The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [84]
I reached over and placed my hand on his sweaty trembling leg, to keep him quiet, to keep him still. My fingers crept up his thighs with his hands guiding mine. I felt for his face in the dark and touched his large Adam’s apple, which bobbed up and down as though about to slide out of his mouth.
He turned over on his side and slipped my nightdress off my shoulders. For a while we both lay on our backs staring at the darkness above us. What now? What then? Who else did we know to turn to?
“It could have been me too at the church with Mimi and Sebastien,” I said. “If I hadn’t noticed two bloody spots on the back of the señora’s dress and stayed a while longer with her. And maybe Odette died in the river because I pressed down on her nose too hard, though this was not my intention.”
“Odette died when Wilner died,” he said. “They killed her when they killed him.”
And for this I was grateful. More grateful than he knew.
His body immediately leaped up to meet mine when I climbed on top of him. I was probably lighter than he expected, bonier and smaller framed than he’d thought. For a while I felt as though he was carrying me, the way Señora Valencia had carried her son and daughter in her womb, the way Kongo might have carried his son Joël, after he’d died, the way first he and then the stranger had carried Odette. Then it was me carrying him. After a while it was as though we were both afloat at the same time, joined in a way that we could never be speaking together, or even crying together.
For several months, as I’d imagined Sebastien’s return, I’d wondered whether my flesh could feel anything but pain. Perhaps Yves had wondered the same about his own.
His breathing was loud and fast like the vapor raising the lid off a steaming pot. Then his body froze abruptly and became heavier and I thought that his heart had stopped, that he had died right there on top of me. He ground his teeth and mumbled to himself, trying to push out everything that wanted to remain safely hidden in him. In the end, all he let out was a flash flood of tears, tears that rolled down my forehead, stung my eyes, made me sneeze when they slipped into my nostrils, and tasted like my own when they fell on my tongue.
As he rolled back on his side of the bed, I felt an even larger void in the aching pit of my stomach. I put on my nightdress and slipped under the sheets. He stepped off the bed, put on his pants, and went outside, leaving the door half open. Sitting under the traveler’s tree, he examined the sky and opened a new pack of La Nationale cigarettes.
In the moonlight, I could almost see the silhouette of bones pushing themselves out in his back. After smoking a few of the cigarettes, he threw the rest of the pack against the side of the house and came back inside. When he climbed onto the bed, I pretended to be asleep—or even dead.
35
The next afternoon, when I went back to Man Denise’s house, the doors were bolted shut and one of the girls who had been looking after her told me that Man Denise had buried some coffee beads in the yard and then returned to her people in Port-au-Prince.
“Do you know where in Port-au-Prince her people live?” I asked.
She shook her head no, turned her back to me, and looked towards the lime-colored hills on the other side of the house.
“Maybe she was tired of being told the same thing, in so many ways,” the girl said. “Might be she went someplace where only her children would find her if they come back.”
She was mending a blouse that didn’t need mending at all, something she was making smaller to fit her own body. I offered to fix the blouse for her, but she would not let it out of her hands. So I watched as she stitched her uneven seams and sewed it too narrow for her shape.
“Better you go,” she said. “She is never coming back to this house. Her people will travel from Port-au-Prince to sell the house, is what she said. But she herself will never set her foot here