Continental Drift

The women had succeeded during the day in getting the girl to talk, or at least to nod yes and no to their questions while they washed and soothed her. They did not learn about Vanise’s child, and they did not learn about Émile’s son Claude. Instead, they concluded that Vanise had come over from Haiti alone, as they themselves had done years before and as Émile had done.

She was on a boat, they told Émile, and there was a great storm, and the Haitians on the boat had to jump into the sea when the boat began to sink. She was saved from drowning by Brav Ghede, no other. That’s all she can say, Thérèse reported. Ghede, Ghede, Ghede.

Émile shook his head no, frowned and looked down on the face of his sister as she slept. Not that one, he said. Not Ghede. She’ll tell us more when she’s rested and has eaten.

But she did not tell them anything more. She woke and wept and murmured the name of Ghede, Brav Ghede, Baron Cimetière, moaning and turning in the wide bed, her face wet with sweat, her arms and legs tangling in the sheets. Émile and the two women washed her head with rags soaked with herbs — trois paroles, gâté sang and trompette — and to warm her heart and liver, made her sip a tea brewed from citronella grass.

But Vanise spoke no more words, and soon she seemed not to recognize where she was or whom she was with. She stared at the worried dark faces above her as if they were cat faces or cow faces. Émile went to work the next day, and when he returned that evening and saw that his sister was the same, learned that she had called all day long for Ghede in all his names, he went out and made the arrangements to take her to Ghede.

At the rear of a flaking white windowless two-story building with a flat roof, an abandoned warehouse located at the eastern end of Little Haiti several blocks off Miami Avenue, Émile stops and hands his sister to Thérèse and walks slowly up the rotting stairs to a loading dock, faces a door with a small square of plywood where there was once a pane of glass, and knocks. Rusting railroad tracks pass down the alley between the warehouses; from Miami Avenue in the distance comes the bustle of cars cruising late, windows open, radios blaring. A siren howls for a few seconds, then goes silent. Émile glances down the steps to his sister, held in the thick arms of Thérèse and Marie like a rag doll, limp and tiny, head lolling forward, arms hanging down, hands open as if to reveal stigmata. They have dressed her in a white frock, and she is barefoot.

The door opens a crack, and Émile steps quickly away so he can be seen. Come in, Dorsinville, a man’s voice says. Émile turns and waves the others up.

The two women hesitate, then Thérèse shakes her head no. You take her now, she says to Émile. I cannot go in there. I am Catholic. She checks Marie, who approves.

Quickly, Émile descends the stairs and takes his sister from the women’s arms. I am Catholic also! he hisses, and he turns away and hitches the girl up the steps to the platform and takes her inside. The man closes the door and drops a bar to lock it.

The man is carrying a flashlight, but aims it down, so Émile cannot see his face. They are inside a huge open space, he can feel that, despite the total darkness, and he can smell old paper and cloth, dry ticking and straw, as if the place had once been used to store mattresses.

This is your sister, eh? the man says, and he shines his light on Vanise’s face, gray now and closed to everything. Ah, he says in a low voice. Poor thing. Poor little thing.

Where …? Émile begins.

You wish to pay me now? the man interrupts. The Baron has already arrived. He’s eager to see you. Both of you, he adds.

Émile reaches into his pocket and draws out the bills, two crinkled twenties, and passes them into the man’s outstretched palm.

Come now, the man says, and he leads them into darkness, playing the beam of his light on the floor as they walk. They cross the broad expanse of the warehouse, stepping over pieces of snake-like electrical conduit, around piles of old cardboard boxes and tipped and scattered stacks of newsprint, to a set of narrow wooden stairs in the far corner. The man mounts the stairs ahead of him, and Émile sees that he is a round and not young man and is wearing white shoes, socks, trousers and shirt, with a band of red, glossy cloth tied around his thick waist. Tucked into the waistband on one side is a machete, on the other a long, narrow knife. When, at the landing at the top of the stairs, Émile gets a glimpse of the man’s face, he realizes that he has seen the man probably a hundred times on the streets of Little Haiti, a most ordinary-looking, brown-faced man, a clerk or deliveryman or barber, with round, smooth cheeks, thin mustache, high, shiny forehead with short hair graying at the temples.