Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  First it rained for several days, a breezy, late summer rain, warm and various, turning the leaves of the trees, like wet, silver-palmed hands, this way and that, as the breeze off the sea tumbled against the hills. All the wood got soaked through, and when their cookfires went out, the people slept long and late inside their houses and shops, waking to talk in low voices and to peer out the door again and again at the red ground still riddled and puddled from the stoop to the lane, dribbling down the lane and down the hillside in new streams that ran red as blood all the way to the sea. These were long, boring days of waiting, gossiping, thinking of food and of the past, fussing with children’s hair and guessing and arguing lightly about when the rain would stop and wood dry out so cookfires could be lit and yams baked again, damp clothes dried, bedding spread in the sunlight, children sent scurrying to the fields for greens and to the shop for a can of tinned beef or a box of yellow cheese. A few people in the settlement, Aubin, the police chief, Chauvet, the shopkeeper, and Placide, who owns a small truck, have kerosene stoves and were able to cook inside their houses. Soon the smell of their food cooking in the morning and again late in the day drifted through the settlement and set our stomachs to grumbling and made it difficult to keep our hearts from tightening with anger against everything—against our neighbors with their stoves, against our restless children, against the pair of uncooked yams in the corner on the floor, against the pair of chickens under the cabin scratching in the dirt and clucking quietly to each other, against the cold chunks of breadfruit crumbling in our mouths. We smelled a stew, a dense tangle of threads of tomato, chicken, onion and greens, and we looked across the dark room at each other’s faces, the small children lying on the bed, the boy by the window, the sister-in-law and her baby in the chair by the window, and it was difficult for us not to hate the world so much that we hated even each other, we who must live in this world.

  Then the rain stopped. The wind died, and the sky seemed to lift: and lighten to a milky white. We smiled and stepped to the open doorway and looked at the yard, where everything dripped and glistened, as if the entire valley had all at once been plucked from under the sea by a gigantic hand and set down there between the blue-green mountains inland and the pearly sea beyond the hills. It was beautiful and newborn.

  Then, before we could stop him, the boy darted around us and ran down the path, quickly gone, eager to see his friends and walk with them to Port-de-Paix, where they follow older boys and men who teach them how to make a little money doing things we will not permit them to do here in Allanche. We cannot keep them here, where they have no land to raise a crop and yet have no other way than farming to earn money for their families or themselves. These days all the boys soon go away to the towns and cities, even to Port-au-Prince, where, without their mothers and fathers, they become drunkards and pimps and beggars and even worse. Most of them never come back.

  Aubin—the chief of police, he’s called, though he has no assistant—came down the lane from his office, which is also his home, and as he passed the cabin, he called out, You should shutter your window, ladies, and lock your door! This is the start of a hurricane!

  He came to the window and peered in at us. He was wearing his cap and the jacket of his uniform, so we knew this was official business, this warning, even though he often called on us or shouted hello when he passed by, for the sister-in-law, Vanise, is the mother of his child and he enjoyed keeping track of the child, although he no longer cared for the mother, who, despite her youth, had grown thin and sour-faced and silent, except when she talked to us or to her baby.

  It’s a big one, a strong blow, he said, and puffing his round brown cheeks, he blew a gust of wind into the darkness of the cabin—pfff!—and laughed.

  Then he was serious, for he saw we were frightened and alone, and he said he’d heard it on his radio. Everyone should just stay inside their cabins and wait out the storm, he said. It’ll pass over the island in a few hours. Where’s your boy? he asked us, and when he learned that the boy had left as soon as the rain stopped, he seemed concerned for a second. The roads have washed out, he said. He’ll have to turn back. There’s no road to Port-de-Paix anymore, it’s buried in mud off the hills, he said. I heard it on my radio.

  We listened in silence to him, and so he said, Pray he gets back before the hurricane strikes. Or he’ll come home dead in a box. He said this with a cheerfulness we have grown used to, for he does not want the boys to come back at night, or ever. He wants them to disappear into the towns and not cause him trouble anymore.

  And your husband, do you hear from him in America? Aubin asked. Does he send you money still? He smiled like a snake, no lips, no teeth. He’s been gone a long time now, eh? Must be a rich man by now. He laughed, as if he had told a joke. Or else in jail. They put Haitians in jail in America, you know. I heard that on my radio too.

  We said nothing, for though it was true, we had not heard a word from the man in over a year, we also knew he was not in jail, for he had sent us money, American money, for almost two years, which we had hidden away, as he wanted us to do, for the time when we would be able to go to America to join him there. We knew that in the last year someone had been stopping his letters and removing the money from the envelopes, someone in the settlement, probably, who had learned somehow that he was sending us the money he earned taking care of a golf course in Florida. We had brought his first letter, after taking the money from it, to Berthe Moriset, a woman in the settlement who reads letters for people, and she had read his instructions to us to save the money and spend it only “in emergency,” which we understood to mean only when we were ready to come to America, but when we heard those words from Berthe’s lips, we knew we had made a mistake in taking the letter to her, for now everyone would know. After that, we took out the money and burned the letters unread. Two more letters came, and then, for a year, no more. But we knew, even so, the man was not in jail.

