“We brought you something to refresh you,” he told Dany.
His aunt seemed neither distressed nor irritated by the interruption. She could have sent Old Zo and the girl away, but she didn’t. Instead she told them to put their offering on an old table in the corner. The girl quietly put the plate down and backed out of the room, avoiding Dany’s eyes.
“I hope you’re both hungry,” the old man said, not moving from his spot. “Everyone is going to bring you something.”
Clusters of food-bearing people streamed in and out of the house all afternoon. He and his aunt would sample each plate, then share the rest with the next visitor until everyone in the valley had tasted at least one of their neighbors’ dishes.
By the time all the visitors had left and he and his aunt were alone together, it was dark and his aunt showed no interest in hearing what he had to say. Instead she offered him her cot, but he talked her into letting him have the sisal mat she’d spread out on the floor for herself.
She fell asleep much more quickly than he did. Mid-dream, she laughed, paid compliments, made promises, or gave warnings. “Listen, don’t go too far. Come back soon. What a strong baby! I’ll make you a dress. I’ll make you coffee.” Then she sat up in her cot to scold herself, “Estina, you are waking the boy,” before drifting once again into the images in her head.
In the dark, listening to his aunt conduct entire conversations in her sleep, he realized that aside from blood, she and he shared nocturnal habits. They were both palannits, night talkers, people who wet their beds, not with urine but with words. He too spoke his dreams aloud in the night, to the point of sometimes jolting himself awake with the sound of his own voice. Usually he could remember only the very last words he spoke, but remained with a lingering sensation that he had been talking, laughing, and at times crying all night long.
His aunt was already awake by the time he got up the next morning. With help from Old Zo’s daughter, who seemed to have been rented out to his aunt for the duration of his visit, she had already set up breakfast on the small table brought out to the front gallery from inside the house. His aunt seemed restless, almost anxious, as if she’d been waiting for him to rise for hours.
“Go wash yourself, Da,” she said, handing him a towel. “I’ll be waiting for you here.”
Low shrubs covered in dew brushed against his ankles as he made his way down a trail toward the stream at the bottom of the fall. The water was freezing cold when he slipped in, but he welcomed the sensation of having almost every muscle in his body contract, as if to salute the dawn.
Had his father ever bathed in this stream? Had his parents soaked here together, in this same spot, when they’d come to stay with his aunt? He had so little information and so few memories to draw on that every once in a while he would substitute moments from his own life in trying to re-create theirs. But lately what was taking up the most space in his mind was not the way his parents had lived but the way they had died.
A group of women were coming down the path toward the river with calabashes and plastic jugs balancing on top of their heads. They would bathe, then fill their containers further up, closer to the fall. He remembered spending hours as a boy watching the women bathe topless, their breasts flapping against their chests as they soaped and scrubbed themselves with mint and parsley sprigs, as if to eradicate every speck of night dust from their skin.
When he got back to his aunt’s house, he had a visitor, a short, muscular boy with a restrained smile and an overly firm handshake. The boy’s brawny arms were covered with tattoos from his elbows down to his wrists, his skin a canvas of Chinese characters, plus kings and queens from a card deck. One-Eyed Jack, Hector, Lancelot, Judith, Rachel, Argine, and Palas, they were all there in miniature, carved into his nut-brown skin in navy blue and red ink.
“I sent for Claude,” his aunt announced. “He’s the one I was telling you about, one of the boys who was sent back.”
Claude was sitting next to his aunt, on the top step in front of the house, dipping his bread in the coffee Old Zo’s daughter had just made.
“Claude understands Creole and is learning to speak bit by bit,” his aunt said, “but he has no one to speak English to. I would like you to talk with him.”
Claude was probably in his late teens, too young, it seemed, to have been expatriated twice, from both his native country and his adopted land. Dany sat down on the step next to Claude, and Old Zo’s daughter handed him a cup of coffee and a piece of bread.
“How long have you been here?” he asked Claude.
“Too long, man,” Claude replied, “but I guess it could be worse. I could be down in the city, in Port, eating crap and sleeping on the street. Everyone here’s been really cool to me, especially your aunt. She’s really taken me under her wing.”
