The Farming of Bones

by Edwidge Danticat

  Sebastien’s father was killed in the great hurricane that struck the whole island—both Haiti and the Dominican Republic—in 1930. He lost his father and almost everything else. This is why he left Haiti. This is why I have him. A sweep of winds that destroyed so many houses and killed so many people brought him to me.

  Sebastien’s mother is still alive in Haiti. Sometimes, when we are almost asleep together, Sebastien will hear a pigeon; the pigeons he hears—and I don’t always hear them—tend to go on moaning night after night with their mysterious calls in their mysterious language.

  The pigeons always make him draw in his breath, suck his teeth, and say, “Ay, pobrecita manman mwen.” My poor mother.

  6

  Doctor Javier went off to see a young man who was bedridden with chills and a fever. He promised to return to visit the children once more before nightfall.

  Juana was in the pantry preparing chicken soup for the señora, a soup made from the meat of an old hen, and a stew for the rest of the household. The children were sleeping in their cradle as Señora Valencia lay in her bed, everything but her face covered by several blankets.

  I walked over to look at the babies. Dwarfed by her brother, Rosalinda lay completely still. I reached in and picked her up. Señora Valencia turned over on her side and saw me holding her daughter.

  “Amabelle, put her face on your breast,” she said.

  Rosalinda remained asleep while I unbuttoned my blouse and placed her tiny cheek between my breasts and collarbone. I could instantly feel the air streaming in and out of her nose, her breathing falling into step with the beating of my heart.

  “Isn’t it miraculous?” Señora Valencia’s eyes traveled back between her daughter and her son as though there was nothing else in the world she could see. “Javier says that they can’t see anything except the light and the dark for the first days. I don’t believe him. They’re too perfect.”

  Señora Valencia motioned for me to come sit on the bed next to her. I put Rosalinda back in her cradle and walked towards her mother.

  “Amabelle, I must confess something,” she said. “When I had you light the candle to La Virgencita after the children were born, it was really for my mother. I promised her I’d light her a candle after I gave birth. Last night when my first pains began, I felt like my mother was with me. I’d been having more than my usual number of dreams since I became with child, but last night did not feel like a dream. My mother sat here next to me, in this bed. She put her arms around me and touched my stomach. This is why I did not scream until the last moment. I never felt alone.”

  She turned to look at the white candle on the layette chest, the wick half buried in a mass of melted paraffin, the flame long since extinguished by all the movements in the room.

  “I wish you had known Mami, Amabelle,” she said.

  “I wish I had known her as well, Señora.” But her mother had died even before my parents had drowned, leaving us both to parent all our childhood dreams out of ourselves.

  Juana walked in with a tray of steaming soup and a sweet tea brew and placed them on the bed, in front of Señora Valencia.

  “Eat well, Señora,” she said. “Remember, the children feed from you.”

  Tears began to stream down Juana’s face again. She turned to me and said, “See that the señora eats,” and then she ran out of the room.

  “Juana was at Mami’s side both times Mami was pregnant,” Señora Valencia explained.

  I placed an embroidered shawl around the señora’s neck and handed her a spoon. After the señora had eaten a few spoonfuls, Rosalinda began to whimper. I picked her up and brought her to her mother.

  “My tiny little one, she must grow strong, or how will she defend herself when her brother wants to tussle?” Señora Valencia said as she took her from my hands. “I can’t wait for Pico to see the children. I hope he and Papi will return tonight.”

  “I know the señor will want to come,” I said.

  “My Pico is so full of ambition. He told me that he’s dreamed since he was a boy of advancing in the army and one day becoming president of this country.”

  “And you the wife of the president, Señora?”

  “I wouldn’t like it,” she said, wrinkling her nose, as though smelling something sour. “When Pico procures everything he wants, he might not want me anymore. As a boy, he was so poor. Now he can’t accept that he has a bit of comfort and he doesn’t have to fight to make the sun rise every morning.”

