“How was the journey?” she asked.
“Too fast,” reported Luis. “Don Ignacio went too fast going to the barracks. Señor Pico went too fast coming back. I thought you’d have to go and plant a white cross on the side of a mountain for me. They say those automobiles are made for automobile races. I felt like we were in one.”
“Are you still shaking?” Juana asked, wrapping her large arms around his meager frame.
“I haven’t told you even half the tale,” Luis said. “Señor Pico was the one driving on the return. I have never seen a man so overjoyed. It wasn’t his fault. Who can blame him?”
“Blame him for what?” Juana asked.
“Señor Pico was driving and talking. The closer we came to the house, the faster he went. He asked Don Ignacio all sorts of questions about the children. When Don Ignacio wouldn’t tell him for the seventh and seventy-seventh time how big the children were, who they looked like and so much else, Señor Pico went even faster. When we reached the road near the ravines, we saw three men walking ahead—”
“Blessed Mother who gives life, forgive us,” Juana interrupted. She raised both her hands up in the air as though to complain to the stars.
“Señor Pico shouted at the men and blew the klaxon,” Luis continued. “Two of the men ran off. The other one didn’t seem to hear the horn. The automobile struck him, and he went flying into the ravine. He yelled when the automobile hit him, but when we came out to look, he was gone. It was a bracero, maybe one who works at Don Carlos’ mill.”
I knew most of the people who worked with Sebastien at Don Carlos’ mill, lived in Don Carlos’ compounds, and toiled in Don Carlos’ cane fields. The valley was small enough that most of us were familiar with one another. I thought immediately of Sebastien. Surely another worker would have come for me already had Sebastien been struck by Señor Pico’s automobile.
Something rustled under the flame tree. We all jumped to our feet. I expected to see Sebastien running towards me, his body drenched in blood. Instead, it was Doctor Javier and his younger sister, Beatriz. Beatriz spent her days pounding her fingers on a piano in her mother’s parlor and speaking Latin to herself. She wanted to be a newspaper woman, it was said, travel the world, wear trousers, and ask questions of people suffering through calamities greater than hers. Señor Pico had been courting Beatriz—who had no interest in him—before he began pursuing the señor a. One day, when Beatriz had abruptly asked him to leave her mother’s parlor so she could play her piano alone, the señor had stumbled down the road in a haze of lovesick rejection and seen Señora Valencia, who was plucking red orchids from her father’s garden to put in the small vase at her bedside. Señor Pico, known to her only as Beatriz’s frequent escort at local society gatherings, suddenly joined in the orchid picking and after a month of visits to the señora’s parlor asked Papi for her hand in marriage. Papi said yes after consulting with the señora, on the condition that his daughter would stay in her own comfortable house rather than having to live in one of those meager isolated bungalows near the barracks, where Señor Pico often needed to be located due to his special military duties.
Juana rose to greet the doctor and Beatriz. Beatnz had braided some bright ribbons into her caramel-colored, calf-length hair; the braid swayed back and forth like a giant fish skeleton across her back.
Nodding to Juana, Doctor Javier asked, “Has the father arrived?”
“Yes, he has come,” Juana said. “Good evening, Señorita Beatriz.”
“Salve!” replied Beatriz in Latin.
“¡Hola! to you too, Señorita Beatriz,” Juana said, dusting off the back of her dress. “Will you please go into the house?”
I didn’t stop worrying about Sebastien. As the laughter and Beatriz’s effortless Latin phrases echoed from Señora Valencia’s bedroom, I walked over to the flame tree and peeked at the dead goat Señor Pico had brought home. Near the bloody spot where the goat’s nose almost touched the ground lay my sewing basket and Sebastien’s still-unfinished shirt. I had dropped them there when I’d heard Señora Valencia’s first screams. I picked up the basket and Sebastien’s shirt and took them back to the rocker with me. The joyful reunion continued upstairs while Luis kept fanning the flames to keep Señor Pico’s bath warm.
