The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [18]
It was hard to imagine Kongo hauling Joel very far on his back. Joel was much taller and larger-boned, the kind of man who was called upon to pull an oxcart full of cane when the oxen were too fatigued to do the job.
“They say a son’s never too big to be carried or beaten by his father,” Sebastien said, rubbing a balled fist against his swollen eye. “If Kongo carried off Joel by himself then there’s more truth to that than I thought.”
“Maybe Kongo wished to say his farewell alone,” I said, raising his fist from his eye.
“The others have been out looking for him,” he said. “I think he took Joel’s body away because he wants us to let him be. I’m going to respect his wishes. He’ll come back when he wants.”
He ran both his hands up and down my back. He had been this way the whole year we’d been together. His favorite way of forgetting something sad was to grab and hold on to somebody even sadder.
“You’re sweating,” he said, letting his fingers slide along my spine.
“I had my dream of my parents in the river,” I said.
“I don’t want you to have this dream again,” he said.
“I always see it precisely the way it took place.”
“We’ll have to change this thing, starting now.” He blew out the lamp. The room was pitch black. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened for his voice.
“I don’t want you to dream of that river again,” he said. “Give yourself a pleasant dream. Remember not only the end, but the middle, and the beginning, the things they did when they were breathing. Let us say that the river was still that day.”
“And my parents?”
“They died natural deaths many years later.”
“And why did I come here?”
“Even though you were a girl when you left and I was already a man when I arrived and our families did not know each other, you came here to meet me.”
His back and shoulders became firm and rigid as he was concocting a new life for me.
“Yes,” I said, going along. “I did wander here simply to meet you.”
“I don’t give you much,” he said, “but I want you to know that tomorrow begins my last zafra. Next year, I work away from the cane fields, in coffee, rice, tobacco, corn, an onion farm, even yucca grating, anything but the cane. I have friends looking about for me. I swear it to you, Amabelle, this will be my last cane harvest, just as it was Joël’s.”
I knew he considered Joel lucky to no longer be part of the cane life, travay tè pou zo, the farming of bones.
“Tonight, when Yves and me, we carried Joël’s corpse into the compound,” he said, “I thought about how both Yves’ father and my father died, his father organizing brigades to fight the Yanki occupation in Haiti and my father in the hurricane.”
I reached up and pressed my hands against his lips. We had made a pact to change our unhappy tales into happy ones, but he could not help himself.
“Sometimes the people in the fields, when they’re tired and angry, they say we’re an orphaned people,” he said. “They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don’t belong anywhere and that’s us. I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are.”
11
I am sick in bed with a fever that makes my body feel heavier than a steel drum filled with boiling tar. I sense myself getting larger and larger and at the same time more liquid, like all the teas and syrups my mother pours into me. My father says that I am in fact becoming smaller, shrinking closer to my bones, and there is little that is liquid in me that the fever does not dry up.
“It is a sickness we brought home to her from someone else,” my mother concludes while standing over me one day, her lips puckered, her mouth switching from side to side as it always did when she was in deep thought. “I suppose it might be the young girl we treated two weeks ago, you