Continental Drift (19 page)

The roosters arch their short backs and cut the still air with harsh calls from the edge of town down to the square in the middle and back out to the opposite side, and soon the dry, clean smell of new woodsmoke reaches Vanise and the boy, and they realize at once that they are hungry.

The boy speaks of it first. Should we stop to eat? he asks. We have the ham. And the yams, he reminds her, and the rose apples and guavas they picked on the walk from Allanche to Le Mô1e—when was it? Only yesterday morning? Is the last dawn they saw yesterday’s, and that on Haiti? Has it all happened so quickly? How did they move so soon from a known world to an unknown one, and why aren’t they more frightened than they are? The boy cannot understand this. He can ask the questions, but he cannot answer them, and that frightens him more than any answers might. He feels like a boy in a dream, not quite responsible for his actions. If something appears in the dream that can kill him, he knows he will just fly up and over it.

At the center of the town there is a crossroads and a low wall encircling a Cottonwood tree. Here Vanise stops and sits. The boy stands before her, looking around him at the four roads that seem to come from above to this low place in the middle, there to cross and rise up on the opposite side. A half-dozen houses, mostly un-painted masonry buildings tacked onto smaller, older, daub-and-wattle cabins, face the several roads, with overgrown yards in front and here and there an old American car, dented and rusting, parked beside the house. Doors open now and then, and a person, usually a child, appears, runs to the outhouse and returns slowly, languidly, walking barefoot across wet grass, opens the door and disappears into the warm darkness inside. Little girls in short cotton smocks march out and back, little boys in white saggy underpants, lean shirtless men wearing jeans or gym shorts, fat women in sleeveless, baglike dresses.

It’s as if no one sees the young Haitian woman in the red headscarf and blue-gray skirt and blouse, her baby in her arms, and the boy, a lad slightly taller than she, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark pants and black sneakers. Their baskets lie at their feet next to the low marl wall, and while the woman sits on the wall and nurses her infant, the boy gropes through the baskets in search of breakfast—fruit, a pair of egg-shaped, pale green
jambosien
and a pair of lemony
goyaoiers.
It’s almost as if the strangers are invisible in this tiny town, for though no one stepping from his door could fail to see them at the crossroads in the milky dawn light beneath the tall cottonwood tree, no one calls them or even hails them with a tentatively raised hand.

Vanise and Claude hear them call and hail one another, however:
Tyrone, you fetch me wood now, bwoy, or me beat you! And: Get dat dog from out de house! G’wan now, get ’im from de house, y’ hear? There’s
a familiar enough roll to the words, the grumpy, early-morning sounds they themselves make back in Allanche, but Vanise and Claude can’t understand the words. It’s garble to them, as if the people are speaking backwards. The boy’s eyes open wide in wonder, and Vanise cocks her head, listens more closely. She hears music from a radio, not Haitian music, certainly, and nothing like it, either, not calypso or reggae or salsa. It’s a twangy, slow music, and though thinned by the cheap transistor radio inside the cabin, it’s unmistakably American country and western music. They’ve heard that sound before, now and then, from the radio and on records brought back on holidays from Port-au-Prince by cousins returning to the country intent on impressing those who refused or weren’t able to move to the city.

The boy says, Maybe this is America. Only not Miami, that’s all. Miami’s probably someplace near here, that’s all.

Vanise looks at him with scorn. America doesn’t look like this, she says in a low voice, almost a whisper.

But where are we, then?

Vanise shoves her face close to the boy’s and hisses. We’re in the center of a village, at a crossroads, and we’re eating our breakfast there! Anybody can see that. You can see that. She’s not angry at the boy, but she sends her words to him as if they had been heated and cast into cold water. Give me the
jambosier
, she says.

He passes her the fruit, and she tears off a fleshy chunk with her teeth. The baby, finished sucking at her breast, has fallen asleep and lolls back against her shoulder. Holding the rose apple with her teeth, Vanise buttons her blouse quickly and resumes eating. She hadn’t realized how hungry she had become, with all the excitement—first the fear of the boat ride and the sea, then the joy at the sight of land, and then the disappointment and anger, and now the complex fight to stave off being lost—and she’s almost startled by the intensity of her own hunger and the pleasure she takes from satisfying it. The boy, too, eats ravenously and with sudden joy.

