The Farming of Bones Read online

Señora Valencia motioned for me to move even closer with her son.

  “They differ in appearance.” She wanted another opinion.

  “Your son favors your cherimoya milk color,” I said.

  “And my daughter favors you,” she said. “My daughter is a chameleon. She’s taken your color from the mere sight of your face.”

  Her fingers still trembling, she made the sign of the holy cross from her forehead down to the sweaty cave between her swollen breasts. It was an especially hot morning. The air was heavy with the scent of lemongrass and flame trees losing their morning dew to the sun and with the smell of all the blood the señora had lost to her children. I refastened the closed patio doors, completely shutting out the outside air.

  “Will you light a candle to La Virgencita, Amabelle? I promised her I would do this after I gave birth.”

  I lit a white candle and set it on the layette chest beside the cradle that had been the señora’s own as a child.

  “Do you think the children will love me?” she asked.

  “Don’t you already love them?”

  “I feel as if they’ve always been here.”

  “Do you know what you will name them?”

  “I think I’ll name my daughter Rosalinda Teresa to honor my mother. I’ll leave it to my husband to name our son. Amabelle, I’m so happy today. You and me. Look at what we have done.”

  “It was you, Señora. You did this.”

  “How does my daughter look? How do you find my dusky rose? Does she please you? Do they please you? She’s so small. Take her, please, and let me hold my son now.”

  We exchanged children. For a moment Rosalinda seemed to be floating between our hands, in danger of falling. I looked into her tiny face, still streaked with her mother’s blood, and I cradled her more tightly in my arms.

  “Amabelle do you think my daughter will always be the color she is now?” Señora Valencia asked. “My poor love, what if she’s mistaken for one of your people?”

  3

  In the awakened dark, Sebastien says, if we are not touching, then we must be talking. We must talk to remind each other that we are not yet in the slumbering dark, which is an endless death, like a darkened cave.

  I tell him that I would rather he touch me, stroke me in all the same places, in all the same ways. He is too tired, he says, so we must talk. Silence to him is like sleep, a close second to death.

  He asks about my family, what my parents were like when they were alive.

  “What was it you admired most about your mother?”

  At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it’s never been an infant’s whimper, a boy’s whisper, a young man’s mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me.

  “Tell me what you liked most about your mother?” he asks again, when I spend too much time admiring the voice and not answering.

  “I liked her tranquility,” I say. “She was a woman who did everything slowly, in her own time, as my father liked to say. She was a woman of few words. When she did speak, her words were direct and precise. ‘The baby’s old nest took its time coming out. It was like another child altogether.’ She was a stern-faced woman with a half gourd for a forehead, that is to say, her forehead was big, high and wide, like mine, a sign of a good mind, some say. She didn’t show a lot of affection to me. I think she believed this was not a good way to raise a girl, who might not have affection the rest of her life. She also didn’t smile often.”

  “You don’t smile often.”

  “She was a thin woman like me. I think I look like her, but I do smile more.”

  “Are you smiling now?” I can hear him smiling in the dark. The smile blends into his voice, slightly halting his speech now and then.

  His fingers slice the air towards me. Before his hands land on either side of my waist, I’m already squealing and cackling like a sick hen, already feeling as if I’m being tickled.

  “Tell me something more of your mother,” he says, once the tickling and more squealing have stopped. “Tell me what her name was.”

  “Her name was Irelle Pradelle,” I say, “and after she died, when I dreamt of her, she was always smiling. Except of course when she and my papa were drowning.”

  4

  Doctor Javier dashed straight to Señora Valencia’s bed as soon as he arrived. When he walked into the room, she quickly announced, “Amabelle and I have done it, Javier. We have given birth to the children, twins.”

  Doctor Javier was a remarkably tall man who seemed to be looking down at everyone around him. His squinting eyes appeared dangerous and fierce as he examined the children, clipping their umbilical cords closer to their bellies.

  “How long was it, your labor?” he asked Señora Valencia.

  “It began last night,” she answered.

  “Why didn’t you send for me then?”

  “Remember the way we’d counted? I thought it could not be time yet.”

  “We misjudged things perhaps.”

  “The children and me, we are lucky Amabelle knew how to birth babies,” she said. “I could never have done it by myself.”

  “We are all grateful to Amabelle.” Doctor Javier smiled at me as he brushed aside his wiry auburn hair, which extended in a widow’s peak to the middle of his forehead. A small wooden carving of cane leaves was pinned to the collar of his embroidered shirt. It was a charm, like the amulets the cane cutters here in Alegría wore around their necks to protect them from evil spells.

  “Amabelle, boil some water, please,” the doctor said. “The little ones will need a wash.”

  The house stood at the top of a hill with a view of the azure-green mountains in the back and a wide road in front. I went out the back door, where the pantry opened onto the grounds. Rushing to my room, I took off my blood-drenched apron and blouse, and piled them both in a corner near the latrines.

  Far down the hill, I could see the housemaid, Juana, returning from the stream with a bucket full of clothes on her head. Juana and her man, Luis, had worked for Papi even before Señora Valencia was born. Juana stopped at their house, whose peaked roof lay half buried in the grassy hill.

