The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [74]
“Come, come,” Yves called as we walked past the trellised doors of the old Hotel New York, and then past a sidewalk where someone was demonstrating the use of a phonograph and a sewing machine from a shop on La Rue A. Yves seemed to be searching for some place to enter while walking in circles as if he was lost and didn’t even know it.
On La Rue B, he stood in the middle of an open tourist market, scratching the scabs on his unshaven head as he waited for me to catch up. When I reached him, he asked me to stand there, holding on to the front post of a pharmacy as he ran inside and bought a pack of La Nationale cigarettes. He smoked nearly the whole pack by the time we reached the cathedral.
In front of the cathedral, a woman moved so close to me that I could smell the chewing tobacco on her breath, the sweat that dried and then poured out again from her forehead, and the bitter thick-skinned oranges piled in a basket standing by itself on her head. Without looking where her hand was going, she reached up and pulled an orange from the basket and gave it to me.
“You warm this orange on an open fire,” she said, “Let it burn until the skin turns black.”
“I thank you,” I said.
“I am not finished,” she said. “When the skin turns all black, you know it’s ready. Then you cut it open while the juice is still hot, slap the insides against your flesh, then you take a warm bath and wash the orange flesh away. All your cuts will heal. Your bone aching will stop.”
I grasped the orange tightly so it would not fall. She walked behind me, then gave another orange and the same commands to someone else.
Yves was now keeping pace beside me. A few people recognized him as we walked down a gravel road, away from the commercial area. A man with a pile of embroidered tourist shirts on his arm followed us and announced to the people living in the small crowded limestone houses along the gravel road, “It’s Man Rapadou’s boy, Yves. He’s returned from over there.”
The man poked his hand out from underneath the heap of shirts he was carrying and gave Yves a joyous handshake.
“They didn’t take you, eh,” he said. “They couldn’t take you. No more than the Yankis could take me.”
The man with the tourist shirts talked endlessly about events that had taken place since Yves had left, how the Yankis had gone back to their country three years before, how Yves’ mother was well, though always heart-crushed, anxious for him.
The house was one of many constructed from mismatched pieces of timber and rusting tin. Yves leaped towards a low step that led to his mother’s front door. A large woman was standing on the doorstep, struggling to push her arms through the short sleeves of her rainbow-striped blouse. Her fingers were snarled in the fabric and she tore at it fiercely to free herself. Her chest was bare, the skin of her breasts the color of molasses. She was about to step into the road without the blouse when Yves jumped in front of her. He guided her clenched fists through the sleeves and calmly buttoned the blouse for her. She watched as he did this and rocked herself all the while, saying his name. When he was done, she grabbed his head and pressed it against her neck, then wept into the scabs on his scalp.
The woman did not see me standing there on the edge of a growing crowd of curious onlookers. I spun the orange in my hand and tried not to squeeze it too hard from anxiety.
“Man Rapadou, you’re so happy to see your son, no?” said the man with the pile of tourist shirts in his arms.
Yves walked over, took my hand, and brought me out of the crowd.
“You have a woman. This is your woman?” his mother asked.
“Don’t be so rash, Man Rapadou,” Yves said.
The mother opened her arms and nodded her head, beckoning to me. I wasn’t certain how to respond, so I stood there next to Yves, pretending I didn’t understand what she’d said. She yanked my hand