The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [0]
Breath, Eyes, Memory
Krik? Krak!
Portions of this novel appeared in altered form in Granta 54, Best of Young American Novelists (Summer 1996) as “The Revenant” and in Conjunctions 27, The Archipelago New Caribbean Writing (1996) as “Condolences”
Copyright © 1998 by Edwidge Danticat
All rights reserved
Published by
Soho Press, Inc
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Danticat, Edwidge, 1969—
The farming of bones a novel / Edwidge Danticat
p cm
ISBN 1-56947-126-6 (alk paper)
I Title
PS3554 A5815F37 1998 98-3655
813’54—dc21 CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Jephthah called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized and killed him at the fords of the Jordan Forty-thousand -were killed at the time
Judges 12 4-6
In confidence to you, Metrès Dlo, Mother of the Rivers
Amabelle Désir
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Acknowledgements
1
His name is Sebastien Onius.
He comes most nights to put an end to my nightmare, the one I have all the time, of my parents drowning. While my body is struggling against sleep, fighting itself to awaken, he whispers for me to “lie still while I take you back.”
“Back where?” I ask without feeling my lips moving.
He says, “I will take you back into the cave across the river.”
I lurch at him and stumble, trying to rise. He levels my balance with the tips of his long but curled fingers, each of them alive on its own as they crawl towards me. I grab his body, my head barely reaching the center of his chest. He is lavishly handsome by the dim light of my castor oil lamp, even though the cane stalks have ripped apart most of the skin on his shiny black face, leaving him with crisscrossed trails of furrowed scars. His arms are as wide as one of my bare thighs. They are steel, hardened by four years of sugarcane harvests.
“Look at you,” he says, taking my face into one of his spacious bowl-shaped hands, where the palms have lost their lifelines to the machetes that cut the cane. “You are glowing like a Christmas lantern, even with this skin that is the color of driftwood ashes in the rain.”
“Do not say those things to me,” I mumble, the shadows of sleep fighting me still. “This type of talk makes me feel naked.”
He runs his hand up and down my back. His rough callused palms nip and chafe my skin, while the string of yellow coffee beans on his bracelet rolls over and caresses the tender places along my spine.
“Take off your nightdress,” he suggests, “and be naked for true. When you are uncovered, you will know that you are fully awake and I can simply look at you and be happy.” Then he slips across to the other side of the room and watches every movement of flesh as I shed my clothes. He is in a corner, away from the lamp, a shadowed place where he sees me better than I see him. “It is good for you to learn and trust that I am near you even when you can’t place the balls of your eyes on me,” he says.
This makes me laugh and laugh loud, too loud for the middle of the night. Now I am fully disrobed and fully awake. I stumble quickly into his arms with my nightdress at my ankles. Thin as he says I am, I am afraid to fold in two and disappear. I’m afraid to be shy, distant, and cold.