The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [89]
37
The dead season is, for me, one never ending night.
I dream all the time of returning to give my testimony to the river, the waterfall, the justice of the peace, even to the Generalissimo himself.
A border is a veil not many people can wear. The valley is a daydream, the village, the people, and Joël, with a grave that only a broken-hearted old man would ever know how to find.
I would go back with Odette to say her “pesi” to the Generalissimo, for I would not know how to say it myself. My way of saying it would always be—however badly—“perejil.” For somewhere in me, I still believe that perhaps one simple word could have saved all our lives.
I had never desired to run away. I knew what was happening but I did not want to flee. “Where to?”, “Who to?”, was always chiming in my head.
Of all the people killed, I will wager that there were many asking like me “Who to?” Even when they were dying and the priests were standing over them reciting ceremonial farewells, they must have been asking themselves, “Go in peace. But where?”
Heaven—my heaven—is the veil of water that stands between my parents and me. To step across it and then come out is what makes me alive. Odette and Wilner not coming out is what makes them dead.
I was never naive, or blind. I knew. I knew that the death of many was coming. I knew that the streams and rivers would run with blood. I knew as well how to say “pesi” as to say “perejil.”
You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.
My dreams are now only visitations of my words for the absent justice of the peace, for the Generalissimo himself.
He asked for “perejil,” but there is much more we all knew how to say. Perhaps one simple word would not have saved our lives. Many more would have to and many more will.
The more days go by, the more I think of Joël’s grave. (Of Wilner’s, Odette’s, Mimi’s, and Sebastien’s too.) I could no more find these graves than the exact star that exploded and fell from the sky the night each of them perished.
The more I think about their graves, the more I see mine: a simple stone marker with written on it only my name and the day I die.
But it must be known that I understood. I saw things too. I just thought they would not see me. I just thought they would not find me. Only when Mimi and Sebastien were taken did I realize that the river of blood might come to my doorstep, that it had always been in our house, that it is in all our houses.
I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children’s inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.
I hear the weight of the river all the time. It creaks beneath the voices, like a wooden platform under a ton of mountain rocks. The river, it opens up to swallow all who step in it, men, women, and children alike, as if they had bellies full of stones.
It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.
The slaughter is the only thing that is mine enough to pass on. All I want to do is find a place to lay it down now and again, a safe nest where it will neither be scattered by the winds, nor remain forever buried beneath the sod.
I just need to lay it down sometimes. Even in the rare silence of the night, with no faces around.
38
I waited for Doctor Javier’s reply by watching Yves leave for the fields every morning to return home after dark. I waited for Doctor Javier’s reply by feeling my wider, heavier body slowly fold towards my feet, as though my bones were being deliberately pulled from their height towards the ground. I waited for Doctor