  “The señor’s work is important.” I told her what I knew she also believed.

  “I wish I could see him more,” she said. “I miss the dark taste of cigars in his mouth.”

  Señora Valencia raised the little girl up to her shoulder as if she had already been doing it all her life.

  “I’ve thought of everything I want to tell the children,” she said, “things they might need to know and other things as well, where I may have to hold my tongue.”

  “You know what best to do, Señora.”

  “What you did for me today, Amabelle, Mami should have been here to do, except she was like me and would have been screaming in agony, too.” She threw her head back and laughed at the pain linking her with her mother. “Amabelle, after my mami died, Juana told me that in our faith if there is a choice between a baby and a mother during a birth, you must choose the baby.”

  “I am glad we never had to choose, Señora.”

  “If you’d had to make this choice, I’d want you to look after my children. See what we’ve brought forth together, my Spanish prince and my Indian princess.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to be a princess?” Señora Valencia murmured into her daughter’s face. “She will steal many hearts, my Rosalinda. Look at that profile. The profile of Anacaona, a true Indian queen.”

  “Juana and I will sleep in the house with you tonight,” I offered to the señora.

  “Juana will only drown us in more of her tears,” she chuckled.

  “I will ask her to call on the patron saint of tears to stop hers.”

  “I think it best if she sleeps in her own house and you in your room.”

  “One of us must stay with you, even if Señor Pico returns.”

  I left the señora to the care of one of her husband’s girl cousins, who had come from the village with more old hen soup, eggs, nutmeg, money, and dog’s teeth for the babies’ protection, and went down to the pantry to find Juana.

  Juana was sitting at the table, stirring a wooden spoon around the plate of stew in front of her. Her eyes were red from all the crying she had done. She got up and ladled out a bowl of stew from the pot for me.

  “I think a tear or two might have fallen in the stew while you were cooking,” I said as I sat at the table next to her.

  I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I saw the chunks of cabbage, yucca and manioc floating in my bowl.

  “There are no tears in your bowl,” Juana said. “I was careful. Nothing but what is meant to be there ever enters my stew.”

  “I was not serious,” I said, patting the cushion of flesh on her back.

  “Don’t tease. What if the señora heard you?”

  “Why are you crying so, Juana? I don’t believe they’re all for joy, your tears.”

  “It’s a grand day in this house,” she said, “a day that comes to remind me how quickly time passes by. A woman like me grows old while more and more children arrive m this world.”

  “Are you jealous, Juana? Do you want your own babies?”

  “Jealous? Santa Ana, the Holy Mother who gives life, what if she heard you?” She rapped her knuckles on the four corners of the table, as though to test the strength of the wood, and then picked up a rag and wiped the already clean table legs.

  “If she has ears, then Santa Ana, she’s already heard everything I said.”

  “The sin’s on your head, then,” she said. “But you’re not a believer.”

  “How do you know I’m not a believer?”

>   “Do you believe in anything?”

  Juana rubbed her closed hands together as though washing in the stream. After years of working as a housemaid, it was hard for her to remain still.

  “I remember when Señora Valencia’s mother became pregnant with her,” she said. “One day, she had no menstrual rags for me to wash. I said to her, ‘Señora Rosalinda, could you be with child?’ She said to me, ‘Juana, I dare not even dream it.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘It would be too miraculous.’ She was with child indeed, and during the first and second months her body became so uneasy. She grew larger and larger until she was too wide for most passageways in this house. If anyone looked like they were going to have twin babies, it was Señora Rosalinda.”

  Juana stood up and poured another bowl of stew for herself. She’d had an enormous appetite over these past few months and had grown even broader, especially around her face.

  “Now Señora Valencia has children of her own.” She pondered the event out loud. “Look how quick the time has passed. It’s not the time itself, but what it does to us.”

  “You’re far from old,” I said. She was at least fifty, twice my and Señora Valencia’s age, but her body looked hardy and capable, like it could still bear many children.

