The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [68]
As we sat there with Odette under a canopy of trees in the middle of a grassy field, she spat up the chest full of water she had collected in the river. “With her parting breath, she mouthed in Kreyol “pesi,” not calmly and slowly as if she were asking for it at a roadside garden or open market, not questioning as if demanding of the face of Heaven the greater meaning of senseless acts, no effort to say “perejil” as if pleading for her life. Que diga amor? Love? Hate? Speak to me of things the world has yet to truly understand, of the instant meaning of each bird’s call, of a child’s secret thoughts in her mother’s womb, of the measured rhythmical time of every man and woman’s breath, of the true colors of the inside of the moon, of the larger miracles in small things, the deeper mysteries. But parsley? Was it because it was so used, so commonplace, so abundantly at hand that everyone who desired a sprig could find one? We used parsley for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides. Perhaps the Generalissimo in some larger order was trying to do the same for his country.
The Generalissimo’s mind was surely as dark as death, but if he had heard Odette’s “pesi,” it might have startled him, not the tears and supplications he would have expected, no shriek from unbound fear, but a provocation, a challenge, a dare. To the devil with your world, your grass, your wind, your water, your air, your words. You ask for perejil, I give you more.
30
We were found the next morning, at dawn, by a priest and a young doctor who were walking the savannas, looking for survivors. Yves had carried Odette’s body some distance from the riverbank in the dark, far enough that we could no longer see the river and the bridge.
The priest called for help, and suddenly we were surrounded by men and women in different stages of hurt and healing, asking where we were from, had we seen this and that person from this or that campo or this or that mill.
Someone took Odette from Yves without questioning us. She seemed small and pliable, weightless in the stranger’s arms.
We followed the one carrying her to another field dotted with large tents. Yves limped onward, his eyes fixed on Odette.
“What was her name?” asked the tired-looking priest with an open notebook in his hand. He wiped his mouth with a white handkerchief, the whitest thing I had seen since the lace covering the statue of La Virgen on the road up the mountain.
Yves said, “Odette, but we do not know her surname.”
“Her relations?” asked the priest.
“We do not know where they are from.”
The man with Odette in his arms was walking on the side of the road where the corpses had been hauled and laid out in rows. Priests and a bishop in full dress performed the last rites for each of the dead. We did not ask where Odette would be buried, for we knew she would likely have to share her grave with all the others there. Besides, the priest had already moved on to someone else.
I took one last look at Odette’s face. There was a stillness to it I nearly envied. She did not look like someone death had taken by surprise; her body had very hastily eased into it: her open hands, her bent knees, the relaxed face.
I must have been standing over her body for several hours. Wherever I go, I will always be standing over her body.
No farewell could be enough.
All I had wanted was for her to be still.
Yves took my hand and pulled me away from the body into one of the large tent clinics where people were squeezed together on benches and clustered on blankets on the floor. Two nuns greeted us from behind a small table.
“You don’t look as bad as some,” a nun with a manly, square-jawed, chocolat-au-lait face said to me in Kreyol.
Two doctors were working behind wooden dividers inside the tents. Yves and I were crowded on a long school bench with many others and told to wait our turn.
We tried not to look at the people around us, especially those whose bodies were bared, as if giving you permission to gape deep inside them.
As we waited,