The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [88]
“I cannot stop him once he begins,” the sister said, using her bare fingers to wipe the growing puddle of drool on either side of her brother’s chin.
“Sometimes I cannot believe that this one island produced two such different peoples,” Father Romain continued like a badly wound machine. “We, as Dominicans, must have our separate traditions and our own ways of living. If not, in less then three generations, we will all be Haitians. In three generations, our children and grandchildren will have their blood completely tainted unless we defend ourselves now, you understand?”
Perhaps finally tired of talking, he stopped and lowered his face, his chin down to his chest.
“He was beaten badly every day,” the sister said, stroking his shoulder. “When he first came, he told me they’d tied a rope around his head and twisted it so tight that sometimes he felt like he was going mad. They offered him nothing to drink but his own piss. Sometimes he remembers everything. Sometimes, he forgets all of it, everything, even me.”
“Forget,” mumbled Father Romain. He went back to concentrating on improving his kite. With more strength than I’d expect his trembling hands to have, he ripped a piece off the front end of his shirt to make a longer tail for the kite.
“Non, Jacques,” his sister scolded, like a young mother correcting an errant child. “He’s ruined many of his shirts this way,” she said, turning back to me.
“Did you know Doctor Javier at all?” I asked the sister.
“Jacques, do you remember a Doctor Javier?” she asked.
Father Romain tied the strip of cloth from his shirt to the end of his kite and said nothing.
“I didn’t know all of Jacques’ friends,” the sister said. “He is a priest. I am a singer and not a singer of religious songs.”
“How long will you stay here?” I asked her.
“As long as he wants to be here,” she said. “Where do you live?”
“In Cap Harden,” I said, “at the house of a woman they call Man Rapadou.”
“Our family has a fine house in Cap Haitien, near the cathedral,” she said. “I hope he will let me take him there soon. Even in this state, Jacques still wants to go back across the border to find the people he served in that little valley town, but he will be killed if he crosses again.”
The sister shook the flame tree pods once more. Father Romain looked up, his eyes suddenly gleaming like a hungry dog being called to a long-awaited meal.
When I said good-bye to him, he greeted me again as though he were seeing me for the first time.
I pressed my missive into his sister’s hands. “Please give this to him during one of those times when he remembers,” I said.
As I left his house, I wanted, but could not bring myself, to visit the river. Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside, with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before.
That night in bed, I told Yves that I had seen Father Romain at the border.
“Don’t you think I have gone there too?” he asked. “Don’t you think I have seen him, the poor bekeke?”
“Please don’t call him that,” I said.
“Did you see what state he was in, talking, talking like that without stopping? His sister was the one who told me first that all the killings were meant to look as if they had been done by farmers with machetes; no rifles were ever intended to be fired as was done with Wilner.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you had gone to see him? Do you know that Man Denise is gone, that people have been coming to tell her that Mimi and Sebastien are dead?”
“I don’t always tell you what I know or where I go,” he said.
His silence before he fell asleep was weighted with rage and guilt. Like Sebastien, he had always lived for work. The two most important