The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [85]
“Better you go now,” the girl said.
So I went to the Cap’s cathedral, where a late afternoon Mass was being held. A group of consecrants lined up to accept the Eucharist at the feet of a giant crucifix that was bleeding crimson paint for blood.
I stood in the back near a slanted wall of votive candles and watched the whole assembly march to the altar and then back up again, crossing themselves and bowing to the crucifix one last time before they turned their backs to it.
A woman slipped in next to me with her hands outstretched towards the candles and a transparent window of La Vierge, whose dress was made of sun sieved through blue glass.
“No communion for you?” she asked, looking away from the Virgin’s downcast eyes.
“No communion,” I said.
“No confession?”
“No confession.”
“Even as you say one simple word,” she said, with an open-mouthed smile, “I know the sound of your talk. Did you just return?”
“Some time ago,” I said.
“Me too. Some time ago,” she said. “I used to have a little trade of my own, selling things there, but now I work for the priests here, cleaning the church, and cooking for them.”
I looked her over for a mark, a scar, some damage that I could see. She was looking at my legs, wondering perhaps if that was the only way in which I’d been hurt.
“Where did you live there?” she asked.
“Alegría,” I said.
“Never went there,” she said.
“Where did you live?” I asked her.
“Higüey,” she said. “Was it cane country where you were?”
“Small cane, small mills.”
“The place where you lived, is Alegría what it was called officially or did our people christen it this way?”
“I’ve always heard it called this,” I said.
“People I was with, they’d christen places. And the name they gave these places nobody outside knew. Was there much joy where you were, that they’d call it Alegría?”
For as long as I could remember, people had always called the cluster of rich homes and mountains, streams, and cane fields that surrounded Señora Valencia’s house, Alegría.
“Maybe the people who called it this were jesting,” I said.
She let out a laugh too noisy for any sacred place.
“You here to talk to the priests about the slaughter?” she asked. “Father Emil, he’s the one who listens to the stories.”
She pointed out Father Emil. He was the shorter and fatter of the two priests standing at the altar. The other one was older, French, and white, with hair like a mare’s forelock falling into his eyes.
“You will have to wait some,” she said, “until after the Mass and all the alms are given for the day.”
After the Mass, the priests went out on the steps in front of the cathedral and distributed bread to the poor waiting outside. The woman ran to a back room and came out with two rolls of bread. She placed them in my hand without a word so I would not be shamed by accepting them.
As the fathers walked past us on the way back inside, she grabbed Father Emil’s cassock and said, “Father, this one here has been waiting a long time to see you.”
Father Emil looked down at the bread in my hand and gave me a nod of pity. The woman pressed her hands against my back and shoved me towards him.
I followed him to a room behind the altar. The room had a wide desk, two cane-back chairs, a small cross on the wall, and a glass case full of books for the school the priests ran behind the church.
“You’ve come to talk about the slaughter?” he asked, offering me one of the fragile cane-back chairs. He slipped behind the desk and sat down. “To all those who tell us of lost relations, we can offer nothing, save for our prayers and perhaps a piece of bread. So we have stopped letting them tell us these terrible stories. It was taking all our time, and there is so much other work to be done.”
“Father, I have not come to tell you a tale,” I said. “And I’ve already received a piece of bread.