  I put the pot of water to boil on a bed of charcoal in my own outdoor cooking shed and waited for Juana to come up. From the yard I also saw the tightly closed shutters of Señora Valencia’s room. They were painted indigo blue like most of the main house except for the wraparound verandah, which was the crimson red of Alegría’s flame trees at high bloom.

  Juana did not climb up, so I returned to Señora Valencia’s room with two enameled basins full of warm water, carrying one on the crown of my head and the other one in my hands. Señora Valencia was fully covered from chin to toe, the bloody sheets mounded in a pile in the corner. Papi had removed the mattresses from her bed, replacing them with the clean ones from her mother’s old bed in the sewing room.

  Doctor Javier helped me put the containers down on the layette chest. He poured some medicine in the water with which to bathe the children. Señora Valencia handed him her son.

  “Amabelle, do you remember precisely what time the children were born?” Papi asked. He had a notebook on his lap in which to inscribe the details for the birth certificates.

  “It was still morning.” Señora Valencia looked up at an old clock set in a mahogany case that Papi had been sent from Spain by his father some twenty years before.

  I looked over Papi’s shoulder as he wrote ceremoniously in his best script the time and place of the births, noting that it was on the thirtieth of August, the year 1937, the ninety-third year of independence, in the seventh year of the Era of Generalissimo Rafael Leomdas Trujillo Molina, Supreme Commander-m-Chief, President of the Republic.

  “And how long apart were the children born, Amabelle?” asked Papi. “Do you remember?”

  “The second one was a surprise. I don’t know,” I sai
d.

  “Not more than a quarter of an hour later,” offered Señora Valencia.

  When it was her turn to be bathed, Doctor Javier took Rosalinda and dipped her in the water. She remained still as the water met her skin.

  “She has a little charcoal behind the ears, that one,” Doctor Javier boldly told Señora Valencia as he lifted her daughter from the water.

  “It must be from her father’s family,” Papi interjected, his fingertips caressing the skin of his sun-scorched white face. “My daughter was born in the capital of this country. Her mother was of pure Spanish blood. She can trace her family to the Conquistadores, the line of El Almirante, Cristobal Colon. And I, myself, was born near a seaport in Valencia, Spain.”

  We swaddled the babies in the white bands that I had hemmed during Señora Valencia’s pregnancy when she thought she would only have a girl. She took her daughter in her arms while Papi stared down at his grandson, rocking him back and forth across his chest.

  “You make a very impolite assertion,” Papi scolded Doctor Javier in a low voice when he thought his daughter wasn’t listening. “We don’t want to hear anything more of the kind.”

  “Amabelle, could I trouble you for un cafecito?” Doctor Javier thought it best to escape from Papi’s presence.

  “Give him anything he wants,” Papi said without looking up from his grandson’s face.

  Doctor Javier followed me to the pantry. As he passed through the doorway, a suspended bundle of dried parsley leaves brushed his scalp, leaving behind a few tiny stems in his hair. I reached up to flick them away but stopped myself in time. It would be too forward of me to touch him; he might misunderstand. Working for others, you must always be on your guard. Doctor Javier always addressed me kindly, but I could not presume that he would enjoy the feel of my hand wandering through his hair.

  “Amabelle, were you a midwife all this time and you never told us?” he asked.

  “I don’t think myself a midwife, Doctor.” Some of the coffee spilled as I poured it into a red orchid-patterned cup, set on its saucer, on a silver tray in front of him.

  “How did you know how to birth those children?”

  “My mother and father were herb healers in Haiti. When it was called for, they birthed a child,” I said, wanting to be modest on behalf of my parents, who had always been modest themselves.

  “Valencia tells me the little girl had a struggle,” he said.

  “She had a caul over her face and the umbilical cord was badly placed, yes.”

  “Badly placed, around her neck? It’s as if the other one tried to strangle her.”

  “If you will permit me, Doctor, I would rather not condemn these little children by speaking such things.”

  “Many of us start out as twins in the belly and do away with the other,” he persisted. “When I was a medical student, one time we found the two small legs of a baby separately lodged in the back of a grown male cadaver. No other manner to explain this, save that these legs had been lodged in the man since before he was born.”

  I thought perhaps he told me this to unnerve me. Many people who considered themselves clever found pleasure in frightening the household workers with marvelous tales of the outside world, a world they supposed we would never see for ourselves.

  “On the other hand,” he continued, “sometimes you have two children born at the same time; one is stillborn but the other one alive and healthy because the dead one gave the other a life transfusion in the womb and in essence sacrificed itself.”

  “I am thankful ours both survived,” I said.

  “Aside from medicine, my passions are language and lineage,” he said. “That little Rosalinda teaches me something when I look at her.”

  Was he showing off more of his knowledge for my sake?

  “Now that our old friend, the señora’s husband, is an officer, I never know what to call him,” he said. “His rank changes so often. If I remember, he was last a colonel. I have not seen him for some time.”

  “He returns from the barracks often enough,” I said, trying to make my way out of the conversation. “When he’s at home you’re always elsewhere. You should ask Señora Valencia your questions, Doctor.”

