The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [48]
Vaval too walked out to the street and collected a few cast-off beer and rum bottles. Putting an end to their contemplation, my mother ordered them both to go back into the house and find something more useful to do. Rosie somehow managed to interrupt Mother long enough to point out that across the alley Monsieur Christophe’s tap station had been dismantled by the passing crowd and his faucets were pumping free water faster than a newly slaughtered pig pumps blood. A different crowd was emerging now, a crowd of maids, menservants, and indentured children, restavèks, carrying all sorts of vessels, including buckets, water jugs, earthen jars, calabashes, and even chamber pots, to gather the precious water. Mother ordered Rosie and Vaval to hurry up and collect as much water as they could for our house.
At my mother’s side, I tried to calculate how much money Monsieur Christophe was losing as each of his six faucets and their missing handles pumped out several gallons of water per minute. Usually, he would sell a bucket of water for twenty centimes, to everyone except my mother, who could get it from him for less. When cassavas and colas, breads or mangoes or straw hats didn’t sell, my mother would buy a bucket of water from Monsieur Christophe and have Rosie walk through the streets downtown, reselling the water by the cup to thirsty people. Now Monsieur Christophe, a scowling, cinnamon-colored man who was only slightly taller than I, was trying to shut off the main valve that would keep any more water from gushing forth. But someone had walked away with the large knob that controlled the water flow, leaving Monsieur Christophe and a group of other men who worked for him with no choice but to try to slide the large knobless tube shut by force.
“Michel, come over here.” Monsieur Christophe spotted me during one of those times when he turned away from the valve in despair. “We need more hands.”
It was a new day, I thought. The number of people marching through the alleys when it wasn’t carnival or Rara season without being shot down by the macoutes had confirmed it. What right did our resident water hoarder have to order me to do anything? Still, I walked over. The big shove from my mother also helped me make up my mind. Besides, there was always the possibility that things could return to the way they’d been the night before—the television could have an image of the presidential couple coming back—and the crowds could ungather. Also, there were people with shops in our neighborhood, people like Monsieur Christophe, who had always been and would always be powerful, maintaining authority through control of water or bread or some other important resource, as Romain might say, no matter what was going on politically.
I hated joining Monsieur Christophe’s valve-shutting operation because it would delay my trip to Romain’s. In any case, I didn’t feel I was helping very much, with so many stronger boys and men already offering ideas, pulling out makeshift tools they always carried in their pockets, enjoying the entire affair much more than I was. I wanted to let the water flow. There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hand of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leanings had been.
But I wasn’t thinking like this back then. I simply wanted to go off and visit my friend. I only think all this now, as a thirty-year-old man, lying in bed next to my pregnant wife, watching