imbecile.”
12
The sweet fleeting smell of lemongrass at dawn has always been my favorite scent. Standing at the top of the hill, I saw Luis in front of his house, using a flour-sack rag to wash Joel’s blood off one of the two automobiles owned by Señor Pico, Packards they called them, the type of vehicle the Generalissimo himself loved to be driven in at that time.
I walked to the stream behind the neighboring sugar mill where the cane workers bathed at daybreak, before heading out to the fields. It was the first day of a new cane harvest. The stream was already crowded, overflowing with men and women, separated by a thin veil of trees.
Everyone was unusually quiet, even in their whisperings. Instead of the regular loud morning chatter, there was only the sound of hummingbirds chirping, the water gurgling, circling around all the bodies crammed into its path.
I waved to Mimi, Sebastien’s younger sister. She slid her face in and out of the water, making bubbles with her mouth. Mimi had followed Sebastien to the valley when he’d moved here four years earlier. These days she worked as one of the maids of Doña Eva, the widowed mother of Doctor Javier and Beatriz.
“This afternoon Doña Eva is having a Mass and a sanco-cho for the anniversary of her birth,” Mimi announced. My feet floated above the warm pebbles at the bottom of the stream. It was as if nothing else of much importance had taken place, and for want of other information she had announcements from her mistress’ life to share. “The doña is fifty years old. Will your people be coming to her Mass?”
Mimi always called Señora Valencia and Señor Pico “moun ou yo,” my people, as though they worked for me. While pedaling in the stream, she ceremoniously raised her arms above the surface of the water and picked a small leaf off my nose. On her right hand, she had a bracelet made of coffee beans, painted in yellow gold and threaded on a string, just like Sebastien’s. It was something their mother had made them for safety and luck before they left her on the other side of the border after the hurricane had killed their father.
Thinking of the fiftieth anniversary of Doña Eva’s birth being on the first day since Joel’s death, and that perhaps I would never have a chance to utter a farewell to Joel’s closed eyes, I murmured to Mimi, “Do you think you and I will live long enough to be as old as Doña Eva?”
“I don’t want to live so long,” she answered in her usual abrupt manner. “I’d rather die young like Joel did.”
“Do you really want to end like that, in a ravine?” I whispered to her so the others would not hear.
“I’d rather have death surprise me,” she said loudly. “I don’t want to wait a long time for it to come find me.”
Mimi was at least four years younger than me and, not counting this sudden death she was saying she wanted, had more time ahead of her than I did. There were women in the stream who were ancient enough to be our great-grandmothers. Four of them were nearby, helping a few of the orphaned girls to wash themselves. Among the oldest women, one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.
The oldest cane-cutting women were now too sick, too weak, or too crippled to either cook or clean in a big house, work the harvest in the cane fields, or return to their old homes in Haiti. So they started off every morning bathing in the stream, and then spent the rest of the day digging for wild roots or waiting on the kindness of their good neighbors.
Mimi’s face grew sad and serious as she observed the other women, especially Félice, a young woman, the housemaid of Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine, a rich Haitian couple who lived among the valley’s well-to-do families. Félice had a hairy beet-colored birthmark like a mustache over her lip. She was reasonably pretty, but the birthmark was all you saw when you
12
The sweet fleeting smell of lemongrass at dawn has always been my favorite scent. Standing at the top of the hill, I saw Luis in front of his house, using a flour-sack rag to wash Joel’s blood off one of the two automobiles owned by Señor Pico, Packards they called them, the type of vehicle the Generalissimo himself loved to be driven in at that time.
I walked to the stream behind the neighboring sugar mill where the cane workers bathed at daybreak, before heading out to the fields. It was the first day of a new cane harvest. The stream was already crowded, overflowing with men and women, separated by a thin veil of trees.
Everyone was unusually quiet, even in their whisperings. Instead of the regular loud morning chatter, there was only the sound of hummingbirds chirping, the water gurgling, circling around all the bodies crammed into its path.
I waved to Mimi, Sebastien’s younger sister. She slid her face in and out of the water, making bubbles with her mouth. Mimi had followed Sebastien to the valley when he’d moved here four years earlier. These days she worked as one of the maids of Doña Eva, the widowed mother of Doctor Javier and Beatriz.
“This afternoon Doña Eva is having a Mass and a sanco-cho for the anniversary of her birth,” Mimi announced. My feet floated above the warm pebbles at the bottom of the stream. It was as if nothing else of much importance had taken place, and for want of other information she had announcements from her mistress’ life to share. “The doña is fifty years old. Will your people be coming to her Mass?”
Mimi always called Señora Valencia and Señor Pico “moun ou yo,” my people, as though they worked for me. While pedaling in the stream, she ceremoniously raised her arms above the surface of the water and picked a small leaf off my nose. On her right hand, she had a bracelet made of coffee beans, painted in yellow gold and threaded on a string, just like Sebastien’s. It was something their mother had made them for safety and luck before they left her on the other side of the border after the hurricane had killed their father.
Thinking of the fiftieth anniversary of Doña Eva’s birth being on the first day since Joel’s death, and that perhaps I would never have a chance to utter a farewell to Joel’s closed eyes, I murmured to Mimi, “Do you think you and I will live long enough to be as old as Doña Eva?”
“I don’t want to live so long,” she answered in her usual abrupt manner. “I’d rather die young like Joel did.”
“Do you really want to end like that, in a ravine?” I whispered to her so the others would not hear.
“I’d rather have death surprise me,” she said loudly. “I don’t want to wait a long time for it to come find me.”
Mimi was at least four years younger than me and, not counting this sudden death she was saying she wanted, had more time ahead of her than I did. There were women in the stream who were ancient enough to be our great-grandmothers. Four of them were nearby, helping a few of the orphaned girls to wash themselves. Among the oldest women, one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.
The oldest cane-cutting women were now too sick, too weak, or too crippled to either cook or clean in a big house, work the harvest in the cane fields, or return to their old homes in Haiti. So they started off every morning bathing in the stream, and then spent the rest of the day digging for wild roots or waiting on the kindness of their good neighbors.
Mimi’s face grew sad and serious as she observed the other women, especially Félice, a young woman, the housemaid of Don Gilbert and Doña Sabine, a rich Haitian couple who lived among the valley’s well-to-do families. Félice had a hairy beet-colored birthmark like a mustache over her lip. She was reasonably pretty, but the birthmark was all you saw when you
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