The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [49]
“There is a side to Pico that I never liked,” confessed Beatnz. “He’s always dreamt that one day he would be president of this country, and it seems to me he would move more than mountains to make it so.”
“He is a good man,” Señora Valencia said, using her customary defense of her husband.
“Many good men commit terrible acts these days,” Beatnz said.
“So you want to marry a priest who will first speak to you in Latin?” Señora Valencia asked, turning the conversation back to its original direction.
“A señorita who speaks Latin, my mother says, will never find a husband,” added Beatriz. “My mother married when she was even younger than I am now. Look at her, she is alone all the same, a young widow in the end.”
“So you are afraid of being more alone than you are now?” the señora asked.
“It is not that I am afraid,” Beatriz said. “I would like to travel, escape, to go far away.”
“Where would you go, to the capital?”
“I don’t know. Maybe further. In Alegría, the girls dream only of going to schools of domestic science in Ciudad Trujillo. Elsewhere, in Spain for example, perhaps they have other aspirations.”
“I don’t think I will ever leave here,” Señora Valencia said. “This is the place of my mother’s grave, my son’s grave. It is likely my father will be buried here. I will never leave here.”
“Soon people will come to places like Alegría only for rest, for the tranquility of the land,” Beatriz said.
“I think they will come for the wealth of the cane.” Señora Valencia pushed her rocker forward and wrapped both her arms around the gallery corner post. “Since I was a child, the cane fields have grown. The mills have become larger and there are more cutters staying here after the harvests. This is our future.”
There was still some time before the Mass would begin. I heard the rumble of automobiles and hurried out to the top of the hill. A truck was approaching. Señora Valencia and Beatriz got up and walked down the incline to the road. Beatriz was holding the house lamp, lighting their way.
By the time they reached the road, the truck had already sped by and disappeared. They both squeezed themselves into the narrow space between the drainage ditches and Juana and Luis’ front door as another group of military trucks rushed by without stopping.
It took a while for the sun-baked dust to settle. The road was empty now, except for a few roaming goats regaining their footing.
The dust was too much for Señora Valencia, I thought. She was breathing hard and fast as though a pillow full of rocks was being pressed down on her face. Beatriz rushed into Juana’s house and came out with an earthen jar of water. She spilled some of the water into her cupped palm and wet the señora’s face.
Beatriz and I propped her up on each side and carried her back to the top of the hill as a few more army trucks raced by, heading in the direction of the border. The trucks speeding by worried me, but more worrisome somehow were the face-sized splotches of blood that I now saw on the back of the señora’s dress, stains that were growing wider even as we carried her to her bedroom. In spite of this, I told myself I would just see that the señora was put to bed and then I would hurry to the church.
“Amabelle, please stay with me.” Señora Valencia reached up and grabbed my wrists as she was lowered into her bed. She held me with almost the same force as when she was in labor.
“Amabelle knows how to look after me,” she told Beatnz. “I did not give myself enough time to rest after the births, isn’t this so, Amabelle?”
“Por favor, Señora, release me so I can go and find you a remedy,” I said.
My wrists ached when she released them. Her eyes trailed me out the door. Perhaps she knew that I wouldn’t be coming back.
I went down to the pantry, intending to leave by way of the grounds in the back. Lidia was pouring tea into a cup for her cousin as Papi entered the house with Juana.
Papi dragged a cross made of freshly sawed cedar across the red clay floor in the pantry. The cross had Señor Joël Raymond