The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [15]
“On the day my grandchildren are born, I was in an automobile that may have taken a man’s life,” Papi said. “My son-in-law did not want to stay and search, and I did not force him to do it. It was already dark. I didn’t make myself or Luis go down into the ravine to look for the man, to see if we could save his life. You will tell me, Amabelle, if you hear of this man, if you hear that he lived or died. You will ask your friends and then report to me.”
“I will.”
“Good-night, then.”
“Good sleep, Papi.”
Outside, Luis skinned and chopped up the dead goat. He piled the legs in a bucket and covered them with clumps of rock salt.
When I was a child, my father and I used to play a game called osle using the small front-leg joint bones from a goat. These bones are like dominoes, except they have a curved back and three hollowed sides. I’d spent hours alone trying to get a handful of five to land on the same side. I never succeeded.
I asked Luis to cut off the two small bones for me. Wiping off the blood, I took them to my room. There I undressed, taking off my sand-colored housedress and the matching faded square of cloth wrapped around my head. Nearly everything I had was something Señora Valencia had once owned and no longer wanted. Everything except Sebastien.
I spread an old sheet on the floor next to a castor oil lamp and a conch shell that Sebastien had given me, saying that in there flowed the sound fishes hear when they swim deep inside the ocean’s caves. On the wall was pasted a seven-year-old calendar, from the year of the great hurricane that had plundered the whole island, a time when so many houses were flattened and so many people were killed that the Generalissimo himself had marched through the windswept streets of the Dominican capital and ordered that the corpses he encountered during his inspection be brought to the Plaza Colombina and torched in public bonfires that burned for days, filling the air with so much ash that everyone walked with their eyes streaming, their handkerchiefs pressed against their noses, and their parasols held close to their heads.
I lay on my mat on the floor, giving Sebastien time to arrive. If he didn’t come soon then I would have to go and look for him in the compound at the mill.
In the meantime, I did something I always did at times when I couldn’t bring myself to go out and discover an unpleasant truth. (When you have so few remembrances, you cling to them tightly and repeat them over and over in your mind so time will not erase them.) I closed my eyes and imagined the giant citadel that loomed over my parents’ house in Haiti, the fortress rising out of the miter-shaped mountain chain, like two joined fists battling the sky.
The citadel had been conceived by Henry I, a king who wanted to conquer a world that had once conquered him. My father loved to recount this tale of Henry I, a slave who, after the captives had rebelled against the French and formed their own nation, built forts like the great citadel to keep intruders away.
As a child, I played in the deserted war rooms of Henry I’s citadel. I peered at the rest of the world from behind its columns and archways, and the towers that were meant to hold cannons for repelling the attack of ships at sea. From the safety of these rooms, I saw the entire northern cape: the yellow-green mountains, the rice valley, the king’s palace of three hundred and sixty-five doors down in the hills above Milot and the Palais des Ramiers, the queen’s court across the meadow. I smelled the musty cannonballs and felt Henry I’s royal armor bleeding rust onto my hands, armor emblazoned with the image of a phoenix rising over a wall of flames and the words the king was said to have uttered often—Je renais de mes cendres—promising that one day he would rise again from the ashes of his death. I heard the wind tossing through the wild weeds and grass growing out of the cracks in the stone walls. And from the high vaulted ceilings, I could almost hear the king giving orders to tired ghosts who