The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [90]
His sister had moved Father Romain to a hospital in Portau-Prince, so I didn’t see him again until May 1961, after the Generalissimo was killed in a monsoon of bullets as he was being driven out of the capital city on a highway named after him.
Father Romain was in the Cap then for a family event and came to stand out in the sun on the cathedral steps and watch a parade of survivors singing on the street:
Yo tiye kabrit la! Adye!
They killed the goat! Adye!
It was the first time since the crowds waiting for the justice of the peace that I had seen a group remembering, a strange celebration of the living and the dead, the children and grandchildren of the slaughter.
Father Romain had been forced to age faster than most of us, but I could tell under his hollowed cheekbones and high round bounty of salt-and-pepper hair that he was experiencing his own share of uncertain joy. He seemed like a different person, the older brother—no, the grandfather—of the man he once was, the man who had taught the children about the properties of the wind and the invisible substances in the air by flying kites.
I didn’t know where the sister was that day but she was not with him or with us, those of us who took to the once fire-engulfed streets of the Cap to clank pots and cans and sing to celebrate the Generalissimo’s passing.
Yves came home from the fields to wander in and out of the small crowd, nibbling at his lower lip as though he wanted to weep for every scream of our happiness.
Man Rapadou and I walked arm in arm, her body nimble and spry as she entered the last years of her eighth decade.
Man Rapadou had been essential to me in the simple routine of my life. We’d wake up together at the same time every morning after Yves had left for the fields and she would help me with my sewing. I treasured my sewing; I enjoyed feeling my index finger cramped inside the thimble, found many hours’ pleasure in watching the needle rise and fall, guarding the fragile thread with caution as it snaked through the cloth. I never used machines because that would have taken away a great part of the physical enjoyment.
Every morning at dawn, Man Rapadou and some of the women from the yard would go to market and bring back fresh ingredients for a meal that wasn’t ready until late afternoon, closer to the time when Yves came home. Even though she knew he ate elsewhere, or maybe even had another woman looking after him, she still treated him like he was her helpless boy who had just enough strength to make his father’s land come alive.
As his fortune had grown, Yves had added four more rooms to the courtyard, two of them mine and mine alone. (His mother did not want to move elsewhere and leave her old relations and happy-sad memories behind.) There were times when I shut myself in those two rooms that were mine and took to bed for months, times when I had too much lint in my throat, or an aching arm that prevented me from sewing, when the joint of my knee would throb, and the ringing in my ears would chime without stop. Other than those moments, the Generalissimo’s death was the only reprieve from my routine of sewing and sleeping and having the same dreams every night.
“Oh, Man Amabelle, look at you doing the kalanda,” someone called out from the crowd in front of the cathedral.
I didn’t even realize I’d been dancing. Didn’t even know I could dance. Still, it wasn’t the compliment I heard but the title belonging to an elder—a “Man” like Man Irelle, Man Denise, or Man Rapadou—before my name.
I saw young men and women leaping with maracas and tambourines that day who were not yet born when I’d returned, and I felt time slither around me in a way it didn’t when I was alone with Man Rapadou and her people in the courtyard.
Yves walked ahead of all of us, staying out of the crowd spilling over into