Continental Drift

And your husband, do you hear from him in America? Aubin asked. Does he send you money still? He smiled like a snake, no lips, no teeth. He’s been gone a long time now, eh? Must be a rich man by now. He laughed, as if he had told a joke. Or else in jail. They put Haitians in jail in America, you know. I heard that on my radio too.

We said nothing, for though it was true, we had not heard a word from the man in over a year, we also knew he was not in jail, for he had sent us money, American money, for almost two years, which we had hidden away, as he wanted us to do, for the time when we would be able to go to America to join him there. We knew that in the last year someone had been stopping his letters and removing the money from the envelopes, someone in the settlement, probably, who had learned somehow that he was sending us the money he earned taking care of a golf course in Florida. We had brought his first letter, after taking the money from it, to Berthe Moriset, a woman in the settlement who reads letters for people, and she had read his instructions to us to save the money and spend it only “in emergency,” which we understood to mean only when we were ready to come to America, but when we heard those words from Berthe’s lips, we knew we had made a mistake in taking the letter to her, for now everyone would know. After that, we took out the money and burned the letters unread. Two more letters came, and then, for a year, no more. But we knew, even so, the man was not in jail.

What about you? Aubin asked Vanise. She sat in a clump of shadow in the far corner of the cabin, looking down at the infant in her lap as if its father were not present. She did not respond, so he shouted her name, Vanise! What about you? Does the baby do well?

We explained for her that there was no food, for we had been inside since the rain started and had not been able to find dry wood for the fire to bake the yams or cook one of the chickens.

Aubin looked at us as if we were all children and said that we should have stored wood under the house, but when we tried to explain that it was very difficult to find enough deadwood to store it against the future, he waved us silent. He’s a busy man, Aubin, and does not want to be troubled by our difficulties.

Go to my office, he told the eldest of the daughters on the bed. Fetch an armful of sticks from under the building so your mother can make a fire and cook food for you. This is shameful, he said. A house with no man in it …, he muttered in disgust. We did not hear the rest, for he was gone.

But it did not matter what Aubin thought or said, for we knew, with the hurricane coming, with the boy gone and the road washed out, with all the danger and with the suffering yet to come, after the suffering we had already gone through, it was clear that the loas were hungry, and we said to one another that as soon as the hurricane was over, we would go to Cabon or Bonneau with one of the chickens and make a service for their feeding.

This seemed to lighten Vanise’s load of woe. She stood, placed her infant son on the bed with the other children and made for the door, saying she would kill the remaining chicken, the one not saved for the houngan, and pluck it, and when the daughter returned from Aubin’s with the sticks for the fire, we would cook it and have food to eat during the hurricane.

But this was not to happen. The girl quickly returned from Aubin’s house empty-handed and weeping, for she had been greeted there by Aubin’s wife, who knew of his child with Vanise. Aubin’s wife, a sharp-tongued woman, shouted at the girl that she would not feed her husband’s mistress and bastard and sent her away with threats of a beating.

Swiftly, Vanise descended into gloom again, and despite our wishes to remain optimistic, we followed her there, and before long, we were all once again sitting in the damp shadows of the cabin staring at the ceiling or looking out the door and window, lost in the floating world of our thoughts, as if the world where there was a hurricane coming and our son out somewhere in it and where there was no food to eat, no dry firewood, no dry clothes or bedding, as if that world did not exist.