  “You don’t know how long I prayed for a child myself,” she said.

  “I have no child, but even I know you must do more than pray.”

  “Sinner!” She laughed and playfully slapped the back of my hand.

  “So you’ve wanted babies?” I asked.

  “Babies always lead us to talk of more babies. Don’t you want to have your own?”

  I shook my head no. Perhaps because my parents both had died young, I never imagined myself getting older than I was, much less living long enough to bear my own children. Before Sebastien, all my dreams had been of the past: of the old country, of places and people I might never see again.

  “I was close to becoming a mother once,” Juana said. “My stomach grew for three months and nine days, then all at once it was gone. ¡Adiós bebé! This child was never born. It never had a sex. Never had a name. My Luis, he loves children. If they could grow out of the ground, he would have grown one for me long ago. At this moment in life, a woman asks herself: What good is all this flesh? Why did I have this body?”

  Juana and her sisters had been raised in a convent school where their mother was the cook. She was going to be a nun like her two sisters until she met Luis. She and Luis left together and settled in the valley. Juana thought she couldn’t have children because she had abandoned her calling. Even her lost pregnancy must have seemed like a deserved punishment from a God she had defied.

  “Look at me,” she said, rotating her arms as though she were ironing. “I have no need to cry for myself. I must cry for Doña Rosalinda, who died in the attempt to bring a second child into the family. And I must cry for Señora Valencia, who’s without her mother on this day.”

  7

  One night, in the awakened dark, when he is missing his father, Sebastien asks, “What was it that you admired most about your father?”

  I pretend that I cannot remember, but he insists. “Please tell me, Amabelle, I wish to know this.”

  “My father’s name was Antoine Désir,” I say because I know he will ask it again. “I always heard people call him Fre Antoine, Brother Antoine, like they called my mother Man Irelle, Mother Irelle. My mother was older than him, I believe, and some say she looked it.”

  “Tell me what you liked most about him, your father.” Sebastien’s voice is more hesitant than usual, it’s as though he really does not want to know, like he would rather I say I never had a father, but he knows I had one, whom I lost like he lost his.

  “My father was joyful, contrary to my mother’s quietly unhappy ways,” I admit. “He used to pick me up and try to throw me up in the air, even when I became too heavy to be carried, even when everything he did ceased to seem like a miracle to me. He liked to make like he was going to eat my food if he finished his plate before I finished mine. He spent a lot of time doing the birthing and healing work. He was always looking for some new way to heal others, searching for cures for illnesses that he had not yet even encountered. Aside from the birthing and healing work he and my mother did together, he spent a lot of time outside the house trying to help other people plow their fields and dig waterways to their land. I was always very jealous of the time he spent on other people’s land.”

  I can tell, he is ready. He wants me to ask about his dead father. I can tell by the endless pause after I’m done speaking, the way he opens his mouth now and again and then only sighs as if to ask himself where he could possibly make himself begin.

  “How did the hurricane find your father?” I end up saying. It is not the gentlest or most deft way to ask, but I believe it will help him speak.

  He opens his mouth a few more times and moans.

  “If you let yourself,” he says finally, “you can see it before your eyes, a boy carrying his dead father from the road, wobbling, swaying, stumbling under the weight. The boy with the wind in his ears and pieces of the tin roofs that opened the father’s throat blowing around him. The boy trying not to drop the father, not crying or screaming like you’d think, but praying that more of the father’s blood will stay in the father’s throat and not go into the muddy flood, going no one knows where. If you let yourself, you can see it before your eyes.”

  8

  Señor Pico Duarte bore the name of one of the fathers of Dominican independence, a name that he had shared with the tallest mountain on the island until recently, when it was rechristened Pico Trujillo after the Generalissimo. Yet, at thirty-six years of age, Señor Pico Duarte was still shorter than the average man, even in his military boots, which seemed to add height to the other officers. With his honey-almond skin and charcoal eyes, he was the one that baby Rosalinda resembled most.

