The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [1]
“Your clothes cover more than your skin,” he says. “You become this uniform they make for you. Now you are only you, just the flesh.”
It’s either be in a nightmare or be nowhere at all. Or otherwise simply float inside these remembrances, grieving for who I was, and even more for what I’ve become. But all this when he’s not there.
“Look at your perfect little face,” he says, “your perfect little shape, your perfect little body, a woman child with deep black skin, all the shades of black in you, what we see and what we don’t see, the good and the bad.”
He touches me like one brush of a single feather, perhaps fearing, too, that I might vanish.
“Everything in your face is as it should be,” he says, “your nose where it should be.”
“Oh, wi, it would have been sad,” I say, “if my nose had been placed at the bottom of my feet.”
This time he is the one who laughs. Up close, his laughter crumples his face, his shoulders rise and fall in an uneven rhythm. I’m never sure whether he is only laughing or also crying at the same time, even though I have never seen him cry.
I fall back asleep, draped over him. In the morning, before the first lemongrass-scented ray of sunlight, he is gone. But I can still feel his presence there, in the small square of my room. I can smell his sweat, which is as thick as sugarcane juice when he’s worked too much. I can still feel his lips, the eggplant-violet gums that taste of greasy goat milk boiled to candied sweetness with mustard-colored potatoes. I feel my cheeks rising to his dense-as-toenails fingernails, the hollow beneath my cheekbones, where the bracelet nicked me and left a perfectly crescent-moon-shaped drop of dried blood. I feel the wet lines in my back where his tongue gently traced the life-giving veins to the chine, the faint handprints on my waist where he held on too tight, perhaps during some moment when he felt me slipping. And I can still count his breaths and how sometimes they raced much faster than the beating of his heart.
When I was a child, I used to spend hours playing with my shadow, something that my father warned could give me nightmares, nightmares like seeing voices twirl in a hurricane of rainbow colors and hearing the odd shapes of things rise up and speak to define themselves. Playing with my shadow made me, an only child, feel less alone. Whenever I had playmates, they were never quite real or present for me. I considered them only replacements for my shadow. There were many shadows, too, in the life I had beyond childhood. At times Sebastien Onius guarded me from the shadows. At other times he was one of them.
2
Births and deaths were my parents’ work. I never thought I would help at a birth myself until the screams rang through the valley that morning, one voice like a thousand glasses breaking. I was sitting in the yard, on the grass, sewing the last button on a new indigo-colored shirt I was making for Sebastien when I heard. Dropping the sewing basket, I ran through the house, to the señora’s bedroom.
Señora Valencia was lying on her bed, her skin raining sweat and the bottom part of her dress soaking in baby fluid.
Her waters had broken.
As I lifted her legs to remove the sheets, Don Ignacio, Señora Valencia’s father—we called him Papi—charged into the room. Standing over her, he tugged at his butterfly-shaped mustache with one age-mottled hand and patted her damp forehead with the other.
“¡Ay, no!” the señora shouted through her clenched grinding teeth. “It’s too soon. Not for two months yet.”
Papi and I both took a few steps away when we saw the blood-speckled flow streaming from between his daughter’s legs.
“I will go fetch the doctor,” he said. His hidelike skin instantly paled to the color of warm eggshells.
As he rushed out the door, he shoved me back towards the