my skin and was floating to the ceiling, watching all of this from above. She turned my hand over and using a sooty twig, she marked my palm with an X.
I looked down at the mark, then back at her, thinking she would say something to me, but she dropped my hand and spun away, joining the believers in their hypnotic shuffle around the fire. A few minutes later, she fainted and was carried off. The drumming died out and the candles were extinguished. The house lights came on to reveal the bare earth spattered red.
“Whoa! What a show,” Philippe said in what sounded like awe.
“It wasn’t a show.” My voice was smaller than usual. My mother and father took turns reassuring me. Of course it was all just a show, there’s nothing to be scared of. Their words were like water trickling over stone. Later, when I told her about it, Grandmère Lucille said I was right, it was a good sign. But she never did explain what she meant. That’s the way she was, always an enigma.
If only Grandmère Lucille could see me now. I have her spiral notebook, where she wrote her unsent letters and jotted down the names of herbs and what they do. There is a family legend that when Grandmère Lucille worked as a maid in Haiti, she had used her leaf medicine to save a black American woman’s life. Who knows? I might have to save someone’s life too. When I once asked her about it, Grandmère Lucille replied with a typical Haitian proverb: “Only the knife should know the heart of the yam.” Another secret she would never tell, and now it’s too late. It was frustrating always being told to mind my own business, when all I wanted was to make sense of things. Still, I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone, and this little notebook is all I have.
A woman calls my name, and my heart sinks. Her hair is cut in a smooth white bob. She’s slender and prettier than the photos I saw online.
“Fabienne, is it? Fabienne, I’m terribly sorry for the wait,” she says with that Boston Brahmin accent that immediately makes me think of the Kennedys. No surprise there. Miss Porter’s, Radcliffe, English, magna cum laude.
We shake hands. Her sunglasses are propped jauntily on her head, showing off gray-green eyes, those high cheekbones that age gracefully, and lightly freckled skin without makeup or a trace of sheen. Even more annoying is that she’s actually smaller than she appears on television. I suck in my stomach and straighten my back.
Her sleeveless white linen shift is completely unwrinkled. The dress I instantly recognize as Eileen Fisher, that New York designer whose cheapest organic cotton tanks are still fifty bucks.