Soon after, Doctor Javier watched me from afar as he left with Beatnz. Señor Pico was ready for his bath; Luis carried the water to him.
“My wife wishes to see you,” Señor Pico shouted at me from across the yard.
I went to her room. She was lying in bed, alone for a brief moment, her children sleeping nearby.
“I am grateful to you, Amabelle, for what you did today.” She reached over and squeezed my hands.
When her husband entered the room in his sleeping robe, she quickly dropped my fingers. “Juana will stay here tonight,” she announced.
Why Juana? Why not me? I thought. But maybe Juana had asked to stay. Perhaps she needed to cradle a cloud-soft child and pretend that it was hers. Besides, I had to go to my room and wait for Sebastien. Surely he would know what had happened, who had been struck by the automobile.
Juana was in the old sewing room of Señora Valencia’s mother, piling blankets on the floor to sleep on. Behind her stood a four poster canopy bed that Papi had built long ago for his wife’s afternoon siestas.
Señor Pico pulled shut his wife’s bedroom door to keep out the night air. I waved good-night to Juana, who was already dozing off. Juana blew out her lamp, leaving me in the dark.
In their room, Señor Pico tried to make his wife laugh by telling her how much he had missed her all those nights when he’d been sleeping on stiff, narrow, insect-filled mattresses in the barracks.
“Is it so terrible?” she asked.
Yes, it was, he said. Even worse than that, if truth be told. Away from her, everything was like a seat on a metal bench in Hell.
The señora asked her husband if he had to return to the barracks soon. The soldiers in his charge could wait awhile, couldn’t they?
He’d try to stay through her lying-in period, he said, but things could change quickly. Had he forgotten to inform her? Where had his memory gone? The Generalissimo was spending some time with friends, not far from here. The Generalissimo’s good friend Doña Isabela Mayer was planning to throw a lavish ball for him near the border. He—her husband, could she fathom it?—had been given the task of heading a group that would ensure the Generalissimo’s safety at the border. They would also be in charge of a new border operation.
Wouldn’t this take him away for even longer periods of time? Señora Valencia wanted to know.
She was not to worry at all, he assured her. The operation would be quick and precise. To tell the truth, part of it had already started.
She didn’t sound as happy as perhaps he had wanted her to be. “Let’s not speak of you leaving again,” she said. “At least you are with us now.”
In the parlor, Papi sat alone, as he did every night, in a corner near the parlor’s accordion-shaped radio, straining to make out an announcer’s voice without disturbing the others. He was an exiled patriot, Papi, fighting a year-and-a-half old civil war in Spain by means of the radio. On his lap were maps showing different Spanish cities that he consulted with a hand magnifier as he listened. The maps were cracked along the creases and edges, becoming closer to dust with every passing day.
“How is the fighting today?” I asked. “Is your side winning?”
“The good side does not always win,” he said.
“Do you wish you were there?”
“In the war, an old man like me?”
Above Papi’s head loomed a large portrait of the Generalissimo, which Señora Valencia had painted at her husband’s request. Her painting was a vast improvement on many of the Generalissimo’s public photographs. She had made him a giant in full military regalia, with vast fringed epaulets and clusters of medals aligned in neat rows under the saffron braiding across his chest. Behind him was the country’s
red and blue flag with the white cross in the middle, along with the coat of arms and the shield: DIOS, PATRIA, LIBERTAD. GOD, COUNTRY, LIBERTY. But the centerpiece was the Generalissimo himself, the stately expression on his oval face, his head of thick black hair (the beginning of gray streaks carefully omitted), his full vibrant locks swept back in gentle waves to frame the wide forehead, his coy gentle smile, and his eyes, which seemed oddly tender. Bedroom eyes, many had called them.
Papi seemed unaware of the Generalissimo’s enormous presence as he listened for word from much farther away.
“Would you like some hot guanabana tea?” I asked. “Good for sleep.”
He shook his head no.
“Amabelle, I am not a lucky man,” he declared.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“I think we killed a man tonight,” he said.
