The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [47]
“He wanted to speak to me out in the woods, man to man, about my son,” Kongo replied.
“He was not worth your breath,” Yves said; his Adam’s apple rose and fell several times faster when he was angry. “Only killing him would make things even.”
“Things are never even,” Kongo said. “If it was so, his life and my life would be the same.”
“What did he say?” Yves asked.
“He asked me my son’s name,” Kongo said. “Wanted to make a cross and write my boy’s name on it, he did. He wanted to put the cross on my son’s grave. I told him no more crosses on my boy’s back.”
“You should have killed him and buried him in the woods,” Yves said.
“He told me he killed people in a war when he was a young man,” Kongo said. “He couldn’t remember how many he’d killed but felt like each one was walking kot a kot with him, crushing his happiness. For his woman to die on the night his only son was to be born, for my son to be killed the day his grandchildren saw the first light, he felt this was the doing of the people he killed in the war, people still walking side by side with him. He thought his grandson’s death showed this.”
“He wants you to carry your own sadness and his too?” Yves asked, his Adam’s apple bulging against the thin skin covering it.
Kongo reached over and tapped Yves’ shoulder to calm him.
“I want nothing more from him.” Kongo picked up a handful of almonds and pounded them with his fists to force them to surrender their kernels.
“Misery makes us appear small,” he said, “but we are men. We spoke like men. I told him what troubled me, and he told me what troubled him. I feel perhaps I understood him a trace and he understood me.”
“It’s only a masquerade of kindness.” Yves got up and paced back and forth in front of the mat where Joel had once slept. “Tonight I sell the wood in our room.”
“Tonight a truck is leaving,” Sebastien said. “Amabelle, Mimi, and me, we think of going.”
“All the same, I’m staying,” Yves said, running his fingers over his shaved head. “I’m selling the wood and I’m staying. There are many who believe the rumors are simply meant to chase us away.”
“Perhaps that is true,” Sebastien said, “but I wouldn’t like to sit like a dog in cage if they are true.”
“What will you do?” Yves turned back to the old man.
“I’ve been here fifteen years now,” Kongo said. “I’m too old for these types of journeys.” He reached into one of his pots and fished out a fistful of maize flour. Sprinkling the flour, he sketched a large letter V on the floor, each side spread far apart, like arms stretched out towards an invisible sky.
“This is something my old grandfather used to do before I went on a journey,” he explained. “‘I make this mark for you,’ he used to say, ‘because we’re one departing on two trails.’ Your trail is the trail of rivers and mountains, and on your journey you will require protection.”
Sebastien and Yves both seemed sadly content, as though their dead fathers had come back to offer them a benediction.
Kongo rubbed his hands together to brush off the maize flour once he was done. He looked up and winked at us. “Like a Saint Chnstophe,” he said.
Yves got up and left Kongo’s room. When I looked outside, a few moments later, I saw him heading towards the road in the dark with two of Papi’s cedar planks on his back.
“Wait for tomorrow to sell!” Sebastien shouted as he rushed after him.
“Tomorrow you may not be here!” Yves yelled back. “When we’re both home, we’ll have a Sunday meal together, you and me, except we’ll not eat too much, not enough to kill us.”
I bent down and kissed Kongo’s forehead good-bye. He kept his eyes on his maize-flour sketch on the floor.
Walking away, I couldn’t help but think that once I was gone, I would never hear about it when Kongo died.
Outside, Sebastien took my face in his hand and kissed me on the mouth.
“I’m tired of the harvest and all the cane,” he said. “Perhaps it’s time to see my mother. My mother, she did not think I would be gone this long. I’ll go find Mimi and we’ll meet you at the chapel.”
When I reached Señora Valencia