The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [61]
I lingered and offered the sisters my remaining banana. They refused it, pushing my hand away. When Yves beckoned for me to hurry, I was surprised that I could yield so fast and leave them behind. But the most important task, I told myself, was to find Mimi and Sebastien.
We followed the mountain trail down, away from the fires. The sun was fully up now. And going down into the woods seemed like a prudent idea. There were many more trees to cover us there, more places to hide, probably a creek or two to drink from.
It was late morning, and something reminded me that it was Saturday. I thought of past Saturdays spent sitting in the house with Señora Valencia, sewing baby clothes, going through the market stands with Juana, helping Papi in his flower garden, visiting Sebastien at the mill—even after long days when he had to do extra work outside the cane to earn a few more pesos to pay his debts. For so long this had been my life, but it was all the past. Now we all had to try and find the future.
I knew precisely what I would do when I crossed the border. I’d exchange the pesos for gourdes and look for a little house to rent on the citadel road, where I had lived as a child. I wondered who had our house now and if I could still claim the land as my inheritance. I had no papers to show, but it was probably recorded some place that the land was once my father’s and mother’s and—even though I hadn’t been there for a long time—was still my birthright.
Tibon became as quiet as everyone else after we left the sisters. We were going down a steep part of the mountain, which required a lot of concentration from all of us but most especially from him because of his limp and wounded ankle. The grade was steep and we could easily trip, stumbling down the incline into a rough-edged gorge crowded with kapok trees whose branches rose as high as the hills and whose roots stuck out of the ground like the entrails of crushed animals.
We reached the foot of the mountain by mid-afternoon. At the mouth of the forest was a small deserted settlement of thatched huts and wood cabins with long vines of tobacco leaves drying in roped layers around them.
Tibon limped to the first of five doorways lined up in a short row.
“No one here,” he called as he moved on to the next. Wilner and Odette rushed ahead of him. There was no one in any of the four other houses either, they discovered.
“Maybe the owners are out planting more tobacco,” Wilner called. “Or maybe they’ve gone selling.”
Wilner dashed in and out of the cabins, separating from his woman and then joining up with her again. He found bundles of corn and a water well with a bucket suspended from a rope. Odette discovered a few wooden bowls and distributed some water among us.
“When you’re thirsty,” Odette said, “no matter how much water you drink afterwards, nothing ever tastes like the first drop.”
“I wonder why more people didn’t travel the same way we did across the mountains,” Wilner commented before drinking his water.
“It’s a big mountain,” Tibon said.
“Perhaps it was the fire,” offered Odette.
“Some could have crossed before the fire,” Wilner argued.
“Maybe there are no people left,” Odette said. She splashed the rest of the water on her face, washing her armpits and the space between her breasts. Wilner wandered in and out of the huts, to see what other treasures could be found.
He ran out with a pile of land papers in his hand. “Look, this was under one of the mattresses,” he said. “They are traders, Haitian traders. A big family.”
“They were not poor.” Tibon untied his shirt from his head and put it on. He fished a wooden pipe out of his pants pocket and crammed it with a piece from a tobacco leaf that still looked too damp for smoking. Puffing at the unlit pipe, he moaned after each smokeless draw. For the first time since we’d left the sisters, it seemed as though his guilt was waning.
At this moment we were all certain that chance had blessed