The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [69]
“Sister, some cool water, please.”
“Sister, don’t you forget me.”
“Sister, I feel so dead.”
“Sister, has he come, my son? Have they come, my daughter, my man, my woman, my mother, my father?”
Their cries rose above the groans of others who like me were unable to speak their desires.
It must have been some hours before the nun with the square jaws finally came to fetch me.
“You don’t look bad as some. You look rather well,” she repeated.
Leaving Yves behind, I was taken past a line of people with burns that had destroyed most of their skin, men and women charred into awkward poses, arms and legs frozen in mid-air, like tree trunks long separated from their branches.
Behind the wooden screen, one doctor was seeing to many people lying on a row of jointed tables. Next to me was a woman with her leg dangling by a fragile bend of her right knee. The woman bounced her head up and down as she mumbled something to herself, a plea to keep her whole leg, a supplication to the doctor not to make her incomplete, to allow her to go into the next world the same way she had come into this one.
Another doctor came in with a small saw. The woman kept her eyes on the poles and ropes that formed the tent’s frame and the tiny canvas windows with mosquito webbing above her head.
I saw my doctor’s eyes peeking over the top of his soiled white mask. There was an urgency to everything he did. He stole glances at the other woman as he tore open my tattered dress. One hand turned my face away from the woman’s operation, and the other hand raised my legs as he inspected my stomach for cuts. His eyes stood frozen for a single moment as the woman had her leg disjoined, as she gyrated in shock, making the other doctor’s tasks difficult, as the blood shot from what was left of her thigh, a drop landing on my eyelids, as the other doctor stopped to announce, “She’s not going to live,” and as I closed my eyes against her blood, thinking this would be the last time I would see someone dying, so sure was I that when the doctor said, “She’s not going to live,” he was also talking about me.
When I came to, I was in a large room with wooden walls and a tin roof like the face of a dirty mirror. The midday heat burned through the ceiling, as if trying to set us all on fire. People fanned themselves for relief and to frighten the flies and ants away from their wounds.
I was lying on a thin blanket, next to a splintered post that held up most of the ceiling. Above me were two shutters; between them a breeze streamed in from outside.
My knees were bandaged, and so was my head. The house uniform was gone. I was wearing a different dress from the one I’d arrived in, a frock in faded denim made for a woman with a much longer and wider body than mine.
To distract myself, I pushed my hands in and out of the empty pockets. A whiff of wet pine breezed past my nose. I heard the moan of a man trying not to scream, saw Odette’s dying face, and drifted back to sleep.
In my sleep, I see my mother rising, like the mother spirit of the rivers, above the current that drowned her.
She is wearing a dress of glass, fashioned out of the hardened clarity of the river, and this dress flows like raised dust behind her as she runs towards me and enfolds me in her smoke-light arms. Her face is like mine is now, in fact it is the exact same long, three-different-shades-of-night face, and she is smiling a both-rows-of-teeth revealing smile.
“I was saving my smile for when you needed it,” she says, in a cheerful voice I do not remember, for she had always spoken so briefly and so sternly. “I didn’t want you to think that love was not scarce because it is, that it flowed freely from everywhere, or that it was something you could expect without price from everyone.”
“And what of that time when I was dying and the doll came?” I ask her. “Why did you not love me then?”
“You were never truly dying, my precious imbecile,” she says. “You were unbalanced in the head, as you are now. Your heart was racing and your blood was