The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [57]
I moved towards the man with the uneven arms. I was drawn to him in part by curiosity but also because I pitied his condition. I wanted him to explain it to me. Was it tuberculosis or a flesh disease? Did it come from cutting the cane with one arm while neglecting the other? Was he born this way?
The young man seemed to forget his malformation unless someone’s eyes lingered on it too long. He straightened his posture and pushed his chest forward to make his arms seem of one proportion.
Yves and Wilner discussed what roads to take to reach the border more quickly. Wilner had traveled through the mountains at least once before but could not remember the way clearly now. Odette recalled that there were some settlements high in the hills, which we would do well to avoid. They disagreed, though, on how long the journey should take.
“We’ll be at the border before sunset tonight,” said Yves.
“You have misjudged, my friend,” shouted the man with the uneven arms, “how long it takes for men to cross mountains! Two days,” he insisted, “and besides, we don’t want to arrive at the border at night.”
The pumpkin-haired women listened, even as they distributed their tiny portions of food and drink between themselves.
“Let’s not squander time, then.” Yves started walking. “If we stop to rest only at night, the journey will be shorter.”
“M’se Tibon,” the man with the uneven arms said, holding out his emaciated hand towards me.
“How long have you been traveling, Tibon?” I asked him.
“Five days on foot,” he said.
“Did you see others being taken?” I asked.
“I am coming back,” he said, “from buying charcoal outside the mill where I work, when two soldiers take me and put me on a truck full of people. The people who fight before going on the truck, they whip them with bayonets until they consent. After we’re all on the truck, some of us half dead, not knowing whose blood is whose, they take us out to a high cliff over the rough seas in La Romana. They make us stand in groups of six at the edge of the cliff, and then it’s either jump or go against a wall of soldiers with bayonets pointed at you and some civilians waiting in a circle with machetes. They tell the civilians where best to strike with the machetes so our heads part more easily from our bodies.” Tibon used his bony hand to make the motion of a machete striking his collarbone. “They make us stand in lines of six on the edge of the cliff,” he said. “Then they come back to the truck to get more. They have six jump over the cliff, then another six, then another six, then another six.”
I didn’t know how many groups of six he named. I shut my ears to him for a moment and tried to imagine Sebastien’s voice, telling me he was alive. I knew this would be his great worry, that I didn’t know what had happened to him and that perhaps I would think it was my fault he had disappeared. But he hadn’t disappeared; I wanted to be convinced of this, invoking his voice and face on many past occasions: the night he came to tell me that Joël had died, other nights when he had been so careworn and weary, yet so happy that I had gone to his room to see him, nights when he was bothered by the heavy smell of cane that was always with him, in his room, in his clothes, in the breeze, even in his hair, mornings when he woke up and begrudged the sound of the cane being cut because it reminded him of the breaking of dry chicken bones.
Tibon went on naming another group of six, then another.
“Last they come for me,” he said.
The others angled their necks towards him. They were paying close attention, as if they couldn’t help themselves. Yves was the only one who did not seem interested. He kept walking swiftly, fixing his eyes on the road ahead.
“When I jump off the cliff,” Tibon continued, “I tell myself not to be afraid. I say to myself, Tibon, today you and the birds become one. They say for a bird to stand on its two feet and not fly is laziness. Tibon, I tell myself, today you are a bird.”
He opened his arms and spread them,