The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [58]
“It’s a long way from the cliff to the sea,” he said. “I fall and fall, passing the rocks where many of the bodies land on the way down. And then me, I fall in the water. I know it too when I strike the water because it is so cold and sharp, the water, more like a big machete than water. I have many cuts on my body where the water sliced me, some tears on my ankles, which now cause me to limp.”
He raised his pants to show me the cuts on his ankle, many of them scabbed and deep, covered with the brown-red dust of all the different roads he had traveled.
“Now I’m in the water,” he said, “but when I look at the beach, there are peasants waiting with their machetes for us to come out of the water, some even wading in to look for the spots on the necks where it’s best to strike with machetes to cut off heads. I swim out into a sea cave. I hold on to a rock and fight the water until nighttime, and this is when, with another comrade who also survived, we take to traveling. My companion finds walking harder than those rocks we almost fell on, so he goes back to the mill. But me, I say now and until my last breath, if I die, I die on my feet.”
The pumpkin-haired woman next to me was crying. Her body was slumped, her face sunk into her chest; her cheeks swelled up as if she was trying not to vomit. Still her tears were silent, almost polite. She muffled them with a man’s handkerchief, embroidered with the word lie on each corner.
The other pumpkin-haired woman moved closer and put her arms around her.
When the comforter noticed me staring, she pointed to Yves and asked in Spanish, “Is he your man?”
“No,” I answered.
“I thought he was your man,” Tibon said, “the way he looks at you, like his eyes can protect you.”
“I am promised to someone else,” I said.
“Where is the man you’re promised to? Was he taken?” the woman consoling the crying one asked.
“So I was told,” I said.
“I am Dolores. This is my little sister, Doloritas,” she said after a pause. “Our mother suffered much when each one of us was being born so gave us these grave names we have.”
Doloritas swallowed a lump in her throat, removed the handkerchief from her face, and asked, “What do they call you?”
“They call me Amabelle,” I said.
“Ah, Amabelle, like a taste of cool water in a drought,” said Tibon.
“How long has your journey been?” the older sister asked in Spanish. The two sisters didn’t seem to speak any Kreyol.
“Only one day,” I said.
“The sisters have been with us three days,” Tibon said.
Doloritas covered her eyes with the handkerchief once more.
“Don’t cry so much, Doloritas,” Tibon said. “Save some of your tears to shed for joy when we find your man.”
Doloritas lowered the handkerchief from her face as she considered this. If Tibon, a cripple, had escaped, why not her man?
“We are Dominicanas,” Dolores explained.
“They took him,” Doloritas added. “They came in the night and took him from our bed.”
“We have yet to learn your language,” Dolores said.
“We are together six months, me and my man,” Doloritas said. “I told him I would learn Kreyol for when we visit his family in Haiti.”
“I know nothing,” Dolores said. “Doloritas was lost when they took him. She wanted to go to the border to look for him. I could not let her go alone in her state.”
“What is his name?” I asked, looking directly into Doloritas’ reddened eyes. “Your man, what is his name?”
“We called him He,” she said, pushing her wet handkerchief towards me to show the embroidering of his name. “He is a nickname for Ilestbien. He told me that it means ‘he is well.'”
We walked through the afternoon without resting. The sun teased us by occasionally seeking shelter behind a dense cloud, often for long periods of time.
The mountain air grew cooler as dusk approached. Our fatigue limited our desire for more talk. Besides, each person’s story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.
Now and then, Tibon would pierce the silence with his