“I will.”
“Good-night, then.”
“Good sleep, Papi.”
Outside, Luis skinned and chopped up the dead goat. He piled the legs in a bucket and covered them with clumps of rock salt.
When I was a child, my father and I used to play a game called osle using the small front-leg joint bones from a goat. These bones are like dominoes, except they have a curved back and three hollowed sides. I’d spent hours alone trying to get a handful of five to land on the same side. I never succeeded.
I asked Luis to cut off the two small bones for me. Wiping off the blood, I took them to my room. There I undressed, taking off my sand-colored housedress and the matching faded square of cloth wrapped around my head. Nearly everything I had was something Señora Valencia had once owned and no longer wanted. Everything except Sebastien.
I spread an old sheet on the floor next to a castor oil lamp and a conch shell that Sebastien had given me, saying that in there flowed the sound fishes hear when they swim deep inside the ocean’s caves. On the wall was pasted a seven-year-old calendar, from the year of the great hurricane that had plundered the whole island, a time when so many houses were flattened and so many people were killed that the Generalissimo himself had marched through the windswept streets of the Dominican capital and ordered that the corpses he encountered during his inspection be brought to the Plaza Colombina and torched in public bonfires that burned for days, filling the air with so much ash that everyone walked with their eyes streaming, their handkerchiefs pressed against their noses, and their parasols held close to their heads.
I lay on my mat on the floor, giving Sebastien time to arrive. If he didn’t come soon then I would have to go and look for him in the compound at the mill.
In the meantime, I did something I always did at times when I couldn’t bring myself to go out and discover an unpleasant truth. (When you have so few remembrances, you cling to them tightly and repeat them over and over in your mind so time will not erase them.) I closed my eyes and imagined the giant citadel that loomed over my parents’ house in Haiti, the fortress rising out of the miter-shaped mountain chain, like two joined fists battling the sky.
The citadel had been conceived by Henry I, a king who wanted to conquer a world that had once conquered him. My father loved to recount this tale of Henry I, a slave who, after the captives had rebelled against the French and formed their own nation, built forts like the great citadel to keep intruders away.
As a child, I played in the deserted war rooms of Henry I’s citadel. I peered at the rest of the world from behind its columns and archways, and the towers that were meant to hold cannons for repelling the attack of ships at sea. From the safety of these rooms, I saw the entire northern cape: the yellow-green mountains, the rice valley, the king’s palace of three hundred and sixty-five doors down in the hills above Milot and the Palais des Ramiers, the queen’s court across the meadow. I smelled the musty cannonballs and felt Henry I’s royal armor bleeding rust onto my hands, armor emblazoned with the image of a phoenix rising over a wall of flames and the words the king was said to have uttered often—Je renais de mes cendres—promising that one day he would rise again from the ashes of his death. I heard the wind tossing through the wild weeds and grass growing out of the cracks in the stone walls. And from the high vaulted ceilings, I could almost hear the king giving orders to tired ghosts who had to remind him that it was a different time—a different century—and that we had become a different people.
Imperceptibly Henry I’s murmurs became Sebastien’s. I rose and walked to the door. Sebastien was standing there. He handed me two yams with the roots and dirt still clinging to them. The yams were from the small garden behind his room at the compound. Sometimes I cooked for him. Whenever we could we ate together.
“I almost dreamt about you,” I said. “I was home and I wanted you to be with me.”
“I’ve been waiting outside, watching for the right moment,” he said.
His shirt, one of the many I had made for him from indigo-dyed flour sacks, was covered with dried red mud and tufts of green grass. There were cactus needles still sticking to the cloth and some to the skin along his arm, but he did not seem to feel their sting. One of his eyes was swollen, the pouch underneath visibly filled with blackened blood. He tried to smile, holding the side of his face where the smile tore at him and hurt.
“Did you fall in the cane fields?” I asked, already sensing it was not so. I touched the scruffy beard that he had grown the last few days. Some clumps of the hair were stained green as though his face had been pressed down against crushed grass for a long time.
“I cannot stay,” he said. At least he was speaking normally, I thought. His voice had not changed. “Old Kongo’s waiting for me at the mill. His son Joel was killed. Joël is dead.” His dirt-stained forehead was sweating. He brushed the sweat off with a single swipe of his hand.
