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

seen death closely before.
    “What’s Kongo doing?” I asked. Perhaps Sebastien was staying calm by thinking of the next step, the next action.
    “The first thing is to put Joël’s body in the ground,” he said.
    “Does Kongo know whose automobile hit Joel?”
    “At this time, all he knows is that his son is dead. He needs to make a coffin. Don Carlos won’t pay for a burial.”
    Luis and Papi had gone to bed. I led Sebastien behind the latrines. There Papi had a stack of cedar planks that he used for his leisure occupation, making tables and chairs and building miniature houses. Sebastien took four long boards, stained and polished, enough to build a coffin for a grown man.
    I offered to help him carry them, but he refused.
    “You stay,” he said. “I will come back.”
    I looked down at the yams, leaning against the wall where I had laid them soon after he had given them to me.
    “With all this, you had time to bring these yams?” I asked.
    “You stay here until I come back,” he said, “don’t try to go anywhere.”
    I heard him breathing hard, struggling with the weight of the wood as he hauled it away. I went back to my room, lay down, and waited for his return.
    Poor Kongo. Condolences, Kongo. Two new children came into the world while you have to put your son in the ground.

 
    9
    It is a Friday, market day. My mother, my father, and me, we cross into Dajabón, the first Dominican town across the river. My mother wants to buy cooking pots made by a Haitian pot maker named Moy who lives there, the best pot maker in the area. There is a gleam to Moy’s pots that makes you think you are getting a gem. They never darken even after they have been used on outdoor cooking fires for years.
    In the afternoon, as we set out to wade across the river again with our two new shiny pots, it starts to rain in the mountains, far upstream. The air is heavy and moist; a wide rainbow arc creeps away from the sky, dark rain clouds moving in to take its place.
    We are at a distance from the bridge. My father wants us to hurry home. There is still time to cross safely, he says, if we hasten. My mother tells him to wait and see, to watch the current for a while.
    “We have no time to waste,” my father insists.
    “I’ll carry you across, and then I’ll come back for Amabelle and the pots,” my father says.
    We walk down from the levee. My father looks for the shallows, where the round-edged rust-colored boulders we’d used before as stepping stones have already disappeared beneath the current.
    “Hold the pots,” my mother tells me. “Papa will come back for you soon.”
    On the levee are a few river rats, young boys, both Haitian and Dominican, who for food or one or two coins, will carry people and their merchandise across the river on their backs. The current is swelling, the pools enlarging. Even the river rats are afraid to cross.
    My father reaches into the current and sprinkles his face with the water, as if to salute the spirit of the river and request her permission to enter. My mother crosses herself three times and looks up at the sky before she climbs on my father’s back. The water reaches up to Papa’s waist as soon as he steps in. Once he is in the river, he flinches, realizing that he has made a grave mistake.
    My mother turns back to look for me, throwing my father off balance. A flow of mud fills the shallows. My father thrusts his hands in front of him, trying to keep on course. My mother tightens her grip around his neck; her body covers him and weighs him down at the same time. When he tries to push her up by her legs, a cluster of vines whisks past them; my mother reaches for the vines as though they were planks of a raft.
    As the rain falls, the river springs upwards like an ocean riptide. Moving as close as they can to the river’s edge, the boys throw a thick sisal rope to my parents. The current swallows the rope. The boys reel it back in and wrap it around a boulder. The knot slides