When they have finished the fruit, the boy decides to risk another question. What are we going to do, Vanise? He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and studies the door of the house across the road from them.

We shall wait. She says it firmly, as if waiting were an action, like hiding or running away or building a house. She passes the boy the sleeping baby, which he holds expertly in the crook of his skinny arm, and she breaks off a leafless branch of the tree behind them, squats in the dust and begins to draw. As she draws, she prays in a broken way that she knows is amateurish and incomplete, but it’s all she can remember from her sister-in-law’s teaching. She knows the names of the cardinal points, and she addresses them properly: to the east,
À
Table
; to the west,
Dabord
; in the north,
Olande
; and in the south,
Adonai
. She draws a long horizontal line from east to west in the dust, then two verticals, one long and one short, that cut the horizontal into three parts. She crosses herself, and while she draws elaborations and curls, circles and lines around the crossbars, she salutes the two
trinities, first the Christian God, his son Jesus and the Holy Ghost, then les
Mystères
, les
Morts
, and
la Marassa
, the sacred twins.

Standing, she crosses her arms and examines the drawing at her feet, a vever for Papa Legba. Now, she says, we wait.

The boy relaxes and sits down on the low wall, the baby still in his arms. He’s no longer afraid. He did not know that his Aunt Vanise possessed so much
rada
knowledge, that she was a
mambo
, or he would not have been frightened before, when he did not know where they were. They will wait now, here at the crossroads under the sacred cottonwood tree, for old Papa Legba to help them.

The sun rises above the trees, and soon the day is dry and hot. A car rumbles down the lane to the crossroads and slows as it passes; the driver, a skinny black man wearing a painter’s cap, does not seem to notice them. A few minutes later, a boy on a red Honda putts by, changing gears and gunning his motor at the intersection, spinning his rear wheel as he turns to the left and heads up the rise and over it out of sight. Soon schoolchildren emerge from the houses and from the woods on narrow pathways. They are dressed in white and blue uniforms and carry books and papers under their arms and in satchels. Behind them, on the far side of the crossroads, a store has opened to the street, and several of the children stop there in the shade for box milk or Coke. They ignore Vanise and Claude and the baby as they pass, but look back at the trio when they have got behind them.

At the tops of breadfruit trees and utility poles, turkey buzzards perch and show their backs and stretch dew-wet wings to the sun. Doves coo in the crackling underbrush, and long-legged egrets stalk the marshes and gutters and now and then rise awkwardly from the moist ground and soar, suddenly graceful, against the cloudless blue sky. The sun moves slowly higher in the sky, and the shadow of the cottonwood tree in the center of the village of Kew shrinks until it is no larger than the circumference of the tree itself, a blot on the dusty gray round. Vanise and the boy are thirsty now, and the boy, Claude, finally, after thinking about it for close to an hour, asks his aunt if he can try to buy a Coca-Cola at the store behind them.

No, she says. We must wait for Papa Legba. We cannot leave. Besides, we have no more money. She reaches down and plucks from the ground next to the
vever
a smooth round pebble she has suddenly spotted there, as if it were a new plant that broke through the ground a second before. There, she says, passing the pebble to the boy, who puts it into his dry mouth. You see, Old Bones is looking after us.

The lad smiles and sucks contentedly on the stone. After a moment, he, too, reaches to the ground and retrieves a smooth pebble, which, with a broad, understanding smile, he gives to his aunt.

The hours pass, and as the afternoon comes on and the day begins to cool slightly, women and older girls emerge from the darkness of their houses and stroll down the road past the cottonwood tree to the store, to the butcher over the low rise beyond, to their neighbors’ houses. All of them ignore the strangers, the boy and the woman and her baby. They see them, of course, but this is a shy, careful people, a patient people as well, not like Jamaicans or Bahamians, not like Cubans, either, all of whom would have accosted the strangers by now and demanded to know why they were sitting in the center of their town, where did they come from, what do they want here.

