“I am looking for Amabelle,” he said through the crack in the door. Running his fingers over the verandah rail, he stood outside in the night and listened to the tree frogs croaking.
“Please come,” I said.
He eyed the pile of cedar that Papi kept stacked near the latrines. “Let me stand here a moment,” he said. “There is so much wood here. I’ve been on sugar land all over this country, and there’s never enough wood to spare for us. I’ve seen people take doors off hinges to make coffins for their dead.”
He reached through the doorway and handed me a papier-mâché mold of a man’s face.
“I bring this offering for your house,” he said. “I hope you will accept.”
I took the mask from him. The face hinted at his, but many decades earlier. The forehead was curved and wide, the raised cheekbones standing out above the hollowed space over the jaws. The lips were half open, between a grin and a scream; it was the death face of his son.
I showed him to the mat where I prepared to sleep. He sat down. Picking up my conch shell, he blew into it, forcing out a clipped lively melody, a carnival rhythm.
“You hungry?” I asked him.
He yawned to show he was hungry without having to speak the words. I had some rice from the baptism meal that I had been saving for Sebastien. I removed it from three layers of plantain leaves and served it to him with a wooden spoon.
“Back home I earned my living making masks for carnival,” he said between bites. “I was the only mask maker in my town. All I ever needed was a bit of flour and paper and I could make this type of mask. Had a woman, thirty years she was with me, the mother of my son. She loved masks, she did. The more of them I made, the more she seemed to love me.
I gave him a small calabash full of water. He pushed his head back and drank until it was empty.
“At my age, my memory won’t always serve me well,” he said. “Could be I knew you when you were young. Could be you’re one of those children who ran and hid when my woman and I came down the street with our masks to open the carnival parade. Could be you climbed the greasy pole in my yard to get the money at the top. I always had a big celebration for the children at carnival. Naturally one never remembers all the children.”
“What is your true name?” I asked. “The name you had before you came here?” This was something I suddenly wanted to know. I was hoping that in the remembering he would want to share this too.
“Some things are too wasteful to remember,” he said, “like burning blood in an oil lamp.” His breathing grew louder as though his stomach was getting used to being full.
“After my woman died, I stopped the mask-making to do carpentry. But I wasn’t good at making anything but masks, I wasn’t. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the masks without my woman. I sold all my land. My money went on things I thought I could buy to forget: mostly liquor, firewater, and happy people’s company. Couldn’t ever be alone when I was sad. Before you could tap your foot one time, I had nothing. Joel and I were used to working together. Both he and me, we would have been beggars if we did not come here. But I’m not here only to eat your food and tell you tales. I came because Sebastien sent me.”
“Has something happened to Sebastien?” I asked. Because of the baptism, I had not been able to go and see Sebastien all day.
“Sebastien’s well, he is,” he said. “He decided after what happened at the ravine that he didn’t want to waste more time. He sent me to ask you if you would promise yourself to him and keep yourself just for him. When a young man’s serious about a young woman, the old customs demand he bring his parents to express his intentions to her parents. Since both your parents and his parents are absent, I came to you on his word.”
I looked down at the mask in my hand. I couldn’t help but think of the night Joel had died, how for a moment I’d thought it was Sebastien who had been struck down by Señor Pico’s automobile. The old man glanced at me and then at the mask.
“Always hoped my son would find a woman like you,” he said, “a good woman.”
“Joel had a good woman,” I said.
“You think of that one with the big black mark under her nose. I did not want her for him.”
“She wanted your son,” I said. “She desired your blessings. She still does.”
“Blessings? What for? My son’s only a remembrance now, if even this. The one with the big mark under her nose, she is young, and the young do not stay young by keeping watch on the past. Soon she will find another man, and my son will slip from her mind.”
“She’s still very troubled,” I said.
“I hope Sebastien will let you keep the mask,” he said.
“Are you certain you don’t want to keep this face for yourself?” I asked.
“I’ve made many,” he said, “for all those who, even when I’m gone, will keep my son in mind. If I could, I would carry them all around my neck, I would, like some men wear their amulets. I give this one to you because you have a safe place to preserve it.”
“I’m happy to have it,” I said, “though ‘happy’ is not the proper word.”
“I’m glad to give it to you,” he said, “though ‘glad’ is also not the proper word.”
“Thank you for trusting me with something so precious to you,” I said.
“My son was precious to me,” he said. “This is only a sad reminder of him.”
As he got up to leave, I straightened his collar and removed a clump of rice that was clinging to the top button of his shirt.
“Now you look handsome.” I said.
“Sebastien, he let me keep the clothes,” he said. “I put in some pleats and made them smaller.”
“I am happy you were the one to bring this word from Sebastien,” I said.
“I don’t often have a chance to do these things,” he said. “I also had another thought when I came here tonight.”
“Tell me, please.”
“The elder of your house, Don Ignacio, he’s not asked again to come and see me, no?”
With Rafi’s death, Papi did seem to have forgotten about him and Joel.
“I’m not surprised,” he said, “that my son has already vanished from his thoughts.”
