The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [34]
I walked out into the night, past the ravine into which Joel had been thrown. Lemongrass and bamboo shoots lined the road. A breeze raced down the incline, the rustle growing louder as the grass blades bent towards the gorge at the bottom of the ravine.
In Don Carlos’ compound, children roamed, circling a wooden food stand run by a Dominican woman named Mercedes and her two sons: Reinaldo and Pedro. Mercedes was said to be a distant relative of Don Carlos, a peasant woman with city ways.
A group of cane cutters stood in front of Mercedes’ stand, buying liquor and joking with her and her sons. The older son, Reinaldo, worked as a guard in the cane fields during the day while his brother Pedro operated the cane press inside. Mercedes—and consequently Don Carlos, at least by rumor—had some relations from the interior campos who lived in the compound and worked as cutters in the fields, but Mercedes never openly claimed these people. “They are peasants who fell blind into this life of the cane,” she said to anyone who asked. “They have no reason to live like pigs. This is their country.”
The compound children hopped around Mercedes’ stand near the chatting men who shoved them away from adult conversations with slaps on their bottoms and orders for them to go find their mothers, whether they had mothers or not. The children then ran off to play, dashing back and forth behind the flowered curtains that served as doors for some of the rooms. Women were cooking on blackened boulders and sticks behind the cabins, pouring cups of water over naked infants to wash them before the evening meal. They were singing work songs, but their voices were so tired, I could hardly make out the words or the melody. Some men were dozing off in their doorways. They startled themselves awake when anyone walked by. I squeezed myself between two young lovers seeking a comfortable dark corner, their usual sapodilla tree taken over by a small group of men arguing over a domino game. The game was stopped now and again so a player could defend a bad choice or a loss. Sebastien’s friend Yves, who was with Sebastien and Joel when Joel was killed, was one of the domino players. Yves shaved his head to keep cane ticks out of his scalp. His Adam’s apple was as large as a real apple, his legs too short for his lanky body.
I motioned to a boy who was playing with pebbles on the ground at their feet. He was a beautiful child with a long manly face. He skipped from foot to foot, fidgeting while standing in front of me. I handed him the goat bones Luis had cut for me the night Señor Pico had come home. He smiled as he thanked me, pulled on the unraveling hem of his short pants, then ran off to show the other children his prize.
Félice was sitting on the doorstep in front of Kongo’s room, her fingers trembling as she picked at the birthmark beneath her nostrils.
“Kongo here?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Why don’t you go inside and sit with him?”
“He won’t receive me,” she said.
I peeked through the bit of palm frond that served as Kongo’s door. The room was dim, except for an oil lamp at his feet. There were two old mats facing each other on the dirt floor and a pile of half gourds and earthen jars in the middle. Kongo sat on his own mat, squeezing a rare, precious, ball of flour dough in and out of the spaces between his fingers. He cursed the flour, murmuring that nothing ever took shape the way one wanted it to.
Félice motioned for me to go to Kongo. “I know he will receive you,” she said.
“Old Kongo?” I called from the doorway. “It’s Amabelle, come to see you.”
Kongo moved aside the scrap of palm frond and let me in. I walked over to the mat where his son Joël had once slept. A pair of clean dark pants and a bright yellow shirt were laid out as though Joël had set them down to be grabbed in a hurry. I leaned towards the old man to better see his face.
“Too dark?” he asked.
“A little,” I said.
“M’renmen darkness,” he said. “In sugar land, a shack’s for sleeping, not for living. Living is only work,