The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat Read Free Book Online

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