“Joel dead? How?”
“Yves, Joël, and me, we were walking along when an automobile hit Joel and sent him into the ravine.”
“And you? Did you break any bones?” I asked, as if this were the only way in which a person could be wounded, only when his body was almost crushed, pulped like the cane in the presses at the mill.
“Yves and I were lucky,” he said. And then I thought how truly fortunate he was. He was not crying or yelling or throwing rocks at the house, or pounding a tree stump against the side of the automobile that had killed his friend. Perhaps the truth had not yet touched him deeply enough. But, then, he had seen death closely before.
“What’s Kongo doing?” I asked. Perhaps Sebastien was staying calm by thinking of the next step, the next action.
“The first thing is to put Joël’s body in the ground,” he said.
“Does Kongo know whose automobile hit Joel?”
“At this time, all he knows is that his son is dead. He needs to make a coffin. Don Carlos won’t pay for a burial.”
Luis and Papi had gone to bed. I led Sebastien behind the latrines. There Papi had a stack of cedar planks that he used for his leisure occupation, making tables and chairs and building miniature houses. Sebastien took four long boards, stained and polished, enough to build a coffin for a grown man.
I offered to help him carry them, but he refused.
“You stay,” he said. “I will come back.”
I looked down at the yams, leaning against the wall where I had laid them soon after he had given them to me.
“With all this, you had time to bring these yams?” I asked.
“You stay here until I come back,” he said, “don’t try to go anywhere.”
I heard him breathing hard, struggling with the weight of the wood as he hauled it away. I went back to my room, lay down, and waited for his return.
Poor Kongo. Condolences, Kongo. Two new children came into the world while you have to put your son in the ground.
It is a Friday, market day. My mother, my father, and me, we cross into Dajabón, the first Dominican town across the river. My mother wants to buy cooking pots made by a Haitian pot maker named Moy who lives there, the best pot maker in the area. There is a gleam to Moy’s pots that makes you think you are getting a gem. They never darken even after they have been used on outdoor cooking fires for years.
In the afternoon, as we set out to wade across the river again with our two new shiny pots, it starts to rain in the mountains, far upstream. The air is heavy and moist; a wide rainbow arc creeps away from the sky, dark rain clouds moving in to take its place.
We are at a distance from the bridge. My father wants us to hurry home. There is still time to cross safely, he says, if we hasten. My mother tells him to wait and see, to watch the current for a while.
“We have no time to waste,” my father insists.
“I’ll carry you across, and then I’ll come back for Amabelle and the pots,” my father says.
We walk down from the levee. My father looks for the shallows, where the round-edged rust-colored boulders we’d used before as stepping stones have already disappeared beneath the current.
“Hold the pots,” my mother tells me. “Papa will come back for you soon.”
On the levee are a few river rats, young boys, both Haitian and Dominican, who for food or one or two coins, will carry people and their merchandise across the river on their backs. The current is swelling, the pools enlarging. Even the river rats are afraid to cross.
My father reaches into the current and sprinkles his face with the water, as if to salute the spirit of the river and request her permission to enter. My mother crosses herself three times and looks up at the sky before she climbs on my father’s back. The water reaches up to Papa’s waist as soon as he steps in. Once he is in the river, he flinches, realizing that he has made a grave mistake.
My mother turns back to look for me, throwing my father off balance. A flow of mud fills the shallows. My father thrusts his hands in front of him, trying to keep on course. My mother tightens her grip around his neck; her body covers him and weighs him down at the same time. When he tries to push her up by her legs, a cluster of vines whisks past them; my mother reaches for the vines as though they were planks of a raft.
As the rain falls, the river springs upwards like an ocean riptide. Moving as close as they can to the river’s edge, the boys throw a thick sisal rope to my parents. The current swallows the rope. The boys reel it back in and wrap it around a boulder. The knot slides away from the boulder as soon as it leaves their hands.
The water rises above my father’s head. My mother releases his neck, the current carrying her beyond his reach. Separated, they are less of an obstacle for the cresting river.
I scream until I can taste blood in my throat, until I can no longer hear my own voice. Yet I still hold Moy’s gleaming pots in my hands.
