The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [17]
We are at a distance from the bridge. My father wants us to hurry home. There is still time to cross safely, he says, if we hasten. My mother tells him to wait and see, to watch the current for a while.
“We have no time to waste,” my father insists.
“I’ll carry you across, and then I’ll come back for Amabelle and the pots,” my father says.
We walk down from the levee. My father looks for the shallows, where the round-edged rust-colored boulders we’d used before as stepping stones have already disappeared beneath the current.
“Hold the pots,” my mother tells me. “Papa will come back for you soon.”
On the levee are a few river rats, young boys, both Haitian and Dominican, who for food or one or two coins, will carry people and their merchandise across the river on their backs. The current is swelling, the pools enlarging. Even the river rats are afraid to cross.
My father reaches into the current and sprinkles his face with the water, as if to salute the spirit of the river and request her permission to enter. My mother crosses herself three times and looks up at the sky before she climbs on my father’s back. The water reaches up to Papa’s waist as soon as he steps in. Once he is in the river, he flinches, realizing that he has made a grave mistake.
My mother turns back to look for me, throwing my father off balance. A flow of mud fills the shallows. My father thrusts his hands in front of him, trying to keep on course. My mother tightens her grip around his neck; her body covers him and weighs him down at the same time. When he tries to push her up by her legs, a cluster of vines whisks past them; my mother reaches for the vines as though they were planks of a raft.
As the rain falls, the river springs upwards like an ocean riptide. Moving as close as they can to the river’s edge, the boys throw a thick sisal rope to my parents. The current swallows the rope. The boys reel it back in and wrap it around a boulder. The knot slides away from the boulder as soon as it leaves their hands.
The water rises above my father’s head. My mother releases his neck, the current carrying her beyond his reach. Separated, they are less of an obstacle for the cresting river.
I scream until I can taste blood in my throat, until I can no longer hear my own voice. Yet I still hold Moy’s gleaming pots in my hands.
I walk down to the sands to throw the pots into the water and then myself. The current reaches up and licks my feet. I toss the pots in and watch them bob along the swell of the water, disappearing into the braided line that is the river at a distance.
Two of the river boys grab me and drag me by my armpits away from the river. Their faces seem blurred and faraway through the falling rain. They pin me down to the ground until I become still.
“Unless you want to die,” one of them says, “you will never see those people again.”
10
When Sebastien returned from the compound that night, he was wearing a clean shirt and had washed most of the grass from his beard and face. He sat and leaned back against the wall, watching a lizard dash across the ceiling. I made room for him to lie down on the mat next to me.
“Señor Pico’s at home now,” I said. “You have to be careful coming and going.”
“At this moment, what I want more than anything is for Señor Pico to try and strike me,” he said, in an angry tone that I was not used to. Perhaps it was all becoming more familiar to him now. His friend had died. He could have died. We were in the house of the man who had done it. Sebastien could go in and kill him if he really wanted to.
“Señor Pico has rifles,” I reminded him, “and we are on his property.”
“Is the air we breathe his property?” he asked.
“How was Kongo?”
“No one can find him,” he said.
“Where did he go?”
“After we brought the body to him—”
“What condition was the body in?” I asked, regretting the words as soon as they left my mouth.
“He fell from a great height into the ravine,” he said.
“What did Kongo do with the body?”
“He let a few people see,” he said calmly.