Free The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat Page B

rape, murder of 5,000 people”— all apparently committed when he ran a militia ironically called Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti.
    For a month now, both Anne and her husband had been casting purposefully casual glances at the flyer on the lamppost in front of their stores each morning while opening up and again at night while lowering their shutters. They’d never spoken about the flyer, even when, bleached by the sun and wrinkled by the cold, it slowly began to fade. After a while, the letters and numbers started disappearing so that the word rape became ape and the 5 vanished from 5,000, leaving a trio of zeros as the number of Constant’s casualties. The demonic-looking horns that passersby had added to Constant’s head and the Creole curses they’d scribbled on the flyer were nearly gone too, turning it into a fragmented collage with as many additions as erasures.
    Even before the flyer had found its way to her, Anne had closely followed the story of Emmanuel Constant, through Haitian newspapers, Creole radio and cable access programs. Constant had created his death squad after a military coup had sent Haiti’s president into exile. Constant’s thousands of disciples had sought to silence the president’s followers by circling entire neighborhoods with gasoline, setting houses on fire, and shooting fleeing residents. Anne had read about their campaigns of facial scalping, where skin was removed from dead victims’ faces to render them unidentifiable. After the president returned from exile, Constant fled to New York on Christmas Eve. He was tried in absentia in a Haitian court and sentenced to life in prison, a sentence he would probably never serve.
    Still, every morning and evening as her eyes wandered to the flyer on the lamppost in front of her beauty salon and her husband’s barbershop, Anne had to fight a strong desire to pull it down, not out of sympathy for Constant but out of a fear that even though her husband’s prison “work” and Constant’s offenses were separated by thirty-plus years, she might arrive at her store one morning to find her husband’s likeness on the lamppost rather than Constant’s.
    “Do you think it’s really him?” she whispered to her husband.
    He shrugged as someone behind them leaned over and hissed “Shush” into her ear.
    The man her daughter believed to be Constant was looking straight ahead. He appeared to be paying close attention as the church choir started a Christmas medley.
    What child is this, who, laid to rest

On Mary’s lap, is sleeping?
    Her daughter was fuming, shifting in her seat and mumbling under her breath, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on the man’s profile.
    Anne was proud of her daughter, proud of her righteous displeasure. But what if she ever found out about her own father? About the things he had done?
    After the sermon, the congregation got up in rows to walk to the front of the church to take Holy Communion.
    “How lucky we are,” said the priest, “that Jesus was born to give of his flesh for us to take into ourselves.”
    How lucky
we
are, Anne thought, that we’re here at all, that we still have flesh.
    When her turn came, Anne got up with a handful of people from her pew, including the young couple sitting next to her, and proceeded to the altar. Uninterested and unconfessed, her husband and daughter remained behind.
    Standing before the priest, mouthing the Act of Contrition, she parted her lips to receive the wafer. Then she crossed herself and followed a line of people walking back in the other direction, to their seats.
    As she neared the pew where her daughter believed Constant was sitting, she stopped to have a good look at the man on the aisle.
    What if it were Constant? What would she do? Would she spit in his face or embrace him, acknowledging a kinship of shame and guilt that she’d inherited by marrying her husband? How would she even know whether Constant felt any guilt or shame? What if