water was soaking her skin. The leeches slowly crawled out of the jar and climbed on a lump on her calf.
She ground her teeth when one of the larger leeches bit into her skin. She leaned back against the porch railing, pulled her notebook from her sack, and began writing her name. She wrote it over and over, following a pattern at the top of the page.
The leeches sucked the blood out of her lump, until they were plump and full. She pulled them away one by one, slid her fingers down their backs, and pumped the blood into an empty jar. I felt my head spinning, my stomach about to turn inside out. Tante Atie noticed the pained expression on my face.
'It's no loss, angel,' she said. 'It's only blood, bad blood at that.'
I asked my grandmother if I could cook supper for us that night.
Tante Atie offered to take me to a private vendor where food was cheaper than the mache. She put the leeches in some clean water and we started down the road.
'What are you making for us?' she asked.
'Rice, black beans, and herring sauce,' I said.
'Your mother's favorite meal.'
'That's what we cooked most often.'
We followed a footpath off the road, down to a shallow stream. An old mule was yanking water vines fromtheedgeof the stream while baby crabs freely dashed around its nostrils.
A woman rilled a calabash a few feet from where my sandals muddied the water. Tante Atie chatted with the women as she went by. Some young girls were sitting bare-chested in the water, the sun casting darker shadows into their faces. Their hands squirted blackened suds as they pounded their clothes with water rocks.
A dusty footpath led us to a tree-lined cemetery at the top of the hill. Tante Atie walked between the wooden crosses, collecting the bamboo skeletons of fallen kites. She stepped around the plots where empty jars, conch shells, and marbles served as grave markers.
'Walk straight,' said Tante Atie, 'you are in the presence of family.'
She walked around to each plot, and called out the names of all those who had been buried there. There was my great-grandmother, Beloved Martinelle Brigitte. Her sister, My First Joy Sophilus Gentille. My grandfather's sister, My Hope Atinia Ife, and finally my grandfather, Charlemagne Le Grand Caco.
Tante Atie named them all on sight.
'Our family name, Caco, it is the name of a scarlet bird. A bird so crimson, it makes the reddest hibiscus or the brightest flame trees seem white. The Caco bird, when it dies, there is always a rush of blood that rises to its neck and the wings, they look so bright, you would think them on fire.'
From the cemetery, we took a narrow footpath to the vendor's hut. On either side of us were wild grasses that hissed as though they were full of snakes.
We walked to a whitewashed shack where a young woman sold rice and black beans from the same sisal mat where she slept with her husband.
In the yard, the husband sat under the shade of a straw parasol with a pipe in his mouth and a demijohn at his feet. He was pounding small nails into leather straps and thin layers of polished wood to make sandals.
The hammering echoed in my head until I reached the cane fields. The men were singing about a woman who flew without her skin at night, and when she came back home, she found her skin peppered and could not put it back on. Her husband had done it to teach her a lesson. He ended up killing her.
…
I was surprised how fast it came back. The memory of how everything came together to make a great meal. The fragrance of the spices guided my fingers the way no instructions or measurements could.
Haitian men, they insist that their women are virgins and have their ten fingers.
According to Tante Atie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn't her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for her even before she was born. Sometimes, she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself.
I rushed back and forth between the iron pots in the yard. The air smelled like spices that I had not cooked with since I'd left my mother's home two years before.
I usually ate random concoctions: frozen dinners, samples from global cookbooks, food that was easy to put together and brought me no pain. No memories of a past that at times was cherished and at others despised.
By the time we ate, the air was pregnant with rain. Thunder groaned in the starless sky while the lanterns flickered in the hills.
'Well done,' Tante Atie said after her fourth serving of my rice and beans.
My grandmother chewed slowly as she gave my daughter her bottle.
'If the wood is well carved,' said my grandmother, 'it teaches us about the carpenter. Atie, you taught Sophie well.'
Tante Atie was taken off guard by my grandmother's compliment. She kissed me on the forehead before taking the dishes to the yard to wash. Then, she went into the house, took her notebook, and left for her lesson with Louise.
My grandmother groaned her disapproval. She pulled out a small pouch and packed pinches of tobacco powder into her nose. She inhaled deeply, stuffing more and more into her nostrils.
She had a look of deep concern on her face, as her eyes surveyed the evening clouds.
'Tande. Do you hear anything?' she asked.
There was nothing but the usual night sounds: birds finding their ways in the dark, as they shuffled through the leaves.
Often at night, there were women who travelled long distances, on foot or on mare, to save the car fare to Port-au-Prince.
I strained my eyes to see beyond the tree shadows on the road.
'There is a girl going home,' my grandmother said. 'You cannot see her. She is far away. Quite far. It is not the distance that is important. If I hear a girl from far away, there is an emotion, something that calls to my soul. If your soul is linked with someone, somehow you can always feel when something is happening to them.'
'Is it Tante Atie, the girl on the road?'
'Non. It is really a girl. A younger woman.'
'Is the girl in danger?'
'That's why you listen. You should hear young feet crushing wet leaves. Her feet make a swish-swash when they hit the ground and when she hurries, it sounds like a whip chasing a mule.'
I listened closely, but heard no whip.
'When it is dark, all men are black,' she said. 'There is no way to know anything unless you apply your ears. When you listen, it's kom si you had deafness before and you can hear now. Sometimes you can't fall asleep because the sound of someone crying keeps you awake. A whisper sounds like a roar to your ears. Your ears are witness to matters that do not concern you. And what is worse, you cannot forget. Now, listen. Her feet make a swish sound and when she hurries it's like a whip in the wind.'
I tried, but I heard no whip.
'It's the way old men cry,' she said. 'Grown brave men have a special way they cry when they are afraid.'
She closed her eyes and lowered her head to concentrate.
'It is Ti Alice,' she said.
'Who is Ti Alice?'
'The young child in the bushes, it is Ti Alice. Someone is there with her.'
'Is she in danger?'
My grandmother tightened her eyelids.
'I know Ti Alice,' she said. 'I know her mother.'
'Why is she in the bushes?'
'She must be fourteen or fifteen years now.'
'Why is she out there?'
'She is rushing back to her mother. She was with a friend, a boy.'
I thought I heard a few hushed whispers.
'I think I hear a little,' I said, rocking my daughter with excitement.
