The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [32]
“You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t just drop out of the sky. I came because I want to tell you something.”
“What is it, Da?” she asked, weaving and unweaving her fingers. “Are you finally getting married?”
“No,” he said. “That’s not it. I found him. I found him in New York, the man who killed Papa and Manman and took your sight.”
Why the old man chose that exact moment to come through the door he would never know. Perhaps it was chance, serendipity, or maybe simply because the old man was a nosy pain in the ass. But just then Old Zo came in, pushing the mortar-and-pestle girl ahead of him. She was carrying a covered plate of food.
“We brought you something to refresh you,” he told Dany.
His aunt seemed neither distressed nor irritated by the interruption. She could have sent Old Zo and the girl away, but she didn’t. Instead she told them to put their offering on an old table in the corner. The girl quietly put the plate down and backed out of the room, avoiding Dany’s eyes.
“I hope you’re both hungry,” the old man said, not moving from his spot. “Everyone is going to bring you something.”
Clusters of food-bearing people streamed in and out of the house all afternoon. He and his aunt would sample each plate, then share the rest with the next visitor until everyone in the valley had tasted at least one of their neighbors’ dishes.
By the time all the visitors had left and he and his aunt were alone together, it was dark and his aunt showed no interest in hearing what he had to say. Instead she offered him her cot, but he talked her into letting him have the sisal mat she’d spread out on the floor for herself.
She fell asleep much more quickly than he did. Mid-dream, she laughed, paid compliments, made promises, or gave warnings. “Listen, don’t go too far. Come back soon. What a strong baby! I’ll make you a dress. I’ll make you coffee.” Then she sat up in her cot to scold herself, “Estina, you are waking the boy,” before drifting once again into the images in her head.
In the dark, listening to his aunt conduct entire conversations in her sleep, he realized that aside from blood, she and he shared nocturnal habits. They were both palannits, night talkers, people who wet their beds, not with urine but with words. He too spoke his dreams aloud in the night, to the point of sometimes jolting himself awake with the sound of his own voice. Usually he could remember only the very last words he spoke, but remained with a lingering sensation that he had been talking, laughing, and at times crying all night long.
His aunt was already awake by the time he got up the next morning. With help from Old Zo’s daughter, who seemed to have been rented out to his aunt for the duration of his visit, she had already set up breakfast on the small table brought out to the front gallery from inside the house. His aunt seemed restless, almost anxious, as if she’d been waiting for him to rise for hours.
“Go wash yourself, Da,” she said, handing him a towel. “I’ll be waiting for you here.”
Low shrubs covered in dew brushed against his ankles as he made his way down a trail toward the stream at the bottom of the fall. The water was freezing cold when he slipped in, but he welcomed the sensation of having almost every muscle in his body contract, as if to salute the dawn.
Had his father ever bathed in this stream? Had his parents soaked here together, in this same spot, when they’d come to stay with his aunt? He had so little information and so few memories to draw on that every once in a while he would substitute moments from his own life in trying to re-create theirs. But lately what was taking up the most space in his mind was not the way his parents had lived but the way they had died.
A group of women were coming down the path toward the river with calabashes and plastic jugs balancing on top of their heads. They would bathe, then fill their containers further up, closer to the fall. He remembered spending hours as a boy watching the women bathe topless, their breasts flapping against their chests as they soaped and scrubbed