Free She Weeps Each Time You're Born by Quan Barry Page B

go to his aid. In the morning you learn that a man had gone out to meet his lover but had been mauled by a tiger. Before roll call there is a crowd gathering by the water station. The man’s extremities look intact but his innards have been skillfully removed. A woman bends over the body but doesn’t shed a tear. It is a crime to leave the plantation at night. There is talk of rebels proselytizing in the hills. Nobody comes forward to claim the body. Eventually two men are singled out to take it away. The men load it on a flatbed and drive it to the place where the workers are building Village Fifteen. The body will be planted where the new saplings will go.
    A few days later a small shrine goes up by a storage shed, a tiny pagoda with a roof not much bigger than a rice bowl, a place to burn joss. When Eduard, the head overseer, sees it, he orders it torn down. We’re not running a goddamn temple, he says. Your mother bows her head, closes her eyes. When she’s done, she looks to you to do the same. You bow your head but don’t know what to pray for. As the days and weeks pass, this happens repeatedly, words not readily coming to you. Like speaking into the darkness. A feeling of being all alone, though there are thousands at your side, each one stooped and suffering. Lady, keep us in Your sight.
    Terres Noires stretches for miles, trees planted in straight lines as far as the eye can see. In the back of Eduard’s flatbed it takes more than two hours to drive from one end to the other. Such cultivation, such care. You will be ten years old in the fall. You are too young to consider how any of this got here. How the first truckloads of men and women came down from the north in the late twenties. Men working to clear the land. Hack down the forest. Rip out the old trunks. Plant the saplings. Build the villages. The barracks and sheds and the garages and the water stations and the cooling rooms where they store the liquid rubber and the system of houses for the network of overseers, thegreat villa where the
propriétaire
lives with his thousand-bottle reserve in the cellar.
    You will be ten years old in the fall, eyes clear as crystals. Nobody believes you are fourteen as your mother claims, though many of the women who have given birth to children are hardly bigger than you. The first few weeks you work the land around Village Twelve like everyone else. Roll call at five, then up on the trucks and out to the sectors. The day starts at six, then all day in among the trees with your pruning hook, your hand ax. The tin bucket always with you, which you use to empty the small wooden bowls that sit in hooks placed at the end of the track, the track itself a great ribbon cut diagonally around the trunk so that the latex oozes out and runs down the long slanting gouge and into the bowl. The latex white and creamy, which the workers joke about though you don’t understand. You never knew there could be so much to do in the world, every hour of your life given over to something, the need to stay in constant motion. You spend the days filling your bucket, careful not to spill.
    This is what you learn that first week at Terres Noires. There are no eight-hour shifts. No medical clinics worth mentioning. No thirty pounds of rice per month. On the trucks by five, all day milking the trees, then back on the trucks at six. Sundays you spend cleaning the village, sharpening the adzes and pruning hooks, cleaning the tin buckets of their residue. When it is all done, sometimes there is time for
cheo
, the traditional plays of song and dance that help the workers forget themselves. In
cheo
lovers meet in wet paddies. Lost princes wander the land before being restored. Tricksters with good hearts ultimately deliver the protagonist from his enemies. It is all a metaphor, but for what you are unsure.
    In each of Terres Noires’ fourteen villages there is a commissary, a small store where everything is costly and of