The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [19]
My mother makes me a doll out of all my favorite things: strings of red satin ribbons sewn together into the skin, two pieces of corncob for the legs, a dried mango seed for the body frame, white chicken feathers for flesh, pieces of charcoal for the eyes, and cocoa brown embroidering thread for the hair.
There are times when I want to be a girl again, to touch this doll, because when I touch it, I feel nearer to my mother than when her flesh is stroking mine in the washbasin or in the stream, or even when she’s reaching down to plop down a compress heavy with aloe on my forehead.
As I lie in bed with my doll and my fever, during the few moments when I’m alone, the doll rises on her corncob feet, yanks several strands of her thread hairs and uses them to jump rope. She sings my favorite rope jumping songs, plays with my osles, and says, “You will be well again, ma belle Amabelle. I know this to be true.” Her voice is gentle, musical, but it echoes, like she’s speaking from inside a very tall bottle. “I am sure you will live to be a hundred years old, having come so close to death while young.”
While I am watching her play, I want to give the doll a name, but I don’t remember names other than my own, and that one only because I’ve just heard her say it while addressing me.
When I am well, like the doll said I would be, I ask my mother, “What name should I give to this doll who walked about the room and played for me, and looked after me when I was sick?”
“There is no such thing and no such doll,” my mother says. “The fever made you an imbecile.”
12
The sweet fleeting smell of lemongrass at dawn has always been my favorite scent. Standing at the top of the hill, I saw Luis in front of his house, using a flour-sack rag to wash Joel’s blood off one of the two automobiles owned by Señor Pico, Packards they called them, the type of vehicle the Generalissimo himself loved to be driven in at that time.
I walked to the stream behind the neighboring sugar mill where the cane workers bathed at daybreak, before heading out to the fields. It was the first day of a new cane harvest. The stream was already crowded, overflowing with men and women, separated by a thin veil of trees.
Everyone was unusually quiet, even in their whisperings. Instead of the regular loud morning chatter, there was only the sound of hummingbirds chirping, the water gurgling, circling around all the bodies crammed into its path.
I waved to Mimi, Sebastien’s younger sister. She slid her face in and out of the water, making bubbles with her mouth. Mimi had followed Sebastien to the valley when he’d moved here four years earlier. These days she worked as one of the maids of Doña Eva, the widowed mother of Doctor Javier and Beatriz.
“This afternoon Doña Eva is having a Mass and a sanco-cho for the anniversary of her birth,” Mimi announced. My feet floated above the warm pebbles at the bottom of the stream. It was as if nothing else of much importance had taken place, and for want of other information she had announcements from her mistress’ life to share. “The doña is fifty years old. Will your people be coming to her Mass?”
Mimi always called Señora Valencia and Señor Pico “moun ou yo,” my people, as though they worked for me. While pedaling in the stream, she ceremoniously raised her arms above the surface of the water and picked a small leaf off my nose. On her right hand, she had a bracelet made of coffee beans, painted in yellow gold and threaded on a string, just like Sebastien’s. It was something their mother had made them for safety and luck before they left her on the other side of the border after the hurricane had killed their father.
Thinking of the fiftieth anniversary of Doña Eva’s birth being on the first day since Joel’s death, and that perhaps I would never have a chance to utter a farewell to Joel’s closed eyes, I murmured to Mimi, “Do you think you and I will live long enough to be as old as Doña Eva?”
“I don’t want to live so long,” she answered in her usual abrupt manner. “I’d rather die young like Joel did.”