The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [95]
Men with names never truly die. It is only the nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air.
His name is Sebastien Onius. Seven years before his own death, he saw his father die. Death to Sebastien Onius was as immense as a tree-tossing beast of a raging hurricane. It was an event that split open the sky and cracked the ground, made the heavens wail and the clouds weep. It was not for one person to live alone.
Perhaps there was water to greet his last fall, to fold around him and embrace him like a feather-filled mattress. Perhaps there were ceremonial words recited in his ears: “Ale avek Bon Dye,” “Go with God,” “Go in peace,” a farewell not so solitary and abrupt, a parting like the dimming of the twilight, darkening the sky for shadows and stars at play.
His name is Sebastien Onius and his spirit must be inside the waterfall cave at the source of the stream where the cane workers bathe, the grotto of wet moss and chalk and luminous green fresco—the dark green of wet papaya leaves.
Sometimes I can make myself dream him out of the void to listen. A handsome, steel-bodied man, he carries a knapsack woven from palm leaves as he walks out of the cave into the room where I sleep.
“Amabelle, it is Sebastien, come to see you,” he says. “I have brought remedies for your wounds. I’ve brought citronella and cedarwood to keep the ants and mosquitoes from biting your skin, camphor, basil, and bitter oranges to reduce your fevers and keep your joints limber. I’ve brought ginger and celery, aniseed, and cinnamon for your digestion, turmeric for your teeth, and kowosol tea for pleasant dreams.”
He stands over my bed, fills his lungs with the cloud of lint in the room. I reach over and try to touch him, but he scatters with my reach, like a stream of dust caught in a strong beam of noontime sunlight.
I sense that we no longer know the same words, no longer speak the same language. There is water, wind, land, and mountains between us, a shroud of silence, a curtain of fate.
“Tell me, please, Sebastien,” I say. “I must know. Did you and Mimi suffer greatly?”
He breathes in more of the cloth dust in my room, as though he wants to inhale me and everything there too.
“Sebastien, the slaughter showed me that life can be a strange gift,” I say. “Breath, like glass is always in danger. I chose a living death because I am not brave. It takes patience, you used to say, to raise a setting sun. Two mountains can never meet, but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall.”
41
At first glance, the Massacre appeared like any of the three or four large rivers in the north of Haiti. On a busy market day, it was simply a lively throughway beneath a concrete bridge, where women sat on boulders at the water’s edge to pound their clothes clean, and mules and oxen stopped to diminish their thirst.
The tide was low for October. So low that when the washing women dipped in a bucket, they came up with half of it full of water and the other half full of red-brown sand.
“You see how the river looks now,” one of the women said as she threw a handful of sand back into the flow. “When the current rises, the water can kiss the bridge.”
On the bridge, young soldiers whose faces looked too youthful to hold a past marched back and forth, patrolling the line marked by a chain that separated our country from theirs. They wore dark green uniforms, carried their rifles on straps on their shoulders, and drummed the ground with their shin-stroking laced boots. Our soldiers stayed farther back, away from the bridge, in the customshouse near an open road, the better to watch for invaders.
The border had lost a number of its trees. Holes were still too evident where the trees had been plucked out and replaced with poles that held up doubled strands of barbed wire. All along the walls of spiked metal were signs that