The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [57]
WEEK 6
Two trees, 10 feet apart.
The teacher writes this on the board, turning around to look at our baffled faces. We’ve all grown accustomed to the suffocating heat in the classroom. All of us except her. She wears as few pieces of clothing as possible, yet still sweats so much that she must cover her hands in chalk dust to reduce her prints on the board.
Two trees, 10 feet apart. Taller tree, 50 feet tall, casts a 20-foot shadow. Shorter tree casts a 15-foot shadow. The sun’s shining on each tree from the same angle. How tall is the shorter tree?
It sounds like a riddle that could take a lifetime to solve. We have too much on our minds to unravel these types of mysteries. M’bwè pwa.
“We’re not God,” Rézia says, lowering her head onto the restaurant table. The bottoms of our glasses have begun to stain the exposed wood, circles touching and overlapping. “Who are we to know how tall a tree should be?”
WEEK 7
Tonight we cook an entire meal together. Mariselle fries the plantains and ends up with a hot-oil burn on the knuckle of her middle finger. Rézia makes the meat, stewed goat. I cook the rice with pigeon peas.
We talk about what brought us here.
Mariselle left because her husband, a painter, had painted an unflattering portrait of the president, which was displayed in a gallery show. He was shot leaving the show.
I was asked to leave the country by my mother because I wouldn’t accept an invitation to sing at the national palace. But I also left because long ago my father had disappeared. He’d had a fish stall at the market. One day, one macoute came to take it over and another one took my father away. When my father returned, he didn’t have a tooth left in his mouth. In one night, they’d turned him into an old, ugly man. The next night he took his boat out to sea and, with a mouth full of blood, vanished forever.
I remember the exact moment I learned about my father’s disappearance. I was lying in bed when I felt the thin cotton sheet covering my body rise. My mother hadn’t brought any light into the room, but I could see her clearly, a splinter of moonlight reflected in the tears falling down her face.
“Your papa’s across the waters, lòt bò dlo,” she had whispered. And in my head had sprouted images of my father lost at sea, rowing farther and farther away until he became as small as a leaf bobbing on the crest of the most distant wave. This is when I began to sing. So he could hear me singing his songs from the crest of that wave.
This is Rézia’s story: When she was a girl, her parents couldn’t afford to keep her, so they sent her to live with an aunt who ran a brothel. They lived in three rooms behind the brothel and that’s where Rézia spent most of her time. One night when she was sleeping, a uniformed man walked in. She dug herself into the bed, but it did no good, so she passed out.
“I can always make myself faint when I’m afraid,” Rézia says, fanning the smoke from the pots away from her face. “When I woke up in the morning, my panties were gone. My aunt and I never spoke about it. But on her deathbed she asked for my forgiveness. She said this man had threatened to put her in prison if she didn’t let him have me that night.”
WEEK 8
Mariselle brings in newspapers that we scour for news from home.