  What about you? Aubin asked Vanise. She sat in a clump of shadow in the far corner of the cabin, looking down at the infant in her lap as if its father were not present. She did not respond, so he shouted her name, Vanise! What about you? Does the baby do well?

  We explained for her that there was no food, for we had been inside since the rain started and had not been able to find dry wood for the fire to bake the yams or cook one of the chickens.

  Aubin looked at us as if we were all children and said that we should have stored wood under the house, but when we tried to explain that it was very difficult to find enough deadwood to store it against the future, he waved us silent. He’s a busy man, Aubin, and does not want to be troubled by our difficulties.

  Go to my office, he told the eldest of the daughters on the bed. Fetch an armful of sticks from under the building so your mother can make a fire and cook food for you. This is shameful, he said. A house with no man in it …, he muttered in disgust. We did not hear the rest, for he was gone.

  But it did not matter what Aubin thought or said, for we knew, with the hurricane coming, with the boy gone and the road washed out, with all the danger and with the suffering yet to come, after the suffering we had already gone through, it was clear that the loas were hungry, and we said to one another that as soon as the hurricane was over, we would go to Cabon or Bonneau with one of the chickens and make a service for their feeding.

  This seemed to lighten Vanise’s load of woe. She stood, placed her infant son on the bed with the other children and made for the door, saying she would kill the remaining chicken, the one not saved for the houngan, and pluck it, and when the daughter returned from Aubin’s with the sticks for the fire, we would cook it and have food to eat during the hurricane.

  But this was not to happen. The girl quickly returned from Aubin’s house empty-handed and weeping, for she had been greeted there by Aubin’s wife, who knew of his child with Vanise. Aubin’s wife, a sharp-tongued woman, shouted at the girl that she would not feed her husband’s mistress and bastard and sent her away with
threats of a beating.

  Swiftly, Vanise descended into gloom again, and despite our wishes to remain optimistic, we followed her there, and before long, we were all once again sitting in the damp shadows of the cabin staring at the ceiling or looking out the door and window, lost in the floating world of our thoughts, as if the world where there was a hurricane coming and our son out somewhere in it and where there was no food to eat, no dry firewood, no dry clothes or bedding, as if that world did not exist.

  But, of course, it did exist, and soon the sky darkened again and the rain returned, furiously now, as if angered by delay, pushed by a strong wind out of the sea, until in a short time the rain seemed not so much dropped from the sky above as driven straight at us, a pressing, milky wall of rain that bent the trees, turned the palms inside out, ripped palmettos and stripped shrubs from the ground and pitched them against the bowed trunks of the larger trees, the cabins and the rocks, where they clung for a few seconds, then got torn loose and sent flying in pinwheels over the rough ground to the next tree or outcropping in their path. The noise was immense, a howling, like a beast made nervous and then frantic, a beast crazed by the drumming of the rain against the tin roof and shuttered window and closed door of the cabin. The children cried, and we adults tried to calm them, but we, too, were frightened, because it did not seem to us that the cabin could hold itself against the force of the wind and rain, even though it had stood against many hurricanes over the years. The children knew we were frightened, despite our soothing, reassuring words, so they wept all the louder, their small wails swallowed instantly by the howl of the wind.

  The day became night, and we lit a candle, though we had nothing to see. The wind continued as before, but slowly it shifted the direction it came from, moving from off the sea around to the north, until by midnight it was raging like a huge river down the valley that runs between the hills on the east and the mountains on the west. It was pummeling us from the front now, instead of from the side, and the trees that had been bowed in one direction were bent in another and, weakened, even the large thatch palms began to break off and fall. The children by this time were asleep, exhausted by their fear and weeping, and we were glad they could not hear the trunks of the trees snap and split, the ongoing roar of the wind and rain, the hammering on the roof and against the shutter and the door.

  We woke, though we did not know we had fallen asleep, when suddenly the door was thrown back, and the wind seemed to toss the shadow of the boy, our son, into the room. He shoved the door shut again and tied it, then turned to us and said for us to light another candle, he wanted us to see what he had brought home. He was soaked through, dripping and shiny in the flickering yellow light of the room, and his face was bright and smiling.

  Vanise lit a candle and came close to the boy, and when he held a bundle out to her, she said, Oh! She said it strangely, a mixture of relief, surprise and fear. When she stepped back, we could see that the boy was holding a large ham, the entire smoked leg of a pig, the kind of ham we had never seen before except in the pictures in magazines that people sometimes get from tourists or when they go to Port-au-Prince. A ham! An American ham!

  And here is where we made our mistake, for we woke the children and immediately set to cutting off chunks of the ham, adults and small children alike, devouring it like starved animals. We laughed and grabbed and stuffed the salty meat into our mouths with our hands. Then, as our hunger lost its rage, we slowed and found ourselves nibbling and picking at the pink, grainy ham, now and then drinking water from the gourd, and we began to ask the boy where he had found the ham, who had given it to him?

