The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [77]
“No,” I said. What would be the use? She hadn’t known me when her children were still hers alone, safe in her house.
Soon after that, my body began to feel better, even though I had a constant ringing in my ears and one knee would not bend all the time. Still, I walked by Man Demse’s house every day to see if anything would change. Whenever there was more noise than usual on the roads, whenever people gathered in a group, I rushed out to see if it was the homecoming that would bring Man Denise out of her house. There were new arrivals all the time, people returning from the other side, people who were settling again in our quarter and in hers.
Thinking of Sebastien’s return made me wish for my hair to grow again—which it had not—for the inside of my ears to stop buzzing, for my knees to bend without pain, for my jaws to realign evenly and form a smile that did not make me look like a feeding mule.
At night, lying next to Yves, I grew more and more frightened that Sebastien would not recognize me if he ever saw me again.
33
Yves spent all his days planting in his father’s fields, then lingered with his friends and neighbors for late-afternoon talk after his work.
I never saw him but only heard him undress and slip into bed at night when he finally came home.
A few weeks after his first planting, I waited for him to climb onto his side of the mattress and asked him, “Did anything come up from the ground for you?”.
Since we’d come back, we hadn’t spoken of our situation, never even talked of changing it in a way that would make us both more comfortable at night.
“Only grass might come up this quick,” he said. “And not every type of grass even.”
His scornful voice made me think that he was not a fortunate planter, or maybe he didn’t think he was one.
“I would like to go to the fields with you one day,” I said.
“Why so?” he asked.
“I want to see your father’s land.”
“It’s no different than other land,” he said.
I could hear him suddenly sitting up on the bed as if in defense of what had just been said. I reached for his arms in the dark and pressed them down to show him that I truly wanted to be quietly grateful, to cooperate, to make the best out of our burden.
“I hear there are officials of the state, justices of the peace, who listen to those who survived the slaughter and write their stories down,” he said. “The Generalissimo has not said that he caused the killing, but he agreed to give money to affected persons.”
“Why?” I didn’t think he would have the answer, but I wished he did know.
“To erase bad feelings,” he said, as if he were no longer linked to the slaughter.
“And the dead?”
“They pay their families,” he said.
I knew what he was thinking, that perhaps Man Denise should go, in case Sebastien and Mimi were already dead.
I stepped off the bed and crouched down in a corner of the room, as far from him as I could. I felt grateful that it was dark, that neither one of us could see the other’s face.
“I want to meet that justice of the peace myself,” I said.
“I don’t know if you’ll be given the money,” he said. “The authorities might try to keep it all for themselves. They ask you to bring papers. They ask you to bring proof.” But he knew that it was not money, it was information I was hoping for.
The next morning we went to see the justice of the peace. He was posted in a yellow police building that seemed to have been shaped out of one massive mountain rock. Outside was a group of more than a thousand people waiting to be allowed entry. A line of armed soldiers from the Police Nationale stood between them and the narrow entrance to the building.
As the morning went on, the waiting group became larger, so much so that when I pulled myself up and looked behind me, I could not see where the road ended and the faces began.
Yves had not said a word the whole morning. He occasionally ventured off to get water, or to help carry home some elder who had fainted from the heat.
In the afternoon, food vendors arrived and people shared their tales, as if to practice for their real audience with