“In the city that kind of birthing might have required a serious operation,” Old Zo said, “but we didn’t need the city doctors. Estina knew what to do.”
“Here’s one she brought into the world,” a man said, pushing a boy forward.
“Here’s another,” someone else said.
“She birthed me,” a young man said. “Since my mother died, she’s been like a mother to me, because she was the only other person present at my birth.”
They told of how as a young woman his aunt had embroidered a trousseau that she carried everywhere with her, thinking it would attract a husband. They spoke of her ambition, of her wanting to be a baby seamstress, so she could make clothes for the very same children she was ushering into the world. If he could have managed it, he would have told her neighbors how she had treated her burns herself after the fire, with poultices and herbs. He’d have spoken of her sacrifices, of the fact that she had spent most of her life trying to keep him safe. He would have told of how he hadn’t wanted to leave her, to go to New York, but she’d insisted that he go so he would be as far away as possible from the people who’d murdered his parents.
Claude arrived at the wake just as it was winding down, at a time when everyone was too tired to do anything but sit, stare, and moan, when through sleepy eyes the reason for the all-night gathering had become all too clear, when the purple shroud blowing from the doorway into the night breeze could no longer be ignored.
“I’m sorry, man,” Claude said. “Your aunt was such good people. One of a kind. I’m truly sorry.”
Claude moved forward, as if to hug Dany, his broad shoulders towering over Dany’s head. Dany stepped back, cringing. Maybe it was what his aunt had told him, about Claude having killed his father, but he didn’t want Claude to touch him.
Claude got the message and walked away, drifting toward a group of men who were nodding off at a table near the porch railing.
When he walked back inside the house, Dany found a few women sitting near the plain pine coffin, keeping watch over his aunt. He was still unable to look at her in the coffin for too long. He envied these women the ten years they’d spent with her while he was gone. He dragged his sisal mat, the one he’d been sleeping on these last two nights, to a corner, one as far away from the coffin as possible.
It could happen like that, Ti Fanm had said. A person his aunt’s age could fall asleep talking and wake up dead. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it for himself. Death was supposed to be either quick and furious or drawn out and dull, after a long illness. Maybe Old Zo was right. Blood calls blood. Perhaps she had summoned him here so he could at last witness a peaceful death and see how it was meant to be mourned. Perhaps the barber was not his parents’ murderer after all, but just a phantom who’d shown up to escort him back here.
He could not fall asleep, not with the women keeping watch over his aunt’s body being so close by. Not with Ti Fanm coming over every hour with a cup of tea, which was supposed to cure his bellyaches forever.
He didn’t like her nickname, was uncomfortable using it. It felt too generic to him, as though she were one of many from a single mold, with no distinctive traits of her own.
“What’s your name?” he asked when she brought him her latest brew.
She seemed baffled, as though she were thinking he might need a stronger infusion, something to calm his nerves and a memory aid too.
“Ti Fanm,” she replied.
“Non,” he said. “Your true name, your full name.”
“Denise Auguste,” she said.
The women who were keeping watch over his aunt were listening to their conversation, cocking their heads ever so slightly in their direction.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re deserving,” she said, using an old-fashioned way of acknowledging his gratitude.
She was no longer avoiding his eyes, as though his grief and stomach ailment and the fact that he’d asked her real name had rendered them equals.
He got up and walked outside, where many of his aunt’s neighbors were sleeping on mats on the porch. There was a full moon overhead and a calm in the air that he was not expecting. In the distance, he could hear the waterfall, a sound that, once you got used to it, you never paid much attention to. He walked over to the mausoleum, removed his shirt, and began to wipe it, starting at the base and working his way up toward the flat top surface and the cross. It was clean already. The men had done a good job removing the leaves, pebbles, and dust that had accumulated on it while they were opening his aunt’s slot, but he wanted to make sure it was spotless, that every piece of debris that had fallen on it since was gone.
“Need help?” Claude asked from a few feet away.
He’d been sitting on the porch with some of the men.
Dany threw his dusty shirt on the ground, climbed on top of the mausoleum, and sat down. His aunt’s body would be placed in one of the higher slots, one of two not yet taken.
“Excuse me,” Dany said, “for earlier.”
“I understand,” Claude said. “I’d be a real asshole if I got pissed off at you for anything you did or said to me at a time like this. You’re in pain, man. I get that.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it pain,” Dany said. “There’s no word yet for it. No one has thought of a word yet.”
“I know, man,” Claude said. “It’s a real bitch.”
In spite of his huge muscles and oversized tattoos, Claude seemed oddly defenseless, like a refugee lost at sea, or a child looking for his parents in a supermarket aisle. Or maybe that’s just how Dany wanted to see him, to make him seem more normal, less frightening.
“I hear you killed your father,” Dany said.
The words sounded less severe coming out of his mouth than they did rolling around in his head. Claude pushed both his hands into his pants pockets and looked off into the distance toward the banana groves.
“Can I sit?” he asked, turning his face back toward the mausoleum platform, where Dany was sitting.
“I didn’t mean to say it like that,” Dany said. “It’s not my business.”
“Yes, I killed my old man,” Claude said in the same abrupt tone that he used for everything else. “Everyone here knows that by now. I wish I could say it was an accident. I wish I could say he was a bastard who beat the crap out of me and forced me to defend myself. I wish I could tell you I hated him, never loved him, didn’t give a fuck about him at all. I was fourteen and strung out on shit. He came into my room and took the shit. It wasn’t just my shit. It was shit I was hustling for someone else. I was really fucked up and wanted the shit back. I had a gun I was using to protect myself out on the street. I threatened him with it. He wouldn’t give my shit back, so I shot him.”
There was even less sorrow in Claude’s voice than Dany had expected. Perhaps Claude too had never learned how to grieve or help others grieve. Maybe the death of a parent early in life, either by one’s own hand or by others, eliminated that instinct in a person.
“I’m sorry,” Dany said, feeling that someone should also think of a better word for their particular type of sorrow.
“Sorry?” Claude wiped a shadow of a tear from his face with a quick swipe of the back of his hand. “I’m the luckiest fucker alive. I’ve done something really bad that makes me want to live my life like a fucking angel now. If I hadn’t been a minor, I’d have been locked up for the rest of my life. They might have even given me the chair. And if the prisons in Port had had more room, or if the police down there were worth a damn, I’d be in a small cell with a thousand people right now, not sitting here talking to you.”
Claude threw his hands up in the air and, raising his voice, as if to call out to the stars slowly evaporating from the sky, shouted, “Even with everything I’ve done, with everything that’s happened to me, I’m the luckiest fucker on this goddamned planet. Someone somewhere must be looking out for my ass.”
It would be an hour or so now before Dany’s aunt’s burial at dawn. The moon was already fading, slipping away, on its way to someplace else. The only thing Dany could think to do for his aunt now was to keep Claude speaking, which wouldn’t be so hard, since Claude was already one of them, a member of their tribe. Claude was a palannit, a night talker, one of those who spoke their nightmares out loud to themselves. Except Claude was even luckier than he realized, for he was able to speak his nightmares to himself as well as to others, in the nighttime as well as in the hours past dawn, when the moon had completely vanished from the sky.
