The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

Author:Edwidge Danticat
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Adult, Contemporary, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9781417743049
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MONKEY TAILS

(FEBRUARY 7, 1986/FEBRUARY 7, 2004)

Mother and I cowered beneath her cot after a small rock pierced the sheet of plastic she’d draped over our bedroom window the week before as extra protection against the alley mosquitoes. She was winded from all the excitement outside, forcing air out of her lungs while trying to contain a sudden bout of hiccups. Keeping her eyes closed, she felt for the rosary around her neck and between hiccups and deep breaths whispered, “Jesus, Mary, Saint Joseph, please watch over Michel and me.”

The sound of a large crowd stomping through the alley between Monsieur Christophe’s water station and our house seemed to be what was making the cot rattle, rather than Mother’s and my shaking bodies. Above the echoes of drums, horns, bamboo flutes, and conch shells, we heard voices shouting, “Come out, macoutes! Come out, macoutes!” daring members of the Volunteers for National Security militia to appear from wherever they were hiding.

Overnight our country had completely changed. We had fallen asleep under a dictatorship headed by a pudgy thirty-four-year-old man and his glamorous wife. During the night they’d sneaked away—I had to see the television images myself before I could believe it—the wife ornately made up, her long brown hair hidden under a white turban, her carefully manicured fingers holding a long cigarette, the husband at the wheel of the family’s BMW, driving his wife and himself to the tarmac of an airport named after his dead father, from whom he’d inherited the country at nineteen, to an American airplane that would carry them to permanent exile in France. The presidential couple’s reign had ended, his having lasted fifteen years and hers the span of their six-year marriage. Their departure, however, orphaned a large number of loyal militiamen, who had guarded the couple’s command with all types of vicious acts. Now the population was going after those militiamen, those macoutes, with the determination of an army in the middle of its biggest battle to date.

My cousin Vaval, who’d left the house at dawn to catch a camion to the provinces but then had postponed his trip to come back and brief us on what was going on, told us how on his way to the bus depot he had seen a group of people tie one of these militiamen to a lamppost, pour gasoline down his throat, and set him on fire. The flock making its way through the alley behind our house was probably on a similar quest for vengeance, most likely looking for a man called Regulus, who lived nearby. Regulus ’ eighteen-year-old son, Romain, was my hero and the person whom at that time I considered my best friend.

It didn’t take long for the crowd to move past our house. I had to remind myself that these men and women, old and young, meant no harm to people like us, people like Mother, Vaval, and me. Vaval was so certain of this that he was standing out in front of the house watching the crowd, as though it was an ordinary parade going by.

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