The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [49]
I reluctantly joined the group of men squatting around stupid Monsieur Christophe’s valve, trying to shut it off, but I spent most of my time watching more and more people arrive to collect the free water, more and more street children slipping beneath the taps for impromptu showers and being shoved aside so the water might be used for more important purposes. My mother was standing across the alley observing me, and each time our eyes met, she would give me a scolding glance for not participating more. Still, I could tell she was proud of me. For once I was surrounded by men, doing men’s work. She seemed happy that Monsieur Christophe had thought to include me and even happier still that he would occasionally single me out for some task, like holding a rag or a screwdriver, a task I would share with Tobin, Monsieur Christophe’s openly acknowledged son.
“Strange how blessings come,” I imagined my mother saying. Strange too how people with means can make the less fortunate feel special by putting them to work. As much as I loved my mother, I would have easily traded that satisfied grin on her face for a word, any word, even an insult, from Romain.
My opportunity for escape came when my mother joined Rosie and Vaval in collecting just a little more water for the house. She had strolled across the alley, carrying two small jugs, and had gone back inside the house to put them away once they were full. I handed Monsieur Christophe’s son Tobin, a pale-skinned fellow twelve-year-old, the screwdriver I was holding. And at a moment when Monsieur Christophe was concentrating on some complicated procedure that required him to be as close to the valve as possible, I ran.
There was a different feel to our neighborhood for sure. People were walking around looking dazed, exchanging bits of information they were gathering from the radio and television and from one another. Like Rosie, many were collecting shrubs from the ground and waving them in the air. Some of the men were wearing red bandannas around their heads and swinging sticks and tree branches while pouring rum and beer on one another. Others were dancing and performing somersaults but stopping occasionally to yell slogans or phrases they had held too long in their chests: “We are free” or “We will never be prisoners again.”
The bells of the nearby cathedral were chiming non-stop even as several people were shouting, through windows and above the loud horns of passing cars, that the tomb of the pudgy dictator’s father, from whom the son had inherited the country, had just been excavated by demonstrators. An early rumor had it that the son had carried the father’s bones with him into exile, but the people who’d opened the father’s crypt believed they had the bones and were parading them downtown, skull and all.
Graffiti were going up everywhere. Down with the departed president and his wife! Down with poverty! Down with suffering! Down with everything you can imagine.
From the radio reports that were being broadcast at the loudest possible volume from every house, I gathered that the homes of former government officials and the abandoned mansions of the president and his wife were being ransacked, with protesters carrying away everything from tiles to toilet bowls to toothbrushes. There was the stench of kerosene and burning tires wafting through the air. It was only a matter of time before the rubber smell would be replaced with that of flesh.
The doors were bolted tight at Romain’s mother’s house. Only when I got there did I remember that Romain’s mother was away on one of her business trips, buying cloth and women’s undergarments in Curaçao for resale. Like my mother, Romain’s was a business-minded woman, even though she was operating on a larger scale than my mother was.
Romain’s aunt Vesta came to the door and opened it a crack to check out my face. I was in love with Vesta too, enraptured by her long neck and legs, which she displayed freely in thigh-stroking skirts. Vesta hastily let me in. She wanted me to