I walked back to the trail that encircled the stream. Unel rushed ahead as the others stayed behind me.

"It's not prudent to walk alone these days," Unel scolded.

"Thank you for your counsel," I said.

"We want to protect our people," Unel said. "After Joel was killed, we formed the night-watchman brigade. If they come, we'll be prepared for them."

"I am going back," another man spoke from behind me. "I won't wait for things to go from talk to bloodshed, I'm going back to Haiti. I won't take the automobile roads where all the soldiers are, I'll travel through the mountains. I'm going back this very Saturday. I'm prepared to leave all this behind. Thank you, Alegria. Our time here has been joyful, but now I must say good-bye to you."

"I will stay and fight," Unel said. "I work hard; I have a right to be here. The brigade stays to fight. While we fight we can help others."

"All this because Joel's been killed?" I asked Unel.

The coolness in my voice must have startled him, for he paused and looked at me before taking another step to follow his companions, who had left him behind. It wasn't that I had grown indifferent to Joel's death, but I couldn't understand why Unel and the others would consider that death to be a herald of theirs and mine too. Had Senor Pico struck Joel with his automobile deliberately, to clear his side of the island of Haitians?

"Let me ask again. Haven't you heard the talk?" Unel asked.

"I've heard too much talk," I said.

When we reached the compound, I returned the blanket to Unel. He rolled it up, tied it with a short rope, and threw it back across his shoulder.

"Thanks to her, if I am cold tonight, I have a wet blanket to wrap myself in," Unel told Sebastien as they shook hands. "I will take this opportunity to warn the others," Unel said. "The times have changed. We all must look after ourselves."

Unel and his men walked from shack to shack cautioning everyone to be watchful, not to walk alone at night. He enrolled a few more sentries among the cane workers, some who promised that they would walk the valley with him the following night. Others joked that only a woman could get them out of their beds to walk the valley all night after they had spent a whole day on their feet in the cane fields.

I hurried into Sebastien's room, my clothes dripping wet. Both Yves and Sebastien looked as though they'd been about to put out their lamp and go to sleep.

"I thought Kongo was still with you," Sebastien said.

Yves got up, stroked his shaved head, and went outside. I stepped out of my clothes but remained in my slip. Sebastien went out to hang my day dress to dry. When he returned, we lay down on his mat. He raised an old rice sack sheet over our bodies. I could feel his boils and the sabila poultice sliding down his leg as he called Yves back into the room.

"Have you heard some talk?" I asked Sebastien.

"Unel's talking of an order from the Generalissimo."

"Yes, that talk."

"I don't know what to make of it," Sebastien said. "I keep hearing it, but I don't know if all of it is true."

"Just before you came, we were speaking about you," Yves said, slipping back on his own mat across the room. "Did your ears burn?"

"What were you saying?" I asked.

"Yves was telling me I should sell the wood," Sebastien said.

"Papi's wood?"

"We can sell it," Yves said, twisting his neck and turning his large Adam's apple towards us. "I know someone who's looking for good well-cured wood to make tables and chairs."

"I don't want this wood near me," Sebastien said. Even though he was not speaking of the rumors, I could tell he was becoming as troubled as the others, distracted even. "Since we didn't use it for the reason we took it, I want to return the wood to its owner."

"There's no taking it back." Yves yanked a few sisal strands from the edge of his straw mat.

"Then, it is your wood now," Sebastien said. "I give it to you. It's yours to do with what you wish."

Yves coiled his body into a ball and turned his back to us. "There's no taking it back," he repeated, his voice already fading with sleep.

"You sent Kongo with word for me," I whispered to Sebastien.

"There are plenty of men who would have made a promise to you long ago," he said.

"Should we go to Father Romain for blessings?" I asked, becoming more and more impatient about being promised in a time-honored way to Sebastien. "I know you don't like priests and rituals, but Father Romain is our friend."

