My mother turns back to look for me, throwing my father off balance. A flow of mud fills the shallows. My father thrusts his hands in front of him, trying to keep on course. My mother tightens her grip around his neck; her body covers him and weighs him down at the same time. When he tries to push her up by her legs, a cluster of vines whisks past them; my mother reaches for the vines as though they were planks of a raft.
As the rain falls, the river springs upwards like an ocean riptide. Moving as close as they can to the river’s edge, the boys throw a thick sisal rope to my parents. The current swallows the rope. The boys reel it back in and wrap it around a boulder. The knot slides away from the boulder as soon as it leaves their hands.
The water rises above my father’s head. My mother releases his neck, the current carrying her beyond his reach. Separated, they are less of an obstacle for the cresting river.
I scream until I can taste blood in my throat, until I can no longer hear my own voice. Yet I still hold Moy’s gleaming pots in my hands.
I walk down to the sands to throw the pots into the water and then myself. The current reaches up and licks my feet. I toss the pots in and watch them bob along the swell of the water, disappearing into the braided line that is the river at a distance.
Two of the river boys grab me and drag me by my armpits away from the river. Their faces seem blurred and faraway through the falling rain. They pin me down to the ground until I become still.
“Unless you want to die,” one of them says, “you will never see those people again.”
10
When Sebastien returned from the compound that night, he was wearing a clean shirt and had washed most of the grass from his beard and face. He sat and leaned back against the wall, watching a lizard dash across the ceiling. I made room for him to lie down on the mat next to me.
“Señor Pico’s at home now,” I said. “You have to be careful coming and going.”
“At this moment, what I want more than anything is for Señor Pico to try and strike me,” he said, in an angry tone that I was not used to. Perhaps it was all becoming more familiar to him now. His friend had died. He could have died. We were in the house of the man who had done it. Sebastien could go in and kill him if he really wanted to.
“Señor Pico has rifles,” I reminded him, “and we are on his property.”
“Is the air we breathe his property?” he asked.
“How was Kongo?”
“No one can find him,” he said.
“Where did he go?”
“After we brought the body to him—”
“What condition was the body in?” I asked, regretting the words as soon as they left my mouth.
“He fell from a great height into the ravine,” he said.
“What did Kongo do with the body?”
“He let a few people see,” he said calmly. “Then Yves and I helped him take Joel down to the stream. We washed him and cleaned off all the blood and brought him back to Kongo’s room. Kongo said he wanted to stay alone with the body, then while I was waiting here to enter your room, he took it away.”
It was hard to imagine Kongo hauling Joel very far on his back. Joel was much taller and larger-boned, the kind of man who was called upon to pull an oxcart full of cane when the oxen were too fatigued to do the job.
“They say a son’s never too big to be carried or beaten by his father,” Sebastien said, rubbing a balled fist against his swollen eye. “If Kongo carried off Joel by himself then there’s more truth to that than I thought.”
“Maybe Kongo wished to say his farewell alone,” I said, raising his fist from his eye.
“The others have been out looking for him,” he said. “I think he took Joel’s body away because he wants us to let him be. I’m going to respect his wishes. He’ll come back when he wants.”
He ran both his hands up and down my back. He had been this way the whole year we’d been together. His favorite way of forgetting something sad was to grab and hold on to somebody even sadder.
“You’re sweating,” he said, letting his fingers slide along my spine.
“I had my dream of my parents in the river,” I said.
“I don’t want you to have this dream again,” he said.
“I always see it precisely the way it took place.”
“We’ll have to change this thing, starting now.” He blew out the lamp. The room was pitch black. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened for his voice.
“I don’t want you to dream of that river again,” he said. “Give yourself a pleasant dream. Remember not only the end, but the middle, and the beginning, the things they did when they were breathing. Let us say that the river was still that day.”
“And my parents?”
“They died natural deaths many years later.”
“And why did I come here?”
“Even though you were a girl when you left and I was already a man when I arrived and our families did not know each other, you came here to meet me.”
His back and shoulders became firm and rigid as he was concocting a new life for me.
“Yes,” I said, going along. “I did wander here simply to meet you.”
“I don’t give you much,” he said, “but I want you to know that tomorrow begins my last zafra. Next year, I work away from the cane fields, in coffee, rice, tobacco, corn, an onion farm, even yucca grating, anything but the cane. I have friends looking about for me. I swear it to you, Amabelle, this will be my last cane harvest, just as it was Joël’s.”
I knew he considered Joel lucky to no longer be part of the cane life, travay tè pou zo, the farming of bones.
“Tonight, when Yves and me, we carried Joël’s corpse into the compound,” he said, “I thought about how both Yves’ father and my father died, his father organizing brigades to fight the Yanki occupation in Haiti and my father in the hurricane.”
I reached up and pressed my hands against his lips. We had made a pact to change our unhappy tales into happy ones, but he could not help himself.
