The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [91]
He was not pleased with us for taking part in the instant parade; I could tell. He spoke so little now that I could read whole phrases on his sweaty knotted brows. The questions posed on his face that day were ones I was also asking myself.
How dare you dance on a day like this?
What could we do but dance?
It’s like dancing on all the graves.
There were no graves, no markers. If we tried to dance on graves, we would be dancing on air. Besides, this was a harmless, effortless dance, one our people knew well, the dance of farewell to a departed tyrant.
For twenty-four years all of my conversations with Yves had been restricted to necessary prattle. Good-morning. Good-night. What goes? Good-bye. The careful words exchanged between people whose mere presence reminds each other of a great betrayal.
I had often hoped that he would find a woman to love him and take him away from the courtyard. I couldn’t escape myself because I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t have the strength to travel in search of distant relations whose lives had gone well enough without me; I didn’t even know if they would recognize me if they saw me. Some of them might have come looking for me after my parents drowned, but maybe they thought I had drowned, too.
So in spite of the solemn expressions on many of the faces in the crowd, in spite of those who wept even as they were dancing, in spite of the dead whose absence trailed us as did the dust of their bones in the wind, even as our chances vanished of ever glaring and spitting into his eyes, we were still having a celebration, if only because the Generalissimo was dead and we had survived.
After the crowd had thinned out, I walked up the steps in front of the cathedral, leaving Man Rapadou and Yves to wait for me on the sidewalk. Father Romain was standing with a group of parishioners walking out of the cathedral.
“Mon pè, you are better?” I asked from the outer row of the group.
“By His grace, yes.” His voice was as tranquil as his eyes were suddenly attentive, the two most visible signs of the young man he had once been.
“I am Amabelle Désir, Father,” I said. “I came to see you when you were in Ouanaminthe. I lived in Alegría. How is your sister?”
“You knew my sister?” he asked.
“Yes. I saw her in your house in Ouanaminthe.”
“She still sings in nightclubs in Port-au-Prince.” He extended his right hand to me, watching it rise from his side as though his own flesh was a marvel to him still.
“Father, will you return to Alegría now?” someone asked.
He seemed surprised that so many others knew about Alegría. “Alegría, a name to evoke joy,” he said, his voice rising as if for a group before a pulpit. “Perhaps this is what its founders—those who named it—had in mind. Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.”
Yves and Man Rapadou climbed the steps and went to sit inside the cool cathedral. Yves did not even look at Father Romain as he walked by, supporting his mother’s steps by holding on to her elbow.
“Father, will you return to Alegría?” Another person asked the question again.
Father Romain looked down at our group as though we had just planted the seed of this idea in his head.
“Yes, I will return,” he said, “to help those of our people who are still there if I can.”
“When will you return, Father?” I asked.
“I am no longer a father,” he said, then corrected himself. “I am a father to three young boys. I am no longer with any order.”
“Why, Father?” the question escaped from an unguarded mouth.
“It took more than prayers to heal me after the slaughter,” he said with a sadness that he was too distraught to show when I first saw him at the border. “It took holding a pretty and gentle wife and three new lives against my chest. I wept so much when they arrested me. I wept all the time