The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [75]
“Her name is Amabelle,” Yves said. Hearing him say it, listening to the mother repeat it, made me feel welcomed.
“Inside now,” the mother said, waving good-bye to the onlookers. She was wearing one shoe on her foot. The other she had left inside in her haste to run out and greet her son.
We were in the first room of the house. The back room led to a courtyard shared among many families. It reminded me of the compound at Don Carlos’ mill.
Yves went out to greet his relations who lived around the courtyard. They brought a chair out for him to sit in beneath a tree in the middle of the yard, a tall, vibrantly green traveler’s tree with the palmetto branches spread out like the fingers on a hand.
The mother served us a hot cup of salted coffee. The inside of my mouth was scalded as I sipped, but I struggled not to spit it out because the saline taste washed out the taint of parsley and blood that had been on my tongue since the beating at the square.
Yves’ relations from the yard put together and cooked a large meal for him. They fried and stewed all his favorite foods: goat meat and eggplants, watercress in codfish sauce, corn mush, and black beans.
Yves ate everything placed in front of him. Now and again his mother would interrupt his eating to tell a story about how much he had eaten as a boy, not only food and sweets, but also moist dirt from bean plant roots, which he liked to rub against his gums until they bled.
Yves stopped to listen to his mother’s stories as though he too was hearing them for the first time. The mother was telling her tales, I realized, to stop him from eating too quickly, to force him to rest his mouth and stomach.
“Remember a man who was put in prison.” The mother stood in a corner rubbing her large belly. “After nothing but bread and water for thirty days, they let him out of prison and he brought himself home. First thing I do is cook him all the rich food he had dreams about in prison. He ate until he fell over on his plate in the middle of eating. He died eating,” she told the relations with a deep long laugh. “Please, don’t kill my son. A man can die of hunger, but a man can also die over a plate of food.”
Yves put his spoon down and pushed his plate away. His mother chortled, even though no one was cackling along with her. She seemed to be the only one who could laugh out of sadness, a sadness that made the laughter deeper and louder still, like the echo of a scream from the bottom of a well.
The mother stroked her hairy chin with her long thick fingers, still laughing. She reminded me of the old women at the cane mill with their cheeks split in half, the flesh healed because it had to but never sealed in the same way again.
I remembered what my father used to say as he would hurry off with a knapsack of bottles filled with leaves and warm rum, as he raced to a birth or to a death, thinking of ways to encourage or halt the event. “Misery won’t touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.”
The mother looked liked she’d had her own share of misery. The only thing it hadn’t touched was a mouth full of perfect white teeth, curved like the round edges of an enamel cup, none of them her own.
My own mouth was still too bruised for hard foods. A full plate of fried goat meat remained on my lap. Yves’ mother walked over to me and asked, “Some soup for you? It won’t be too hot or too thick.”
She took the full plate from my lap and came back with a small bowl of pumpkin soup. While the others watched, she fed me the soup with a tiny spoon as though I were a sick, bedridden child.
32
That night, the mother moved six cousins out of the second room so Yves could share his old bed with me. The bed was made from four posts mortared to the ground and a wooden platform that held a small mattress filled with old rags.
The room where Yves’ mother slept was separated from ours