The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [27]
Señor Pico and Doctor Javier were sitting out on the lower verandah overlooking Papi’s vast orchid garden when I brought them the rum and cigars. The garden had always been a great source of pride for Papi, who had forty-eight different species of orchids growing there, including a special hybrid with wide feathery petals that glowed like Christmas lanterns, the kind Señora Valencia had been plucking for the vase at her bedside the day she and the señor, as it was often repeated, had their hearts joined together.
“You have had your first night as a father,” Doctor Javier said to Señor Pico. “I see you survived.”
“No one slept.” Señor Pico laughed as he drew on a long cigar. He handed another one, unlit, to the doctor. “Is that how it will always be, no one sleeping?”
“They grow and become calmer,” the doctor said, biting off the end of his cigar.
15
My mother’s cooking takes all day. She goes to the stream to wash our clothes and visits with our neighbors while the pot lies on the rocks, the contents bubbling up as if to make the pot talk.
I am always curious as to what is boiling inside and whether it is yet mashed into something thick and edible. Dry red beans take the longest, but I like to see them each float up to the surface and shed their skin to the water’s heat.
It takes me half a morning to make my way to the boiling pot. I start at the kowosol tree across the yard and slowly progress towards the fire. I stop on the way to jump rope, to smash marbles against each other, to watch some of the vendor women mutter to themselves as they pee under their long skirts, standing up in the middle of the road, when they think no one is looking.
Finally I am at the pot. The steam is rising, the lid clanking against the water’s force. I reach over and raise the lid from the side and immediately my forearm is scalding and I am blinded by the fog of red kidney beans.
I feel a hand descend on my burning forearm and I release the pot lid in the dust.
It is my father and he is laughing.
“Soon you will have to be near a pot every day,” he says, turning my face to show me that I am blind only when I am looking straight into the steaming pot. “For now you don’t have to be and you should not be.”
16
Sometime after Joel’s death and Kongo’s disappearance with the body, I walked into the orchid garden that on his very first day in the Dominican Republic Papi had bought, along with the house, with a gentleman’s handshake from Don Francisco, Doña Eva’s husband, and Doctor Javier and Beatriz’ father, may he in eternal peace rest. Papi was tending to the orchids in this same garden, stroking petals and yanking weeds and rocks from the earth beneath them. He was wearing his well-worn, mud-stained shirt and gardening pants, the pockets bulging with seeds. Juana had given me a large cup of water to bring to him.
“I brought you some water,” I said, “so that you’ll suffer less with this heat.”
“How kind you are,” he said, removing the old straw hat from his head and fanning his face with it. He took the water and drank.
“I have finally heard of a man dying,” he said, when he was done with the water. “Don Carlos himself told me that one of his men died some days ago. But there are so many who work for Don Carlos, he did not know the name of the man who died.”
“I have given four planks of your wood to a cane cutter who wanted to make a coffin,” I said.
He put the water cup down on a piece of open ground. Staring ahead, he moved his lips in a hurried conversation with himself.
“Even though we did not go down into the ravine,” he said, “we left the automobile and looked for his body along the incline. There were two other men with him who ran, so when we didn’t see the one we hit, we thought—I hoped—that he’d run, too.” He pressed a closed fist down on his hat, now on the ground. “The wood you took, who was it for?”
“It was for a man who was struck by Señor Pico’s automobile,” I said.
“Do you