After Kongo left, I rushed out to see Sebastien. I didn’t go the ravine route but down through the footpath around the stream, which was a much cooler trail at night.
It was a dark night, but I knew the trail well enough to follow it in my sleep. I dashed around the stream, listening to the tree frogs and the cicadas trilling from far away.
I had been walking for some time when I heard the parting of tree branches and the flopping of footsteps landing in the mud holes behind me. The steps were faint at first, but slowly grew in force and concentration. They were coming closer, marching in perfect unison.
Jumping off the path, I tried to slip into the stream but landed on my bottom with a splash.
The night appeared clearer from the water. I reached down to the bed of the stream, feeling for a rock, something to use in defending myself. Looking back towards the footpath, I saw nobody there. Perhaps my fear had created all the noises.
“You in the water.” A man’s voice called from behind a shadowed tree. He spoke to me in Kreyol.
I anchored my feet at the bottom of the stream, reached under, and finally grabbed a rock. Three men were standing at the causeway, each holding a machete, the blades reflecting the water’s clarity.
“This is a time to sleep, not to swim,” the same man said.
I could see all their faces now. They were stonemasons who lived in the neighboring houses, on the road leading to the stream. I walked out of the water, shivering as the night air dried my skin. Among the men was Unèl, who had once rebuilt the latrines in Señora Valencia’s yard. Unèl handed me a blanket that he carried rolled up and tied with a rope on his back.
“Where are you going at this late hour, Amabelle?” he asked.
“To see Sebastien,” I said.
br /> “Haven’t you heard all the talk?” he asked.
“What talk?”
“Talk of people being killed.”
“That is just talk, started since Joel died,” I said.
“You should tell Sebastien to come for you when he wishes to see you at night,” he said.
I walked back to the trail that encircled the stream. Unèl rushed ahead as the others stayed behind me.
“It’s not prudent to walk alone these days,” Unèl scolded.
“Thank you for your counsel,” I said.
“We want to protect our people,” Unèl said. “After Joel was killed, we formed the night-watchman brigade. If they come, we’ll be prepared for them.”
“I am going back,” another man spoke from behind me. “I won’t wait for things to go from talk to bloodshed, I’m going back to Haiti. I won’t take the automobile roads where all the soldiers are, I’ll travel through the mountains. I’m going back this very Saturday. I’m prepared to leave all this behind. Thank you, Alegría. Our time here has been joyful, but now I must say good-bye to you.”
“I will stay and fight,” Unèl said. “I work hard; I have a right to be here. The brigade stays to fight. While we fight we can help others.”
“All this because Joël’s been killed?” I asked Unèl.
The coolness in my voice must have startled him, for he paused and looked at me before taking another step to follow his companions, who had left him behind. It wasn’t that I had grown indifferent to Joël’s death, but I couldn’t understand why Unèl and the others would consider that death to be a herald of theirs and mine too. Had Señor Pico struck Joel with his automobile deliberately, to clear his side of the island of Haitians?
“Let me ask again. Haven’t you heard the talk?” Unèl asked.
“I’ve heard too much talk,” I said.
When we reached the compound, I returned the blanket to Unèl. He rolled it up, tied it with a short rope, and threw it back across his shoulder.
“Thanks to her, if I am cold tonight, I have a wet blanket to wrap myself in,” Unèl told Sebastien as they shook hands. “I will take this opportunity to warn the others,” Unèl said. “The times have changed. We all must look after ourselves.”
Unèl and his men walked from shack to shack cautioning everyone to be watchful, not to walk alone at night. He enrolled a few more sentries among the cane workers, some who promised that they would walk the valley with him the following night. Others joked that only a woman could get them out of their beds to walk the valley all night after they had spent a whole day on their feet in the cane fields.
I hurried into Sebastien’s room, my clothes dripping wet. Both Yves and Sebastien looked as though they’d been about to put out their lamp and go to sleep.
“I thought Kongo was still with you,” Sebastien said.
Yves got up, stroked his shaved head, and went outside. I stepped out of my clothes but remained in my slip. Sebastien went out to hang my day dress to dry. When he returned, we lay down on his mat. He raised an old rice sack sheet over our bodies. I could feel his boils and the sabila poultice sliding down his leg as he called Yves back into the room.
“Have you heard some talk?” I asked Sebastien.
“Unèl’s talking of an order from the Generalissimo.”
“Yes, that talk.”
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Sebastien said. “I keep hearing it, but I don’t know if all of it is true.”
“Just before you came, we were speaking about you,” Yves said, slipping back on his own mat across the room. “Did your ears burn?”
“What were you saying?” I asked.
“Yves was telling me I should sell the wood,” Sebastien said.
“Papi’s wood?”
“We can sell it,” Yves said, twisting his neck and turning his large Adam’s apple towards us. “I know someone who’s looking for good well-cured wood to make tables and chairs.”
“I don’t want this wood near me,” Sebastien said. Even though he was not speaking of the rumors, I could tell he was becoming as troubled as the others, distracted even. “Since we didn’t use it for the reason we took it, I want to return the wood to its owner.”
