In the churchyard I heard only echoes that come with the night—the cicadas, tree frogs, and squawking bats. The gate around the school was chained. There was no light in the house behind the gate where Father Romain and Father Vargas and some of the orphaned school children lived.
Leaving the church, I stayed off the main road and followed a tangle of sword ferns, sapodilla, and papaya trees to a trench bordering a plot of Don Carlos’ virgin cane.
I waited there awhile, hoping the soldiers would be gone by the time I reached the mill. When I finally entered the cane field, it was pitch black inside, as dark as it might be in a coffin under the ground with six feet of dirt piled over your face.
It was a darkness where the recollection of light did not exist at all, as if the bright moon overhead would never dare approach the compressed layers of cane leaves, spread over each other like house shingles.
The sound of crickets and grasshoppers echoed in the cane tent; I took tiny steps, holding my bundle close to my chest. As I moved forward, I didn’t want to stir the cane too much in case the soldiers were waiting on the other side. Nor did I want my steps to arouse any animals that might be nesting in the sodden loam, gnawing at the cane roots: rabbits, rats, or garden snakes, which Sebastien and the others had often faced while working.
A scorching foul-smelling heat rose from the ground; the marsh underneath the cane sank with each of my steps. I felt the short cane spears cutting my legs and covered my face with my hand to keep the tall ones out of my eyes. An ant colony marched up my thighs. The more I smacked them away, the more they crept up my back.
I saw faint breaches of light as I moved closer to the shacks at the compound. Mercedes’ stand was closed now, and the soldiers were gone. Lamps were lit inside the cane cutters’ rooms, but no one was outside. I brushed the ants off my back as I approached Kongo’s door.
“Kongo, it’s Amabelle, come to see you,” I whispered.
A few peered out with lamps from the shacks as I entered Kongo’s room. My legs were bleeding, and a line of rust-colored ants were clinging to my arm. Kongo raised his lamp, brought the flame close to my skin, and brushed the ants aside. I felt a line of blood trickle from between my eyebrows.
“Did they take you too?” he asked, using his pocket handkerchief to mop the blood from my face.
“I walked through the cane,” I said.
He pointed to Joel’s mat and asked me to sit down.
“Sebastien went with Mimi to the chapel,” he said. “They went there to meet you. Others tell me that army trucks came and took them away.”
“Is it true?” I was not so ready to believe.
He lifted one of the pots in the middle of the room and took out a lemon. He cut the lemon and pressed both halves to the bridge of my nose.
“It will keep you from shedding more blood.” He gave me the rest of the lemon to rub over the cuts on my legs. Gritting my teeth, I rubbed.
“And where is it thought they’ll be taken?” I asked.
“If they don’t kill them at once, they’ll bring them to the border prison near Dajabón.” He spoke in a distant voice, as if death no longer meant anything to him. “They used to take us to prison near Dajabón, then bring us to the bridge at the border and let us go. I don’t know if they’ll let them go this time. Sebastien’s friend Yves is at that Doña Sabine’s house. They did not take him. He’s the one who came to tell me about Sebastien and his sister. He wanted me to go with him to Doña Sabine’s house. I told him I’m staying here, and if need be, I’ll die here.”
A few ants were still crawling over my scalp, hiding in the short tresses of my hair. I scratched furiously, trying to frighten them out. There was blood under my fingernails when I pulled them out of my hair.
“I am going to Dajabón, then,” I said.
“You certain you don’t want to stay here?” he asked. “We are more protected here in the mill compound.”
“I want to go to the border,” I said.
“Do you know how to reach it?”
“I hear there are roads through the mountains.”
“You follow the stream up the mountains. There are grottos and caves to sleep in at night. This is how I came here again and again many times, in the beginning. When you come down from the mountain, you know where to cross the river? Very shallow in some places, that river. This time of year, it’s most shallow near the bridge.”
“I will remember this,” I said.
“There might be soldiers in the mountains,” he added. “I heard from a man here in the compound that they’re burning Haitian houses in the mountain villages.”
“Before I go, I need to speak to Yves,” I said.
He looked down at my bundle and saw the silhouette of his son’s death mask in it. “Don’t go through the cane again. I’ll show you another way.”
We tiptoed out and turned the corner through Sebastien’s yam garden. I paused there for just a moment, thinking how much pleasure it gave Sebastien to plant and grow things for himself after he had been working the cane all day for someone else. I crawled under a wooden fence that opened to a narrow footpath leading to a side gate at Doña Sabine’s house. Kongo took the hidden trail back to the mill without saying anything more.
I waited until I thought he was back at the mill, then walked to the front gate of Doña Sabine’s house. I had to pound on it with a rock before my knock was heard. I was afraid the noise would be detected by soldiers somewhere farther up the road, but I had no choice.
Félice peered through the grille at the entrance, then pushed the metal door open and dragged me in. There were no watchmen at the gate.
“Your face?” she asked, the birthmark rising and falling with every movement of her lips.
“A scratch.” I reached up to touch the bridge of my nose. “Where are the watchmen who were here before?” I asked.
“Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine sent them away,” she said. “They were afraid the watchmen would change their allegiance and turn on them. Doña Sabine sent the people they were guarding and her young relations off to Haiti yesterday.”
Félice pointed to the steps in front of the main house, where clusters of men and women were craning their necks trying to make out what was happening at the gate. A couple—an older woman and a young man who looked like they might be related—moved towards the entrance.
“I hear it was terrible on the road. We could hear all the noise coming from there,” Félice said. “Is that where you were hurt?”
“They took Unèl and many of his men,” I said.
“Anybody die?”
“Unèl looked bad.”
“Some of the people on the steps just came from the road,” she said. “Maybe I should stand here and wait in case more arrive. We don’t want them to make so much noise knocking that the soldiers hear them.”
The old woman and the young man peered into the darkness over Félice’s shoulder. The woman was covered with leaf and mud stains. Her dress was torn on the side and in the back. The young man’s clothes smelled of onion and garlic; his hands were callused, his fingers bent and curved the way some old men’s were.
“The soldiers could be close,” Félice concluded, “but Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine are here. Their money and position may protect us.”
“We had planned to sleep in the cane fields,” the old woman said. “Many people will sleep in the ravines tonight.”
“I hear Sebastien was arrested at the church,” Félice said. “Mimi too.”
“They carried the doctor off with all those people who were to cross the border with him,” the old woman said. “The priests they took alone in a separate automobile. The priests begged the soldiers to let them stay with the people. The soldiers wouldn’t let them. One of the priests was crying.”
We searched the grounds for Yves. He was sleeping in front of a row of servants’ rooms. The last two planks of Papi’s wood were leaning against the wall next to him.
Yves jumped to h
is feet as soon as I laid my hand on his shoulders. He rubbed the back of his hands against his eyes, looking around as though he didn’t know where he was.
“I sold half the wood,” he said.
“Yves, did you see them take Mimi and Sebastien?” I asked.
“I saw many taken,” he said, dropping his face.
Doña Sabine called for Félice. She and Don Gilbert were sitting on one of the terraces, perched in two reclining chairs with only a hurricane lamp between them. Félice stepped across the yard and climbed a stone staircase to reach them.
“Who came?” Doña Sabine’s voice carried across the grounds.
“A friend,” Félice said.
“Who is this friend?” demanded Doña Sabine. “We must be cautious.”
“Be careful who you let in.” Don Gilbert echoed his wife’s warning. “We are going to sleep.”
On her way to her bed, Doña Sabine leaned over the verandah and examined their property. There was surrender in her voice when she said, “We will not be able to save everybody.”
It was not even certain that they could save themselves.
After the dona and her husband had gone inside, I told Yves, “I must go to Dajabón. There is a chance of finding Mimi and Sebastien there. I should go at once.”
I could tell Yves did not have much hope, but he agreed to come with me. When Félice returned, we told her we were leaving.
“Gather a few things,” Yves told her. “Come with us.”
“I cannot leave,” Félice said. “I am afraid. This must be what it means to get old. I never was afraid when I was young. Now I am afraid all the time.”
“Yves and I will be with you,” I said.
“I don’t want to die walking,” she said.
“Gather your things and come,” Yves insisted. “No one dies walking.”
“I already have decided,” she said. “I will stay here. This way I can look after Joel’s father too.”
I untied my packet and handed Félice Kongo’s mask of Joel’s face. She raised the mask up to her neck and stroked the paper lip with her fingers.
“It’s a good likeness of him,” she said.
Yves took the mask from Félice, glanced at it, and hastily handed it back to her.
“This wood was to be a man’s coffin,” he said, pointing at the planks of Papi’s cedar leaning against the wall. “Since you’re staying here, I’ll trade this wood to you for a good machete.”
Félice went into one of the workers’ rooms and came out with a machete for Yves and a long meat chopping knife for me. The machete had a light brown cowhide sheath and a sling for carrying it across one’s back. I wrapped the sharp knife in my spare dress and put it in my bundle.
Félice took us to the gate and let us out.
“Perhaps I will see you both again one day,” she said through the grid.
We followed a trail up the stream. Yves grabbed a tree branch and tapped it against the side of his leg as he walked.
We journeyed side by side along most of the path. He let me go ahead when the trail became too narrow.
As the night wore on, we each drifted into our separate thoughts, our own visions of what might lie ahead.
27
The night thinned into a dawn of charcoal gray. We ran across a stream, where Yves bent down, took a handful of water, and whisked it around in his mouth. Dipping my head in the current, I jolted myself awake with the brisk coolness of the flow.
“When do you think we’ll arrive at the border?” I asked.
“Tonight,” he said, reaching across his back to make certain the machete was still there.
He got up and started walking again. The water trickling from my hair soaked my blouse, gluing the thin cotton cloth of the gray house uniform to my skin.
A crossroads split our trail into two paths: one led back to the valley, and the other up to the mountains. We heard the rattle of an oxcart struggling down the incline behind us and crouched beneath a croton hedge to wait for it to pass.
