The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [81]
She held her head between her hands as though it were an unfamiliar thing, a load now too heavy for her. Reclining, she clutched the pillow under her head.
“I named him Sebastien,” she said, “because I knew it would be wise if a man could have two deaths. The first one comes quick enough, so it’s good to have another one in reserve.”
I moved towards her and adjusted the pillow beneath her head. I pressed my palm down on her forehead as she looked up, staring directly into my eyes. I could tell that she trusted something about me, even though she herself might not have known what it was.
“A young man came here to see me some days past.” She reached up and pressed down hard on my hand as it was resting on her forehead. “He came here to see me on his way to Port-au-Prince. He said he saw my children killed, in a courtyard, between two government edifices there, in a place he called Santiago. He said he saw them herd my children with a group, make them lie face down on the ground, and shoot them with rifles.”
I felt my fingers stick to her forehead as she pressed down harder on my hand. Her body was shaking, but she was not crying.
“In my place, would you believe this?” she asked.
“No, I would not believe this,” I said. But in my heart I kept thinking, how could I not? Wouldn’t Sebastien have come home already if he was still alive?
“You knew my Micheline. You knew my Sebastien. Do you believe it for yourself?” she insisted.
“No, I do not believe it for myself,” I said.
But I did. I believed it because of what I had seen, in Dajabón, because of what I had heard of La Romana, because of what the people said in the clinic that day about those who’d died in Santiago.
“Leave me, please,” she said, releasing my hand.
“I wish to stay,” I said.
“Leave me.”
As I was going, she stopped me in the doorway and asked, “Did you ever see my children wearing these bracelets I made for them?”
“They were never without them,” I said.
“This is what they say, the people who come here to bring the word to me. It is not just one traveler, but many. They say that my children died with my bracelets on their wrists.”
Pushing her hand inside her pocket, she pressed the beads against the side of her thigh.
“Those who die young, they are cheated,” she said. “Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they’re cheated because they don’t know it’s coming. They don’t have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young, even when you break them, you don’t believe you have them. But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no?”
I nodded yes. Mostly because I knew she wanted me to.
“I wish people would stop coming to tell me they saw my children die,” she said. “I wish I had my hopes that they were living someplace, even if they never did come back to see me again.”
“Maybe those who came with the word, maybe they are mistaken.”
“They are always strangers, the people who come,” she said. “They do not know me. Before they died, either alone or together, my son and daughter told them to come here and tell me about their fates.”
She pushed her hands into her pocket and pressed them down on the beads.
“Leave me now,” she said. “I’m going to dream up my children.”
I strolled like a ghost through the waking life of the Cap, wondering whenever I saw people with deformities