Krik? Krak!

  The way my son reacts to my lips stroking his cheeks decides for me if he's asleep. He is like a butterfly fluttering on a rock that stands out naked in the middle of a stream. Sometimes I see in the folds of his eyes a longing for something that's bigger than myself. We are like faraway lovers, lying to one another, under different moons.

  When my smallest finger caresses the narrow cleft beneath his nose, sometimes his tongue slips out of his mouth and he licks my fingernail. He moans and turns away, perhaps thinking that this too is a part of the dream.

  I whisper my mountain stories in his ear, stories of the ghost women and the stars in their hair. I tell him of the deadly snakes lying at one end of a rainbow and the hat full of gold lying at the other end. I tell him that if I cross a stream of glass-clear hibiscus, I can make myself a goddess. I blow on his long eyelashes to see if he's truly asleep. My fingers coil themselves into visions of birds on his nose. I want him to forget that we live in a place where nothing lasts.

  I know that sometimes he wonders why I take such painstaking care. Why do I draw half-moons on my sweaty forehead and spread crimson powders on the rise of my cheeks. We put on his ruffled Sunday suit and I tell him that we are expecting a sweet angel and where angels tread the hosts must be as beautiful as floating hibiscus.

  In his sleep, his fingers tug his shirt ruffles loose. He licks his lips from the last piece of sugar candy stolen from my purse.

  No more, no more, or your teeth will turn black. I have forgotten to make him brush the mint leaves against his teeth. He does not know that one day a woman like his mother may judge him by the whiteness of his teeth.

  It doesn't take long before he is snoring softly. I listen for the shy laughter of his most pleasant dreams. Dreams of angels skipping over his head and occasion-ally resting their pink heels on his nose.

  I hear him humming a song. One of the madrigals they still teach children on very hot afternoons in public schools. Kompè jako, domé vou? Brother Jacques, are you asleep?

  The hibiscus rustle in the night outside. I sing along to help him sink deeper into his sleep. I apply another layer of the Egyptian rouge to my cheeks. There are some sparkles in the powder, which make it easier for my visitor to find me in the dark.

  Emmanuel will come tonight. He is a doctor who likes big buttocks on women, but my small ones will do. He comes on Tuesdays and Saturdays. He arrives bearing flowers as though he's come to court me. Tonight he brings me bougainvillea. It is always a surprise.

  "How is your wife?" I ask.

  "Not as beautiful as you."

  On Mondays and Thursdays, it is an accordion player named Alexandre. He likes to make the sound of the accordion with his mouth in my ear. The rest of the night, he spends with his breadfruit head rocking on my belly button.

  Should my son wake up, I have prepared my fabrication. One day, he will grow too old to be told that a wandering man is a mirage and that naked flesh is a dream. I will tell him that his father has come, that an angel brought him back from Heaven for a while.

  The stars slowly slip away from the hole in the roof as the doctor sinks deeper and deeper beneath my body. He throbs and pants. I cover his mouth to keep him from screaming. I see his wife's face in the beads of sweat marching down his chin. He leaves with his body soaking from the dew of our flesh. He calls me an avalanche, a waterfall, when he is satisfied.

  After he leaves at dawn, I sit outside and smoke a dry tobacco leaf. I watch the piece-worker women march one another to the open market half a day's walk from where they live. I thank the stars that at least I have the days to myself.

  When I walk back into the house, I hear the rise and fall of my son's breath. Quickly, I lean my face against his lips to feel the calming heat from his mouth.

  "Mommy, have I missed the angels again?" he whispers softly while reaching for my neck.

  I slip into the bed next to him and rock him back to sleep.

  "Darling, the angels have themselves a lifetime to come to us."

  between

  the pool and

  the gardenias

  She was very pretty. Bright shiny hair and dark brown skin like mahogany cocoa. Her lips were wide and purple, like those African dolls you see in tourist store windows but could never afford to buy.

  I thought she was a gift from Heaven when I saw her on the dusty curb, wrapped in a small pink blanket, a few inches away from a sewer as open as a hungry child's yawn. She was like Baby Moses in the Bible stories they read to us at the Baptist Literary Class. Or Baby Jesus, who was born in a barn and died on a cross, with nobody's lips to kiss before he went. She was just like that. Her still round face. Her eyes closed as though she was dreaming of a far other place.

  Her hands were bony, and there were veins so close to the surface that it looked like you could rupture her skin if you touched her too hard. She probably belonged to someone, but the street had no one in it. There was no one there to claim her.

  At first I was afraid to touch her. Lest I might disturb the early-morning sun rays streaming across her fore-head. She might have been some kind ofwanga, a charm sent to trap me. My enemies were many and crafty. The girls who slept with my husband while I was still grieving over my miscarriages. They might have sent that vision of loveliness to blind me so that I would never find my way back to the place that I yanked out my head when I got on that broken down minibus and left my village months ago.

  The child was wearing an embroidered little blue dress with the letters R-O-S-E on a butterfly collar. She looked the way that I had imagined all my little girls would look. The ones my body could never hold. The ones that somehow got suffocated inside me and made my husband wonder if I was killing them on purpose.

