The Farming of Bones

by Edwidge Danticat

  “I’ll have to tell Sebastien.” Mimi splashed the water with her palms. The others turned to stare, cutting their eyes at her for seeming too joyful on such a day. She paddled the water with more force, making it rise up and shield her like a curtain of glass. She was like a naked statue in one of those fountains at the town square with water sprouting out of her navel and mouth.

  “No sad faces,” she said. “Joel’s well enough where he is. He’d want us to be glad for him. We should give him a joyous wake to send his spirit on its way. He would want us to laugh and be grateful he’s not here now.”

  Félice walked out of the stream and went to dress in the bushes. Mimi was one of the last people still left in the water.

  “Mimi’s only a child,” I said, following Félice. “She didn’t know what she was saying.”

  “This must be what it means to get old,” Félice said, in her usual urgent voice, which sometimes blurred the words when she was speaking. She covered the hairy birthmark with her hands as she chose her words and forced them out. “I could hate no one when I was young. Now I can and I do.”

  Dropping her head onto my shoulder, she pressed her forearms into my ribs as she leaned against me. Her body felt heavy and limp; I was afraid she was going to faint and fall right there at my feet.

  “Courage, dear one,” I said, trying to hold her up.

  “He was too young,” she said, “and Kongo will not even let the others act in response to this.”

  “What can be done?”

  “An eye for an eye, as Mimi says.”

  “No eye for no eye,” I said. “We cannot start a war here.”

  “It would not be a war,” she said, “only something to teach them that our lives are precious too.”

  “What will this do for Joel now?”

  “Everything’s lost to Joel,” she said. “It’s too late for him. But we should do something to keep them from taking others.”

  She pulled herself away from me, to stand on her own feet.

  “We must leave it to Kongo,” I said. “It is his son who died. He will know best what to do.”

  13

  Every night Sebastien talks in his sleep.

  “Do you know what I would like to do?” he asks one night.

  “Tell me what you would like to do.” You feel masterful making a sleeping person respond while you, awake, question the person. In some ways it is a miracle, like being loved, or watching a parrot—such a small animal—repeat words that have just crossed human lips.

  “I’d like to fly a kite,” Sebastien answers in his sleep when I ask what he would like to do.

  “What manner of kite?”

  “A piece of clear paper over a bamboo spine, a girl’s red satin ribbon for the tail.”

  “If I offer you my red satin ribbon?”

  He turns over and buries his head in the pillow.

  If I offer him my red satin ribbon?

  No retort.

  14

  Between the stream and Don Carlos’ mill were the houses of those Sebastien called the non-vwayajè Haitians, the ones who were better off than the cane cutters but not as wealthy as Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine and their friends, the rich Haitians.

  The stable non-vwayajè Haitians lived in houses made of wood or cement. They had colorful galleries, zinc roofs, spacious gardens, cactus fences with green vines crawling between the cactus stems. Their yards were full of fruit trees—mangos and avocados especially—for shade, nourishment, and decoration. They were people whose families had been in Alegría for generations: landowners, farmers, metalworkers, stonemasons, dressmakers, shoemakers, a married schoolteaching couple and one Haitian priest, Father Romain. Some of them had Dominican spouses. Many had been born in Alegría. We regarded them all as people who had their destinies in hand.

  That morning I thought of Sebastien’s decision to leave the cane fields after the harvest as I greeted those of them who were already outside, some sitting in cane back chairs while they had their morning meal of bread and coffee, corn mush, and mangú, others marching around their property like sentinels before rushing out to their day’s work. I saw Unèl, a dwarfish stonemason, and called out to him. He waved back with a wide toothy smile. Unèl had once rebuilt the workers’ latrines in Señora Valencia’s yard along with a group of friends he called his brigade.

  Parents were walking their children to the one-room school started by Father Romain and a Dominican priest, Father Vargas. The flat cinder-block building was already too crowded, and the parents who were taking their young ones there complained as they did every morning about the limitations on their children’s education.