Claude flapped his heavily tattooed arms, as if to illustrate the word “wing.”
“When I first got here,” he continued, “I thought I’d get stoned. I mean, I thought people would throw rocks at me, man. Not the other kind of stoned. I mean, coming out of New York, then being in prison in Port for three months because I had no place to go, then finally my moms, who didn’t speak to me for the whole time I was locked up, came to Port and hooked me up with some family up here.”
His aunt was leaning forward with both hands holding up her face, her white hair braided like a crown of gardenias around her head. She was listening to them speak, like someone trying to capture the indefinable essence of a great piece of music. Watching her face, the pleasure she was taking in the unfamiliar words made him want to talk even more, find something drawn-out to say, tell a story of some kind, even recite some poetry, if only he knew any.
“So you’re getting by all right?” he asked Claude.
“It took a lot of getting used to, but I’m settling in,” Claude replied. “I got a roof over my head and it’s quiet as hell here. No trouble worth a damn to get into. It’s cool that you’ve come back to see your aunt, man. Some of the folks around here told me she had someone back in New York. I had a feeling when she’d ask me to speak English for her.”
Claude reached down and picked up a couple of pebbles from the ground. It seemed to Dany that he could easily crush them if he wanted to, pulverize them with his fingertips. But instead he took turns throwing them up in the air and catching them, like a one-handed juggler. “It’s real big that you didn’t forget her, that you didn’t forget your folks,” he went on. “I wish I’d stayed in touch more with my people, you know; then it wouldn’t be so weird showing up here like I did. These people don’t even know me, man. They’ve never seen my face before, not even in pictures. They still took me in, after everything I did, because my moms told them I was their blood. I look at them and I see nothing of me, man, blank, nada, but they look at me and they say he has so-and-so’s nose and his grandmother’s forehead, or some shit like that.” One of Claude’s pebbles fell on the ground, missing his hand. He did not bend down to pick it up, but threw the others after it. “It’s like a puzzle, a weird-ass kind of puzzle, man,” he said. “I’m the puzzle and these people are putting me back together, telling me things about myself and my family that I never knew or gave a fuck about. Man, if I’d run into these people back in Brooklyn, I’d have laughed my ass off at them. I would’ve called them backward-ass peasants. But here I am.”
His aunt was engrossed, enthralled by Claude’s speech, smiling at times while the morning rays danced across her eyes, never penetrating her pupils. He was starting to think of his aunt’s eyes as a strange kind of prism, one that consumed light rather than reflected it.
“I can’t honestly say I love it here,” Claude seemed to be wrapping up, “but it’s worked out good for me. It saved my life. I’m at peace here, and my family seems to have made peace with me. I came around; I can honestly say I was reformed in prison. I would’ve been a better citizen than most if they hadn’t deported me.”
“You still have a chance,” Dany said, not believing it himself. “You can do something with your life. Maybe you’re back here for a reason, to make things better.”
He was growing tired of Claude, tired of what he considered his lame excuses and an apparent lack of remorse for whatever it was he’d done.
“How long will you be staying?” Claude asked.
“A while,” Dany said.
“Is there anything you want to do?” Claude asked. “I know the area pretty well now. I take lots of walks to clear my head. I could show you around.”
“I know where things are,” Dany said. “And if I don’t remember, my aunt can—”
“It’s just with her not being able to see—”
“She can see, in her own way.”
“Cool, man. I was just trying to be helpful.”
Even with the brusque way their conversation ended, Claude seemed happy as he left. He had gotten his chance to speak English and tell his entire life story in the process.
After Claude’s departure, Old Zo’s daughter came up and took the empty coffee cup from Dany’s hand. She lingered in front of him for a minute, her palm accidentally brushing against his fingertips. At times, she seemed older than she looked. Maybe she was twenty, twenty-five, but she looked twelve. He wondered what her story was. Were those children he had seen in Old Zo’s yard hers? Did she have a husband? Was he in the city? Dead?
She hesitated before stepping away, as though she gave too much thought to every move she made. When she finally walked away, Dany’s aunt asked him, “Do you know why Claude was in prison?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Do you know what his people say?”