  I called out all the names I wanted to give them: Eve-line, Josephine, Jacqueline, Hermine, Marie Magdalene, Célianne. I could give her all the clothes that I had sewn for them. All these little dresses that went unused.

  At night, I could rock her alone in the hush of my room, rest her on my belly, and wish she were inside.

  When I had just come to the city, I saw on Madame's television that a lot of poor city women throw out their babies because they can't afford to feed them. Back in Ville Rose you cannot even throw out the bloody clumps that shoot out of your body after your child is born. It is a crime, they say, and your whole family would consider you wicked if you did it. You have to save every piece of flesh and give it a name and bury it near the roots of a tree so that the world won't fall apart around you.

  In the city, I hear they throw out whole entire children. They throw them out anywhere: on doorsteps, in garbage cans, at gas pumps, sidewalks. In the time that I had been in Port-au-Prince, I had never seen such a child until now.

  But Rose. My, she was so clean and warm. Like a tiny angel, a little cherub, sleeping after the wind had blown a lullaby into her little ears.

  I picked her up and pressed her cheek against mine.

  I whispered to her, "Little Rose, my child," as though that name was a secret.

  She was like the palatable little dolls we played with as children—mango seeds that we drew faces on and then called by our nicknames. We christened them with prayers and invited all our little boy and girl friends for colas and cassavas and—when we could get them— some nice butter cookies.

  Rose didn't stir or cry. She was like something that was thrown aside after she became useless to someone cruel. When I pressed her face against my heart, she smelled like the scented powders in Madame's cabinet, the mixed scent of gardenias and fish that Madame always had on her when she stepped out of her pool.

  I have always said my mother's prayers at dawn. I welcomed the years that were slowing bringing me closer to her. For no matter how much distance death tried to put between us, my mother would often come to visit me. Sometimes in the short sighs and whispers of some-body else's voice. Sometimes in somebody else's face. Other times in brief moments in my dreams.

  There were many nights when I saw some old wo
men leaning over my bed.

  "That there is Marie," my mother would say. "She is now the last one of us left."

  Mama had to introduce me to them, because they had all died before I was born. There was my great grandmother Eveline who was killed by Dominican soldiers at the Massacre River. My grandmother Defile who died with a bald head in a prison, because God had given her wings. My godmother Lili who killed herself in old age because her husband had jumped out of a flying balloon and her grown son left her to go to Miami.

  We all salute you Mary, Mother of God. Pray for us poor sinners, from now until the hour of our death. Amen.

  I always knew they would come back and claim me to do some good for somebody. Maybe I was to do some good for this child.

  I carried Rose with me to the outdoor market in Croix-Bossale. I swayed her in my arms like she was and had always been mine.

  In the city, even people who come from your own village don't know you or care about you. They didn't notice that I had come the day before with no child. Suddenly, I had one, and nobody asked a thing.

  In the maid's room, at the house in Pétion-Ville, I laid Rose on my mat and rushed to prepare lunch. Monsieur and Madame sat on their terrace and welcomed the coming afternoon by sipping the sweet out of my sour-sop juice.

  They liked that I went all the way to the market every day before dawn to get them a taste of the outside country, away from their protected bourgeois life.

  "She is probably one of those manbos," they say when my back is turned. "She's probably one of those stupid people who think that they have a spell to make them-selves invisible and hurt other people. Why can't none of them get a spell to make themselves rich? It's that voodoo nonsense that's holding us Haitians back."

  I lay Rose down on the kitchen table as I dried the dishes. I had a sudden desire to explain to her my life.

  "You see, young one, I loved that man at one point. He was very nice to me. He made me feel proper. The next thing I know, it's ten years with him. I'm old like a piece of dirty paper people used to wipe their behinds, and he's got ten different babies with ten different women. I just had to run."

  I pretended that it was all mine. The terrace with that sight of the private pool and the holiday ships cruising in the distance. The large television system and all those French love songs and rara records, with the talking drums and conch shell sounds in them. The bright paintings with white winged horses and snakes as long and wide as lakes. The pool that the sweaty Dominican man cleaned three times a week. I pretended that it belonged to us: him, Rose, and me.

  The Dominican and I made love on the grass once, but he never spoke to me again. Rose listened with her eyes closed even though I was telling her things that were much too strong for a child's ears.

  I wrapped her around me with my apron as I fried some plantains for the evening meal. It's so easy to love somebody, I tell you, when there's nothing else around.

  Her head fell back like any other infant's. I held out my hand and let her three matted braids tickle the life-lines in my hand.

  "I am glad you are not one of those babies that cry all day long," I told her. 'All little children should be like you. I am glad that you don't cry and make a lot of noise. You're just a perfect child, aren't you?"

  I put her back in my room when Monsieur and Madame came home for their supper. As soon as they went to sleep, I took her out by the pool so we could talk some more.