  “I’m weary of military men,” he said, not discouraged by my lack of interest. “They don’t often like me, those men of the Guardia, even those like Pico who are old acquaintances. But let us put this thought aside for a moment. Amabelle, what I wish to tell you is this: I’m quite anxious about the little girl.”

  “Isn’t she healthy?” I asked.

  “If Valencia feeds her well, she could become robust in a few weeks. But she is so small. Can you make certain that she nurses her often? Please tell Juana too. She may also be looking after the children.”

  “And the boy?”

  “He looks healthy. It’s little Rosalinda who makes me anxious.” He turned his empty cup upside down on the saucer, a signal that he didn’t want any more coffee. “Let me also say this to you, Amabelle. You should leave here and become a midwife in Haiti.”

  I felt my eyebrows shoot up, my mouth forming a grimace that might be interpreted as a smile.

  “I am not a midwife,” I said. “And I haven’t been across the border since I was a child of eight years.”

  “You can be trained,” he said. “Valencia once told me that you can read and write. People like you are needed at the small clinic I sometimes visit across the river. We have only two Haitian doctors for a large area. I cannot go there all the time, and I know of only one or two midwives in that region of the border. You are greatly needed.”

  “You’re kind to think so highly of me, Doctor.”

  “Would you like to go?”

  “There is much to consider—”

  “Consider all of it, then,” he said as he left me.

  I was still feeling pleased by the doctor’s proposal when Juana walked into the pantry with the house linen folded in a basket.

  “I received some coffee from my sisters today,” Juana said. Juana’s two younger sisters, Ana and Maria, were both nuns living in a convent orphanage in a mountain village close to the border.

  Juana pulled a ripe yellow mango out of her pocket and handed it to me. “I know you would have picked that one if you passed it on the tree,” she said.

  I immediately sank my teeth into the mango, letting the thick, heavy juices fill my mouth.

  “How is the señora?” she asked.

  “Didn’t you hear the screams?”

  “What screams?”

  “The señora in labor.”

  “Baby?”

  “Babies!”

  She dropped the linen basket on the floor, then bent down and picked up all the scattered sheets. Juana was a heavy woman whose every movement was exaggerated by the expanse of her flesh. Her pale hands were large but fragile looking, as though they would explode if you stuck a needle in them.

  “How many babies?” she asked, her head bobbing with excitement.

  “How many could it be? She’s not a hen.”

  “Two?”

  “One boy and one girl.”

  “Twin babies in this house,” she said, crossing herself. “This is for certain the doing of Santas Felicitas and Perpetua. Where’s the señora now?”

  “In her room, with Doctor Javier.”

  “Oh! It was Santa Monica’s doing, bringing Doctor Javier on time.”

  “He came too late,” I said, neglecting the modesty I had been taught in childhood by my parents. “I birthed the babies myself. It happened so quickly, you would call it a miracle.”

  “Miracles always happen in my absence,” she said. “I have to tell Luis.” She rushed out of the pantry, then came running back in. “First I must see the señora and the babies for myself.”

  I put my mango down. We walked to Señora Valencia’s room. Juana burst into tears as soon as she saw the children: Rosalinda in her mother’s arms and the little boy undergoing another close examination by Doctor Javier.r />
  Señora Valencia held Rosalinda out towards Juana.

  “Take her,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to hold my daughter, Juana?”

  “I’m afraid I will cry,” Juana sobbed.

  “You’re already crying,” Señora Valencia observed.

  Peeking at the little boy, Juana approached the bed.

  “I’ve named my daughter Rosalinda Teresa,” Señora Valencia said.

  “For your maim!” Juana sobbed louder now. “Oh, had your mother lived to see this day, she would have been so joyful.”

  “Then, why are you crying?” Señora Valencia said. “It’s a happy day.”

  “Your mother would have been crying, too, more tears of joy than tears of sadness.”

  “I will go to the barracks to fetch Pico,” Papi said. “I want to come back before dark.”

  “Don’t go alone, Don Ignacio.” Juana stepped in front of him with Rosalinda resting in her arms.

  “No need to worry, I’ll go with God,” Papi said, a trace of impatience in his voice.

  “Yes, please go with God. But also take Luis with you,” Juana urged. “He’s in the banana grove cutting a few bananas for me. I don’t know how he missed hearing all of this.”

  “We’ll try to return tonight,” Papi said, kissing his daughter’s hand.

  “Señora, you rest,” Juana said. “Amabelle and me, we’ll look after everything.”

  “Don’t spoil her too much,” Doctor Javier cautioned.

  “Valencia, don’t let the kindness of these good women spoil you.”

  “Pobrecita, this is her time of risk,” said Juana. “She must spend the necessary number of days lying in, resting, both for herself and for the children.”

  5

  Sebastien—who is from the north of Haiti like I am, though we did not know each other when we lived there—feels haunted by the crooning of pigeons. Their cry, he says, sounds like it’s not meant for others to hear, but like each howling pigeon is trying to bury its head deep inside itself. He imagines that the way pigeons moan is the same way ghosts cry when they are too lonely or too sad, when they have been dead so long that they have forgotten how to speak their own names.