  “I pushed my son out of my body here, in this country,” one woman said in a mix of Alegrían Kreyol and Spanish, the tangled language of those who always stuttered as they spoke, caught as they were on the narrow ridge between two nearly native tongues. “My mother too pushed me out of her body here. Not me, not my son, not one of us has ever seen the other side of the border. Still they won’t put our birth papers in our palms so my son can have knowledge placed into his head by a proper educator in a proper school.”

  “To them we are always foreigners, even if our granmèmès’ granmèmès were born in this country,” a man responded in Kreyol, which we most often spoke—instead of Spanish—among ourselves. “This makes it easier for them to push us out when they want to.”

  “You heard the rumors?” another woman asked, her perfect Kreyol embellished by elaborate gestures of her long fingers. “They say anyone not in one of those Yanki cane mills will be sent back to Haiti.”

  “How can the Yanki cane mills save anyone?” the Dominican-born woman with the Dominican-born son replied. “Me, I have no paper in my palms to say where I belong. My son, this one who was born here in this land, has no papers in his palms to say where he belongs. Those who work in the cane mills, the mill owners keep their papers, so they have this as a rope around their necks. Papers are everything. You have no papers in your hands, they do with you what they want.”

  I thought of my own situation. I had no papers to show that I belonged either here or in Haiti where I was born. The children who were being taken to school looked troubled as they glanced up at their parents’ faces, which must have seemed—if I remembered the way a parent’s face looked to a child—only a few inches away from the bright indigo sky. I found it sad to hear the non-vwayajè Haitians who appeared as settled in the area as the tamarind trees, the birds of paradise, and the sugarcane—it worried me that they too were unsure of their place in the valley.

  After joining the group, the stonemason, Unèl, began to talk about Joel.

  “Did you hear that they attacked an innocent man with an automobile and threw his corpse into a ravine?” Unèl asked.

  This is not the way it was, I wanted to say. But who was I to defend Señor Pico?

  Many of them had heard about Joël, but this was not anything new to them. They were always hearing about rifles being purposely or accidentally fired by angry field guards at braceros or about machetes being slung at cane workers’ necks in a fight over pesos at the cane press. Things like this happened all the time to the cane workers; they were the most unprotected of our kind.

  “First it is someone like Joel, and then it will be someone like us,” Unèl said, showing a braver sentiment than the others, “unless we gather together to protect ourselves.”

  Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine had erected a circular wall along the road enclosing them inside their expansive villa. As we moved towards their gate, I saw Félice standing on one of the raised verandahs between the two arched stone staircases at the front of Doña Sabine’s house. Doña Sabine stood in front of her, gesturing in our direction.

  The people ahead of me all spun around to look at Doña Sabine. Each adult in turn pointed at his or her chest, asking with hand signals whom she wanted. Doña Sabine kept pointing until Unèl realized that she was calling to him.

  Unèl broke away from the g
roup and moved towards the tall wrought-iron gate to Doña Sabine’s house. Her ten Dominican guards stood in a crowd at the gate, ready to defend her in case Unèl proved dangerous. She waved them off and motioned for Unèl to follow her and Félice past the foliage in her garden, the flowering bushes lined up in cropped rows, like schoolboys’ new haircuts.

  Félice looked up and gave me a quick shy smile as I walked past the gate, then returned her gaze to the amber-tinted mosaic designs on the path as she walked at Doña Sabine’s side.

  Doña Sabine had once been a famous dancer who had traveled everywhere in the world. Her husband owned a rum enterprise, which had been in his family for five generations, first on Haitian soil and then on what became Dominican soil during the two governments’ land exchanges some years before. Doña Sabine herself was a short woman, thinner than was perhaps beneficial to her health. From behind she looked more girlish than most girls, but each of her steps was like a long practiced dance. Now her elegant feet were engulfed in large cowhide slippers that probably belonged to her husband. Her hands were weighted down by a ring on every finger, except the thumbs. It was as though she were wearing all the jewels she owned, guarding them on her person rather than sheltering them in a cache.

