The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [71]
The group grew impatient with that one. He took too long to arrive at the center of his tale.
“I thought of my woman when I woke up that morning in that pit with all the dead faces around me and all the vultures overhead,” he said.
“Oh, the vultures,” everyone chimed in. They could not get enough, those vultures, covering the daytime sky like a midnight cloud. If you were not walking fast enough, they would try for your eyes, those vultures. It was as if they could sniff the scent of death on you, those vultures.
“It wasn’t always just the vultures,” someone added, “the ‘good birds’ became man-eaters too: the swallows, the warblers, even the tiny hummingbirds, they all wanted the taste of flesh.”
“Waking up among the dead, I started screaming,” the man from the cadaver pit went on. “And then I thought of my woman and our first night together, and in spite of all the corpses, I smiled.”
The people around him smiled, too, at the beauty of such an innocent moment, when a young woman wakes up in her new man’s bed for the first time and forgets how she came to be there. Had there ever been a time when such a thing as being a stranger in someone’s bed could startle a person?
“Where is your woman now?” someone asked.
The man clapped his hands together and shrugged, a gesture of not knowing.
“It would take too much to kill me,” bragged the next speaker. “I’m one of those trees whose roots reach the bottom of the earth. They can cut down my branches, but they will never uproot the tree. The roots are too strong, and there are too many.”
“Who said this?” someone asked. “Wasn’t it General Toussaint Louverture?”
“A smart man,” someone said. “In those times we had respect. When Dessalines, Toussaint, Henry, when those men walked the earth, we were a strong nation. Those men would go to war to defend our blood. In all this, our so-called president says nothing, our Papa Vincent—our poet—he says nothing at all to this affront to the children of Dessalines, the children of Toussaint, the children of Henry; he shouts nothing across this river of our blood.”
A woman was singing, calling on the old dead fathers of our independence. Papa Dessalines, where have you left us? Papa Toussaint, what have you left us to? Papa Henry, have you forsaken us?
“Freedom is a passing thing,” a man said. “Someone can always come and snatch it away.”
They went on to debate the wisdom of having traveled the forested valleys rather than the mountain roads. They wondered what would happen to their relations who had disappeared. Some had traveled in large groups and the nearly dead had to be left behind. They looked back and reordered the moments—second vision, hindsight. What could have been done differently? Whatever became of our national creed, “L’ union fait la force”? Where was our unity? Where was our strength? And how can we not hate ourselves for the people we left behind?
At the same time, they dreamed of the first meals their mothers and sisters, who they had not seen for many years, would cook for them. They dictated step by step what the first domino games and cockfights with their fathers and compadres would be like, the first embraces given to lovers and children.
“It all makes you understand that the flesh is like everything else,” the man who had been in the pit with the cadavers said. “It is no different, the flesh, than fruit or anything that rots. It’s not magic, not holy. It can shrink, burn, and like amber it can melt in fire. It is nothing. We are nothing.”
The woman with the rope burns engraved on her neck asked if she could have my food. I nodded and went back to sleep.
When I woke up again, the nun with the square jaws was tapping her fingers against the itchy wound dressings on my head.
“Do you know how long it has been?” she asked.
I shook my head no.
“Three days,” she said. “You have slept for three days and three nights. You did not look bad as some, but you had such a fever, I was afraid you would die.”
I tried to part my lips and