The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [79]
At dusk, the justice of the peace did not come out to speak to the crowd. The head sergeant came out instead and announced that there would be no more testimonials taken. All the money had already been distributed. The justice of the peace had already gone away when no one was looking, knowing we would be enraged if we saw him depart.
It took some time for people to take in what this meant. Their disappointment grew as the word spread from mouth to mouth and was reinterpreted by one person for the next. There were moans and screams of protests, convulsions and faintings as rocks began to fly.
The people at the front of the crowd charged at the entrance. Trained by Yanki troops who were used to rebellious uprisings, the soldiers shot several rounds of bullets in the air.
A few of the soldiers were caught and passed from hand to hand as blows were struck, but the crowd was not really interested in them. The group charged the station looking for someone to write their names in a book, and take their story to President Vincent. They wanted a civilian face to concede that what they had witnessed and lived through did truly happen. When they did not find such a person inside, they freed the ten male prisoners who were being held in the inner rooms and walked away with a few items the soldiers had left behind: seven chairs, six canteens, two water jugs, three handkerchiefs, fourteen coiled cowhide whips, seventeen cato’-nine-tails, two sets of keys to the cells, and a giant official photograph of President Vincent.
He was a sophisticated-looking man, President Stenio Vincent, with small spectacles worn very close to his eyes. He had a pair of beautifully large ears framing his moon face, a tiny dot of a mustache over pinched pensive lips, a poet’s lips, it was said. In the photograph, he wore a gentleman’s collar with a bow tie, the end of which touched the shiny medal of the Grand Cross of the Juan Pablo Duarte Order of Merit, given to him by the Generalissimo as a symbol of eternal friendship between our two peoples. The image of the Grand Cross caught the flames first when kerosene was brought and the photo, then the police post, was set on fire, though only the wooden doors and the thin coat of paint on the building burned, for the concrete walls of the station did not even scorch.
We dodged the rocks and torches and forced our way out of the crowd. Yves took Man Denise back to her house. Her neighbors who had heard about the melee came to console her. Soon her house was filled with her friends, the girls who ran errands for her, and some traveling vendors who paid to use her empty rooms as a night stop on their long journeys.
The vendors set up mats and sheets in the two bare rooms, places Mimi and Sebastien must once have used. Man Denise had moved all their things into her own room to make it less empty, and also so that the vendors would not walk away with them, one of the errand girls explained.
In the back of the house was Man Demse’s room, containing a ring of old sealed-off oil drums filled with her own things as well as Mimi and Sebastien’s effects.
The vendors helped her climb on top of a pile of clothes on her bed. They wanted her to take off her tan dress and change into her nightdress, but she refused.
“Forgive me,” she said, excusing herself for the pile of clothes and the disorderliness of the oil drums in her room. “What a difficult day this has been.”
The neighbors offered her many cups of tea. She raised herself to take a sip from each, then buried her head in the pillow.
“Leave me,” she said, “please.”
They left her, but we could