Free Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat Page B

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 régime 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 régime 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?"
    "Intelligence is not only in reading and writing."
    "Is she old régime or new régime?"
    "She is like us. The only régime she believe in is God's régime. She says she wants to write things down for posterity."
    "What did you tell her when she said that?"
    "That I already have posterity. I was once a baby and now I am an old woman. That is posterity."
    "If she asks me questions, I am going to answer them," I said.
    "One day you will stick your hand in a stew that will burn your fingers. I told her to watch her mouth as to how she talks to people. I told her to watch out for vagabonds like Toto and Raymond."
    "Never look them in the eye."
    "I told her that too," my grandmother said as she dis-carded the mint leaves.
    My whole body felt taut and taint-free. My grand-mother's face softened as she noticed the sheen of cleanliness.
    "See, you can be a pretty girl," she said, handing me her precious pouch of needles, thimbles, and thread. "You can be a very pretty girl. Just like your mother used to be."

    A burst of evening air chilled my face as I walked across to the yellow house. I was wearing my only Sunday out-fit, a white lace dress that I had worn to my confirmation two years before.
    The lady poked her head through the door