The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [38]
“Here’s another,” someone else said.
“She birthed me,” a young man said. “Since my mother died, she’s been like a mother to me, because she was the only other person present at my birth.”
They told of how as a young woman his aunt had embroidered a trousseau that she carried everywhere with her, thinking it would attract a husband. They spoke of her ambition, of her wanting to be a baby seamstress, so she could make clothes for the very same children she was ushering into the world. If he could have managed it, he would have told her neighbors how she had treated her burns herself after the fire, with poultices and herbs. He’d have spoken of her sacrifices, of the fact that she had spent most of her life trying to keep him safe. He would have told of how he hadn’t wanted to leave her, to go to New York, but she’d insisted that he go so he would be as far away as possible from the people who’d murdered his parents.
Claude arrived at the wake just as it was winding down, at a time when everyone was too tired to do anything but sit, stare, and moan, when through sleepy eyes the reason for the all-night gathering had become all too clear, when the purple shroud blowing from the doorway into the night breeze could no longer be ignored.
“I’m sorry, man,” Claude said. “Your aunt was such good people. One of a kind. I’m truly sorry.”
Claude moved forward, as if to hug Dany, his broad shoulders towering over Dany’s head. Dany stepped back, cringing. Maybe it was what his aunt had told him, about Claude having killed his father, but he didn’t want Claude to touch him.
Claude got the message and walked away, drifting toward a group of men who were nodding off at a table near the porch railing.
When he walked back inside the house, Dany found a few women sitting near the plain pine coffin, keeping watch over his aunt. He was still unable to look at her in the coffin for too long. He envied these women the ten years they’d spent with her while he was gone. He dragged his sisal mat, the one he’d been sleeping on these last two nights, to a corner, one as far away from the coffin as possible.
It could happen like that, Ti Fanm had said. A person his aunt’s age could fall asleep talking and wake up dead. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it for himself. Death was supposed to be either quick and furious or drawn out and dull, after a long illness. Maybe Old Zo was right. Blood calls blood. Perhaps she had summoned him here so he could at last witness a peaceful death and see how it was meant to be mourned. Perhaps the barber was not his parents’ murderer after all, but just a phantom who’d shown up to escort him back here.
He could not fall asleep, not with the women keeping watch over his aunt’s body being so close by. Not with Ti Fanm coming over every hour with a cup of tea, which was supposed to cure his bellyaches forever.
He didn’t like her nickname, was uncomfortable using it. It felt too generic to him, as though she were one of many from a single mold, with no distinctive traits of her own.
“What’s your name?” he asked when she brought him her latest brew.
She seemed baffled, as though she were thinking he might need a stronger infusion, something to calm his nerves and a memory aid too.
“Ti Fanm,” she replied.
“Non,” he said. “Your true name, your full name.”
“Denise Auguste,” she said.
The women who were keeping watch over his aunt were listening to their conversation, cocking their heads ever so slightly in their direction.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re deserving,” she said, using an old-fashioned way of acknowledging his gratitude.
She was no longer avoiding his eyes, as though his grief and stomach ailment and the fact that he’d asked her real name had rendered them equals.
He got up and walked outside, where many of his aunt’s neighbors were sleeping on mats on the porch. There was a full moon overhead and a calm in the air that he was not expecting. In the distance, he