looked down at the baby lying in the dust. She was already sprinkled with some of the soil that I had dug up.
'You see, I saw these faces standing over me in my dreams-'
I could have started my explanation in a million of ways.
'Where did you take this child from?' he asked me in his Spanish Creole.
He did not give me a chance to give an answer.
'I go already.' I thought I heard a little
'You acted too soon,' I said.
'You kill the child and keep it in your room.'
'You know me,' I said. 'We've been together.'
'I don't know you from the fly on a pile of cow manure,' he said. 'You eat little children who haven't even had time to earn their souls.'
He only kept his hands on me because he was afraid that I would run away and escape.
I looked down at Rose. In my mind I saw what I had seen for all my other girls. I imagined her teething, crawling, crying, fussing, and just misbehaving herself.
Over her little corpse, we stood, a country maid and a Spaniard grounds man. I should have asked his name before I offered him my body.
We made a pretty picture standing there. Rose, me, and him. Between the pool and the gardenias, waiting for the law.
the missing peace
We were playing with leaves shaped like butterflies. Raymond limped from the ashes of the old schoolhouse and threw himself on top of a high pile of dirt. The dust rose in clouds around him, clinging to the lapels of his khaki uniform.
'You should see the sunset from here.' He grabbed my legs and pulled me down on top of him. The rusty grass brushed against my chin as I slipped out of his grasp.
I got up and tried to run to the other side of the field, but he caught both my legs and yanked me down again.
'Don't you feel like a woman when you are with me?' He tickled my neck. 'Don't you feel beautiful?'
He let go of my waist as I turned over and laid flat on my back. The sun was sliding behind the hills, and the glare made the rocks shimmer like chunks of gold.
'I know I can make you feel like a woman,' he said, 'so why don't you let me?'
'My grandmother says I can have babies.'
'Forget your grandmother.'
'Would you tell me again how you got your limp?' I asked to distract him.
It was a question he liked to answer, a chance for him to show his bravery.
'If I tell you, will you let me touch your breasts?'
'It is an insult that you are even asking.'
'Will you let me do it?'
'You will never know unless you tell me the story.'
He closed his eyes as though the details were never any farther than a stage behind his eyelids.
I already knew the story very well.
'I was on guard one night,' he said, taking a deep theatrical breath. 'No one told me that there had been a coup in Port-au-Prince. I was still wearing my old regime uniform. My friend Toto from the youth corps says he didn't know if I was old regime or new regime. So he shot a warning at the uniform. Not at me, but at the uniform.
'The shots were coming fast. I was afraid. I forgot the password. Then one of Toto's bullets hit me on my leg and I remembered. I yelled out the password and he stopped shooting.'
'Why didn't you take off your uniform?' I asked, laughing.
He ignored the question, letting his hand wander between the buttons of my blouse.
'Do you remember the password?' he asked.
'Yes.'
'I don't tell it to just anyone. Lean closer and whisper it in my ear.'
I leaned real close and whispered the word in his ear.
'Don't ever forget it if you're in trouble. It could save your life,' he said.
'I will remember.'
'Tell me again what it is.'
I swallowed a gulp of dusty air and said, 'Peace.'
A round of gunshots rang through the air, signaling that curfew was about to begin.
'I should go back now,' I said.
He made no effort to get up, but raised his hand to his lips and blew me a kiss.
'Look after yourself tonight,' I said.
'Peace.'
On the way home, I cut through a line of skeletal houses that had been torched the night of the coup. A lot of the old regime followers died that night. Others fled to the hills or took boats to Miami.
I rushed past a churchyard, where the security officers sometimes buried the bodies of old regime people. The yard was bordered with a chain link fence. But every once in a while, if you looked very closely, you could see a bushy head of hair poking through the ground.
There was a bed of red hibiscus on the footpath behind the yard. Covering my nose, I pulled up a few stems and ran all the way home with them.
My grandmother was sitting in the rocking chair in front of our house, making knots in the sisal rope around her waist. She grabbed the hibiscus from my hand and threw them on the ground.
'How many times must I tell you?' she said. 'Those things grow with blood on them.' Pulling a leaf from my hair, she slapped me on the shoulder and shoved me inside the house.
'Somebody rented the two rooms in the yellow house,' she said, saliva flying out from between her front teeth. 'I want you to bring the lady some needles and thread.'
My grandmother had fixed up the yellow house very nicely so that many visitors who passed through Ville Rose came to stay in it. Sometimes our boarders were French and American journalists who wanted to take pictures of the churchyard where you could see the bodies.
I rushed out to my grandmother s garden, hoping to catch a glimpse of our new guest. Then I went over to the basin of rainwater in the yard and took off my clothes. My grandmother scrubbed a handful of mint leaves up and down my back as she ran a comb through my hair.
'It's a lady,' said my grandmother. 'Don t give her a headful of things to worry about. Things you say, thoughts you have, will decide how people treat you.'
'Is the lady alone?'
'She is like all those foreign women. She feels she can be alone. And she smokes too.' My grandmother giggled. 'She smokes just like an old woman when life gets hard.'
'She smokes a pipe?'
'Ladies her age don't smoke pipes.'
'Cigarettes, then?'
'I don't want you to ask her to let you smoke any.'
'Is she a journalist?' I asked.
'That is no concern of mine,' my grandmother said.
'Is she intelligent?'
