The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [59]
WEEK 11
My mother used to say that we’ll all have three deaths: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are put back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all. I sometimes hear a dog bark and I’m startled that it sounds a little like the dogs that roamed around me that day as I sat on the beach, watching my father’s fishing boat being hauled ashore without him in it.
My father used to love cockfights. He enjoyed the way the men would gather in a circle and pass a bottle of rum from hand to hand as they watched. This showed that animals were much smarter than men, he used to say, the way so many of us would congregate to watch two small birds.
He went to dogfights too, but he never enjoyed them as much. He could never get the howl of a dying dog out of his head. At least cocks were small, he said; we eat them, after all.
WEEK 12
When I was a girl, I had a small notebook made of a few folded sheets held together by my mother’s embroidering thread. There I sketched some figures, which were drawn so close together that they looked like they were fighting one another on the page.
My mother was the one who first thought they were fighting. She also thought they were frightening, so she made me a rag doll because she believed I was seeing these little shadows at night and was afraid of them.
Night after night, I clung to this rag doll, whose crooked eyes my mother had drawn over the white cloth with a piece of charcoal. After my father was gone, I twisted the doll’s neck night after night. During the day, I crowded the pages in my notebook with more tiny faces, to keep me company in case my mother also disappeared.
WEEK 13
Even though I’ve sung at a lot of funerals, I’m not necessarily a religious person. But I agree to Rézia’s idea to light candles so we can pass the real test.
Mariselle says we should pray to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. We add in there a prayer too, for our country.
“It’s not a lost cause yet,” Mariselle says, “because it made us.”
To that we toast, forsaking our rum for Mariselle’s Pinot Noir.
It feels like I’m drinking blood, not the symbolic blood of the sacraments, but real blood, velvet blood, our own blood.
I give them as keepsakes a few swatches of my mother’s embroidery. Threads of red clouds, omens for good luck.
Then Rézia asks me, “Why didn’t you go when you were asked to sing at the national palace?”
“Ordered,” I correct her. “I was ordered to go sing there.”
“Why didn’t you go?” Rézia persists. “If you had gone, maybe you’d still be home.”
I made a choice that I’d rather stop singing altogether than sing for the type of people who’d killed my father.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Rézia says. “Jackie Kennedy can go to Haiti anytime she wants, but we can’t.”
WEEK 14
We won’t know for some time if we passed. Yet Rézia’s still shaking with post-test anxiety when we sit down, each of us with a bowl of leftover stew from the day’s menu.
Mariselle is wearing a set of gold bangles that, when she moves her arms, sound like the type of miniature gourd rattles you might put on a child’s grave.
“I finally unpacked my suitcases,” she says, “to celebrate.”
She’s gotten a job at a gallery not far from Rézia’s restaurant and will be selling paintings, some of them her husband’s.
We celebrate with her by holding hands and twisting our way through the narrow spaces between the tables.
“And you, Freda, what are you going to do now?” an out-of-breath Mariselle asks when we stop.
“I’m going back,” I say, sinking into a chair.