I knew I should call for help, but there was no one coming and going, alive or dead. Besides, I felt so rested, I did not want to be disturbed. Above me spun a sky full of grass and the planks nailed in twos across the grange door.

I remembered once, when I was a girl, watching an infant boy my mother and father had midwifed into this world. A month later, the mother left the boy with us when she went to market. While he was sleeping, he rolled himself into a ball and spun around on the bed. I watched him do this for some time before I called for my father, who was cutting wood outside, and my mother, who was washing clothes behind the house.

"I think this baby has the evil in him," I told them.

My father laughed and slapped the little boy's bottom, which made him stop his spasms. Then he explained, my father, that sometimes in the first year, babies remembered their births with their bodies and had to repeat it many times before they could forget. When they did this, you were to help them recollect the whole thing, especially their coming out, by tapping them on their bottom as had been done to them after their birth.

Some time later, I woke up and stumbled to my feet. Miraculously, I had not hurt myself. I wiped my face with the back of both hands and walked to a limestone house in the distance, a solitary lodging in a large open field. An old woman sat crouched in the doorway, shelling peas on her lap. Her thumbs dashed in and out of the soft green pods, thrusting out perfectly round green peas into a half filled bowl.

"I've come to see Father Romain," I said.

She pointed down the field to a boxlike clapboard shack with a zinc roof.

The front door was open, but I knocked anyway. A young woman came to the door, wearing a flowered sundress, the top of which barely covered her small flat breasts. She was fanning her face with two long flame tree pods that made a haphazard melody as she waved them back and forth.

"Is Father Romain here?" I asked.

"Who wants him?" She continued to swing the pods, making it hard for me to hear her voice above the clatter.

"They call me Amabelle," I said. "I knew him in Alegria."

Swinging the pods even harder, she said, "I do this when I'm not in view of my brother so he knows where I am. It comforts him."

Stepping out of the doorway, she motioned for me to walk inside.

"Do not be saddened if he does not remember you," she said. "So many people have come to him asking about their relations, but when he was arrested, he was always kept with the other priest, Father Vargas. He was never with the Haitian prisoners."

She stopped the rattling and led me through a bare room, then out to the yard, where Father Romain was sitting on a rocker beneath a cluster of mango trees.

"Jacques!" she shouted. "You have a visitor, someone who knew you in Alegria."

Father Romain was wearing a straw hat that covered most of his face. A thicket of sable hair peeped through the open collar of his long roomy shirt. His hands trembled as he squinted, fumbling to tie a piece of thin orange paper around the skeleton of a small kite. When his jaws quivered, he reached up and stroked his cheek to control the twitching.

"Who has come?" he muttered. Spittle was glistening from either side of his mouth. Though still young, he had the look of those who no longer recognized anything, people for whom life was blending into one large shadow, their vision clouding over as they surrendered their sight to very old age.

The sister left the yard, went into the room, and brought out another set of chairs. Father Romain's eyes traveled up and down, from the trunk of the mango trees and then back to his sister, before he saw me.

"Speak loudly and tell him what you must tell him," she said. "His mind wanders."

"Father, my name is Amabelle Desir," I said.

"Yes, Amabelle Desir." His voice was a distant mumble as he held the kite up to his face.

"Father, do you recognize me?"

He shook his head from side to side.

"You don't remember me?"

"No," he said.

"Father, I need to know if perhaps you encountered Mimi and Sebastien Onius before or after you were in prison."

The priest shook his head from behind the kite. "Prison? Wi. Wi. I encountered many people in prison."

"See how they aged him in prison," his sister said.

"Our country is the proudest birthright I can leave them," babbled Father Romain. He was staring up blankly at his sister as if trying with all his powers of understanding to make out her words and mine too.

"They forced him to say these things that he says now whenever his mind wanders," she explained.

"On this island, walk too far in either direction and people speak a different language," continued Father Romain with aimless determination. "Our motherland is Spain; theirs is darkest Africa, you understand? They once came here only to cut sugarcane, but now there are more of them than there will ever be cane to cut, you understand? Our problem is one of dominion. Tell me, does anyone like to have their house flooded with visitors, to the point that the visitors replace their own children? How can a country be ours if we are m smaller numbers than the outsiders? Those of us who love our country are taking measures to keep it our own."

"I cannot stop him once he begins," the sister said, using her bare fingers to wipe the growing puddle of drool on either side of her brother's chin.

"Sometimes I cannot believe that this one island produced two such different peoples," Father Romain continued like a badly wound machine. "We, as Dominicans, must have our separate traditions and our own ways of living. If not, in less then three generations, we will all be Haitians. In three generations, our children and grandchildren will have their blood completely tainted unless we defend ourselves now, you understand?"

Perhaps finally tired of talking, he stopped and lowered his face, his chin down to his chest.

"He was beaten badly every day," the sister said, stroking his shoulder. "When he first came, he told me they'd tied a rope around his head and twisted it so tight that sometimes he felt like he was going mad. They offered him nothing to drink but his own piss. Sometimes he remembers everything. Sometimes, he forgets all of it, everything, even me."

"Forget," mumbled Father Romain. He went back to concentrating on improving his kite. With more strength than I'd expect his trembling hands to have, he ripped a piece off the front end of his shirt to make a longer tail for the kite.

"Non, Jacques," his sister scolded, like a young mother correcting an errant child. "He's ruined many of his shirts this way," she said, turning back to me.

