The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [56]
There is such a cord between desperate women that when I looked at them I knew what each one was hoping for even before their whispers brushed past my ears. They made novenas for lovers who had strayed, for sons and daughters to marry, for children who were sick, for the safe return of those who had traveled to the capital, forsaking them.
One of the women—the last one on the line—dragged a pack mule with one hand and carried a portrait of the Generalissimo with the other. She was praying for his good health and safe journey through life. “Let him continue to lead us with a strong hand and an even stronger heart,” she implored.
Leaving the village behind, we started down the curve of a pebbly mountain road. We walked silently for a long time. The sun was scorching hot, and we had no hats or parasols for protection.
I tied the hem of my dress into a knot and raised it up to my thighs. Yves looked out of the corner of his eyes, pretending not to see the cloth brushing against the shredded skin on the back of my legs.
When it seemed like it was midday, we stopped on the side of the mountain to rest. I yanked up handfuls of the wild grass and dandelions growing out from between the rocks, remembering that my father had called them “pisannwit,” saying that as he blew the dandelions’ fragile fuzz into the wind, children were being cured of pissing in their beds.
A flock of rain birds squawked loudly as they passed overhead. Among them were fork-tailed swallows and swifts, trailed by a pack of yellow warblers, barely twisting their wingtips as they rode through the wind columns above the mountains.
Yves leaned back against a boulder and closed his eyes. I sat a few feet away, looking down at the land beneath us, the mesh of water, tobacco and cane fields, and the tiny houses terraced in the foothills.
Three women and two men trudged up a narrow track towards us. They looked like the straggling members of a vast family, except for two of the women who had coils of pumpkin-colored hair. Those two seemed like they might be Domimcanas—or a mix of Haitian and Dominican—in some cases it was hard to tell.
The man at the head of the line noticed me. The group rushed up the hill with a new sense of expectation. Everyone was carrying a small bundle, except a short man in the rear who was limping. He had taken off his shirt and tied it around his head to keep himself cool. The young man had uneven arms, one bulky, bulging with muscles, the other thin and withered, the skin clinging to the bones.
“Now I am even closer to the sun,” the man at the head of the group said when he reached us. He had a deeply melodious voice, like the sanbas who told stories in song.
“There’s no shade,” the woman next to him complained. She used the wide, butterfly-shaped collar on her dress to fan her face. She and the man had the same musical voice, which made me think they were brother and sister, but I was wrong. She was his woman and he, her man.
Their speaking startled Yves out of his sleep. I asked the sanba-voiced man, “Where is your group coming from?”
He and his woman, Odette, were coming from a big sugar mill on the other side of the island, a big mill owned by North Americans, Yankis.
“We hear it’s safe in the big mills,” I said. “Why didn’t you stay there?”
“Let them say what they will,” Odette answered, cutting her eyes at me as though to reproach my ignorance. She turned in a circle and breathed in a passing breeze. Only she and her sanba-voiced man, Wilner, were from the same mill. The others they had encountered on the road, just as they were finding us now, Odette explained.
The two pumpkin-haired women and the man with the uneven arms crouched down to rest. They shared portions of foods wrapped in banana leaves and drank from old jugs and a worn-out wineskin.
“Do you have good luck?” Wilner asked Yves.
Yves laughed out loud. “Why do you want to know?” he asked.
“I like to know what type of