Moonbath by Yanick Lahens

Author:Yanick Lahens
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941920572
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2017-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

21.

Dieudonné grew up between the sea and the hot, rocky earth of Anse Bleue. Learning alongside Orvil and Fénelon to decipher the signs of the sky. To understand the language of the waters, the alphabet of the winds. To read the clouds in the sky, to decipher if they carried rain. To remember that to go out to sea is to know the time of departure, but never that of the return, because only Agwé and God know. To take out the animals from the enclosure and lead them to drink. To bend over and break your back under that sun makes your skin sticky, under the dry skies that, day after day, close the belly of the earth and push stones over her. To caress the belly of this same earth so that she delivers again. Green. Thick. Soft. To ration the millet flour in the big mortar in the middle of the lakou, for the only meal of the day. To distinguish the work of women from that of men and to be served by them. Namely to let the women fly like flocks of birds in the early morning, and wait for them in silence in the sweetness of the twilight. To collapse into sleep with the density of a stone and the lightness of an angel, to await the visitors of dreams.

Dieudonné had formed the belief that he had three fathers and three mothers. A close father, Orvil, another further away, Fénelon, and a father of whom they never spoke. Three mothers: Ermancia, Cilianise, and an absent one, Olmène, who sometimes appeared in his dreams. She came from the sea or from the lands behind the mountains, dressed in white, and descended a ladder to approach him. He stretched out his arms and then she vanished into a great white cloud.

Dieudonné often caught his grandmother Ermancia in the act of throwing one last glance at the horizon before closing the door of the hut at dusk. You’d think that she was waiting for somebody. Like Olmène or Léosthène would return as they had left. Without warning. Without goods to carry. Their only baggage their feet, sturdy enough to walk to the dreams that had called them. She imagined these same feet, strong as she preferred them, returning them to childhood, returning them to the lakou.

Dieudonné grew up with our same fears, those of wandering spirits, of curses, of paquets rangés* at the crossroads, and he learned the spells to summon the Invisibles, the verses to petrify the devils and the psalms to ward off all dangers. “The Lord is my shepherd, if he is with me, who will be against me?” And Dieudonné never took his eyes off his grandfather Orvil as he mixed, crushed, kneaded, and blended the strange herbs, the rare spices, and the dark debris, reducing them into a smooth and light ointment or a thick and greasy potion. Nor when he prepared the bains de chance* with flowers, fruits, spices, and perfumes, for promises that lit up the eyes of visitors.

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