  Unèl followed her and Félice up the covered passageway to the main house. She likely had some work for him to do. Doña Sabine’s husband, Don Gilbert, was standing out in the sun in a beige nightshirt, shouting orders to a large group of people who were scattered about the garden. When he looked up to see Unèl, his wife blew him a silent kiss, which he returned with a wave of his hand.

  In spite of their smiles and kisses, there was a feeling of distress about the place; it was as though another Yanki invasion was coming. I had never seen so many people working for Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine: clusters of anxious faces peering out from everywhere in the garden, people who looked tired and ill, some with bandages on their shoulders and pieces of clothing acting as slings to hold up their arms.

  On the way back to Señora Valencia’s house, I stopped at the parish school to visit with Father Romain. Father Romain was younger than most of the priests I had seen. He was dressed in his cassock, running through the yard with a large ring-shaped kite giving his pupils a lesson on the principles of light and colors, terrain and landscape, earth and sky, and the precise direction of the wind at the exact place in which they were standing.

  “It is Amabelle,” he said, handing the kite to one of the older boys to fly, “she who is from the same village of the world as me, Cap Haitien, the city of Henry Ps great citadel.”

  Father Romain always made much of our being from the same place, just as Sebastien did. Most people here did. It was a way of being joined to your old life through the presence of another person. At times you could sit for a whole evening with such individuals, just listening to their existence unfold, from the house where they were born to the hill where they wanted to be buried. It was their way of returning home, with you as a witness or as someone to bring them back to the present, either with a yawn, a plea to be excused, or the skillful intrusion of your own tale. This was how people left imprints of themselves in each other’s memory so that if you left first and went back to the common village, you could carry, if not a letter, a piece of treasured clothing, some message to their loved ones that their place was still among the living.

  Priests were not excluded from this, and Father Romain, though he was devoted to his students, missed his younger sister and his other relations on the other side of the border. In his sermons to the Haitian congregants of the valley he often reminded everyone of common ties: language, foods, history, carnival, songs, tales, and prayers. His creed was one of memory, how remembering—though sometimes painful—can make you strong.

  The children crowded around him, yanking at his fingers, begging him to continue with the kite-flying class. He calmed them by taking turns touching each of their heads. When he had tapped all the children, he reached over and stroked my hand, and removing his instructor’s spectacles to look straight into my eyes, he told me, “I am needed, Amabelle.”

  “Certainly I see that, Father,” I said.

  “I have already told this to Kongo,” he said. “Please tell Sebastien for me, too. I am sad for Joel’s death. These things happen too often. People die unfairly, innocently. His father will need kind words from all of us.”

  “Thank you, Father,” I said, feeling that he had given me what I had come for, a fresh measure of hope.

  “Thank you for your visit, Amabelle.”

  His students dragged him away, fighting for control of the kite string.

  Walking up the hill to Señora Valencia’s house, I saw Doctor Javier’s sister, Beatriz. She was wearing an old green sundress and twirling a matching parasol above her head. The morning breeze went through her skirt, raising it above her knees, but she did not seem to notice.

  Beatriz walked into the parlor where Papi was sitting near the radio, listening for word from Spain. He had his notebook on his lap, in which he scribbled a few words, looked up, then scribbled again, between loud fits of coughing.

  Beatriz kissed Papi on the cheek, showing him a kindness she reserved only for old men who had no interest in marrying her. Papi kept his eyes on his notebook and continued to write. Beatriz picked a wicker sofa across from him and sat down. She swung her long braid from her back to her shoulder. The end of the braid landed on the closed parasol on her lap. “Papi, you haven’t strolled past our house in some time.” She played with the braid while talking.