“Sometimes the people in the fields, when they’re tired and angry, they say we’re an orphaned people,” he said. “They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don’t belong anywhere and that’s us. I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are.”
11
I am sick in bed with a fever that makes my body feel heavier than a steel drum filled with boiling tar. I sense myself getting larger and larger and at the same time more liquid, like all the teas and syrups my mother pours into me. My father says that I am in fact becoming smaller, shrinking closer to my bones, and there is little that is liquid in me that the fever does not dry up.
“It is a sickness we brought home to her from someone else,” my mother concludes while standing over me one day, her lips puckered, her mouth switching from side to side as it always did when she was in deep thought. “I suppose it might be the young girl we treated two weeks ago, you remember?”
My mother makes me a doll out of all my favorite things: strings of red satin ribbons sewn together into the skin, two pieces of corncob for the legs, a dried mango seed for the body frame, white chicken feathers for flesh, pieces of charcoal for the eyes, and cocoa brown embroidering thread for the hair.
There are times when I want to be a girl again, to touch this doll, because when I touch it, I feel nearer to my mother than when her flesh is stroking mine in the washbasin or in the stream, or even when she’s reaching down to plop down a compress heavy with aloe on my forehead.
As I lie in bed with my doll and my fever, during the few moments when I’m alone, the doll rises on her corncob feet, yanks several strands of her thread hairs and uses them to jump rope. She sings my favorite rope jumping songs, plays with my osles, and says, “You will be well again, ma belle Amabelle. I know this to be true.” Her voice is gentle, musical, but it echoes, like she’s speaking from inside a very t
all bottle. “I am sure you will live to be a hundred years old, having come so close to death while young.”
While I am watching her play, I want to give the doll a name, but I don’t remember names other than my own, and that one only because I’ve just heard her say it while addressing me.
When I am well, like the doll said I would be, I ask my mother, “What name should I give to this doll who walked about the room and played for me, and looked after me when I was sick?”
“There is no such thing and no such doll,” my mother says. “The fever made you an imbecile.”
12
The sweet fleeting smell of lemongrass at dawn has always been my favorite scent. Standing at the top of the hill, I saw Luis in front of his house, using a flour-sack rag to wash Joel’s blood off one of the two automobiles owned by Señor Pico, Packards they called them, the type of vehicle the Generalissimo himself loved to be driven in at that time.
I walked to the stream behind the neighboring sugar mill where the cane workers bathed at daybreak, before heading out to the fields. It was the first day of a new cane harvest. The stream was already crowded, overflowing with men and women, separated by a thin veil of trees.
Everyone was unusually quiet, even in their whisperings. Instead of the regular loud morning chatter, there was only the sound of hummingbirds chirping, the water gurgling, circling around all the bodies crammed into its path.
I waved to Mimi, Sebastien’s younger sister. She slid her face in and out of the water, making bubbles with her mouth. Mimi had followed Sebastien to the valley when he’d moved here four years earlier. These days she worked as one of the maids of Doña Eva, the widowed mother of Doctor Javier and Beatriz.
“This afternoon Doña Eva is having a Mass and a sanco-cho for the anniversary of her birth,” Mimi announced. My feet floated above the warm pebbles at the bottom of the stream. It was as if nothing else of much importance had taken place, and for want of other information she had announcements from her mistress’ life to share. “The doña is fifty years old. Will your people be coming to her Mass?”
Mimi always called Señora Valencia and Señor Pico “moun ou yo,” my people, as though they worked for me. While pedaling in the stream, she ceremoniously raised her arms above the surface of the water and picked a small leaf off my nose. On her right hand, she had a bracelet made of coffee beans, painted in yellow gold and threaded on a string, just like Sebastien’s. It was something their mother had made them for safety and luck before they left her on the other side of the border after the hurricane had killed their father.
Thinking of the fiftieth anniversary of Doña Eva’s birth being on the first day since Joel’s death, and that perhaps I would never have a chance to utter a farewell to Joel’s closed eyes, I murmured to Mimi, “Do you think you and I will live long enough to be as old as Doña Eva?”
“I don’t want to live so long,” she answered in her usual abrupt manner. “I’d rather die young like Joel did.”
“Do you really want to end like that, in a ravine?” I whispered to her so the others would not hear.
“I’d rather have death surprise me,” she said loudly. “I don’t want to wait a long time for it to come find me.”
Mimi was at least four years younger than me and, not counting this sudden death she was saying she wanted, had more time ahead of her than I did. There were women in the stream who were ancient enough to be our great-grandmothers. Four of them were nearby, helping a few of the orphaned girls to wash themselves. Among the oldest women, one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.
The oldest cane-cutting women were now too sick, too weak, or too crippled to either cook or clean in a big house, work the harvest in the cane fields, or return to their old homes in Haiti. So they started off every morning bathing in the stream, and then spent the rest of the day digging for wild roots or waiting on the kindness of their good neighbors.
