The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [82]
I followed the road from Man Denise’s house out to the quay, where ships entered the harbor with horns blaring while others were being unloaded as they wobbled against the piers. The sacks of rice, beans, and sugar were being distributed among the merchants as a line of bare-chested young men waited with wheelbarrows to carry the stacks off for them. These men, with more than the weight of their bodies in sugar on their heads, shouted in an uneven chorus of rage in order to be allowed to pass through the streets.
34
When I went back to Yves’ house, he had already left for the fields. I sat in the yard with my arms around the traveler’s tree, trying not to pound my head against it.
Man Rapadou came out to the courtyard in her nightdress, smiling. She carried a low chair from her room and sat down next to me.
“You don’t need the justice of the peace,” she said. “You don’t need a confessor. I, Man Rapadou, I know your tale.” She pressed her face close to mine and whispered so the others in the courtyard couldn’t hear. “I asked my son why there is no love between you and him, and he told me about Sebastien.”
As I watched her flawless smile grow wider on her face—which should have been a lot sadder than it was—I stroked the traveler’s tree, not sure what else to do with my hands. I reached up and touched the frilled yellow-green palmetto branches; the narrow stems had woven themselves together like the inside of an enormous wicker basket. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I wanted to scream, but summoning the will to do it already made me feel weak.
“When my son left here, I planted this traveler’s tree, and now look how it’s grown,” Man Rapadou said. “Yves told me you can make dresses and help give birth to children. Since I’m not to have children anymore, maybe you can make me a dress.”
Kindness prevailed on Man Rapadou to let me spend the rest of the day inside, in her son’s bed, by myself. She did not call me to eat, even when the mid-afternoon meal was ready. Instead, she whispered from outside the door that she was saving a plate of food for me to have whenever my stomach felt at ample ease.
As I lay in bed with my arms and legs coiled around myself, I ached inside in places I could neither name nor touch. I could not accept that I’d never see Sebastien again, even though I knew it was possible, just as I would never see my mother and father again, no matter how many times I called them forth both with my own loud voice and the timid one inside my head. When it came to my parents, the older I became, the more they were fading from me, until all I could see were the last few moments spent with them by the river. The rest blended together like the ingredients in a too-long-simmered stew: reveries and dreams, wishes, fantasies. Is that what it would also come to with Sebastien?
I feigned sleep when Yves came to bed that night, but unlike the other times he was not convinced by my frozen pose.
“My beans have sprouted,” he announced. “Looks like I’ll see a harvest.”
I did not want to move. Perhaps he didn’t know about Mimi and Sebastien, and I wasn’t certain how to tell him.
“I hear,” he said, “that the priests at the cathedral listen and mark down testimonials of the slaughter.” This was his gift to me, like the gift the earth had given him in pushing his beans back up in a different form.
“They don’t promise you money.” His voice staggered between high and low, as though he were beginning to think that I might really be asleep. “They’re collecting tales for newspapers and radio men. The Generalissimo has found ways to buy and sell the ones here. Even this region has been corrupted with his money.”
I turned on my back, opened my eyes, and tried to find the silvery lines of rusting tin on the ceiling.
“Will you go yourself to see these priests?” I asked.
“I know what will happen,” he said. “You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours.”
“Will you