Free The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat Page B

head from side to side in apparent disapproval.
    “Do you enjoy it here?’ Beatriz asked like a paid inquisitor.
    “Should I tell you the truth?” he asked.
    “Certainly, the truth,” replied Beatriz
    “Do I like the way things are conducted here now, everything run by military men? Do I like the worship of uniforms, the medals like stars on people’s chests? Do I like this?” He looked up at Señora Valencia’s spectacularly large portrait of the Generalissimo.
    “Do you like it?” Beatriz persisted.
    “No,” Papi said. “I don’t like any part of it.”
    “When you were in the army, did you kill anyone?” Beatriz asked.
    “This is between me and my conscience,” he said.
    “You did, then?”
    “What good can it do you to know what evil things I have or have not been part of?”
    Beatriz threw back her long braid, almost hitting Papi’s face with it. Papi was seized by another fit of coughing. Beatriz hurried to pat his back.
    “You want to know what I’m writing to my grandchildren,” Papi said after catching his breath. “I’ve begun with my birth in the seaport of Valencia. My father was a baker there. There are times when he gave bread to everyone in our quarter for nothing. I was his only son but he would never let me eat until everyone else had eaten. He lived to be ninety years old only to be killed in this evil war.”
    Like me, Papi had been displaced from his native land; he felt himself the orphaned child of a now orphaned people. Perhaps this was why he often seemed more kindly disposed to the strangers for whom this side of the island had not always been home.
    Señora Valencia was nursing her son when I took her morning meal to her. Her husband motioned for me to enter as soon as he saw me in the doorway.
    “Señorita Beatnz is here for a visit,” I told him as I put the tray down.
    I took the children’s dirty linen from a corner and carried it down to the basin of rainwater that Juana kept out in the yard for the wash.
    From the hill I could see some of the cane workers heading towards the fields. Kongo was at the head of the group, with Sebastien close behind. Mimi and Félice were walking with them on their way to buy provisions in the marketplace. I waved to them, but it was Doctor Javier who waved back instead as he climbed up the hill. He walked over to the washbasin before going inside the house.
    “Have you given thought to what I asked?” He spoke Kreyol like a Haitian, with only a slight Dominican cadence. “Soon, I’ll be going back to the clinic for two days,” he said. “If you want, you can come with me and some others. There’ll be many children with us, perhaps ten orphans. The clinic itself is nothing more than a small house. At night some of the workers sleep there. You’ll live there in the beginning. You’ll be paid a wage, though not a big one. The mothers pay with food. Some make you the godparent. I’m godfather to twenty-six children.”
    With Joel’s death, I hadn’t given myself much time to think about this, to consider returning to a place I had not seen since I was a child. The cane workers had all turned at the bend in the road. Sebastien would soon be in the fields for the first day of what he hoped would be his last harvest. He was going to work hard, too hard, to save a few pesos, hoping to change his life. Maybe I too had been waiting for an escape, looking out of the corner of my eyes for a sign telling me it was time to go on to another life, a life that would fully be mine. Maybe I had been hoping for a voice to call to me from across the river, someone to arrive saying, “I have come for you to bring you back.” Maybe this was that voice, that someone disguised as the doctor. Perhaps I should seize this chance. But not unless Sebastien was prepared to leave also.
    “Javier, is this you I hear?” Señor Pico called to Doctor Javier from the parlor.
    “It’s me,” Doctor Javier replied.
    “Come, then.”
    “Amabelle, I need