The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [72]
“Do you have a place to go to now?” she asked.
I shook my head no.
“Can you speak?” she asked.
No.
She motioned for me to open my mouth. I felt my face splitting apart as I did.
“What of the man who came, washed, and dressed you as you suffered through the worst of your fever?”
“Who?” I raised my eyebrows to ask.
“It must be someone you know.”
I felt the large veins in my neck rise, the air catching in large bubbles in my throat. His name is Sebastien Onius.
“He said his name was Yves,” she remembered.
Yves came to see me what must have been a few days later. I wanted to thank him for caring for me during my fever. But how?
He looked better now except for shreds of gauze taped in odd shapes on different sections of his head. His hair had grown in tufts around the gauze. He saw me staring at the tufts and said, “I can’t yet shave my head.”
I wanted to tell him that he looked well. He didn’t need to have his head shaved. He seemed to be healing.
“I sleep outside with the moon,” he said. “It’s good unless it rains.”
Good. Good. I nodded.
“I’ve been looking every place I can for Sebastien and Mimi.” I could tell from the suddenly much graver expression on his face that he thought I was looking too hopeful. “The priests and the bishop try to question people and take their names. I have asked them about Sebastien and Mimi.”
And now? I raised my shoulders to ask. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. Maybe they passed through another border post. Maybe they were well enough to go directly to their mother’s house.”
In spite of my own wishes, I felt myself sliding back towards sleep. It was either cry or sleep. That’s all my body seemed to be able to do.
His visits were like one conversation carried out over many days. Some of them I remembered and others I didn’t.
“I’m going back to my land tomorrow,” he said when he came another time. A little more hair had grown around his bandages, which were smaller now. “Tell me with a nod if you would like to come with me.”
I tried to say yes, I would go with him. I would go with him wherever his home was, try to forget everything that had taken place on the journey, and wait for Mimi and Sebastien to return.
“Good,” he said. “We will let you sleep tonight, and I will come for you tomorrow.”
It rained all that night, and most of the people who were sleeping outside came running inside. The shutters above me were opened, letting a steady drizzle into the room. Someone finally woke up to close them, but by then I was drenched.
Yves made his way towards me and sat in the dark, with his back against a wooden beam nearby.
“I will take you to Sebastien’s house,” he said, “where you can sit with him and Mimi and his mother and talk about all this like a bad dream.”
“How long now since we have been here?” My throat felt like it was tearing from the effort of trying to speak.
“Six days,” he said.
“What did I do when I had the fever?” I asked.
“Sleep and wake, again and again,” he said. “But mostly sleep.”
“And you have been caring for me?”
He nodded.
“With the rain, the river will overflow,” I said. “And if Mimi and Sebastien are crossing, it will not be good.”
“They say the killing has stopped,” he said.
“There is a dream I have often,” I said, “of my parents in the river, in the rain.”
“Sebastien told me more than once about it,” he said.
Someone shouted from the other side of the room. It was the man who had woken up in the cadaver pit. He said he heard his woman calling him from the river, and he wanted to go save her.
While Yves and a few other men restrained him, the nuns awoke from their sleep and forced him to swallow a few spoonfuls of a syrup that along with his grief made him suckle his thumb and cradle his body like an infant for the rest of the night.
The next morning, Yves went along with the priests, the doctors, and the others whose work it was to collect corpses along the riverbank. The work took the whole morning, even though the nuns