Mimi’s face grew sad and serious as she observed the other women, especially Félice, a young woman, the housemaid of Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine, a rich Haitian couple who lived among the valley’s well-to-do families. Félice had a hairy beet-colored birthmark like a mustache over her lip. She was reasonably pretty, but the birthmark was all you saw when you looked at her face.
Félice had been Joel’s woman for some time. Kongo, Joel’s father, had disapproved of the whole affair because he knew firsthand some of Félice’s family history. In a moment of desperate hunger during the first years of the Yanki occupation, Félice’s grandfather had stolen an old hen from the yard of Kongo’s mother in Haiti. He couldn’t bear having his son take up with a woman whose family had a thief for an ancestor, Kongo had said. There was always a risk that this type of thing could run in the blood. He didn’t want to take any chances with his only heir.
Now Kongo was bathing in the middle of the stream, scrubbing his body with a handful of wet parsley, while the sun climbed up in the sky above his silver-tipped hair.
We used pèsi, perejil, parsley, the damp summer morningness of it, the mingled sprigs, bristly and coarse, gentle and docile all at once, tasteless and bitter when chewed, a sweetened wind inside the mouth, the leaves a different taste than the stalk, all this we savored for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides of old aches and griefs, to shed a passing year’s dust as a new one dawned, to wash a new infant’s hair for the first time and—along with boiled orange leaves—a corpse’s remains one final time.
The other men stood apart, giving Kongo more space than usual. He moved slowly as he scrubbed his wide shoulders and contorted himself to allow the parsley to brush over the map of scars on his muscular back, all the while staring at the water’s surface, as though he could see more than his reflection there.
Sebastien and his friend Yves were standing closest to Kongo, nudging away those who wanted to pay their respects.
“I keep asking myself what Kongo’s done with Joel’s corpse,” Mimi muttered in my ear, leaning forward.
No one would dare dispute Kongo, no matter what he had done with his son’s body. He was the most respected elder among us. We all trusted him.
Kongo dropped the used parsley in the stream and raised his machete from the water. Holding his work tool up to the sun, he stroked the edge of the blade as though it were made of flesh. Kongo was still an active worker. He had toiled side by side with his son for more than a dozen cane harvests. Before the full harvest, during the dead season, Kongo, Joël, Sebastien, and his friend Yves had cleared tobacco fields together; on Sundays they cut down trees to make charcoal to sell.
“If one of our men had killed Kongo’s son, they’d expect to die,” Mimi said. “But since it’s one of them, there’s nothing we can do. Poor Kongo, this must be killing him inside. I say, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
A few more people arrived. They shed their clothes and squeezed into the spaces left in the water. Void of ceremony, this was a silent farewell to Joel, a quiet wake at dawn.
“Your people killed Joel rushing home to their twin babies, didn’t they?” Mimi asked. “I hear this is how it happened.”
“Yes. That’s how it was.”
“Beatriz thinks she’ll be the godmother of one of the twins.”
“The señor and the señora will decide.”
“What Beatriz wants, she is often given.”
“Do you always call her Beatriz?” I asked.
“I don’t have to christen her ‘Señorita’ in your presence, do I?”
I thought of Señora Valencia, whom I had known since she was eleven years old. I had called her Señorita as she grew from a child into a young woman. When she married the year before, I called her Señora. She on the other hand had always called me Amabelle.
“I don’t call her ‘Beatriz’ in her presence,” Mimi explained. “But what would be so terrible if we did say only their Chris
tian names?”
“It would demonstrate a lack of respect,” I said. “The way you’d never call one of these old women by their names. You call them ‘Man’ even though they’re not your mother.”
Mimi flinched and looked down at her coffee bean bracelet. She seemed pained for a moment as she glanced at the old women, perhaps searching for her mother’s smile beneath their scowls.
“What does it matter if Beatriz and your lady become angry with us?” she said. “If they let us go, at least we’d have a few days of freedom before dying from hunger.”
“There is your brother who counts on you,” I said, wanting to halt this needless quarrel in light of the heavier pains in the air. “Even when he’s buried in debt, he can always secure a meal from you.”
“Or from you,” she insisted.
“But you are his blood,” I said. “With myself, if we quarrel, he won’t eat from me.”
“I thank you for reminding me why I’m so bound to the misery of that woman’s house,” she said. “When you and my brother set up house together, then perhaps I will be free.”
Everyone watched Kongo as he emerged from the stream. He walked off, leaning on a broken broom handle that served him as a cane. Sebastien and his friend Yves, who had also been on the road when Joel was killed, followed behind Kongo, ready to catch him if the broom handle failed. Yves had a shaved head that shimmered as bright as Kongo’s machete under the morning sun. He and Sebastien followed Kongo back to the compound.
“When will you and Sebastien start living in the same house together?” Mimi asked. “If my brother is too timid to ask, I can act as a go-between.”
“Yesterday Juana called me a nonbehever because I don’t normally pray to the saints,” I said. “She asked me if I believed in anything, and all I could think to say was Sebastien.”