The cart was covered with a blanket made of brown sugar sacks sewn together. Two fat oxen puffed as they yanked their cargo forward. The oxen had pockets of water splashing from the folds of doubled-over flesh along their large bellies. Their horns were joined by ropes and a piece of wood that partially blocked their roving eyes.
Walking beside them were two men, their shirts tucked neatly into their pants, which were rolled to their knees, revealing wet and muddied feet. They were carrying rifles as well as whips.
The cart suddenly stopped, the wheels wedged in a ditch where the slope of the hill met the valley road. One of the men took out a whip and slapped it against the ground, damning the oxen for being so big and so slow. The oxen struggled, raising their front legs, but could not draw the cart out of the trench.
From the back of the cart fell a girl, seventeen or eighteen years old. I raised my head to have a better look at her. Yves shoved my shoulder down, but I could still see her. She was wearing an orange-yellow dress with a cloth of purple madras wrapped around her head. A machete had struck her at the temple and on both her shoulders.
Her face flapped open when she hit the ground, her right cheekbone glistening as the flesh parted from it. She rolled onto her back and for a moment faced the sky. Her body spiraled past the croton hedge down the slope. The mountain dirt clung to her dress, her arms, her face, her whole body gathering a thick cover of dust.
The men did not notice that she had fallen from the cart. They raised the whips menacingly once more, but the oxen could not budge it. Finally they strolled to the back of the cart.
“The blanket was loose,” one said, tucking the sugar sack sheets beneath the cargo.
The loose blanket stirred. A groan could be heard coming from the cart. One of the men picked up a fist-sized rock and pounded on the head—or it might have been an elbow—pushing up the sack. There was no more stirring. The man threw the rock away. They shoved and bumped the cart out of the ditch, then the oxen took over and continued down the meadow, towards the valley.
The crowing of roosters echoed from the mountains. The girl’s corpse had rolled out of sight. Perhaps she’d fallen into one of the ravines and slid into the water.
With the numbness of shock in his voice, Yves said, “At least we survived the night.”
The casitas in the first mountain village were built on stilts, one-room houses with palm frond and thatched roofs. A line of vendors sold food from unsteady wooden stands on the shoulder of the road. Behind them, you could see the valley, dwarfed in the smallness imposed on things by great height and distance.
Yves used one of his two pesos to buy a few hog bananas, cocoplums, and small mangos, which he stuffed in his pants pocket. He offered me some, but I had no appetite.
As he ate, a religious procession strolled by. In front were three women carrying a statue of La Virgen in an ornate carved box covered with a white lace cloth. The women chanted under their breaths, sifting rosaries through their fingers. As they mouthed their slate of wishes and supplications, some of them looked like they were in a trance.
There is such a cord between desperate women that when I looked at them I knew what each one was hoping for even before their whispers brushed past my ears. They made novenas for lovers who had strayed, for sons and daughters to marry, for children who were sick, for the safe return of those who had traveled to the capital, forsaking them.
One of the women—the last one on the line—dragged a pack mule with one hand and carried a portrait of the Generalissimo with the other. She was praying for his good health and safe journey through life. “Let him continue to lead us with a strong hand and an even stronger heart,” she implored.
Leaving the village behind, we started down the curve of a pebbly mountain road. We walked silently for a long time. The sun was scorching hot, and we had no hats or parasols for protection.
I tied the hem of my dress into a knot and raised it up to my thighs. Yves looked out of the cor
ner of his eyes, pretending not to see the cloth brushing against the shredded skin on the back of my legs.
When it seemed like it was midday, we stopped on the side of the mountain to rest. I yanked up handfuls of the wild grass and dandelions growing out from between the rocks, remembering that my father had called them “pisannwit,” saying that as he blew the dandelions’ fragile fuzz into the wind, children were being cured of pissing in their beds.
A flock of rain birds squawked loudly as they passed overhead. Among them were fork-tailed swallows and swifts, trailed by a pack of yellow warblers, barely twisting their wingtips as they rode through the wind columns above the mountains.
Yves leaned back against a boulder and closed his eyes. I sat a few feet away, looking down at the land beneath us, the mesh of water, tobacco and cane fields, and the tiny houses terraced in the foothills.
Three women and two men trudged up a narrow track towards us. They looked like the straggling members of a vast family, except for two of the women who had coils of pumpkin-colored hair. Those two seemed like they might be Domimcanas—or a mix of Haitian and Dominican—in some cases it was hard to tell.
The man at the head of the line noticed me. The group rushed up the hill with a new sense of expectation. Everyone was carrying a small bundle, except a short man in the rear who was limping. He had taken off his shirt and tied it around his head to keep himself cool. The young man had uneven arms, one bulky, bulging with muscles, the other thin and withered, the skin clinging to the bones.
“Now I am even closer to the sun,” the man at the head of the group said when he reached us. He had a deeply melodious voice, like the sanbas who told stories in song.
“There’s no shade,” the woman next to him complained. She used the wide, butterfly-shaped collar on her dress to fan her face. She and the man had the same musical voice, which made me think they were brother and sister, but I was wrong. She was his woman and he, her man.