  You don't just join a family not knowing what you're getting into. You have to know some of the history. You have to know that they pray to Erzulie, who loves men like men love her, because she's mulatto and some Haitian men seem to love her kind. You have to look into your looking glass on the day of the dead because you might see faces there that knew you even before you ever came into this world.

  I fell asleep rocking her in a chair that wasn't mine. I knew she was real when I woke up the next day and she was still in my arms. She looked the same as she did when I found her. She continued to look like that for three days. After that, I had to bathe her constantly to keep down the smell.

  I once had an uncle who bought pigs' intestines in Ville Rose to sell at the market in the city. Rose began to smell like the intestines after they hadn't sold for a few days.

  I bathed her more and more often, sometimes three or four times a day in the pool. I used some of Madame's perfume, but it was not helping. I wanted to take her back to the street where I had found her, but I'd already disturbed her rest and had taken on her soul as my own personal responsibility.

  I left her in a shack behind the house, where the Dominican kept his tools. Three times a day, I visited her with my hand over my nose. I watched her skin grow moist, cracked, and sunken in some places, then ashy and dry in others. It seemed like she had aged in four days as many years as there were between me and my dead aunts and grandmothers.

  I knew I had to act with her because she was attracting flies and I was keeping her spirit from moving on.

  I gave her one last bath and slipped on a little yellow dress that I had sewn while praying that one of my little girls would come along further than three months.

  I took Rose down to a spot in the sun behind the big house. I dug a hole in the garden among all the gardenias. I wrapped her in the little pink blanket that I had found her in, covering everything but her face. She smelled so bad that I couldn't even bring myself to kiss her without choking on my breath.

  I felt a grip on my shoulder as I lowered her into the small hole in the ground. At first I thought it was Monsieur or Madame, and I was real afraid that Madame would be angry with me for having used a whole bottle of her perfume without asking.

  Rose slipped and fell out of my hands as my body was forced to turn around.

  "What are you doing?" the Dominican asked.

  His face was a deep Indian brown but his hands were bleached and wrinkled from the chemicals in the pool. He looked down at the baby lying in the dust. She was already sprinkled with some of the soil that I had dug up.

  "You see, I saw these faces standing over me in my dreams—"

  I could have started my explanation in a million of ways.

  "Where did you take this child from?" he asked me in his Spanish Creole.

  He did not give me a chance to give an answer.

  "I go already." I thought I heard a little meringue in the sway of his voice. "I call the gendarmes. They are com-ing. I smell that rotten flesh. I know you kill the child and keep it with you for evil."

  "You acted too soon," I said.

  "You kill the child and keep it in your room."

  "You know me," I said. "We've been together."

  "I don't know you from the fly on a pile of cow manure," he said. "You eat little children who haven't even had time to earn their souls."

  He only kept his hands on me because he was afraid that I would run away and escape.

  I looked down at Rose. In my mind I saw what I had seen for all my other girls. I imagined her teething, crawling, crying, fussing, and just misbehaving herself.

  Over her little corpse, we stood, a country maid and a Spaniard grounds man. I should have asked his name before I offered him my body.

  We made a pretty picture standing there. Rose, me, and him. Between the pool and the gardenias, waiting for the law.

  the missing

  peace

  We were playing with leaves shaped like butterflies. Raymond limped from the ashes of the old schoolhouse and threw himself on top of a high pile of dirt. The dust rose in clouds around him, clinging to the lapels of his khaki uniform.

  "You should see the sunset from here." He grabbed my legs and pulled me down on top of him. The rusty grass brushed against my chin as I slipped out of his grasp.

  I got up and tried to run to the other side of the field, but he caught both my legs and yanked me down again.

  "Don't you feel like a woman when you are with me?" He tickled my neck. "Don't you feel beautiful?"

  He let go of my
waist as I turned over and laid flat on my back. The sun was sliding behind the hills, and the glare made the rocks shimmer like chunks of gold.

  "I know I can make you feel like a woman," he said, "so why don't you let me?"

  "My grandmother says I can have babies."

  "Forget your grandmother."

  "Would you tell me again how you got your limp?" I asked to distract him.

  It was a question he liked to answer, a chance for him to show his bravery.

  "If I tell you, will you let me touch your breasts?"

  "It is an insult that you are even asking."

  "Will you let me do it?"

  "You will never know unless you tell me the story."

  He closed his eyes as though the details were never any farther than a stage behind his eyelids.

  I already knew the story very well.

  "I was on guard one night," he said, taking a deep theatrical breath. "No one told me that there had been a coup in Port-au-Prince. I was still wearing my old régime uniform. My friend Toto from the youth corps says he didn't know if I was old régime or new régime. So he shot a warning at the uniform. Not at me, but at the uniform.

  "The shots were coming fast. I was afraid. I forgot the password. Then one of Toto's bullets hit me on my leg and I remembered. I yelled out the password and he stopped shooting."

  "Why didn't you take off your uniform?" I asked, laughing.

  He ignored the question, letting his hand wander between the buttons of my blouse.

  "Do you remember the password?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "I don't tell it to just anyone. Lean closer and whisper it in my ear."