The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [92]
39
That night, I watched from my front room as Yves sat under a newer, almost grown traveler’s palm, which he had brought there and planted himself in the same spot as the old one that had withered and died. He was reclining on a rocking chair with a bottle of rum in his hand, looking ahead at nothing in particular except maybe the fireflies that lit themselves in unison as they circled him. The slaughter had affected him in certain special ways: He detested the smell of sugarcane (except the way it disappeared in rum) and loathed the taste of parsley; he could not swim in rivers; the sound of Spanish being spoken—even by Haitians—made his eyes widen, his breath quicken, his face cloud with terror, his lips unable to part one from the other and speak.
Over the years, his father’s land had grown into more than two dozen acres of bean fields. The more he produced, the more land he bought. His family now owned rice paddies, sorghum and wheat plots, coffee, cacao, and yam lots. He had also built himself a cinder-block workhouse near a creek where he consulted with his workers, ate his midday meals, and took siestas during the late afternoons. The creek itself was surrounded with mango, avocado, and papaya trees, under which roamed guinea fowls and wild pigeons that everyone in the area was free to hunt, just as they were to help themselves to the ripening fruits on all of Yves’ trees. In his mother’s old rocker, though, he was simply a poor man alone, sipping from a bottle of the Gardere family’s Reserve du Domaine and dozing off now and again between glances at the sky. Before swallowing a mouthful, he would spill the costly rum on the ground, forming a circle of bubbled dust for the ones we don’t see, the untouchables, the invisibles.
He and I both had chosen a life of work to console us after the slaughter. We had too many phantoms to crowd those quiet moments when every ghost could appear in its true form and refuse to go away.
As I sat on a white plastic bucket and watched him from my doorway, I regretted that we hadn’t found more comfort in each other. After I realized that Sebastien was not coming back, I wanted to find someone who would both help me forget him and mourn him with me. Perhaps this was too great a gift to ask of a man who was in search of the same thing for himself.
The plastic bucket slipped out from beneath me as I got up. Yves turned around and watched me stumble, trying to maintain my balance on my bad knee. By the time he reached me, I was already on my feet. He let go of my hand and walked back to the rocking chair, picked up the bottle of rum, and went into his room.
Once he went, Man Rapadou crossed the yard and came to my sewing room. She had a cold compress on her forehead and was trying to keep drips of water from sliding into her eyes. She dropped her wide body down on a long skirt to which I was adding some last pleats before going to bed.
“Man Rapadou, you are not sleeping well?” I asked.
“It’s all this walking in the sun today,” she said. “I should not have walked so long in the sun today.”
“Are you sick?”
“Not sick, but very tired.” She lay back on my bed, which was a plain cotton mattress kept purposely low, close to the ground.
“Amabelle, my life, like yours, has always been rich with dreams,” she said. “My head barely touches the pillow at night when I dream that I’m falling.”
“Falling?”
“I dream often that I am falling,” she said. “And they get bigger, the things I’m falling from. First I am an infant falling out of my mother’s body. Then I’m falling off my mother and father’s house, a wooden house in the middle of a coffee grove. Then it’s the house of Yves’ father I’m falling from. Then I’m falling off little hills and cliffs. Then it’s mountains; I’m falling off mountains. The next thing