The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [43]
After most of the workers had left for the stream, Sebastien and I went to a mud-and-wattle cooking hut near a wooden fence where the compound met an open dirt road. He brushed two rocks against a dry pine twig and sparked a flame for our coffee.
We sat under the mesquite that leaned over the hut, and while he sipped the coffee out of one side of his mouth, I watched him and grinned against my will.
For some, passion is the gift of a ring in a church ceremony, the bearing of children as shared property. For me it was just a smile I couldn’t help, tugging at the sides of my face. And slowly as he caught glimpses of me between sips of his coffee, he returned the smile, looking the same way I did: bashful, undeserving, and almost ashamed to be the one responsible for the look of desire always rising in a dark flush on the side of his face. His eyes searched everything around him, the live coals and ashes under the coffeepot, the pebbles opening the soil to fit themselves in, the patches of dirt-brown grass dying from being too often trampled underfoot. When the morning breeze lifted his torn and leaf-stained collar, he pressed it back down with his cane-scarred hands. His eyes surveyed all the familiar details of his fingers, pausing only for an instant when our pupils met and trying to communicate with the simple flutter of a smile all those things we could not say because there was the cane to curse, the harvest to dread, the future to fear.
23
I dream of the sugar woman. Again.
As always, she is dressed in a long, three-tiered ruffled gown inflated like a balloon. Around her face, she wears a shiny silver muzzle, and on her neck there is a collar with a clasped lock dangling from it.
The sugar woman grabs her skirt and skips back and forth around my room. She seems to be dancing a kalanda in a very fast spin, locks arms with the air, pretends to kiss someone much taller than herself. As she swings and shuffles, the chains on her ankles cymbal a rattled melody. She hops to the sound of the jingle of the chains, which with her twists grows louder and louder.
“Is your face underneath this?” I ask. The voice that comes out of my mouth surprises me; it is the voice of the orphaned child at the stream, the child who from then on would talk only to strange faces.
“You see me?” she asks, laughing a metallic laugh that echoes inside the mask.
“Why is that on your face?” I ask.
“This?” She taps her fingers against the muzzle. “Given to me a long time ago, this was, so I’d not eat the sugarcane.”
I begin to think inside the dream that it is Sebastien who always brings her here, that she is the hidden image of some jealous woman or the revenant of some dead love he carries with him into my arms.
“Why are you here?” I ask her.
“Told you before,” she says. “I am the sugar woman. You, my eternity.”
I wake up, pounding the arm Sebastien has draped over my breasts to awake him.
If I mumble in my sleep, it is either about my parents or the sugar woman.
“What dream this time?” he asks. Sometimes, he is impatient with my shadows.
24
The high cement walls around Doña Sabine’s house were dotted with watchmen with deep brown peasant faces. Some looked too old, others too young to carry the ancient rusting rifles slumped over their shoulders, the holding straps digging flesh marks into their backs.
As I walked by, I looked up at the high patio doors, where a small cloister of men and women crouched behind fragile curtains while watching passersby on the roads.
Closer to Señora Valencia’s house, Luis was standing in the road, his head swinging back and forth with every movement, every bull cart or peasant merchant on donkey back, every child on his way to the parish schools, every cane cutter heading to the fields.
“The patrón is leaving today,” he said, smiling. “They come for him in a short time.”
The patrón had already stayed much longer than his expected time. His pressing operation, he had told his wife, had been delayed