The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [16]
Imperceptibly Henry I’s murmurs became Sebastien’s. I rose and walked to the door. Sebastien was standing there. He handed me two yams with the roots and dirt still clinging to them. The yams were from the small garden behind his room at the compound. Sometimes I cooked for him. Whenever we could we ate together.
“I almost dreamt about you,” I said. “I was home and I wanted you to be with me.”
“I’ve been waiting outside, watching for the right moment,” he said.
His shirt, one of the many I had made for him from indigo-dyed flour sacks, was covered with dried red mud and tufts of green grass. There were cactus needles still sticking to the cloth and some to the skin along his arm, but he did not seem to feel their sting. One of his eyes was swollen, the pouch underneath visibly filled with blackened blood. He tried to smile, holding the side of his face where the smile tore at him and hurt.
“Did you fall in the cane fields?” I asked, already sensing it was not so. I touched the scruffy beard that he had grown the last few days. Some clumps of the hair were stained green as though his face had been pressed down against crushed grass for a long time.
“I cannot stay,” he said. At least he was speaking normally, I thought. His voice had not changed. “Old Kongo’s waiting for me at the mill. His son Joel was killed. Joël is dead.” His dirt-stained forehead was sweating. He brushed the sweat off with a single swipe of his hand.
“Joel dead? How?”
“Yves, Joël, and me, we were walking along when an automobile hit Joel and sent him into the ravine.”
“And you? Did you break any bones?” I asked, as if this were the only way in which a person could be wounded, only when his body was almost crushed, pulped like the cane in the presses at the mill.
“Yves and I were lucky,” he said. And then I thought how truly fortunate he was. He was not crying or yelling or throwing rocks at the house, or pounding a tree stump against the side of the automobile that had killed his friend. Perhaps the truth had not yet touched him deeply enough. But, then, he had seen death closely before.
“What’s Kongo doing?” I asked. Perhaps Sebastien was staying calm by thinking of the next step, the next action.
“The first thing is to put Joël’s body in the ground,” he said.
“Does Kongo know whose automobile hit Joel?”
“At this time, all he knows is that his son is dead. He needs to make a coffin. Don Carlos won’t pay for a burial.”
Luis and Papi had gone to bed. I led Sebastien behind the latrines. There Papi had a stack of cedar planks that he used for his leisure occupation, making tables and chairs and building miniature houses. Sebastien took four long boards, stained and polished, enough to build a coffin for a grown man.
I offered to help him carry them, but he refused.
“You stay,” he said. “I will come back.”
I looked down at the yams, leaning against the wall where I had laid them soon after he had given them to me.
“With all this, you had time to bring these yams?” I asked.
“You stay here until I come back,” he said, “don’t try to go anywhere.”
I heard him breathing hard, struggling with the weight of the wood as he hauled it away. I went back to my room, lay down, and waited for his return.
Poor Kongo. Condolences, Kongo. Two new children came into the world while you have to put your son in the ground.
9
It is a Friday, market day. My mother, my father, and me, we cross into Dajabón, the first Dominican town across the river. My mother wants to buy cooking pots made by a Haitian pot maker named Moy who lives there, the best pot maker in the area. There is a gleam to Moy’s pots that makes you think you are getting a gem. They never darken even after they have been used on outdoor cooking fires for years.
In the afternoon, as we set out to wade across the river again with our two new shiny pots, it starts to rain in the mountains, far upstream. The air is heavy and moist; a wide rainbow arc creeps away from the sky,