Part 25 (1/2)

”One day we'll all take a trip together,” he said.

”This trip I must make alone.”

”We are waiting for you,” he said, ”we love you very much. Don't stay there too long.”

I lay in my mother's bed all night fighting evil thoughts: It is your fault that she killed herself in the first place. Your face took her back again. You should have stayed with her. If you were here, she would not have gotten pregnant.

When I woke up the next day, Marc was asleep on the sofa.

”Would you pick something for your mother to be buried in?” he asked.

He spoke to me the way older men addressed orphan children, with pity in his voice. If we had been in Haiti, he might have given me a penny to ease my pain.

I picked out the most crimson of all my mother's clothes, a bright red, two-piece suit that she was too afraid to wear to the Pentecostal services.

It was too loud a color for a burial. I knew it. She would look like a Jezebel, hot-blooded Erzulie who feared no men, but rather made them her slaves, raped them, and killed them. She was the only woman with that power. It was too bright a red for burial. If we had an open coffin at the funeral home, people would talk. It was too loud a color for burial, but I chose it. There would be no ostentation, no viewing, neither pomp nor circ.u.mstance. It would be simple like she had wanted, a simple prayer at the grave site and some words of remembrance.

”Saint Peter won't allow your mother into Heaven in that,” he said.

”She is going to Guinea,” I said, ”or she is going to be a star. She's going to be a b.u.t.terfly or a lark in a tree. She's going to be free.”

He looked at me as though he thought me as insane as my mother.

At my mother's dressing, in the Nostrand Avenue funeral home, her face was a permanent blue. Her eyelids were stretched over her eyes as though they had been sewn shut.

I called Joseph one last time before we got on the plane. He put the baby on the phone to wish me Bon Voyage. This time she said Manman. When I said good-bye, she began to cry.

”She feels your absence,” Joseph said.

”Does she sleep?” I asked.

”Less now,” he said.

My mother was the heavy luggage that went under the plane. I did not sit next to Marc on the plane. There were enough seats so that I did not have to. There were not many people going to Haiti, only those who were in the same circ.u.mstances as we were, going to weddings or funerals.

At the airport in Port-au-Prince, he spun his head around to look at everything. It had been years since he had left. He was observing, watching for changes: In the way the customs people said Merci and au revoir when you bribed them not to search your bags. The way the beggars clanked the pennies in their tin cans. The way the van drivers nearly killed one another on the airport sidewalk to reach you. The way young girls dashed forward and offered their bodies.

He had been told by the funeral home that my mother's body would follow us to the Cathedral Chapel in Dame Marie. A funeral home driver would pick her up. As soon as she got there, we could claim her and bury her, that same day, if that's what we wanted. The chauffeur arrived promptly and gave us a ride, in the hea.r.s.e, to Dame Marie.

I felt my body stiffen as we walked through the mache in Dame Marie. Marc had his eyes wide open, watching. He looked frightened of the Macoutes, one of whom was sitting in Louise's stand selling her last colas.

People greeted me with waves and smiles on the way to my grandmother's house. It was as though I had lived there all my life.

Marc was straining to take in the sights. We walked silently. Louise's shack looked hollow and empty when we went by. In the cane fields, the men were singing about a mermaid who married a fisherman and became human.

My grandmother was sitting on the porch with her eyes on the road. I wondered how long she had been sitting there. For hours, through the night, since she had heard? We ran to each other. I told her everything. What I knew from him, where I blamed myself, and where he had blamed me.

She knew, she said, she knew even before she was told. When you let your salt lay in the sun, you are always looking out for rain. She even knew that my mother was pregnant. Remember, all of us have the gift of the unseen. Tante Atie was sitting on the steps with a black scarf around her head. She was clinging to the porch rail, now with two souls to grieve for.

Marc introduced himself to my grandmother, reciting his whole name.

”Dreams move the wind,” said my grandmother. ”I knew, but she never spoke of you.”

We decided to have the funeral the next morning, just among ourselves. That night we made a large pot of tea, which we shared with only Eliab and the other wandering boys. We did not call it a wake, but we played cards and drank ginger tea, and strung my wedding ring along a thread while singing a festive wake song: Ring sways sways to Mother. Ring stays with Mother. Pa.s.s it. Pa.s.s it along. Pa.s.s me. Pa.s.s me along. to Mother. Ring stays with Mother. Pa.s.s it. Pa.s.s it along. Pa.s.s me. Pa.s.s me along.

Listening to the song, I realized that it was neither my mother nor my Tante Atie who had given all the mother-and-daughter motifs to all the stories they told and all the songs they sang. It was something that was essentially Haitian. Somehow, early on, our song makers and tale weavers had decided that we were all daughters of this land.