The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat

Author:Edwidge Danticat
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 1998-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

27

The night thinned into a dawn of charcoal gray. We ran across a stream, where Yves bent down, took a handful of water, and whisked it around in his mouth. Dipping my head in the current, I jolted myself awake with the brisk coolness of the flow.

“When do you think we’ll arrive at the border?” I asked.

“Tonight,” he said, reaching across his back to make certain the machete was still there.

He got up and started walking again. The water trickling from my hair soaked my blouse, gluing the thin cotton cloth of the gray house uniform to my skin.

A crossroads split our trail into two paths: one led back to the valley, and the other up to the mountains. We heard the rattle of an oxcart struggling down the incline behind us and crouched beneath a croton hedge to wait for it to pass.

The cart was covered with a blanket made of brown sugar sacks sewn together. Two fat oxen puffed as they yanked their cargo forward. The oxen had pockets of water splashing from the folds of doubled-over flesh along their large bellies. Their horns were joined by ropes and a piece of wood that partially blocked their roving eyes.

Walking beside them were two men, their shirts tucked neatly into their pants, which were rolled to their knees, revealing wet and muddied feet. They were carrying rifles as well as whips.

The cart suddenly stopped, the wheels wedged in a ditch where the slope of the hill met the valley road. One of the men took out a whip and slapped it against the ground, damning the oxen for being so big and so slow. The oxen struggled, raising their front legs, but could not draw the cart out of the trench.

From the back of the cart fell a girl, seventeen or eighteen years old. I raised my head to have a better look at her. Yves shoved my shoulder down, but I could still see her. She was wearing an orange-yellow dress with a cloth of purple madras wrapped around her head. A machete had struck her at the temple and on both her shoulders.

Her face flapped open when she hit the ground, her right cheekbone glistening as the flesh parted from it. She rolled onto her back and for a moment faced the sky. Her body spiraled past the croton hedge down the slope. The mountain dirt clung to her dress, her arms, her face, her whole body gathering a thick cover of dust.

The men did not notice that she had fallen from the cart. They raised the whips menacingly once more, but the oxen could not budge it. Finally they strolled to the back of the cart.

“The blanket was loose,” one said, tucking the sugar sack sheets beneath the cargo.

The loose blanket stirred. A groan could be heard coming from the cart. One of the men picked up a fist-sized rock and pounded on the head—or it might have been an elbow—pushing up the sack. There was no more stirring.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.