The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [83]
“I have already gone and they looked in their books. Their names are not there. There are good days now waiting for me in the fields. This means we will start to have money. You can buy cloth and thread, sew for people, and make money on your own.”
At that moment the future seemed a lot more frightening than the past. Perhaps working the earth, making beans sprout out of dry hard seeds and dust, could make him believe that he had forgotten. But I couldn’t trust time or money to make me forget.
Sometimes I conjured up the group from the border clinic, especially Nounoune’s man, who had woken up in the cadaver pit, and the woman with the large appetite and the rope burns on her neck. I imagined them going forward in their lives, cultivating their gardens, taking their animals to the stream, skipping out of the road to avoid speeding trucks, calling their children in for an evening wash, making love to the people they’d been reunited with.
I wanted to bring them out of my visions into my life, to tell them how glad I was that they had been able to walk into the future, but most important to ask them how it was that they could be so strong, what their secret was, how they could wash their lives clean, if only for brief moments, from the past.
“How did you keep on with the planting, even when nothing was growing?” I asked Yves.
I could hear him breathing loudly, tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to find the right phrasing for his answer. “Empty houses and empty fields make me sad,” he said. “They are both too calm, like the dead season.”
He pushed his body down, farther into the mattress, as though our speaking together had made him feel like he was more entitled to do so.
After a long silence, he added, “The night when Joel was hit by the automobile, it was almost me who died.”
“I think Sebastien felt like this, too,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “Joel, Sebastien, and me, we were walking on the road together. Joel was in the middle, and Sebastien and me, we were on either side of him. I was on the side closest to the road. We saw the light and heard the automobile in the same instant. By the time we turned around, it was almost on my neck. Joel pushed me aside, so he had no time to run himself. He was struck and thrown into the ravine.”
I listened for signs that Man Rapadou was in a deep sleep in the next room, her loud snoring and occasional shifts on the bed.
“Then the automobile stopped and the people came out,” he said. “I didn’t see Sebastien. I didn’t know where he was. I thought he was hit, too. I ran off to hide behind a tree in the dark. The old man wanted to stay and look for us, but the other one, the son-in-law, was in a great haste.”
I wanted to tell him that he was right to run, brave even, that perhaps it was Joel’s day to die, that there might have even been a worse death waiting for Joel in the slaughter. I wanted to say most of those things that never comfort the person hearing them, but only the one saying them.
“It could have been me too at the church with Mimi and Sebastien if I hadn’t gone to sell the wood.” He continued. “Yes, I saw them put Sebastien and Mimi and all the others on a truck. I saw it all from the road. They made them stand in groups of six and then forced them to climb. The priests asked to stay with the people, but they took the priests separately, and then they took the doctor and the people together. If he wanted to be a Haitian, they told Doctor Javier, they would treat him like a Haitian. I saw Mimi climb when her turn came. Sebastien was in line behind her. Her knees went weak when she was climbing, and she almost fell. The doctor offered his hand to her, and Sebastien supported her from the rear. I saw all this from the road where I was hiding. I wanted to do for them what Joël had done for me, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Even in the river, with Wilner, I couldn’t. The thought came to me that I should swim across the river again, collect his body to be buried on this side. All the soldiers. All the guns. I couldn’t. I have not been able to do