He was still back there, on the burning porch, hoping that his mother and father would rise and put out the fire. He was in the yard, watching the barber’s car speed away and his aunt crawling off the porch, on her belly, like a blind snake. He was in that room in Brooklyn, with the barber, watching him sleep. Now his aunt’s voice was just an echo of things he could no longer enjoy-his mother’s voice, his father’s laugh.
“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the backs of his hands.
“I should have let you continue telling me what you came here to say.” His aunt’s voice seemed to be floating toward him in the dark. “It’s like walking up these mountains and losing something precious halfway. For you, it would be no problem walking back to find it because you’re still young and strong, but for me it would take a lot more time and effort.”
He heard the cot squeak as she lay back down.
“Tante Estina,” he said, lying back on the small sisal mat himself.
“Wi, Da,” she replied.
“Were my parents in politics?”
“Oh, Da,” she said, as if protesting the question.
“Please,” he said.
“No more than any of us,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“They didn’t do anything bad, Da,” she said, “or anything at all. I didn’t know all my brother’s secrets, but I think he was taken for somebody else.”
“Who?” he asked.
“M pa konnen,” she said.
He thought maybe she’d said a name, Lubin or Firmin.
“Who were they mistaken for?” he asked her again.
“M pa konnen,” she repeated. “I don’t know, Da. Maybe they were mistaken for all of us. There’s a belief that if you kill people, you can take their knowledge, become everything they were. Maybe they wanted to take all that knowledge for themselves. I don’t know, Da. All I know is I’m very tired now. Let me sleep.”
He decided to let her rest. They should have a chance to talk again. She went back to sleep, whispering something he could not hear under her breath, then growing silent. When he woke up the next morning, she was dead.
It was Old Zo’s daughter who let out the first cry, announcing the death to the entire valley. Sitting near the body, on the edge of his aunt’s cot, Dany was doubled over with an intense bellyache. Old Zo’s daughter took over immediately, brewing him some tea while waiting for their neighbors to arrive.
The tea did nothing for him. He wasn’t expecting it to. Part of him was grateful for the pain, for the physically agonizing diversion it provided him.
Soon after Old Zo’s daughter’s cry, a few of the village women started to arrive. It was only then that he learned Old Zo’s daughter’s name, at least her nickname, Ti Fanm, Little Woman, which the others kept shouting as they badgered her with questions.
“What happened, Ti Fanm?”
“Ti Fanm, did she die in her sleep?”
“Did she fall, Ti Fanm?”
“Ti Fanm, did she suffer?”
“Ti Fanm, she wasn’t even sick.”
“She was old,” Ti Fanm said in a firm and mature voice. “It can happen like that.”
They didn’t bother asking him anything. He wouldn’t have known how to answer anyway. After he and his aunt had spoken in the middle of the night, he thought she had fallen asleep. When he woke up in the morning, even later than he had the day before, she was still lying there, her eyes shut, her hands resting on her belly, her fingers intertwined. He tried to find her pulse, but she had none. He lowered his face to her nose and felt no breath; then he walked out of the house and found Ti Fanm, sitting on the steps, waiting to cook their breakfast. The pain was already starting in his stomach. Ti Fanm came in and performed her own investigation on his aunt, then let out that cry, a cry as loud as any siren he had heard on the streets of New York.
His aunt’s house was filled with people now, each of them taking turns examining his aunt’s body for signs of life, and when finding none immediately assigning themselves, and one another, tasks related to her burial. One group ran off to get purple curtains, to hang shroudlike over the front door to show that this was a household in mourning. Another group went off to fetch an unused washbasin to bathe the corpse. Others were searching through the baskets beneath his aunt’s cot for an appropriate dress to change her into after her bath. Another went looking for a carpenter to build her coffin.
The men assigned themselves to him and his pain.
“He’s in shock,” they said.
“Can’t you see he’s not able to speak?”
“He’s not even looking at her. He’s looking at the floor.”
“He has a stomachache,” Ti Fanm intercepted.
She brought him some salted coffee, which he drank in one gulp.
“He should lie down,” one of the men said.
“But where?” another rebutted. “Not next to her.”
“He must have known she was going to die.” He heard Old Zo’s voice rising above the others. “He came just in time. Blood calls blood. She made him come so he could see her before she died. It would have been sad if she’d died behind his back, especially given the way he lost his parents.”
They were speaking about him as though he couldn’t understand, as if he were solely an English speaker, like Claude. He wished that his stomach would stop hurting, that he could rise from the edge of the cot and take control of the situation, or at least participate in the preparations, but all he wanted to do was lie down next to his aunt, rest his head on her chest, and wrap his arms around her waist, the way he had done when he was a boy. He wanted to close his eyes until he could wake up from this unusual dream where everyone was able to speak except the two of them.
By midday, he felt well enough to join Old Zo and some of the men who were opening an empty slot in the family mausoleum. He was in less pain now, but was still uncomfortable and moved slower than the others.
Old Zo announced that a Protestant minister would be coming by the next morning to say a prayer during the burial. Old Zo had wanted to transport the body to a church in the next village for a full service, but Dany was sure that his aunt wouldn’t have wanted to travel so far, only to return to her own yard to be buried.
“I’ve been told that the coffin’s almost ready,” Old Zo said. “She’ll be able to rest in it during the wake.”
Ti Fanm and the other women were inside the house, bathing his aunt’s body and changing her into a blue dress he’d sent her last Christmas through Popo. He had seen the dress in a store window on Nostrand Avenue and had chosen it for her, remembering that blue was her favorite color. The wrapping was still intact; she had never worn it.
Before he left the room he watched as Ti Fanm handed a pair of rusty scissors along with the dress to one of the oldest women, who proceeded to clip three small pieces from the inner lining. As the old woman “marked” the dress, the others moaned, some whispering and some shouting, “Estina, this is your final dress. Don’t let anyone take it from you. Even if among the other dead there are some who are naked, this is your dress and yours alone. Don’t give it away.”
He’d heard his aunt talk about this ritual, this branding of the final clothes, but had never seen it done before. His parents’ clothes had not been marked because they had been secretly and hastily buried. Now in his pocket he had three tiny pieces of cloth that had been removed from the lining of his aunt’s last dress, and he would carry them with him forever, like some people carry locks of hair or fingernails.
He had always been perplexed by the mixture of jubilation and sorrow that was part of Beau Jour’s wakes, by the fact that some of the participants played cards and dominoes while others served tea and wept. But what he most enjoyed was the time carved out for the mourners to tell stories about the deceased, singular tales of first or last encounters, which could make one either chuckle or weep.
The people of his aunt’s village were telling such stories about her now. They told of how she had once tried to make coffee and filtered dirt through her coffee pouch, how she had once delivered the village’s only triplets, saving all three babies and the mother.