A piece of cooking wood held ajar the slat of lumber that served as Sebastien's window. The wood creaked as though about to fall. Sebastien got up and fixed it so the night air could freely enter and cool the room.

"We may not live together in the same house, you and me, until the end of this harvest," he said. "I don't want to bring you here, and I don't want to squeeze myself into your room on that hill and live with those people. Can you please wait for me?"

"I can wait," Yves shouted in his sleep.

"What can you wait for?" Sebastien asked him, laughing.

We walked over to Yves' mat. His eyes were wide open, staring at the wall with a glaze over his pupils, like the cloudy gloss of river blindness.

Sebastien waved his fingers in front of his face. Yves did not blink.

"Ask him how he is," Sebastien said.

"How are things with you, Yves?" I asked.

"Who is asking?" said Yves, still asleep.

"I have known him since we were both in short pants," Sebastien said as we walked back to his mat. "I've lived here in this room with him for many years. Never before has he talked in his sleep, plus with his eyes wide open. It started only after Joel's accident."

Yves and Sebastien both mumbled in their sleep all night, as though traveling through the same dream together.

"Papa, don't die on that plate of food," Yves said as dawn approached. He rolled onto his back, his eyes fixed on the dirty ceiling. His voice was clear yet distant, as though he were reciting a rote school lesson for the hundredth time. "Papa, don't die on that plate of food. Please let me take it away."

Sebastien turned over on his side and mumbled through his own nightmares.

"Is he still talking?" he asked as he woke up.

"About his father dying on a plate of food," I said.

"His mother liked to say that his father died over a plate of food," Sebastien replied in a wearied voice. "The father was put in a bread-and-water prison by the Yankis and let go after thirty days. First thing done by the mother is to cook him all the rich food he dreamt about in prison. The father eats until he falls over with his face in the plate and he's dead."

A cock's crow finally woke Yves. He jumped up and grabbed his work clothes, wanting to be among the first at the stream.

"Did you have bad dreams last night?" I asked Yves.

"Why do you want to know?" he asked, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as though it were going to leap out of his mouth. "You want to use my dreams to play games of chance at Mercedes' stand?"

"We couldn't sleep," Sebastien said. "You were squawking like a crazy parrot all night long."

After most of the workers had left for the stream, Sebastien and I went to a mud-and-wattle cooking hut near a wooden fence where the compound met an open dirt road. He brushed two rocks against a dry pine twig and sparked a flame for our coffee.

We sat under the mesquite that leaned over the hut, and while he sipped the coffee out of one side of his mouth, I watched him and grinned against my will.

For some, passion is the gift of a ring in a church ceremony, the bearing of children as shared property. For me it was just a smile I couldn't help, tugging at the sides of my face. And slowly as he caught glimpses of me between sips of his coffee, he returned the smile, looking the same way I did: bashful, undeserving, and almost ashamed to be the one responsible for the look of desire always rising in a dark flush on the side of his face. His eyes searched everything around him, the live coals and ashes under the coffeepot, the pebbles opening the soil to fit themselves in, the patches of dirt-brown grass dying from being too often trampled underfoot. When the morning breeze lifted his torn and leaf-stained collar, he pressed it back down with his cane-scarred hands. His eyes surveyed all the familiar details of his fingers, pausing only for an instant when our pupils met and trying to communicate with the simple flutter of a smile all those things we could not say because there was the cane to curse, the harvest to dread, the future to fear.

23.

I dream of the sugar woman. Again.

As always, she is dressed in a long, three-tiered ruffled gown inflated like a balloon. Around her face, she wears a shiny silver muzzle, and on her neck there is a collar with a clasped lock dangling from it.

The sugar woman grabs her skirt and skips back and forth around my room. She seems to be dancing a kalanda in a very fast spin, locks arms with the air, pretends to kiss someone much taller than herself. As she swings and shuffles, the chains on her ankles cymbal a rattled melody. She hops to the sound of the jingle of the chains, which with her twists grows louder and louder.