It’s nearly four in the afternoon when a yellow, three-legged dog steps with precise delicacy from the brush at the top of the rise in the road facing Vanise and Claude, looks toward them, turns and approaches them at a lopsided trot. Vanise saw the dog the instant it emerged from the trees and recognized him at once.

With the baby asleep in her arms, she stands, pulling the boy off the wall to a standing position beside her, and together they watch the yellow dog draw near. He has an intelligent, slightly cockeyed face, one ear perked, the other flopping, and he moves on two front legs and one hind more easily, it seems, than if he had all four. He walks with a slightly airy lope, as if gravity did not hold him quite the same way other creatures are held.

A few feet away, the dog stops and stares orange-eyed up at them, one eye looking straight at Vanise, the other studying the boy.
He sniffs the air, then suddenly darts toward the basket at the boy’s feet.

Feed him! Vanise whispers hoarsely. He wants to be fed!

The dog pokes his muzzle at the bottom of the boy’s basket and then looks up and says in a smooth voice, What have you got in there? I want what I smell in your basket.

The boy looks wonderingly over at his aunt. Feed him! she commands. He wants the ham. Feed him.

Quickly, the boy yanks the top from the basket and reaches down, gropes past the clothing and comes to the ham his mother carefully wrapped two nights ago in Allanche. He draws it out, unties the knot in the red kerchief and lays the meat and bone on the ground next to the drawing in the dust. The dog watches warily.

Put it at the top, above the cross, Vanise says in a calm voice.

The boy obeys, moves the ham and stands, and the dog leaps upon the offering, grabs the meat with his mouth near the smaller end, sinks his teeth deeply into it and lifts it, the heavy end dragging the dog’s head down on one side like a man with a pipe in the corner of his mouth.

Then the dog turns away from them, takes a few steps and looks back. He puts the ham carefully down in the middle of the road and says, Come along now. Hurry. Then he grabs onto the ham again, lifts it and starts trotting quickly up the road in the direction he came from. Vanise and Claude reach for their baskets, hoist them to their heads and follow along behind.

The dog moves swiftly, and they can barely keep up. At the top of the hill, he stops a second, looks back at them and steps into the bush. Then it’s down into a tangle of liana vines and low, dense mahoe trees and macca, with the yellow dog darting up and down and over limestone outcroppings and underbrush, the woman, baby and boy with their heavy baskets scrambling along behind, panting in the heat, lashed in the face and on the arms by vines and low branches, losing sight of the dog for an instant, then spotting him again and clambering over stones and fallen trees after him. The baby is awake
now and crying, frightened. Vanise ignores the child and scolds Claude, telling him to hurry, run on ahead, don’t lose sight of him!

Soon they find themselves running along a sandy pathway that winds down a narrow defile between two limestone ridges. The dog stops ahead of them a ways and watches them stumble along behind. He drops the ham again, as if to rest a moment, and says loudly, with tricky laughter in his low, smooth voice, Come on, now, Vanise! Don’t tell me you can’t keep up with an old, three-legged dog! He laughs and grabs up the ham and races on, suddenly leaving the path and scrambling up the steep side of the defile to the top of the ridge and over. They follow, out of breath and wet with sweat, Vanise pushing the boy from behind, urging him on. Hurry, Claude, don’t lose sight of him! Get to the top and find him.

At the top, they stop for a second and search the underbrush beyond, low palmettos all the way to a turquoise streak of sea in the distance. They see the tin roofs of scattered cabins and small, cleared patches of ground here and there. He’s gone! the boy wails. I can’t see him. Then, a second later, No, there he is! and he points ahead at a yellow flash of fur on the ridge fifty yards beyond.

When the dog at last picks his way down the rocky side and enters the palmettos, they leave the ridge and in the palmettos come upon a mud flat, circle it halfway, following the dog’s three-legged tracks in the gray mud when they cannot see the dog itself. Then, beyond the mud flat, the ground rises slightly and opens to a grassy field, and they see at the far end of the field a small, unpainted cinder-block house. The dog heads straight for the house, through a corn field, old, dry corn stalks clattering in the afternoon breeze, across a packed-dirt front yard and around the side of the house to the back.