Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [51]
The peasants turned to me and stared with curiosity.
Were they reassured that this very young girl, inoffensive and incapable, would replace my father in the event of his death? They fixed their amused and scornful eyes on me, and I bravely returned their stares.
“But,” my father added, thumping his chest in a highly theatrical gesture, “I am solid as a rock and I will die when I’m a hundred. I am the lion who watches over this mountain, and even when I sit in the president’s chair, I will still make sure everything is in good working order here.”
“God is good,” Alcius responded calmly.
He gestured to his daughter-in-law, and she ran to the hut and returned with coffee steaming on a tray.
“Sit down, Mademoiselle,” she said to me, pointing to a wicker chair.
“So, will you be chief of state soon, Agronomist?” Alcius asked my father.
“God willing.”
“Agronomist,” said Louisor, Alcius’s son, walking toward my father and standing before him, arms crossed, locking eyes. “We have been working for you for a number of years now, but what you pay us isn’t enough to feed our children.”
“Louisor!” Alcius exclaimed.
And his fearful look was fixed farther away, at a hut whose door was closed.
“Look elsewhere, black man,” my father answered Louisor simply, “and if you find better, you have my permission to leave.”
“I built my hut on this land,” Louisor replied. “Might as well stay.”
My father quickly gestured to Alcius and they walked to the hut with the closed door and knocked three times. An old man with a white beard came out, gave my father a military salute and made him come in, putting a familiar hand on his shoulder. Louisor’s wife squatted at my feet, knees at her chin, skirt gathered between her thighs. Her six children were playing under the mango tree, screaming and chasing each other. The oldest child, who looked about ten, was gathering palm seeds to grind and eat. They were dressed in short red jerseys that came to their navels. Even the oldest was not dressed more decently, and I tried hard not to look at what I called his immodest outfit. The youngest began to sulk and ask for bread. The wife gazed at me silently. Her long face stared at my own, and I could find nothing in it but a kind of stupid astonishment. As the child cried harder, I told her to make him be quiet.
“Quiet, quiet,” she screamed at him, “enough.”
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.
“He’s hungry.”
“Let him eat.”
“It’s not mango season yet,” she said. “There’s nothing in the house; he’ll have to wait until tonight.”
“Why?”
“That’s when Louisor will come back with the money he gets from selling the two bundles of herbs he takes to town.”
“What do you do with the money my father pays you?”
“Money!”
That was all she said, and rising, she took the child and forced his thumb in his mouth.
“Suck, suck,” she said gently, “suck.”
The woman’s young face seemed hewn from stone. I got the feeling that neither joy nor pain could affect it. I was bombarded by a thousand thoughts I was unable to sort out at that moment. My father appeared at the door of the hut with Alcius and the old man. His neck was adorned with multicolored necklaces and his head was bound in a red kerchief. My heart skipped a beat. He called me, and addressing the old man:
“There she is, Papa Cousineau,” he said.
The old man contemplated me for a full minute without saying a word, and then held out his hand to me:
“She looks you straight in the eye, Agronomist,” he said, addressing my father. “That’s a sign that she has a strong head.”
“I raised her like a man,” my father answered, “and now she is old enough to keep my promises.”
“Since you are alive, keep your own promises to the loas. Lion Mountain will not survive if you abandon it. Your daughter will only succeed you upon your death, only upon your death,” the old man firmly stated.
“Then she will have white hair.” My father burst out laughing and thumped his chest. “The lion is