"Is your face underneath this?" I ask. The voice that comes out of my mouth surprises me; it is the voice of the orphaned child at the stream, the child who from then on would talk only to strange faces.

"You see me?" she asks, laughing a metallic laugh that echoes inside the mask.

"Why is that on your face?" I ask.

"This?" She taps her fingers against the muzzle. "Given to me a long time ago, this was, so I'd not eat the sugarcane."

I begin to think inside the dream that it is Sebastien who always brings her here, that she is the hidden image of some jealous woman or the revenant of some dead love he carries with him into my arms.

"Why are you here?" I ask her.

"Told you before," she says. "I am the sugar woman. You, my eternity."

I wake up, pounding the arm Sebastien has draped over my breasts to awake him.

If I mumble in my sleep, it is either about my parents or the sugar woman.

"What dream this time?" he asks. Sometimes, he is impatient with my shadows.

24.

The high cement walls around Dona Sabine's house were dotted with watchmen with deep brown peasant faces. Some looked too old, others too young to carry the ancient rusting rifles slumped over their shoulders, the holding straps digging flesh marks into their backs.

As I walked by, I looked up at the high patio doors, where a small cloister of men and women crouched behind fragile curtains while watching passersby on the roads.

Closer to Senora Valencia's house, Luis was standing in the road, his head swinging back and forth with every movement, every bull cart or peasant merchant on donkey back, every child on his way to the parish schools, every cane cutter heading to the fields.

"The patron is leaving today," he said, smiling. "They come for him in a short time."

The patron had already stayed much longer than his expected time. His pressing operation, he had told his wife, had been delayed until now. Because we were all so accustomed to having the senora alone to ourselves, we preferred having him gone. Now I suspected the senor was tired of watching his daughter grow plumper and happier every day while he was thinking of the male heir he had lost.

"How long will he be gone?" I asked.

He didn't know.

A burning piece of metal breezed past my face as I walked up the hill. I jumped aside, ducking my head. Senora Valencia and her husband were standing under the flame tree, each holding a short-barreled rifle aimed at the calabash trees in front of my room.

The air was filled with a gust of peppery smoke, some of which came to rest in the back of my throat. I closed my eyes to fight the feverish sting in my pupils.

"Amabelle!" Senora Valencia cried out, her voice hoarse with terror. She was in a loose housedress, leaning against the flame tree for support. Senor Pico had on all of his uniform except his cap, which was resting on the far corner of the bench where his wife sat between shots.

I waved my hand to show that I was still alive and then ran into the pantry where Juana was peering out, annoyed.

"I thought you'd caught the last one in your neck." She handed me a cup of water.

"Which saint must I thank for saving me?"

"All of them," she said.

Senora Valencia looked a bit depleted from the shooting but she pulled herself together in time to fire again. Looking towards the house, she appeared worried that the rifle blasts might wake her daughter.

"He should not make her do this," Juana said, "not so soon after she has given birth."

"The senora's strong. She's a good markswoman," I said, after the water had settled in my stomach.

I remembered how, for lack of a boy child, in spite of his saddening memories of the war, Papi used to take the senora hunting with real rifles when she was only a girl. With Papi the hunt was for birds. With her husband, what would the mark be?

Senor Pico guided his wife's hands along her rifle's trigger guard. "Remember, do not aim too high, or you will shoot over the head," he said.

He lined up her hands to fire once more. She shook her body free, leaned forward, lowered her eyes to the top of the gun barrel, then pulled the trigger. A calabash cracked from the tree across the yard and fell, toppling a few smaller ones on its way to the ground.

Senora Valencia lowered her rifle to her side and said, "No mas.

With a towel draped over her shoulder, Juana brought out a large bowl of water. The senora washed her hands and wiped them dry with the part of the towel that fell down to Juana's stomach.

"You must know how to protect yourself," Senor Pico said as they walked back to the house. He held his wife by the arm as though they were reliving their wedding march.

"Papi and Luis will be here to look after Rosalinda and me," she said.