“There’s no taking it back.” Yves yanked a few sisal strands from the edge of his straw mat.
“Then, it is your wood now,” Sebastien said. “I give it to you. It’s yours to do with what you wish.”
Yves coiled his body into a ball and turned his back to us. “There’s no taking it back,” he repeated, his voice already fading with sleep.
“You sent Kongo with word for me,” I whispered to Sebastien.
“There are plenty of men who would have made a promise to you long ago,” he said.
“Should we go to Father Romain for blessings?” I asked, becoming more and more impatient about being promised in a time-honored way to Sebastien. “I know you don’t like priests and rituals, but Father Romain is our friend.”
A piece of cooking wood held ajar the slat of lumber that served as Sebastien’s window. The wood creaked as though about to fall. Sebastien got up and fixed it so the night air could freely enter and cool the room.
“We may not live together in the same house, you and me, until the end of this harvest,” he said. “I don’t want to bring you here, and I don’t want to squeeze myself into your room on that hill and live with those people. Can you please wait for me?”
“I can wait,” Yves shouted in his sleep.
“What can you wait for?” Sebastien asked him, laughing.
We walked over to Yves’ mat. His eyes were wide open, staring at the wall with a glaze over his pupils, like the cloudy gloss of river blindness.
Sebastien waved his fingers in front of his face. Yves did not blink.
“Ask him how he is,” Sebastien said.
“How are things with you, Yves?” I asked.
“Who is asking?” said Yves, still asleep.
“I have known him since we were both in short pants,” Sebastien said as we walked back to his mat. “I’ve lived here in this room with him for many years. Never before has he talked in his sleep, plus with his eyes wide open. It started only after Joel’s accident.”
Yves and Sebastien both mumbled in their sleep all night, as though traveling through the same dream together.
“Papa, don’t die on that plate of food,” Yves said as dawn approached. He rolled onto his back, his eyes fixed on the dirty ceiling. His voice was clear yet distant, as though he were reciting a rote school lesson for the hundredth time. “Papa, don’t die on that plate of food. Please let me take it away.”
Sebastien turned over on his side and mumbled through his own nightmares.
“Is he still talking?” he asked as he woke up.
“About his father dying on a plate of food,” I said.
“His mother liked to say that his father died over a plate of food,” Sebastien replied in a wearied voice. “The father was put in a bread-and-water prison by the Yankis and let go after thirty days. First thing done by the mother is to cook him all the rich food he dreamt about in prison. The father eats until he falls over with his face in the plate and he’s dead.”
A cock’s crow finally woke Yves. He jumped up and grabbed his work clothes, wanting to be among the first at the stream.
“Did you have bad dreams last night?” I asked Yves.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as though it were going to leap out of his mouth. “You want to use my dreams to play games of chance at Mercedes’ stand?”
“We couldn’t sleep,” Sebastien said. “You were squawking like a crazy parrot all night long.”
After most of the workers had left for the stream, Sebastien and I went to a mud-and-wattle cooking hut near a wooden fence where the compound met an open dirt road. He brushed two rocks against a dry pine twig and sparked a flame for our coffee.
We sat under the mesquite that leaned
over the hut, and while he sipped the coffee out of one side of his mouth, I watched him and grinned against my will.
For some, passion is the gift of a ring in a church ceremony, the bearing of children as shared property. For me it was just a smile I couldn’t help, tugging at the sides of my face. And slowly as he caught glimpses of me between sips of his coffee, he returned the smile, looking the same way I did: bashful, undeserving, and almost ashamed to be the one responsible for the look of desire always rising in a dark flush on the side of his face. His eyes searched everything around him, the live coals and ashes under the coffeepot, the pebbles opening the soil to fit themselves in, the patches of dirt-brown grass dying from being too often trampled underfoot. When the morning breeze lifted his torn and leaf-stained collar, he pressed it back down with his cane-scarred hands. His eyes surveyed all the familiar details of his fingers, pausing only for an instant when our pupils met and trying to communicate with the simple flutter of a smile all those things we could not say because there was the cane to curse, the harvest to dread, the future to fear.
23
I dream of the sugar woman. Again.
As always, she is dressed in a long, three-tiered ruffled gown inflated like a balloon. Around her face, she wears a shiny silver muzzle, and on her neck there is a collar with a clasped lock dangling from it.
The sugar woman grabs her skirt and skips back and forth around my room. She seems to be dancing a kalanda in a very fast spin, locks arms with the air, pretends to kiss someone much taller than herself. As she swings and shuffles, the chains on her ankles cymbal a rattled melody. She hops to the sound of the jingle of the chains, which with her twists grows louder and louder.
“Is your face underneath this?” I ask. The voice that comes out of my mouth surprises me; it is the voice of the orphaned child at the stream, the child who from then on would talk only to strange faces.
“You see me?” she asks, laughing a metallic laugh that echoes inside the mask.
“Why is that on your face?” I ask.