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

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 group 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