Then it seemed to me that the dead man was even less lucky than he.
“On the day my grandchildren are born, I was in an automobile that may have taken a man’s life,” Papi said. “My son-in-law did not want to stay and search, and I did not force him to do it. It was already dark. I didn’t make myself or Luis go down into the ravine to look for the man, to see if we could save his life. You will tell me, Amabelle, if you hear of this man, if you hear that he lived or died. You will ask your friends and then report to me.”
“I will.”
“Good-night, then.”
“Good sleep, Papi.”
Outside, Luis skinned and chopped up the dead goat. He piled the legs in a bucket and covered them with clumps of rock salt.
When I was a child, my father and I used to play a game called osle using the small front-leg joint bones from a goat. These bones are like dominoes, except they have a curved back and three hollowed sides. I’d spent hours alone trying to get a handful of five to land on the same side. I never succeeded.
I asked Luis to cut off the two small bones for me. Wiping off the blood, I took them to my room. There I undressed, taking off my sand-colored housedress and the matching faded square of cloth wrapped around my head. Nearly everything I had was something Señora Valencia had once owned and no longer wanted. Everything except Sebastien.
I spread an old sheet on the floor next to a castor oil lamp and a conch shell that Sebastien had given me, saying that in there flowed the sound fishes hear when they swim deep inside the ocean’s caves. On the wall was pasted a seven-year-old calendar, from the year of the great hurricane that had plundered the whole island, a time when so many houses were flattened and so many people were killed that the Generalissimo himself had marched through the windswept streets of the Dominican capital and ordered that the corpses he encountered during his inspection be brought to the Plaza Colombina and torched in public bonfires that burned for days, filling the air with so much ash that everyone walked with their eyes streaming, their handkerchiefs pressed against their noses, and their parasols held close to their heads.
I lay on my mat on the floor, giving Sebastien time to arrive. If he didn’t come soon then I would have to go and look for him in the compound at the mill.
In the meantime, I did something I always did at times when I couldn’t bring myself to go out and discover an unpleasant truth. (When you have so few remembrances, you cling to them tightly and repeat them over and over in your mind so time will not erase them.) I closed my eyes and imagined the giant citadel that loomed over my parents’ house in Haiti, the fortress rising out of the miter-shaped mountain chain, like two joined fists battling the sky.
The citadel had been conceived by Henry I, a king who wanted to conquer a world that had once conquered him. My father loved to recount this tale of Henry I, a slave who, after the captives had rebelled against the French and formed their own nation, built forts like the great citadel to keep intruders away.
As a child, I played in the deserted war rooms of Henry I’s citadel. I peered at the rest of the world from behind its columns and archways, and the towers that were meant to hold cannons for repelling the attack of ships at sea. From the safety of these rooms, I saw the entire northern cape: the yellow-green mountains, the rice valley, the king’s palace of three hundred and sixty-five doors down in the hills above Milot and the Palais des Ramiers, the queen’s court across the meadow. I smelled the musty cannonballs and felt Henry I’s royal armor bleeding rust onto my hands, armor emblazoned with the image of a phoenix rising over a wall of flames and the words the king was said to have uttered often—Je renais de mes cendres—promising that one day he would rise again from the ashes of his death. I heard the wind tossing through the wild weeds and grass growing out of the cracks in the stone walls. And from the high vaulted ceilings, I could almost hear the king giving orders to tired ghosts who had to remind him that it was a different time—a different century—and that we had become a different people.
Imperceptibly Henry I’s murmurs became Sebastien’s. I rose and walked to the door. Sebastien was standing there. He handed me two yams with the roots and dirt still clinging to them. The yams were from the small garden behind his room at the compound. Sometimes I cooked for him. Whenever we could we ate together.
“I almost dreamt about you,” I said. “I was home and I wanted you to be with me.”
“I’ve been waiting outside, watching for the right moment,” he said.
