The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [20]
“I’d rather have death surprise me,” she said loudly. “I don’t want to wait a long time for it to come find me.”
Mimi was at least four years younger than me and, not counting this sudden death she was saying she wanted, had more time ahead of her than I did. There were women in the stream who were ancient enough to be our great-grandmothers. Four of them were nearby, helping a few of the orphaned girls to wash themselves. Among the oldest women, one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.
The oldest cane-cutting women were now too sick, too weak, or too crippled to either cook or clean in a big house, work the harvest in the cane fields, or return to their old homes in Haiti. So they started off every morning bathing in the stream, and then spent the rest of the day digging for wild roots or waiting on the kindness of their good neighbors.
Mimi’s face grew sad and serious as she observed the other women, especially Félice, a young woman, the housemaid of Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine, a rich Haitian couple who lived among the valley’s well-to-do families. Félice had a hairy beet-colored birthmark like a mustache over her lip. She was reasonably pretty, but the birthmark was all you saw when you looked at her face.
Félice had been Joel’s woman for some time. Kongo, Joel’s father, had disapproved of the whole affair because he knew firsthand some of Félice’s family history. In a moment of desperate hunger during the first years of the Yanki occupation, Félice’s grandfather had stolen an old hen from the yard of Kongo’s mother in Haiti. He couldn’t bear having his son take up with a woman whose family had a thief for an ancestor, Kongo had said. There was always a risk that this type of thing could run in the blood. He didn’t want to take any chances with his only heir.
Now Kongo was bathing in the middle of the stream, scrubbing his body with a handful of wet parsley, while the sun climbed up in the sky above his silver-tipped hair.
We used pèsi, perejil, parsley, the damp summer morningness of it, the mingled sprigs, bristly and coarse, gentle and docile all at once, tasteless and bitter when chewed, a sweetened wind inside the mouth, the leaves a different taste than the stalk, all this we savored for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides of old aches and griefs, to shed a passing year’s dust as a new one dawned, to wash a new infant’s hair for the first time and—along with boiled orange leaves—a corpse’s remains one final time.
The other men stood apart, giving Kongo more space than usual. He moved slowly as he scrubbed his wide shoulders and contorted himself to allow the parsley to brush over the map of scars on his muscular back, all the while staring at the water’s surface, as though he could see more than his reflection there.
Sebastien and his friend Yves were standing closest to Kongo, nudging away those who wanted to pay their respects.
“I keep asking myself what Kongo’s done with Joel’s corpse,” Mimi muttered in my ear, leaning forward.
No one would dare dispute Kongo, no matter what he had done with his son’s body. He was the most respected elder among us. We all trusted him.
Kongo dropped the used parsley in the stream and raised his machete from the water. Holding his work tool up to the sun, he stroked the edge of the blade as though it were made of flesh. Kongo was still an active worker. He had toiled side by side with his son for more than a dozen cane harvests. Before the full harvest, during the dead season, Kongo, Joël, Sebastien, and his friend Yves had cleared tobacco fields together; on Sundays they cut down trees to make charcoal to sell.
“If one of our men had killed Kongo’s son, they’d expect to die,” Mimi said. “But since it’s one of them, there’s nothing we can do. Poor Kongo, this must be killing him inside. I say, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.