Haiti Noir

“Leave your shovel behind the house,” Miriam had instructed him before the funeral. That thing was like an extension of his hand. He carried it everywhere, always hoping someone would hire him. “You can start tonight,” Miriam had added, to his delight. She had read the impatience in his eyes, though she was the one who could no longer wait once word had reached her ear about some sneaky schoolgirl who had dropped her newborn into a nearby latrine. A suspicious houseboy had followed the trail of blood from the outhouse to the girl’s thighs, and she’d confessed. Jean-Jean almost slipped into the hole and died himself, when frantic neighbors sent him down there with a bucket on a rope to try and scoop out the remains.

“I remember your mother well,” Jean-Jean said. The thought of getting paid in just a few hours had cured his stutter for now. “She was a good person.” Gwo Manman always had a kind word for him. He would do anything, anything at all, for the Malbranche family.

“We need ice,” Miriam told him.

“I’ll get it,” replied Jean-Jean. For once, no one seemed to care where his hands had been.

Miriam embraced her sister, saying, “Pran kouraj. You did what you thought was best.” She lifted up her hand and her voice: “A toast to Gwo Manman!”

Someone gave Miriam a fresh bottle of rum. She put it to her mouth and drank. She passed the bottle to Foufoune. Do this in remembrance of me.

“To Gwo Manman,” Foufoune said. The liquid burned her throat on its way down. She was not a drinker. Her petite frame had never been able to meet rum on its own terms. A single sip would send her head spinning. But for Gwo Manman… just this once…

When Jean-Jean returned with the ice, the disgruntled mourner thanked him and drank and toasted for several hours before he stumbled out of the house. Foufoune, too, continued to toast her departed mother until her stomach churned and her thoughts began to swirl. Everyone was now stumbling with five-star grief. Foufoune teetered toward the bathroom. It was occupied, but she could not wait.

“Of course,” Miriam said when Foufoune, trembling like a little girl, asked her sister to escort her to that wooden stall behind her house. It had been years since she last used it, but if memory served her correctly, it would be pitch-black inside and densely populated with flying roaches. She would have waited, if she could have, but the rum had instigated a riot inside her stomach and everything she’d ever eaten in her life was seconds away from a violent uprising.

Miriam listened as Foufoune retched into the thirty-foot drop.

“Water.” Foufoune could barely say the word. She would splash her face with water; surely that would make her feel better.

“Yes,” Miriam responded. “I’ll get you some.”

Miriam returned to the house for a pitcher. Jean-Jean was leaning against the wall, an anxious look in his eyes. The last of the stumbling mourners kissed her goodbye and said, “Be strong.”

Miriam filled the pitcher and headed back to the outhouse.

Foufoune slurred something Miriam did not understand as she bent over the latrine, vomiting-too intoxicated to care about the stench or the roaches. Her chignon was still intact, Miriam noted.

The back of Foufoune’s neck was bare, except for the heart-shaped links of a gold chain which Miriam had given to Gwo Manman one Mother’s Day-purchased with money she should have used to extract a molar that was so infected it ended up costing her half of her bottom teeth. Miriam wondered if Foufoune had taken the necklace off their mother’s neck after she died, or if Gwo Manman had willingly given it away.

Without taking her eyes off the gold hearts, Miriam gripped the pitcher in a tight fist and drenched Foufoune in a vengeful baptism.

Stunned, Foufoune turned to ask why. In that second, Miriam reached outside the door and wrapped her fingers around the wooden handle of Jean-Jean’s shovel. She shifted her weight and steadied herself on her callused heels, leaning back just so. As deftly as stirring lumps out of her cornmeal, Miriam delivered a blow so precise that Foufoune’s chignon came undone. She fell sideways over the latrine’s mouth. Miriam hit her again and again.

“This is for Gwo Manman.”

Blood streamed out of Foufoune’s mouth. Her eyelids pulled back in blinding shock. Miriam snatched off the heartshaped necklace, and with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, worked Foufoune’s ever-so-svelte little frame into the hole. Foufoune’s body went through with minimal force, landing with a sound as faint as a serving of rice and beans onto a Styrofoam takeout container.

Miriam held the necklace in a clenched fist, peering into the darkness. She tried but could not see her sister below.