His shirt, one of the many I had made for him from indigo-dyed flour sacks, was covered with dried red mud and tufts of green grass. There were cactus needles still sticking to the cloth and some to the skin along his arm, but he did not seem to feel their sting. One of his eyes was swollen, the pouch underneath visibly filled with blackened blood. He tried to smile, holding the side of his face where the smile tore at him and hurt.
“Did you fall in the cane fields?” I asked, already sensing it was not so. I touched the scruffy beard that he had grown the last few days. Some clumps of the hair were stained green as though his face had been pressed down against crushed grass for a long time.
“I cannot stay,” he said. At least he was speaking normally, I thought. His voice had not changed. “Old Kongo’s waiting for me at the mill. His son Joel was killed. Joël is dead.” His dirt-stained forehead was sweating. He brushed the sweat off with a single swipe of his hand.
“Joel dead? How?”
“Yves, Joël, and me, we were walking along when an automobile hit Joel and sent him into the ravine.”
“And you? Did you break any bones?” I asked, as if this were the only way in which a person could be wounded, only when his body was almost crushed, pulped like the cane in the presses at the mill.
“Yves and I were lucky,” he said. And then I thought how truly fortunate he was. He was not crying or yelling or throwing rocks at the house, or pounding a tree stump against the side of the automobile that had killed his friend. Perhaps the truth had not yet touched him deeply enough. But, then, he had seen death closely before.
“What’s Kongo doing?” I asked. Perhaps Sebastien was staying calm by thinking of the next step, the next action.
“The first thing is to put Joël’s body in the ground,” he said.
“Does Kongo know whose automobile hit Joel?”
“At this time, all he knows is that his son is dead. He needs to make a coffin. Don Carlos won’t pay for a burial.”
Luis and Papi had gone to bed. I led Sebastien behind the latrines. There Papi had a stack of cedar planks that he used for his leisure occupation, making tables and chairs and building miniature houses. Sebastien took four long boards, stained and polished, enough to build a coffin for a grown man.
I offered to help him carry them, but he refused.
“You stay,” he said. “I will come back.”
I looked down at the yams, leaning against the wall where I had laid them soon after he had given them to me.
“With all this, you had time to bring these yams?” I asked.
“You stay here until I come back,” he said, “don’t try to go anywhere
.”
I heard him breathing hard, struggling with the weight of the wood as he hauled it away. I went back to my room, lay down, and waited for his return.
Poor Kongo. Condolences, Kongo. Two new children came into the world while you have to put your son in the ground.
9
It is a Friday, market day. My mother, my father, and me, we cross into Dajabón, the first Dominican town across the river. My mother wants to buy cooking pots made by a Haitian pot maker named Moy who lives there, the best pot maker in the area. There is a gleam to Moy’s pots that makes you think you are getting a gem. They never darken even after they have been used on outdoor cooking fires for years.
In the afternoon, as we set out to wade across the river again with our two new shiny pots, it starts to rain in the mountains, far upstream. The air is heavy and moist; a wide rainbow arc creeps away from the sky, dark rain clouds moving in to take its place.
We are at a distance from the bridge. My father wants us to hurry home. There is still time to cross safely, he says, if we hasten. My mother tells him to wait and see, to watch the current for a while.
“We have no time to waste,” my father insists.
“I’ll carry you across, and then I’ll come back for Amabelle and the pots,” my father says.
We walk down from the levee. My father looks for the shallows, where the round-edged rust-colored boulders we’d used before as stepping stones have already disappeared beneath the current.
“Hold the pots,” my mother tells me. “Papa will come back for you soon.”
On the levee are a few river rats, young boys, both Haitian and Dominican, who for food or one or two coins, will carry people and their merchandise across the river on their backs. The current is swelling, the pools enlarging. Even the river rats are afraid to cross.
My father reaches into the current and sprinkles his face with the water, as if to salute the spirit of the river and request her permission to enter. My mother crosses herself three times and looks up at the sky before she climbs on my father’s back. The water reaches up to Papa’s waist as soon as he steps in. Once he is in the river, he flinches, realizing that he has made a grave mistake.