• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“At the birds. You know they like killing them.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and forced him back in bed.

“You haven’t been playing soccer lately?”

“No.”

“Where’s Fred? He doesn’t come by to see you anymore?”

“No.”

She had the horrible sensation of a foreign presence in the room. She turned her head toward the window and grew quiet.

“Don’t waste your time,” she continued with effort. “Study on your own until then.”

“Until when?”

“Until things get settled.”

She regretted these last words and lowered her eyes as if she were guilty of something. This nineteen-year-old man was as lucid as she was and it was tactless to treat him like a baby. By doing so she risked losing his friendship, which meant so much to her and which she had done so much to keep alive. She spoiled him in secret, like a wily Apache, slipping him money she had saved through great sacrifice. “Your stingy old man won’t know about it,” she told him with a complicit wink. She often went into his room to confide in him, to talk about the father, about his illicit nightly outings that could only have one purpose. He had protested, not being able to imagine this serious and mournful fifty-year-old man wrapped in a woman’s arms, but then one day he had seen him, suddenly young again, talking to a strange young woman in a car, and he had begun to have his doubts. But out of a kind of masculine solidarity, he had refused to betray him, although he became less affectionate and effusive with him.

“I’ll make you a rum punch,” she said to him.

“With lots of rum, please.”

“With lots of rum,” she acquiesced obediently.

She went downstairs to warm the milk into which she then mixed an egg yolk and some rum. She tasted it and added more rum.

Mélie looked at her without saying anything. The small slanting eyes in her black face glowed with mean-spirited joy.

Why does she also hate me? What have I ever done to her? the mother wondered.

“Madame Louis, your father-in-law told me to make sure no one touches this bottle,” she finally said in a honeyed voice in her drawn-out Creole.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, Madame Louis, but he told me, ‘Mélie, if anyone in this house drinks that rum without my permission, I’ll hold you responsible.’”

“Well, you will have to tell him that Monsieur Paul is ill and needed it.”

“Yes, Madame Louis, I will tell him. Monsieur Paul has the flu?”

“And a fever.”

“You’re right, then. What the grandfather was afraid of is someone drinking the rum for no good reason. He doesn’t like drunkards. That’s what he told me, Madame Louis. I’m going to boil a lemon for Monsieur Paul. But I’ll need money to buy it because I can’t just go pick one anymore … You understand?”

She pointed to the garden.

“Yes,” was all the mother said.

The hammering resounded as she stepped onto the landing. She looked through the window and saw two men nailing a notice to an oak trunk. She went into her son’s room, where she found him sitting and listening, trying to understand the sounds he had heard. He took the cup from his mother’s hand and drank down the scorching punch in one gulp.

CHAPTER FIVE

The mother waited until the house was asleep and cautiously got out of the bed where her husband was sleeping. She threw on a dress and felt her way down the stairs. Outside, the beaming moon promenaded across the sky. Suddenly it was veiled by a cloud and all was plunged in darkness. The mother walked up to the stakes and stopped there. She looked at the notice, white as a tombstone, and read these words: NO ENTRY. She stood there a moment, motionless, staring at the trees, which seemed more massive in the darkness. A light gust of wind shook their branches and an owl hooted, as if awakened from its slumber.

“Who goes there?” a voice shouted.

A gigantic black silhouette rose up.

She involuntarily stepped back as a cry of terror escaped from her lips. She saw him, his eyes full of hatred, laughing silently, and she trembled. He drew his gun and pointed it at her: “Want to do it with me, mulatto girl? Want to do it?” she heard. She raised her hands to