The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [73]
The room was full beyond its measure now, with everyone seeking shelter from the mud outside.
I looked for my face in the tin ceiling above me as I waited for Yves to return. With everyone lying face up and with their bodies so close together, I couldn’t tell which face was mine.
The man from the cadaver pit lay on his mat all morning, mumbling his woman’s name. Nounoune, Nounoune. Next to him was a crippled Dominican who could console him only in Spanish.
“Calmate, hombre,” mumbled the Dominican. He was black like the nun who came to re-dress his wounds. He’d been mistaken for one of us and had received a machete blow across the back of his neck for it.
There were many like him in the room, I was told.
31
The sky was smeared with gray—gray like the inside of a broiled fish—when Yves and I finally left the clinic in a camión one afternoon. In that part of the country, the indigo mountains, cactus trees, large egrets and flamingos were great spectacles for the eyes, visions that made the people feel obligated to twist and contort their hurt bodies to peer outside and shiver with gratitude for having survived to see their native land.
Yves and I were pressed into a corner near the back of a crammed row; I knew my knee was pressing into his side, but I could find no room to shift into. Yves had not found Mimi and Sebastien that morning, and for this he was regretful. For this he was silent, watching his own twirling fingers with downcast eyes and grimacing, but not complaining, each time my knee rammed into his side during a sudden stop. Perhaps he thought I hated him and was tormenting him for being there instead of Sebastien; maybe he even thought that he deserved some kind of punishment for not being his friend.
The Cap was still an old new city when we returned to it, a city burnt to the ground many times for its own salvation. These were tales that all the local children knew, for proof was sometimes found buried in their land: a gold coin, a silver saucer, which the ground would vomit up when it rained, like the bones of those laid to rest without caskets in shallow ground. The dream was to find a ja, a chest full of gold that a French plantation owner had buried along with the slaves he had killed and interred next to it so the slaves’ souls could be the guardians of the treasure.
To the French generals who returned in fleets to reclaim these treasures and the souls of their slaves, Henry I had said, “I will not surrender the Cap until it’s in ashes. And even then I will continue to fight on these ashes.” He had given the signal to start the fires by torching his own house first.
The houses that were now built along the Place Toussaint Louverture—under a statue of Toussaint, where the camión left us—the houses of the Cap were now less grand, two stories at best, with wooden railings, double doors, and galleries on top. Not like the old vast plantations that were meant to last for centuries.
As soon as we descended from the camión, Yves parted from all the others. I followed him, looking up and searching the sky.
The giant citadel, Henry I’s treasure, was leaning down towards the city from inside a wreath of sun-filled clouds. I wondered if Yves thought about such things. Or if he even noticed what was inside the shops as we ventured along the cleanly paved streets among small groups of men and women ambling past the shoe and fabric shops on the Rue du Quai. I was trailing far behind him with my face to the skies, trying to ignore the throbbing in my knees. The small bones of my bare feet were grating each other raw. Every movement required a pause, a thought to what I was doing, where my legs were going as opposed to where they were supposed to be.
Some of the merchants and shopkeepers and their workers moaned as we moved among them. They recognized us without knowing us. We were those people, the nearly dead, the ones who had escaped from the other side of the river.
I dragged my feet along, feeling now and