“What do his people say?”
“They say he killed his father.”
That night, Dany dreamed that he was having the conversation he’d come to have with his aunt. They were sitting on the step where he and Claude had spoken. He began the conversation by recalling with his aunt the day his parents died.
He was six years old and his father was working as a gardener in Port-au-Prince. The night of the explosion, he had been at home with his parents and his aunt, who was visiting from Beau Jour, when they heard a loud crash outside. His father went out first, followed by his mother. Dany was about to go after them when he heard the shots. His aunt grabbed him and pinned him to the ground, but somehow he managed to wiggle out of her grasp.
Outside, most of the wooden porch was already on fire. The smoke was so dense he could barely see his parents, his mother slumped over his father on the ground.
Behind him the front door was covered in flames. He ran out to the yard and called out for his aunt at the top of his lungs.
“Shut up now or I’ll shoot you too!” someone was shouting from the street.
It was a large man with a face like a soccer ball and a widow’s peak dipping into the middle of his forehead. The man was waving a gun at him as he opened his car door, and he only lowered the gun to drive away. His aunt then crawled out of the house and away from the porch, coughing the smoke out of her lungs. She was unable to see.
He dreamed his aunt saying, “Yes, this is how it happened, Da,” then urging him to elaborate on what he’d begun to tell her before Old Zo and his daughter had walked into her house. “You said you saw that same man in New York, Da? Are you sure it was him?”
The man who had killed his parents was now a barber in New York. He had a wife and a grown daughter, who visited often. Some guys from work had told him that a barber was renting a room in the basement of his house. When he went to the barbershop to ask about the room, he recognized the barber as the man who had waved the gun at him outside his parents’ house.
“It’s been so many years,” the dream aunt said. “Are you sure he’s the one?”
He took the empty room in the barber’s basement. He couldn’t sleep for months, spending his weekends in nightclubs to pass the time. He visited the barbershop regularly for haircuts, arriving early in the morning soon after he opened. He would sit and watch the barber, now a much thinner man, turn on his radio, then sweep the entire shop before lining up his tools and calling him to the chair. His heart would race as the barber draped a black cape over his chest, then sheared paths through his hair until barely a stubble was left on top of his head. All the while he would study the pictures on the walls, campaign posters for local elections, hairstyle samples that he never chose from, asking the barber only to “cut as much as you can.”
The barber never made conversation, never said, “How do you like the basement?” He only asked in a soft voice that sounded nothing like the hoarse and angry voice that had threatened him so many years ago, “Would you like a shave?”
He never turned down the shaves, for he thought it would give the barber a chance to have a closer look at his face, to remember him. He always expected the barber’s large hands to tremble, but it was his own body that quivered instead, his forehead and neck that became covered with sweat, melting the shaving cream on his chin, forcing the barber to offer him extra napkins and towels and warn him to stay still to avoid nicks and cuts.
Finally, two nights ago, when the barber’s wife was away at a religious retreat—he looked for such opportunities all the time and hadn’t found one until then—he climbed the splintered steps to the first floor, then made his way with a flashlight to the barber’s bedroom.
“What did you do?” the dream aunt asked.
He stood there and listened to the barber breathing. The barber was snoring, each round of snores beginning with a grunt and ending in a high-pitched moan. He lowered his face toward the barber’s widow’s peak, hoping he would wake him up and startle him to death. When he was a boy, he’d heard about political prisoners being choked in their sleep, their faces swelling, their eyes bulging out of their heads. He wanted to do the same thing now to the barber. Or maybe press a pillow down on his face. Or simply wake him up to ask him “Why?”
Looking down at the barber’s face, which had shrunk so much over the years, he lost the desire to kill. It wasn’t that he was afraid, for he was momentarily feeling bold, fearless. It wasn’t pity, either. He was too angry to feel pity. It was something else, something less measurable. It was the dread of being wrong, of harming the wrong man, of making the wrong woman a widow and the wrong child an orphan. It was the realization that he would never know why—why one single person had been given the power to destroy his entire life.