  “I was staying here in case Valencia’s labor pains began,” Papi said.

  “Now that the babies are here—”

  “I will be walking your way again,” he said.

  Juana rushed out from the pantry to meet Beatriz.

  “How kind of you to visit us so early, Señorita Beatriz,” Juana said as a greeting.

  “Thank you,” answered Beatriz, looking annoyed that Juana had disturbed her conversation with Papi.

  “The señora did not have a restful night, with both the children waking at different hours,” Juana announced. “It seems they already have dissimilar temperaments, those children.”

  “Do you have my tea?” Papi coughed as though he were drowning.

  “The tea is boiling,” Juana said. “It must stew; you need it for that cough.” Juana turned back to Beatriz. “Would you like a taste of my good strong coffee, Señorita Beatriz, some that my sisters sent for me from my birthplace only yesterday?”

  “Whatever pleases you, Juana,” Beatriz said.

  “Come, Amabelle.” Juana grabbed my hand and dragged me back to the pantry where she busied herself making everyone’s morning meal. Luis stood in a corner eating quickly before starting his day’s work.

  “Take this.” Juana handed me two boiled yuccas in a large bowl. “Build up your strength. This day will be full of comings and goings for us.”

  I ate while she lined up the cups and saucers on a tray for Papi and Beatriz.

  “Take your time with your food, Amabelle,” she commanded.

  Luis wiped his hands on his pants when he was done eating. He squeezed Juana’s behind as he headed out.

  “Don’t forget the goat meat you must take as a gift to Doña Eva from Señor Pico,” Juana reminded him.

  When I came back into the parlor, Beatriz was bending over the radio with Papi as he turned the large dials to get a sound. The radio remained voiceless. He conceded defeat and turned it off.

  “What are you writing there?” Beatriz asked, peeking into Papi’s notebook.

  “I’m trying to write what I recall of my life,” Papi said, closing the notebook. He cleared a space for me to put the tray in front of him, tore a piece from the bread on my tray, and crammed it into his mouth.

  “Papi, can I see what you have written?” Beatriz asked.

  “I’m writing only for my grandchildren,” Papi replied. “I feel like a bird who’s flown over two mountains without lo
oking at the valley in the center. I don’t know what I will or won’t retain in a few more years. Even now there are many things that took place yesterday I don’t remember.”

  “Your grandchildren were born yesterday. I know you have not forgotten this, have you?” Beatriz teased, sliding her cup and saucer off the tray. The smell of Juana’s coffee scented the entire parlor, like smoke from a green-wood fire.

  I put the tray down on a side table near the radio and started walking back to the pantry.

  “Stay, Amabelle,” Papi said. “I may need you to warm my tea again.”

  “You’ve had a colorful life,” Beatriz said to Papi.

  “What do you know of my life?” Papi sipped his tea as he waited for her reply.

  “I know what Valencia has told me,” she said.

  “Valencia knows only what I tell her, and for an adoring child a foothill can seem like a mountain if her father’s painting the picture.”

  “So you didn’t like being an officer in the Spanish army, is that so?” Beatriz asked.

  “This was almost forty years ago,” Papi said. “Spain was at war then too, a splendid little war, fighting for colonies with Los Estados Unidos. I fled from bloody battles to come here, the great battles of El Caney and San Juan Hill. But even if things were peaceful, I still would have left my country.”

  “Do you like it here?” Beatriz asked.

  “I married here. I’ve raised my daughter here and now my grandchildren—”

  “But does it please you, honestly?”

  “Why do you ask so many questions?”

  “I read in La Nacion that there are women fighting in the International Brigade in Spain,” Beatriz said, twisting her long caramel-colored braid.

  “Is that what you see in your dreams at night, visions of the International Brigade?” Papi puckered his lips and moved his head from side to side in apparent disapproval.

  “Do you enjoy it here?’ Beatriz asked like a paid inquisitor.