The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [87]
Some time later, I woke up and stumbled to my feet. Miraculously, I had not hurt myself. I wiped my face with the back of both hands and walked to a limestone house in the distance, a solitary lodging in a large open field. An old woman sat crouched in the doorway, shelling peas on her lap. Her thumbs dashed in and out of the soft green pods, thrusting out perfectly round green peas into a half filled bowl.
“I’ve come to see Father Romain,” I said.
She pointed down the field to a boxlike clapboard shack with a zinc roof.
The front door was open, but I knocked anyway. A young woman came to the door, wearing a flowered sundress, the top of which barely covered her small flat breasts. She was fanning her face with two long flame tree pods that made a haphazard melody as she waved them back and forth.
“Is Father Romain here?” I asked.
“Who wants him?” She continued to swing the pods, making it hard for me to hear her voice above the clatter.
“They call me Amabelle,” I said. “I knew him in Alegría.”
Swinging the pods even harder, she said, “I do this when I’m not in view of my brother so he knows where I am. It comforts him.”
Stepping out of the doorway, she motioned for me to walk inside.
“Do not be saddened if he does not remember you,” she said. “So many people have come to him asking about their relations, but when he was arrested, he was always kept with the other priest, Father Vargas. He was never with the Haitian prisoners.”
She stopped the rattling and led me through a bare room, then out to the yard, where Father Romain was sitting on a rocker beneath a cluster of mango trees.
“Jacques!” she shouted. “You have a visitor, someone who knew you in Alegría.”
Father Romain was wearing a straw hat that covered most of his face. A thicket of sable hair peeped through the open collar of his long roomy shirt. His hands trembled as he squinted, fumbling to tie a piece of thin orange paper around the skeleton of a small kite. When his jaws quivered, he reached up and stroked his cheek to control the twitching.
“Who has come?” he muttered. Spittle was glistening from either side of his mouth. Though still young, he had the look of those who no longer recognized anything, people for whom life was blending into one large shadow, their vision clouding over as they surrendered their sight to very old age.
The sister left the yard, went into the room, and brought out another set of chairs. Father Romain’s eyes traveled up and down, from the trunk of the mango trees and then back to his sister, before he saw me.
“Speak loudly and tell him what you must tell him,” she said. “His mind wanders.”
“Father, my name is Amabelle Désir,” I said.
“Yes, Amabelle Désir.” His voice was a distant mumble as he held the kite up to his face.
“Father, do you recognize me?”
He shook his head from side to side.
“You don’t remember me?”
“No,” he said.
“Father, I need to know if perhaps you encountered Mimi and Sebastien Onius before or after you were in prison.”
The priest shook his head from behind the kite. “Prison? Wi. Wi. I encountered many people in prison.”
“See how they aged him in prison,” his sister said.
“Our country is the proudest birthright I can leave them,” babbled Father Romain. He was staring up blankly at his sister as if trying with all his powers of understanding to make out her words and mine too.
“They forced him to say these things that he says now whenever his mind wanders,” she explained.
“On this island, walk too far in either direction and people speak a different language,” continued Father Romain with aimless determination. “Our motherland is Spain; theirs is darkest Africa, you understand? They once came here only to cut sugarcane, but now there are more of them than there will ever be cane to cut, you understand? Our problem is one of dominion. Tell me, does anyone like to have their house flooded with visitors,