The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [78]
There was only some vague order to the way people were allowed inside. The most mangled victims, the ones whose wounds had still not healed, were let in as soon as they arrived. Pregnant women entered quickly as well as those who could find some money to bribe the soldiers.
To pass the time waiting, I thought of many ways to shorten my tale. Perhaps Yves and I would go in together and make both our stories one. That way we would give someone else a chance to be heard.
The justice of the peace came to the entrance at sundown. He was plainly dressed in a light green house shirt and pants with a small watch on a gold chain dangling from his pants’ side pocket. In one hand was a large leather covered notebook and in the other a shiny black case. His presence caused a stir in the crowd. The soldiers raised their rifles for silence so he could speak.
“I can do no more today,” he said.
“Non,” moaned the crowd.
“And if I say one more, each of you will want to be that one,” he said.
“Non,” the crowd disagreed.
“I will come tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow, listen faster,” someone recommended.
The soldiers surrounded the justice of the peace as he went back inside, then we saw his automobile speeding away from the protected yard behind the station.
People rushed after him, but quickly gave up the chase, for many of them could not run far because of some injury or exhaustion from being in the sun all day.
The last person who’d had an audience with him was a woman, thirty or thirty-five years old. She was dressed all in white—as though she were going off to a religious ceremony—and had a sun-bleached straw hat tied with a green ribbon under her chin.
“What did they do for you in there?” Yves yelled out to her. Others in the crowd joined in, “Did they give you money?”
She removed her hat and surveyed the faces staring up at her.
“No, he did not give me money,” she said, watching the soldiers for approval. “You see the book he had with him?” She glanced at the guards once more, then turned her face back to the crowd. “He writes your name in the book and he says he will take your story to President Stenio Vincent so you can get your money.” She kept her eyes on the crowd, no longer watching the soldiers for approval. “Then he lets you talk and lets you cry and he asks you if you have papers to show that all these people died.”
The soldiers from the Police Nationale, wearing the same khaki uniforms as the Dominican soldiers—a common inheritance from their training during the Yanki invasion of the whole island—approached the woman from behind and asked her to move away from the entrance. The crowd protested with hisses. Two of the soldiers took her by the arms and carried her down the station steps. She tried to twist out of their hands. Finally someone in the crowd pulled her from them for her own safety.
“If you make trouble,” the sergeant—the station head—announced to the crowd, “you will not be allowed to return tomorrow.”
The crowd dispersed slowly, perhaps wondering if there was any use in coming back the following day.
Yves and I went back there for the next fifteen days. New faces came and went. Some stopped coming. Some never left their places in front of the station, even when it rained.
The justice of the peace came there every day, except Sundays.
On the sixteenth day, we were waiting without hope in the back of the crowd when we saw her coming.
I knew immediately who she was when Yves leaped from his place and headed for her.
“Man Denise, you came,” he said.
“I did come, yes,” she said in a voice sharp and abrupt like her daughter Minn’s. “I want to stand here with all of you.”
She looked too young to be both Mimi and Sebastien’s mother. She was long-legged and slender, her face the color of wet terra-cotta. She wore a long tan dress that swept the floor as she walked.