Free Continental Drift by Russell Banks Page A

sharp-tongued woman, shouted at the girl that she would notfeed her husband’s mistress and bastard and sent her away with threats of a beating.
    Swiftly, Vanise descended into gloom again, and despite our wishes to remain optimistic, we followed her there, and before long, we were all once again sitting in the damp shadows of the cabin staring at the ceiling or looking out the door and window, lost in the floating world of our thoughts, as if the world where there was a hurricane coming and our son out somewhere in it and where there was no food to eat, no dry firewood, no dry clothes or bedding, as if that world did not exist.
    But, of course, it did exist, and soon the sky darkened again and the rain returned, furiously now, as if angered by delay, pushed by a strong wind out of the sea, until in a short time the rain seemed not so much dropped from the sky above as driven straight at us, a pressing, milky wall of rain that bent the trees, turned the palms inside out, ripped palmettos and stripped shrubs from the ground and pitched them against the bowed trunks of the larger trees, the cabins and the rocks, where they clung for a few seconds, then got torn loose and sent flying in pinwheels over the rough ground to the next tree or outcropping in their path. The noise was immense, a howling, like a beast made nervous and then frantic, a beast crazed by the drumming of the rain against the tin roof and shuttered window and closed door of the cabin. The children cried, and we adults tried to calm them, but we, too, were frightened, because it did not seem to us that the cabin could hold itself against the force of the wind and rain, even though it had stood against many hurricanes over the years. The children knew we were frightened, despite our soothing, reassuring words, so they wept all the louder, their small wails swallowed instantly by the howl of the wind.
    The day became night, and we lit a candle, though we had nothing to see. The wind continued as before, but slowly it shifted the direction it came from, moving from off the sea around to the north, until by midnight it was raging like a huge river down the valley that runs between the hills on the east and the mountains on the west. Itwas pummeling us from the front now, instead of from the side, and the trees that had been bowed in one direction were bent in another and, weakened, even the large thatch palms began to break off and fall. The children by this time were asleep, exhausted by their fear and weeping, and we were glad they could not hear the trunks of the trees snap and split, the ongoing roar of the wind and rain, the hammering on the roof and against the shutter and the door.
    We woke, though we did not know we had fallen asleep, when suddenly the door was thrown back, and the wind seemed to toss the shadow of the boy, our son, into the room. He shoved the door shut again and tied it, then turned to us and said for us to light another candle, he wanted us to see what he had brought home. He was soaked through, dripping and shiny in the flickering yellow light of the room, and his face was bright and smiling.
    Vanise lit a candle and came close to the boy, and when he held a bundle out to her, she said,
Oh
! She said it strangely, a mixture of relief, surprise and fear. When she stepped back, we could see that the boy was holding a large ham, the entire smoked leg of a pig, the kind of ham we had never seen before except in the pictures in magazines that people sometimes get from tourists or when they go to Port-au-Prince. A ham! An American ham!
    And here is where we made our mistake, for we woke the children and immediately set to cutting off chunks of the ham, adults and small children alike, devouring it like starved animals. We laughed and grabbed and stuffed the salty meat into our mouths with our hands. Then, as our hunger lost its rage, we slowed and found ourselves nibbling and picking at the pink, grainy ham, now and then drinking water from