The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [70]
“I will never be a whole woman,” I say, “for the absence of your face.”
“Your mother was never as far from you as you supposed,” she says. “You were like my shadow. Always fled when I came to you and only followed when I left you alone. You will be well again, ma belle, Amabelle. I know this to be true. And how can you have ever doubted my love? You, my eternity.”
I couldn’t remember how long I had been asleep. But when I woke up this time, the nuns came through the room and handed out plates of corn mush with black bean sauce and a slice of avocado. I refused by shaking my head, but they left the plate near me anyway.
As they ate, people gathered in a group to talk. Taking turns, they exchanged tales quickly, the haste in their voices sometimes blurring the words, for greater than their desire to be heard was the hunger to tell. One could hear it in the fervor of the declarations, the obscenities shouted when something could not be remembered fast enough, when a stutter allowed another speaker to race into his own account without the stutterer having completed his.
“It was Monday, the last two days in September,” a man began, as though giving an account to a justice of the peace. “I went to the fields in the early morning. When I came home at noontime, the Guardia was in my house. I’d heard talk, rumors of all these happenings at night. I took precautions not to lag outside. But this was the daytime. The soldiers came, picked out some chickens in my yard, and told me I was a thief. I tell you many a man was taken falsely as a thief.”
Another group of voices argued for the right to speak next, as if their owners had been biting their tongues while this last man was speaking.
“Only a few paces from me,” shouted a woman, “they had them tied in ropes and Don Jose, who has known me my whole life, went at them with his machete, first my son, then my father, then my sister.”
My skin felt prickly, as if my blood had been put in a pot to boil and then poured back into me. Or maybe the tin roof was melting and streaming down on me in a light silver rain.
A man who had taken a bullet in the stomach told how he had run for half a day, not realizing he’d been shot. He thought a bullet, especially one from a rifle like the Krag, would hurt worse. He was lucky to have been shot from a distance, he said. At first it felt like an insect sting, a bee sting, not even a wasp bite, which can be deadly to some people.
Another man spoke of how he was hiding behind a tree when a group of soldiers stormed a horse farm. They were so angry not to have found any Haitians there that they shot all the horses.
“I was there in Santiago,” a voice shouted from the other side of the room, “when they shut seven hundred souls into a courtyard behind two government houses. They made them lie facedown in the red dirt and shot them in the back of the head with rifles.”
In the heat’s haze, the ceiling seemed to split in two, the pieces rising on silver wings to the sky, except there was no sky above, just a daytime darkness where a sun should have been.
“I was there,” echoed a young woman with three rings of rope burns carved into her neck, “when they forced more than two hundred off the pier in Monte Cristi.”
I felt my breath racing as if everything inside me was boiling, even though my body was still. Perhaps I had a fever, like my childhood fevers, but if I did have a fever, would the back of my hot hand know to discern its own heat from that of my forehead?
The next man who spoke had been struck with a machete on the shoulder and left for dead. When he awoke the next morning, he found himself in a pit surrounded by corpses.
“I felt like my woman on our first night together,” he said. “She woke up in the middle of the night and started screaming. I said to her, ‘Am I so ugly that you should scream so loud the first night you are with me?’ She looked at me hard and said this was her