The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [104]
The driver started back to the border at great speed. He had a rendezvous and wanted to arrive before morning. He knew how to avoid the military checkpoints, he said, to save time.
I closed my eyes during the whole journey. I could still hear the thunderous waterfall crashing down inside my head, feel the spray against my face, even though we never got out of the car. Sebastien, I didn’t find. He didn’t come out and show himself. He stayed inside the waterfall.
After some time, the young man tapped my shoulder and asked, “Are you dead there? You can’t be dead. It will not be good for me if you are dead.”
I could smell Presidente beer and chewing tobacco on his breath. Without opening my eyes, I said, “No son, I am not dead.”
“Why do you sleep so much?” he asked. I could tell he desired some conversation, a voice to help keep him awake and in control of the car. “Did you not find the people you went to see?”
We drove in silence for some time until his fingernails drummed my shoulder again.
“It’s the middle of the night now,” he said. “You can open your eyes and not see anything.”
“Are we far from the border?” I asked.
“Not far,” he said.
“What work do you do?” I closed my eyes again. “You do more than lottery, do you not?”
“I help bring workers into La Romana for the sugarcane,” he said.
“Why do you do this?” I asked.
“The people here need their sugarcane and other things cut,” he said, “and people suffer for lack of work in our country.”
“Do you know of the big slaughter some years ago?” I asked.
“My mother ran from it with me when I was a baby,” he said. “My father died in it.”
“So you lived it?”
“If that is what you want to say.”
We said nothing more until we were at the bridge crossing. The guards did not even glance at me as we drove through the gate. I tried, in vain, to catch a glimpse of the river, a sliver of moonlight flashing on the surface of the water, a reduced shadow of the sky.
I asked him to let me out before we reached the Haitian customshouse and the open road. He stopped the car and turned off the lights. “Just leave you here? I cannot do that,” he said. “I know it’s the same time of year as when the kout kouto happened. If you want to stop for a moment, say a prayer, and light a candle, I will wait for you, but not for long because I have an important rendezvous.”
“I want you to go now,” I said.
“What will you do here?”
“My man is coming for me,” I lied. “If he’s not waiting at the customshouse now, he will be there soon, and even if he does not come, the guards will let me sleep out front. Besides, it is not long until dawn.”
Perhaps pretending to believe me eased his conscience. He was in a hurry and did not want to argue with me any longer. Maybe he was even afraid of ghosts. Every now and then, I’m told, a swimmer finds a set of white spongy bones, a skeleton, thinned by time and being buried too long in the riverbed.
“You are certain you want to stay here all night?” the young man asked.
“Certain,” I said.
He spat a clump of chewing tobacco out of the side of his mouth as he considered this. “You are a crazy one,” he said.
As he drove off in his car, I walked down to the bank of the river, trying not to trip over my own feet. In the coal black darkness of a night like this, unless you are near it, the river ceases to exist, allowing you to imagine just for a moment that all of them—my mother and father, Wilner, Odette, and the thousands whose graves are here—died natural deaths, peaceful deaths, deaths filled with moments of reflection, with pauses and some regret, the kind of death where there is time to think of what we are leaving behind and what better things may lie ahead.
The day my parents drowned, I watched their faces as they bobbed up and down, in and out of the crest of the river. Together they were both trying to signal a message to me, but the force of the water would not let them. My mother, before she sank, raised her arm high, far above the pinnacle of the flood. The gesture was so desperate that it was hard to tell whether she wanted me to jump in with