The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [5]
“You don’t smile often.”
“She was a thin woman like me. I think I look like her, but I do smile more.”
“Are you smiling now?” I can hear him smiling in the dark. The smile blends into his voice, slightly halting his speech now and then.
His fingers slice the air towards me. Before his hands land on either side of my waist, I’m already squealing and cackling like a sick hen, already feeling as if I’m being tickled.
“Tell me something more of your mother,” he says, once the tickling and more squealing have stopped. “Tell me what her name was.”
“Her name was Irelle Pradelle,” I say, “and after she died, when I dreamt of her, she was always smiling. Except of course when she and my papa were drowning.”
4
Doctor Javier dashed straight to Señora Valencia’s bed as soon as he arrived. When he walked into the room, she quickly announced, “Amabelle and I have done it, Javier. We have given birth to the children, twins.”
Doctor Javier was a remarkably tall man who seemed to be looking down at everyone around him. His squinting eyes appeared dangerous and fierce as he examined the children, clipping their umbilical cords closer to their bellies.
“How long was it, your labor?” he asked Señora Valencia.
“It began last night,” she answered.
“Why didn’t you send for me then?”
“Remember the way we’d counted? I thought it could not be time yet.”
“We misjudged things perhaps.”
“The children and me, we are lucky Amabelle knew how to birth babies,” she said. “I could never have done it by myself.”
“We are all grateful to Amabelle.” Doctor Javier smiled at me as he brushed aside his wiry auburn hair, which extended in a widow’s peak to the middle of his forehead. A small wooden carving of cane leaves was pinned to the collar of his embroidered shirt. It was a charm, like the amulets the cane cutters here in Alegría wore around their necks to protect them from evil spells.
“Amabelle, boil some water, please,” the doctor said. “The little ones will need a wash.”
The house stood at the top of a hill with a view of the azure-green mountains in the back and a wide road in front. I went out the back door, where the pantry opened onto the grounds. Rushing to my room, I took off my blood-drenched apron and blouse, and piled them both in a corner near the latrines.
Far down the hill, I could see the housemaid, Juana, returning from the stream with a bucket full of clothes on her head. Juana and her man, Luis, had worked for Papi even before Señora Valencia was born. Juana stopped at their house, whose peaked roof lay half buried in the grassy hill.
I put the pot of water to boil on a bed of charcoal in my own outdoor cooking shed and waited for Juana to come up. From the yard I also saw the tightly closed shutters of Señora Valencia’s room. They were painted indigo blue like most of the main house except for the wraparound verandah, which was the crimson red of Alegría’s flame trees at high bloom.
Juana did not climb up, so I returned to Señora Valencia’s room with two enameled basins full of warm water, carrying one on the crown of my head and the other one in my hands. Señora Valencia was fully covered from chin to toe, the bloody sheets mounded in a pile in the corner. Papi had removed the mattresses from her bed, replacing them with the clean ones from her mother’s old bed in the sewing room.
Doctor Javier helped me put the containers down on the layette chest. He poured some medicine in the water with which to bathe the children. Señora Valencia handed him her son.
“Amabelle, do you remember precisely what time the children were born?” Papi asked. He had a notebook on his lap in which to inscribe the details for the birth certificates.
“It was still morning.” Señora Valencia looked up at an old clock set in a mahogany case that Papi had been sent from Spain by his father some twenty years before.
I looked over Papi’s shoulder as he wrote ceremoniously in his best script the time and place of the births, noting that it was on the thirtieth of August, the year 1937, the