The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [66]
“You should sit,” Odette told Wilner when he began pacing again. “Alberto said they would not look for anyone here tonight.”
“I will have to find a good crossing place tomorrow,” Wilner said, “a place where we can avoid the soldiers at the bridge.”
“Do you know that you can trust him who offered this place to you?” Yves asked Wilner and Odette. He was lisping heavily himself, his enlarged tongue pushed out between his bloated lips. “How do you know he will not bring the soldiers here?”
“I paid him for this,” Wilner replied.
“Even then?” persisted Yves.
“We’ve never lived lives of certainty,” Odette said.
“Tell me, why don’t our people go to war because of this?” Yves seemed to be asking this as much of himself as of them. “Why won’t our president fight?”
Wilner did not have the answer right then, but he grunted as though he would come up with it if he had the time.
Yves, Wilner, and Odette stopped talking and listened to the night. I could still hear people squealing and laughing, the Guardia sending the drunken home. Footsteps glided through the narrow spaces between the houses. We waited for the footsteps to get louder and then quickly fade away like so many others had before.
There was a knock at the door, the knock of a fist.
“It is Alberto,” a voice whispered through the crack that introduced a tiny sliver of moonlight into the room. “The Guardia is coming this way.”
Wilner stumbled across the room and opened the door. The man on the other side of the threshold was carrying a kerosene lamp, which he pushed inside. The room was suddenly full of light, like an abruptly sunny day. Wilner thanked the man with the lamp and bid him good-night. The light disappeared from the doorway as the man took off running.
I could hear the soldiers at a distance chatting among themselves, the shrieking laughter of women they were lingering to tease, the loud kisses the women were blowing back at them.
Wilner jumped outside and held the door ajar for Odette. Yves limped out after her, then offered his hand to guide me over the threshold. Once outside, I clung to her shoulder as though it were a walking stick.
The voices of the soldiers died down with the humming of trucks out in the square. Wilner led us in a circle down a narrow alley around a string of half-finished cement houses. I heard the soldiers pounding on the doors of the houses farther out on the square. We hurried to a soccer field, bordered with a cinder-block wall. Wilner kept turning around to glimpse the open spaces behind us, to make certain that no one was following.
In a clearing, cows crouched, asleep. A few of them hastily stumbled to their feet as we hobbled past them. The scattered trees and shrubs of the savanna led into a grove of tall coconut palms, which whistled in a breeze I could not feel. Perhaps my whole body was beyond feeling now, beyond healing.
“I think we left them behind,” Wilner announced.
I couldn’t make myself look back. The palms offered enough protection now. Even if they came, we could scatter far enough to delay their search. They would not find all of us.
“Where to find Sebastien and Mimi? Where is it?” I mumbled slowly so they all would understand.
“Does she know the other one is dead?” Wilner asked.
“She knows,” Odette answered for me. “Don’t you know, cherished one? You know Tibon died, don’t you? The dead cannot always come with us on such long journeys.”
I tried to explain. I wanted to go to the fortaleza where I thought they might be holding Mimi and Sebastien. My words ran together, blurred and incomprehensible. They stopped listening, perhaps thinking that each attempt at a phrase was a complaint about leaving Tibon behind.
As we walked out of the palm grove, we found a tree-arched path leading down to the river. From a distance, the water looked deep and black, the bank much steeper than I remembered. Chin-high grass surrounded the spot Wilner chose for our crossing. The bridge lay far ahead, the curve of its iron girders dotted with night lights. The lamps moved from