The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [52]
Once he’d disappeared, I turned and followed the stream up to Don Carlos’ mill. Perhaps Sebastien had not yet left for the church. Maybe he was still at the mill with Mimi, waiting.
Two soldiers were drinking at Mercedes’ stand when I got to the compound. I stayed out of view while they bragged to Mercedes and her sons about what had taken place at the church, telling them that their friends had arrested two recreants—Father Romain and Father Vargas—and many peasants, and of how the priests had pleaded to be brought to the same fortaleza as the peasants who had been arrested outside their church.
“You know how much I admire the Generalissimo,” Mercedes said, her voice quivering beneath the weight of too much of her own firewater. “Even so, I say we are asking for punishment when we arrest the priests in their own churches.”
“You should have been there to see it,” one of the soldiers argued. “They cried like new widows, those priests.”
The church was empty, with only a wooden Christ looking down at the silent pews from his uncomfortable place on the cross. I walked past every neat, untouched bench, hoping to find someone who might be crouching in the dark, another voice to tell me more about what had taken place there. So far as I could see, everything was as usual, nothing had been moved or pushed aside. It was as if no one had ever entered the church at all; the Mass had never started, the people had never gathered.
In the churchyard I heard only echoes that come with the night—the cicadas, tree frogs, and squawking bats. The gate around the school was chained. There was no light in the house behind the gate where Father Romain and Father Vargas and some of the orphaned school children lived.
Leaving the church, I stayed off the main road and followed a tangle of sword ferns, sapodilla, and papaya trees to a trench bordering a plot of Don Carlos’ virgin cane.
I waited there awhile, hoping the soldiers would be gone by the time I reached the mill. When I finally entered the cane field, it was pitch black inside, as dark as it might be in a coffin under the ground with six feet of dirt piled over your face.
It was a darkness where the recollection of light did not exist at all, as if the bright moon overhead would never dare approach the compressed layers of cane leaves, spread over each other like house shingles.
The sound of crickets and grasshoppers echoed in the cane tent; I took tiny steps, holding my bundle close to my chest. As I moved forward, I didn’t want to stir the cane too much in case the soldiers were waiting on the other side. Nor did I want my steps to arouse any animals that might be nesting in the sodden loam, gnawing at the cane roots: rabbits, rats, or garden snakes, which Sebastien and the others had often faced while working.
A scorching foul-smelling heat rose from the ground; the marsh underneath the cane sank with each of my steps. I felt the short cane spears cutting my legs and covered my face with my hand to keep the tall ones out of my eyes. An ant colony marched up my thighs. The more I smacked them away, the more they crept up my back.
I saw faint breaches of light as I moved closer to the shacks at the compound. Mercedes’ stand was closed now, and the soldiers were gone. Lamps were lit inside the cane cutters’ rooms, but no one was outside. I brushed the ants off my back as I approached Kongo’s door.
“Kongo, it’s Amabelle, come to see you,” I whispered.
A few peered out with lamps from the shacks as I entered Kongo’s room. My legs were bleeding, and a line of rust-colored ants were clinging to my arm. Kongo raised his lamp, brought the flame close to my skin, and brushed the ants aside. I felt a line of blood trickle from between my eyebrows.
“Did they take you too?” he asked, using his pocket handkerchief to mop the blood from my face.
“I walked through