  The floor thundered under his boots as he ran from Papi’s automobile into the house to find his wife and newborn children, looking for hints of their presence in the parlor and all the different rooms in the house. Juana and I both followed him blindly, instinctively, to his wife’s room, thinking perhaps he might need something we could bring for him, or his wife, or their new children. Working for others, you learn to be present and invisible at the same time, nearby when they needed you, far off when they didn’t, but still close enough in case they changed their minds.

  Juana was more herself now. She watched with a reserved smile as Señor Pico rushed to the bed where his wife lay and kissed her hair and forehead.

  “Pico, let me see your face,” she said, her fingers pulling at his bristly tar-black hair.

  “Go look at the children,” Papi urged him with a hearty laugh.

  As he stood over his children’s cradle, Señor Pico’s body shook as though he wanted to scream; he held his fist to his mouth to contain his joy. His eyes lingered on his son, his heir. Raising the sheet covering the child’s body, he peeked beneath his diaper to check the boy’s testicles.

  “I will name him Rafael, for the Generalissimo,” he said as Juana reswaddled the children even more securely than before. The señora agreed to this name with a coy nod. And so the boy became Rafael like the Generalissimo, the president of the republic. Rafi for intimates.

  As he contemplated the splendor and uncommon elegance of his new son’s name, Señor Pico peeled off his cap and tunic, which formed a pile of khaki on the floor, where he dropped them. Juana walked over to collect them. This was precisely why we had followed him here, to perform the incidental tasks so he wouldn’t have to think about them at the peak of his joy.

  I glanced over at Juana’s man, Luis, who stood alone in the doorway, looking as though he were going to cry. Luis was still dressed in his daily gardening clothes, a mud-streaked shirt and a roomy pair of pants hanging like an opened parasol around his narrow frame. He held a straw hat reverently against his chest. His face showed the ache of wanting that I
had seen in Juana’s eyes earlier. Because of his shyness, Luis hid all emotion behind his careful gestures of courtesy and respect. He did not venture past the threshold into the bedroom to see the babies. No one asked him to, either.

  “Wouldn’t you like your supper, Señor?” Juana asked, gathering our patrón’s tall laced black boots from the floor.

  Señor Pico motioned her away with a wave of his happy hands.

  “Should we draw you a bath?” she persisted.

  “Leave the water on the coals for me,” he said.

  Luis ran off to warm Señor Pico’s bathwater.

  “It must have been painful. Was it painful?” Señor Pico asked his wife.

  She smiled with a peaceful glow on her face. Juana placed Señor Pico’s clothes in the armoire.

  “Amabelle, Juana, you may both leave us now,” Señor Pico said.

  While the señor visited with his wife and children, I watched from a rocking chair outside the door to my room as Luis sat in the yard with a hurricane lamp, using his hat to fan the fire under Señor Pico’s bathwater. As the flames grew, the night breeze teased them, forming dancing shadows on the sides of the tin bucket. Juana walked over to her man and handed him a bowl of stew. Luis placed the bowl of stew near the bucket to warm. He cleared a spot on the ground and spread a rag next to him for Juana to sit on. She told Luis of having had word (and dried coffee grains) sent from her sisters. Juana spoke excitedly about Señora Valencia’s babies, how she could not believe that Señora Valencia—a child whose birth she had witnessed—was now a mother herself.

  As she chattered, Luis looked at the dark around him, seeming afraid of being attacked by the trees. Yet he remained silent, waiting for his turn to speak. Finally, Juana fell silent, too.

  “Señor Pico bought a goat that I must cut up and salt tonight” was what he said first.

  “Where’s the goat?” she asked.

  Juana peered at the goat, hanging by its hind legs from one of the strongest branches of the flame tree. She then examined her man’s face, perhaps sensing that something disagreeable had taken place, something he was not telling yet.