The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [76]
“Who is this woman?” the mother asked Yves. “Where are her people? Are they here or did they all die in the killing over there?”
Yves said nothing. I went out to the yard, found the cooking fire and a basin of water, bathed myself with the bitter orange the way the woman in front of the cathedral had instructed. I could hear some of the courtyard children giggling as they peered at me through the holes in their doorways. In spite of their curiosity, I knew that my body could no longer be a tempting spectacle, nor would I ever be truly young or beautiful, if ever I had been. Now my flesh was simply a map of scars and bruises, a marred testament.
Yves was still with his mother when I came back to bed. They had moved on to talking about other things unfamiliar to me, about old friends who had died or moved to other parts of the country, about his father’s land, which had not been cultivated since Yves left.
Each time I closed my eyes I saw the river and imagined Sebastien and Mimi drowning the way my mother and father and Odette had. To escape these thoughts, I envisioned Henry Fs citadel as I had seen it again that afternoon, its closeness to the sky, its distance from the river. With my childhood visions of being inside of it, protected, I fell asleep.
The next morning, I stumbled out of bed, ashamed to have slept so soundly and so late. The mother was sitting under the traveler’s tree outside, pouring steaming hot water over the powdered grains in her coffee pouch.
“Where’s Yves?” I asked. I didn’t even know if he had come and lain in the bed with me the night before.
“He’s on his father’s land,” the mother said. “He comes out of bed this morning and says he wants to go and plant some beans in his father’s fields.”
I didn’t know what Yves had told her about me. She got up, walked towards me, clasped my face between her wet hands, and planted a kiss on my forehead.
“You call me Man Rapadou,” she said. “I know your story.”
Which story of mine did she know? Which story was she told?
“Everything you knew before this slaughter is lost,” she said. Perhaps she was encouraging me to embrace her son and forsake Sebastien, even my memories of him, those images of him that would float through my head repeatedly, like brief glimpses of the same dream.
Yves stayed in the fields until nightfall. When he came home his hands were coated with mud and he smelled like the earth had been turned inside out over him.
“I planted a field of green beans,” he announced to his mother.
“I told you. It is not the season,” she said.
“We’ll see,” he said.
“When will you pay a visit to Man Denise?” his mother asked.
He did not answer.
“It is only respectful that you go and visit with her, since you and her son left here together,” she said.
Yves walked out to the courtyard to wash himself. I went back to our room and lay down on the bed, hoping to fall asleep before he returned.
When he came in and called my name, I did not answer. He lay down and curled himself up on his side of the mattress. He did not speak in his sleep that night. Or any other night after that.
While Yves was in the fields the next day and his mother was visiting a friend, I asked some of his relations and found out where Man Denise, Sebastien and Mimi’s mother, lived. I made the promise of a mint confection to a boy who took me there.
The house was not too far from Yves’ but was in a less populated area, with bigger residences and more trees.
I walked back and forth around the property. There was no activity, except for a girl rushing in and out of the yard, carrying jugs of water on her head.
“The woman who lives there, she will not come outside,” the boy with me said. “Do you want to go inside and speak with her?