Continental Drift

There was nothing else to do, it seemed. The money was pressed between the two layers of floorboards under the bed, as thin as a newspaper between two short boards that came up easily, though they had not been lifted in over a year, not even to count. We used to count the money often, once a month, even. We would go over the stacks of green paper, ones, fives, tens and twenties, hungrily in late night candlelight with the door tied shut and the window covered, counting it and adding it up and dreaming over it, while we waited for the distant moment when we could go down to the fishing villages west of Port-de-Paix and make our arrangement with the men who own the boats and carry people over to the Bahamas and then to America and be there with our husband.

The candle fluttered, and we noticed that the wind and rain had resumed and were building to a roar again. The boy sat limply on a stool by the wall, his chest collapsed and his hands resting heavily on his knees. His face was blank, dark and withdrawn to a secret place of shame way inside him.

Lift the boards under the bed, we instructed him, and bring the money. Quickly.

He looked up, not understanding.

You heard. Do it.

He got up and crawled under the bed and soon was grunting and yanking at the boards there. Vanise studied him patiently, as if she were a grand lady and he retrieving a piece of dropped jewelry. She understood what he was doing and why, though he did not, and she seemed almost ready to smile. But that is because she had suffered more than he. He was merely for the first time in his life truly afraid. It was different for Vanise. Long ago, when her mother had died and then her father, and then all her brothers and sisters had died except the one who was the father of the boy, she had ended up living alone in a cabin outside Saint Louis du Nord letting men visit her and pay for her time and laughter and young girl’s body. She had passed through fear then as if through flame to the other side, where resignation abides, and then she had become Aubin’s favorite jeunesse for a while. He brought her back up here to Allanche, where he got a baby on her, and for a while she stepped back from resignation and began to learn how to be a serviteur and feed the loas, until Aubin grew tired of her, and a new, worse thing happened to her spirit, for she stood now on the further side of resignation, where people, especially women, laugh and cry too much and too often, where nothing matters and a second later everything matters. She was emptied out, and although we could love her, we could not trust her. All of us, even Vanise herself, knew that we would live better if we sent her away, but we also knew that she would not leave now unless for a better, safer place.

The wind and rain returned and beat on our heads until morning. We knew we would survive the hurricane, but we prayed to the Virgin and to our mait’-tête, while Vanise and the boy put their few articles of clothing and the uncooked yams and the remainder of the American ham into two small baskets, as if they were going to market in Port-de-Paix at dawn. We prayed on our knees with all the proper words we could remember, which were not so many as we would have liked, for we were no mambo or houngan or even a bush priest, a prêt’ savanne, nor could we go out in the storm and find one to pray for us, nor would we have done so, even if the night were serene, for what Vanise and the boy and Vanise’s baby were about to do could not be told to anyone yet.

The rain stopped, and the wind turned to gusts that came and went, and soon it was silent, and we began to hear hungry seabirds returning from the hills, crossing overhead toward the sea. We opened the door, and a gray block of light from the east fell into the cabin. It was morning. The hurricane had passed, and there was a sudden swelling of joy in our bodies, a warm, filling breath of pleasure, even though we knew that, with dawn, the boy and his aunt and her baby would leave us and that, no matter what happened to them in their journey, we would not see them again. We wrapped the money in a square of scarlet cloth and handed it to Vanise.

The fisherman named Victor in Le Mole is the one that people say carries people over to America. That is how the others left. That is how your brother got to Florida.

The girl looked down at her baby in her arms and smiled a strange, grim smile.

The boy said, Maman? When will you come?

Soon. When there is more money for it. Soon.

He looked at his sisters on the bed and crossed to them and silently patted each on her sleeping head. Then he went to stand by the door. Come on, Vanise. We’ll have to pass a lot of people on the road, and the sooner we pass them the better.