The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [60]
Over his shoulder, a funnel of dark charcoal smoke was rising from one of the small villages we’d left behind. Yves had become accustomed enough to the sight that he kept playing the game, only occasionally glancing in the direction the smoke was drifting before it rose high enough to thin out and become part of the air.
I tried not to wake anyone as I stood, but my movements caused more activity. Wilner’s woman, Odette, woke up, then Wilner, followed by the Dominican sisters, then Tibon. By the time I reached Yves, everyone was awake and watching the fire burning through a village a few tiers below.
There was no mistaking the stench rising towards us. It was the smell of blood sizzling, of flesh melting to the last bone, a bonfire of corpses, like the one the Generalissimo had ordered at the Plaza Colombina to avoid the spreading of disease among the living after the last great hurricane.
Yves placed the machete on his back. He tugged on the game stick, ignoring the splinters stabbing at his fingertips. Odette raised her hands over her nose. Circling her frame with his embrace, Wilner rocked Odette’s body back and forth in his arms. I felt Tibon shiver and then realized I was holding his skeletal hand.
Tibon leaned towards my left ear and whispered, “I almost kill a Dominican boy when I’m ten. I see him coming along the road in front of the mill one day and I decide to beat him to make him say that even if he’s living in a big house and I’m living in the mill, he’s no better than me.”
I pulled my hand from Tibon’s long delicate fingers. His voice grew louder as he continued. “I grab the boy by the neck. I beat him until I’m tired and he’s biting the back of my hand and he’s running. I still have the scar where he bit me. Do you want to see?”
He tried to show the scar on his normal-sized forearm, but no one looked.
“He never tells his family it’s me beating him every day. I warn him ‘I beat you worse if you tell.’ He won’t say what I want him to say, that we’re the same, me and him, flesh like flesh, blood like blood.”
“The mountains are dangerous for us now,” Wilner announced, interrupting Tibon. “I say we follow this trail down and, soon as we can, go through the forest to a place where we can cross the river to the other side.”
“We can get lost in the forest,” Yves said, “walk the same path a hundred times and not know it.”
“‘You can get lost in there,” Wilner said. “Not me. I have two good eyes.”
Wilner turned to the Dominican sisters who were still watching the smoke and addressed them in Spanish. “You will travel with us no more,” he said.
“We cannot leave them here alone,” Tibon protested.
“They are not good for us,” Wilner said, as if the sisters had already disappeared from our presence. “I will not be roasted like lechon for them. This is their country. Let them find the border themselves. They can go to any village in these mountains, and the people will welcome them.”
“What if they betray us?” Odette asked. “What if they send their people after us?”
“They will not betray us,” Tibon said. “I can sense this.”
“We will let you choose your road, and we will choose ours,” Dolontas spoke up. “And we’ll go on to Dajabón and I’ll find Ilestbien.”
Dajabón was a place I remembered as a barely developed town, a place I had not seen since I was a child. Now I imagined it full of people like us, searching for loved ones, mistaking the living for the dead.
As we walked away from them, I wanted to argue for allowing the sisters to come with us, but the fires down below made too strong a demonstration of the danger. Besides, the sisters would not have as many obstacles as we would in Dajabón. If they were asked to say “perejil,” they could say it with ease. In most of our mouths, their names would be tinged with or even translated into Kreyol, the way the name of Doloritas’ man slid towards the Spanish each time she evoked him.