  He showed us a face that knows a secret, and for a while, despite our jokes and coaxing, would not tell us, for he was proud that he had brought this food home and wanted to enjoy our gratitude as long as he could. Finally, when we commanded him to tell us where he got the ham, he told us that he had taken it from a truck turned over in a mud slide on the road to Port-de-Paix, and then, as he expected, we were not as happy with the gift as before.

  What truck was this?

  A truck. Just a van. A van upside down in the mud, with the doors wide open and the rain coming in.

  And where was the driver?

  Gone, Maman.

  Gone? He left his van and this American ham behind?

  There were many hams, he said. Other kinds of meat, too. All wrapped in paper and scattered all over the place, inside the van and falling out into the mud and rain.

  Where did the driver go? Did you see him?

  We saw him…. He was dead. He was inside the van on the floor in front, and his head was all bloody from where he’d hit the windshield when the van turned over from the mud. It must have been hit by the mud when the side of the hill above the road loosened and came rushing onto the road.

  Are you sure he was dead?

  Yes, the boy said quietly.

  Where is the rest of the meat, all the other hams and packages? And who owns them?

  Some are still there. We only took what we could carry. There’s nothing wrong. The driver was a stranger, he’s dead.

  But who owns this meat? we asked the boy, who was now afraid that we were angry with him. Whose van is it? What did it say on the sides? Whose sign is on it?

  The boy did not know whose van it was, and even if there had been a sign on it, he could not have read it anyhow. He just looked up at us, wide-eyed, and shrugged and said, It’s all right. It’s all right, Maman.

  But it was not all right. The ham belonged either to a rich man or to someone in the government or possibly to a hotel or restaurant in Port-de-Paix or Cap Haitien, and now we had eaten fully half of it.

  The white circle of bone that ran through the center of the meat stared from its pink nest like an accusing eye.

  Vanise said in a low voice, Aubin will find out. He’ll find out, and he’ll come here and take away your son to punish him and you. And he’ll take away my baby to punish me. She began to tremble and then to weep.

  The boy said, No, it’s all right. It’s all right! he insisted, but his eyes were wet with fear now, for he, like all of us, knew that such things happen easily. There was his friend, Georges Le Rouge, who had asked the American family he worked for one winter to intercede with the police so he could take his driver’s test for a chauffeur’s license without paying the bribe, and Georges had disappeared the week after the Americans left. Aubin said they had taken him to America with them, but we all knew the truth. And there was the sad affair of the family of Victor Bonneau, whose eldest son went to Port-au-Prince and got mixed up with the people who ran the newspaper that people were not supposed to read. And we all knew Adrienne Merant before her brothers ran off to Santo Domingo, knew her when she was pretty, and knew her afterwards, when the soldiers brought her back to Allanche from Port-au-Prince. People disappeared, or people were changed, and though sometimes it was clear that there were good reasons, it was also clear that sometimes it was only because they had made a mistake no greater than ours. And sometimes it was only because they happened to know or be related to someone who had made a mistake no greater than ours. The boy was wrong to insist that we had done nothing wrong, and he was right to be afraid, and Vanise was no doubt right to weep, and we, we were right to do what we did then.

  We had not noticed it, but the storm had gone silent. The wind and rain had stopped, and the only sound was the drip of the water off the roof and the gurgle of the candle in the dish. It would come again, we knew. The hurricane always stops midway like this, as if to catch its breath, and then the wind turns and continues for another few hours, until, exhausted from having beaten the earth so long, it moves reluctantly away.

  Our voices and the sounds of our movements suddenly sounded loud and harsh. The smaller children and Vanise’s infant slept in a heap on the bed, while we sat around the small table next to the shuttered window, with the candle and the half-eaten ham and the gourd between us, and whispered, trying not to offend our ears with the cr
ackling sounds of our own voices, lips and teeth.

  Vanise, though seated at the table, was a bundle of short movements, her bony chest with its oversized, new mother’s breasts heaving, her fingers tying and untying themselves rapidly as if she were at once knitting and tearing apart a baby’s cap. Aubin will come tomorrow and take us away, she said in a thin voice. Or the police in Cap Haitien will make him do it, or the soldiers. They will find the van, and they’ll know. As soon as Aubin remembers that the boy and his friends were on the road during the storm, he’ll know they took the meat from the van. They’ll all know, and then he’ll come here, and no matter what we tell him, he’ll know the truth.

  She was right. When you deal with people like Aubin, people who have power over you, it’s not enough to lie. You also have to be believed. We could bury the ham deep in the earth way back in the bush, and Aubin would still know that our son had come home in the hurricane with stolen meat and we had eaten it. The only way we could both lie and be believed was if the son was not at home, if, when Aubin arrived, the boy was gone, never to appear at home again. Then, though Aubin would be angry at the boy, he might leave Vanise and her infant and the rest of us here to ourselves. Of course, if he ever found the boy afterwards, if he saw him accidentally in Port-de-Paix some night or caught him walking along the road to Cap Haitien early one morning, he would arrest him, because the boy’s not having come home immediately after the hurricane would mean that any lie he later told concerning the meat would not be believed.