'Don't trouble me tonight, old woman.' Tante Atie strained to control her voice.
The pig started a slow nasal whine.
'I will kill it,' said my grandmother. 'I will kill it.'
My daughter woke up with a sharp cry.
I fed her and rocked her back to sleep. The pig, it was still crying, but there was nothing I could do.
Louise was out of breath when she ran up to the house the next morning. Her face was reddened with tears and her blouse soaked with sweat.
My grandmother motioned for me to take the baby inside the house. I backed myself into the doorway while clinging tightly to my daughter.
I watched from the threshold as Tante Atie gave Louise a cup of cold water from the jug beneath the porch.
'Li alle. It's over,' Louise said, panting as though she had both asthma and the hiccups at the same time. 'They killed Dessalines.'
'Who killed Dessalines?' asked my grandmother.
'The Macoutes killed Dessalines.'
Louise buried her head in Tante Atie's shoulder. Their faces were so close that their lips could meet if they both turned at the same time.
'Calm now,' said Tante Atie, as she massaged Louise's scalp.
'That's why I need to go,' sobbed Louise. 'I need to leave.'
'A poor man is dead and all you can think about is your journey,' snapped my grandmother.
'Next might be me or you with the Macoutes,' said Louise.
'We already had our turn,' said my grandmother. 'Sophie, you keep the child behind the threshold. You are not to bring her out until that restless spirit is in the ground.'
In the fairy tales, the Tonton Macoute was a bogeyman, a scarecrow with human flesh. He wore denim overalls and carried a cutlass and a knapsack made of straw. In his knapsack, he always had scraps of naughty children, whom he dismembered to eat as snacks. If you don't respect your elders, then the Tonton Macoute will take you away.
Outside the fairy tales, they roamed the streets in broad daylight, parading their Uzi machine guns.
Who invented the Macoutes? The devil didn't do it and God didn't do it.
Ordinary criminals walked naked in the night. They slicked their bodies with oil so they could slip through most fingers. But the Macoutes, they did not hide. When they entered a house, they asked to be fed, demanded the woman of the house, and forced her into her own bedroom. Then all you heard was screams until it was her daughter's turn. If a mother refused, they would make her sleep with her son and brother or even her own father.
My father might have been a Macoute. He was a stranger who, when my mother was sixteen years old, grabbed her on her way back from school. He dragged her into the cane fields, and pinned her down on the ground. He had a black bandanna over his face so she never saw anything but his hair, which was the color of eggplants. He kept pounding her until she was too stunned to make a sound. When he was done, he made her keep her face in the dirt, threatening to shoot her if she looked up.
For months she was afraid that he would creep out of the night and kill her in her sleep. She was terrified that he would come and tear out the child growing inside her. At night, she tore her sheets and bit off pieces of her own flesh when she had nightmares.
My grandmother sent her to a rich mulatto family in Croix-des-Rosets to do any work she could for free room and board, as a restavek. Even though my mother was pregnant and half insane, the family took her in anyway because my grandmother had cooked and cleaned in their house for years, before she married my grandfather.
My mother came back to Dame Marie after I was born. She tried to kill herself several times when I was a baby. The nightmares were just too real. Tante Atie took care of me.
The rich mulatto family helped my mother apply for papers to get out of Haiti. It took four years before she got her visa, but by the time she began to recover her sanity, she left.
Tante Atie took me to Croix-des-Rosets, so I could go to school. And when I left, she moved back here, to Dame Marie, to take care of my grandmother.
Somehow Dessalines's death brought to mind all those frightening memories. My grandmother would not let me take Brigitte outside until Dessalines was laid to rest in the ground. That night, I opened the window to listen to the night breeze rustling through the dry tcha tcha bean pods in the distance.
Tante Atie was talking to Louise. Her voice was muffled, her breathing quickened, as she sobbed loudly.
'It is the calm and silent waters that drown you. I never thought it would make me so sad to look in Sophie's face.'
The pig gave a sudden cry as Louise rushed away. Tante Atie slipped inside the house through a side door.
'Nothing should have taken you out into that black night.' My grandmother was waiting inside. 'Did a bird nest in your hair? You seem to have lost your mind.'
'Maybe a good death would save me from all this,' Tante Atie said.
I heard a thump, like a slap across the face.
Tante Atie stormed out of the house and marched out to the porch.
When I came out, Tante Atie was sitting with a lamp and her notebook on her lap. I folded the flaps of Joseph's shirt between my legs and sat on the top step next to her.
'Do you ever visit Mr. Augustin?' I asked.
'No,' she said. 'Sometimes people just disappear from our lives and it is not a bad thing.'
We sat silently and looked at the stars for a while.
'I am going to excuse myself and go back inside,' I said. 'I do not want to leave the baby alone for long.'
'The old woman, she is going to send word to your mother that you are here,' she said.
'My mother does not concern herself with where I am.'
'You are judging her much too harshly.'
'When Joseph and I first married, I used to write her every month. I have sent her pictures of Brigitte. She keeps the letters, but makes no reply.'
'She will come,' said Tante Atie.
'Come where?'
'She will come here. She has promised for a long time to come and arrange the old woman's funeral and the old woman will place on the cassette words begging her to come, so you can settle this quarrel.'
Brigitte got up early the next morning, ready to bounce and play. I lay her on the bed and tried to make her do some baby exercises.
In the next room, my grandmother was recording her reply cassette to my mother.
'Martine, ki jan ou ye?' How are you? 'We are doing fine here, following in the shadow of Father Time. I am well, except for the old bones that ache sometime. Dessalines has died. Macoutes kill him. Do you remember him? He was the coal man.
'I don't even need to talk about Atie. She is carrying on like she has got a pound of rocks on her chest. Sadness is now her way of life. You needn't worry about Sophie. Could be she is on a little holiday. The bird, it always returns to the nest.'
My grandmother stopped to clear her throat. Brigitte grabbed my fingers and held them tightly as she rolled on her side.
'Is Atie in her room?' yelled my grandmother.
'She is out!' I shouted back.
Brigitte shrieked, trying to scream along.
'Is there something you want to say to your mother?'
'No!'
The recorder clicked to a stop.
'Any more you want to say?' asked my grandmother.
'I think we've already said enough.'
In the distance, the bells tolled, announcing Dessalines's funeral. Tante Atie stumbled into her room, her body
