Read Online The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat - Free Book Online

flinched and looked down at her coffee bean bracelet. She seemed pained for a moment as she glanced at the old women, perhaps searching for her mother’s smile beneath their scowls.
    “What does it matter if Beatriz and your lady become angry with us?” she said. “If they let us go, at least we’d have a few days of freedom before dying from hunger.”
    “There is your brother who counts on you,” I said, wanting to halt this needless quarrel in light of the heavier pains in the air. “Even when he’s buried in debt, he can always secure a meal from you.”
    “Or from you,” she insisted.
    “But you are his blood,” I said. “With myself, if we quarrel, he won’t eat from me.”
    “I thank you for reminding me why I’m so bound to the misery of that woman’s house,” she said. “When you and my brother set up house together, then perhaps I will be free.”
    Everyone watched Kongo as he emerged from the stream. He walked off, leaning on a broken broom handle that served him as a cane. Sebastien and his friend Yves, who had also been on the road when Joel was killed, followed behind Kongo, ready to catch him if the broom handle failed. Yves had a shaved head that shimmered as bright as Kongo’s machete under the morning sun. He and Sebastien followed Kongo back to the compound.
    “When will you and Sebastien start living in the same house together?” Mimi asked. “If my brother is too timid to ask, I can act as a go-between.”
    “Yesterday Juana called me a nonbehever because I don’t normally pray to the saints,” I said. “She asked me if I believed in anything, and all I could think to say was Sebastien.”
    “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.