I walk down to the sands to throw the pots into the water and then myself. The current reaches up and licks my feet. I toss the pots in and watch them bob along the swell of the water, disappearing into the braided line that is the river at a distance.
Two of the river boys grab me and drag me by my armpits away from the river. Their faces seem blurred and faraway through the falling rain. They pin me down to the ground until I become still.
“Unless you want to die,” one of them says, “you will never see those people again.”
When Sebastien returned from the compound that night, he was wearing a clean shirt and had washed most of the grass from his beard and face. He sat and leaned back against the wall, watching a lizard dash across the ceiling. I made room for him to lie down on the mat next to me.
“Señor Pico’s at home now,” I said. “You have to be careful coming and going.”
“At this moment, what I want more than anything is for Señor Pico to try and strike me,” he said, in an angry tone that I was not used to. Perhaps it was all becoming more familiar to him now. His friend had died. He could have died. We were in the house of the man who had done it. Sebastien could go in and kill him if he really wanted to.
“Señor Pico has rifles,” I reminded him, “and we are on his property.”
“Is the air we breathe his property?” he asked.
“How was Kongo?”
“No one can find him,” he said.
“Where did he go?”
“After we brought the body to him—”
“What condition was the body in?” I asked, regretting the words as soon as they left my mouth.
“He fell from a great height into the ravine,” he said.
“What did Kongo do with the body?”
“He let a few people see,” he said calmly. “Then Yves and I helped him take Joel down to the stream. We washed him and cleaned off all the blood and brought him back to Kongo’s room. Kongo said he wanted to stay alone with the body, then while I was waiting here to enter your room, he took it away.”
It was hard to imagine Kongo hauling Joel very far on his back. Joel was much taller and larger-boned, the kind of man who was called upon to pull an oxcart full of cane when the oxen were too fatigued to do the job.
“They say a son’s never too big to be carried or beaten by his father,” Sebastien said, rubbing a balled fist against his swollen eye. “If Kongo carried off Joel by himself then there’s more truth to that than I thought.”
“Maybe Kongo wished to say his farewell alone,” I said, raising his fist from his eye.
“The others have been out looking for him,” he said. “I think he took Joel’s body away because he wants us to let him be. I’m going to respect his wishes. He’ll come back when he wants.”
He ran both his hands up and down my back. He had been this way the whole year we’d been together. His favorite way of forgetting something sad was to grab and hold on to somebody even sadder.
“You’re sweating,” he said, letting his fingers slide along my spine.
“I had my dream of my parents in the river,” I said.
“I don’t want you to have this dream again,” he said.
“I always see it precisely the way it took place.”
“We’ll have to change this thing, starting now.” He blew out the lamp. The room was pitch black. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened for his voice.
“I don’t want you to dream of that river again,” he said. “Give yourself a pleasant dream. Remember not only the end, but the middle, and the beginning, the things they did when they were breathing. Let us say that the river was still that day.”
“And my parents?”
“They died natural deaths many years later.”
“And why did I come here?”
“Even though you were a girl when you left and I was already a man when I arrived and our families did not know each other, you came here to meet me.”
His back and shoulders became firm and rigid as he was concocting a new life for me.
“Yes,” I said, going along. “I did wander here simply to meet you.”
“I don’t give you much,” he said, “but I want you to know that tomorrow begins my last zafra. Next year, I work away from the cane fields, in coffee, rice, tobacco, corn, an onion farm, even yucca grating, anything but the cane. I have friends looking about for me. I swear it to you, Amabelle, this will be my last cane harvest, just as it was Joël’s.”
I knew he considered Joel lucky to no longer be part of the cane life, travay tè pou zo, the farming of bones.
“Tonight, when Yves and me, we carried Joël’s corpse into the compound,” he said, “I thought about how both Yves’ father and my father died, his father organizing brigades to fight the Yanki occupation in Haiti and my father in the hurricane.”
I reached up and pressed my hands against his lips. We had made a pact to change our unhappy tales into happy ones, but he could not help himself.
“Sometimes the people in the fields, when they’re tired and angry, they say we’re an orphaned people,” he said. “They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don’t belong anywhere and that’s us. I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are.”