The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [30]
I could tell he regretted having told her that. “What I told you is not true for all children,” he said.
“I will go to his burial,” she declared while sketching a large orchid in red pencil on the lid of the coffin. The wood was still damp from the varnish; her pencils slid off the surface.
“You should stay inside and observe your period of confinement,” Doctor Javier said. “Do you want to risk your health and your daughter’s, too?”
She sketched another large orchid. The paleness of the cedar showed through in the lines where the varnish had still not dried. “Javier, go to my husband and tell him my daughter will not die. He needs your assurance.”
I stayed with Señora Valencia while she painted her father’s orchid garden upon her son’s coffin. On the sides, near the handles, she painted four small hummingbirds. Every once in a while she looked up at the mosquito net behind which her son lay, then continued with renewed devotion.
“Amabelle, today reminds me of the day Papi and I found you at the river.” She wiped her paint-stained hands leaving red finger marks on the front of her housedress. “Do you remember that day?”
I did.
“After my mother’s death, the house was so filled with her presence: her voice, her clothes,” she said. “Papi and I went to visit some of his friends near Dajabón. Papi was more adventuresome then. He took me hunting for birds and taught me to shoot a rifle, as if I were the son who took Mami’s life in childbirth. I told Papi I wanted to see the Massacre River where the French buccaneers were killed by the Spaniards in my history lesson.
“We went to the river and there you were, a bony little girl with bleeding knees. You were sitting on a big rock, watching the water as if you were waiting for an apparition. Papi paid one of the boys by the riverside to interpret for him while he asked you who you belonged to. And you pointed to your chest and said, yourself. Do you remember?”
I remembered.
Magenta-colored paint dripped on the floor as she added more to the coffin. We heard voices coming from the parlor, people arriving in small groups.
Señor Pico walked into the room and moved towards the carved posts on the old bed.
“Where’s Rosalinda?” she asked him.
“Javier is examining her again,” he said, moving closer to inspect the rainbow orchid paintings on the coffin.
“We cannot put him in the ground in this coffin,” he said. “We have to make another.”
“No, this is the one he’ll have,” she said. “He’s a child. The coffin should be playful. I will drape something over it for the burial, one of Mami’s lace tablecloths, one she never used. A beautiful one made from a fine French lace, Valenciennes lace.”
“Many of our neighbors are here,” he said, averting his eyes from the bed.
“I don’t want them to see him,” she said. “I don’t want a wake for him. No wake, Pico. It would be too sad for such a short life.”
“No wake.” He bent down and kissed his wife on the side of her face.
“You go to them now,” she said.
He shut the door and walked out to greet his neighbors.
“Do you believe in paradise, Amabelle?” she asked me.
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure.
The coffin was now covered with a whirl of colors, one seeping into the other, like a sky full of twisted rainbows.
“Amabelle, I was so joyful when Papi said I could bring you to live with us,” she said. “After my mother died, I was desperate for someone my age to come live with us in this house.”
The mixed smell of wood varnish and different-colored paint made my head throb, and I imagined it did hers too. I removed the brushes from her fingers and pulled her hands away from the coffin. Somehow I envied her. At least she could place her hands on it, her son’s final bed. My parents had no coffins.
17
I am in my room listening for music in the trees, the flame tree pods flapping against each other as the hummingbirds squawk back in fear. They know the sound of flame tree pods in motion, the hummingbirds do, but it is a sound that shifts all the time, becoming muted or sharp with the strength of the wind.
I close