The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [35]
“Darkness is good,” I said, simply to agree.
“Is she still there?” he asked of Félice. “I told her to leave, I did, but she won’t go. She can’t stay all night. I don’t want her to stay.”
Félice stirred and cleared her throat as though to remind Kongo that she was listening.
“You the woman who’s with Sebastien?” he asked. “You Amabelle?”
“Yes.”
“When he was killed, my son, Sebastien found the clothes you see next to you, to bury him in. Brought me a pile of wood, Sebastien did, to make a coffin for my son. Sebastien, he is like my own blood.”
“Condolences,” I said. “I am sad for the death of Joel.”
He plopped the dough on the ground and pounded it with his knuckles.
“I was asked to make a request of you,” I said. “Don Ignacio, the elder at the house where I am, would like to come see you.”
He removed his hand from the dough and concentrated on digging the flour out from underneath his fingernails. Then he reached into his pocket for snuff and took a pinch.
“That is a strange request, Amabelle,” he said. “What do they want with me, these people?”
“Don Ignacio wishes to talk to you of Joël’s accident.”
“I don’t know if it was an accident, Amabelle. He was not one to die so easy, my son.” He raised his face towards the ceiling to keep the snuff from sliding from his nose down to his chin. Outside Félice cleared her throat again, this time it sounded like she was crying.
“The elder, Papi, he would like to pay for Joel’s funeral,” I said.
“No funeral for Joël,” he said. “I wanted to bury him in our own land where he was born, I did, but he was too heavy to carry so far. I buried him where he died in the ravine. I buried him in a field of lemongrass, my son.” He lowered his head, letting the tobacco mix drop to his chest. “He was one of those children who grew like the weeds in the fields, my son. Didn’t need nobody or nothing, but he did love his father. It wasn’t ceremonious the way I buried him, I know. No clothes, no coffin, nothing between him and the dry ground. I wanted to give him back to the soil the way his mother passed him to me on the first day of his life.”
I could hear the children outside drawing sticks to decide who should have the first turn at playing with the goat bones. I no longer heard Félice.
“Of all the things he’s done, my son,” Kongo was saying, “of all the ways I’ve seen him be, I’ll never forget how he looked when he was born. So small he was, so bare, so innocent.”
He picked up the dough again and crushed it between his fingers.
“You shouldn’t spend too much time with this old man,” he said. “I don’t want to push you out, but kite’m. Go see Sebastien now.”
“What word should I bring to Don Ignacio?” I asked.
“Tell him I am a man,” he said. “He was a man, too, my son.”
Sebastien was sitting in a corner in his room, rubbing an aloe poultice over some blisters along his calves.
“The body forgets how chancy a cane fire can be,” he said, handing me the ointment.
Sebastien had a bunch of carbuncles over his hips and belly. As I rubbed the poultice on them, I didn’t feel as though I was touching him. It was more like touching the haze of anger rising off his skin, the tears of sadness he would not cry, the move san, the bad blood Joel’s death had stirred in him.
“There are new ticks in the fields with this harvest.” He groaned while turning over for me to rub the ointment onto his back.
Papi’s cedar planks were lined up against the back wall. The planks were glowing, even in the faint light. Papi’s madder glaze had filled the grain in a way that made the surface sensitive both to the shadows and to the light. From the floor you could see the imperfections in the finish, the shading differences, places where the tint didn’t match because Papi had waited too long before adding another coat, or where he had by chance brushed backwards, against the grain.
“Señor Pico’s son died today,” I said.
“This is what I heard,” Sebastien said, his voice rising with a smile as though it were not a sad thing at all.
“You should not rejoice for something like this,