"Did you know Doctor Javier at all?" I asked the sister.

"Jacques, do you remember a Doctor Javier?" she asked.

Father Romain tied the strip of cloth from his shirt to the end of his kite and said nothing.

"I didn't know all of Jacques' friends," the sister said. "He is a priest. I am a singer and not a singer of religious songs."

"How long will you stay here?" I asked her.

"As long as he wants to be here," she said. "Where do you live?"

"In Cap Harden," I said, "at the house of a woman they call Man Rapadou."

"Our family has a fine house in Cap Haitien, near the cathedral," she said. "I hope he will let me take him there soon. Even in this state, Jacques still wants to go back across the border to find the people he served in that little valley town, but he will be killed if he crosses again."

The sister shook the flame tree pods once more. Father Romain looked up, his eyes suddenly gleaming like a hungry dog being called to a long-awaited meal.

When I said good-bye to him, he greeted me again as though he were seeing me for the first time.

I pressed my missive into his sister's hands. "Please give this to him during one of those times when he remembers," I said.

As I left his house, I wanted, but could not bring myself, to visit the river. Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside, with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before.

That night in bed, I told Yves that I had seen Father Romain at the border.

"Don't you think I have gone there too?" he asked. "Don't you think I have seen him, the poor bekeke?"

"Please don't call him that," I said.

"Did you see what state he was in, talking, talking like that without stopping? His sister was the one who told me first that all the killings were meant to look as if they had been done by farmers with machetes; no rifles were ever intended to be fired as was done with Wilner."

"Why didn't you tell me you had gone to see him? Do you know that Man Denise is gone, that people have been coming to tell her that Mimi and Sebastien are dead?"

"I don't always tell you what I know or where I go," he said.

His silence before he fell asleep was weighted with rage and guilt. Like Sebastien, he had always lived for work. The two most important cycles of their lives were the cane harvest and the dead season. Now all he could do was plant and sow to avoid the dead season.

37.

The dead season is, for me, one never ending night.

I dream all the time of returning to give my testimony to the river, the waterfall, the justice of the peace, even to the Generalissimo himself.

A border is a veil not many people can wear. The valley is a daydream, the village, the people, and Joel, with a grave that only a broken-hearted old man would ever know how to find.

I would go back with Odette to say her "pesi" to the Generalissimo, for I would not know how to say it myself. My way of saying it would always be-however badly-"perejil." For somewhere in me, I still believe that perhaps one simple word could have saved all our lives.

I had never desired to run away. I knew what was happening but I did not want to flee. "Where to?", "Who to?", was always chiming in my head.

Of all the people killed, I will wager that there were many asking like me "Who to?" Even when they were dying and the priests were standing over them reciting ceremonial farewells, they must have been asking themselves, "Go in peace. But where?"

Heaven-my heaven-is the veil of water that stands between my parents and me. To step across it and then come out is what makes me alive. Odette and Wilner not coming out is what makes them dead.

I was never naive, or blind. I knew. I knew that the death of many was coming. I knew that the streams and rivers would run with blood. I knew as well how to say "pesi" as to say "perejil."

You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.

My dreams are now only visitations of my words for the absent justice of the peace, for the Generalissimo himself.

He asked for "perejil," but there is much more we all knew how to say. Perhaps one simple word would not have saved our lives. Many more would have to and many more will.

The more days go by, the more I think of Joel's grave. (Of Wilner's, Odette's, Mimi's, and Sebastien's too.) I could no more find these graves than the exact star that exploded and fell from the sky the night each of them perished.

The more I think about their graves, the more I see mine: a simple stone marker with written on it only my name and the day I die.

But it must be known that I understood. I saw things too. I just thought they would not see me. I just thought they would not find me. Only when Mimi and Sebastien were taken did I realize that the river of blood might come to my doorstep, that it had always been in our house, that it is in all our houses.

I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.

I hear the weight of the river all the time. It creaks beneath the voices, like a wooden platform under a ton of mountain rocks. The river, it opens up to swallow all who step in it, men, women, and children alike, as if they had bellies full of stones.

It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.

The slaughter is the only thing that is mine enough to pass on. All I want to do is find a place to lay it down now and again, a safe nest where it will neither be scattered by the winds, nor remain forever buried beneath the sod.

I just need to lay it down sometimes. Even in the rare silence of the night, with no faces around.

38.

I waited for Doctor Javier's reply by watching Yves leave for the fields every morning to return home after dark. I waited for Doctor Javier's reply by feeling my wider, heavier body slowly fold towards my feet, as though my bones were being deliberately pulled from their height towards the ground. I waited for Doctor Javier's reply by sewing clothes for everyone who came with a piece of cloth and held it in front of me and for my effort offered a few gourdes, a plate of food, and sometimes nothing but a kind grin. Yes, I waited for Doctor Javier's reply by growing old.

His sister had moved Father Romain to a hospital in Portau-Prince, so I didn't see him again until May 1961, after the Generalissimo was killed in a monsoon of bullets as he was being driven out of the capital city on a highway named after him.

Father Romain was in the Cap then for a family event and came to stand out in the sun on the cathedral steps and watch a parade of survivors singing on the street: Yo tiye kabrit la! Adye!

They killed the goat! Adye!

It was the first time since the crowds waiting for the justice of the peace that I had seen a group remembering, a strange celebration of the living and the dead, the children and grandchildren of the slaughter.

Father Romain had been forced to age faster than most of us, but I could tell under his hollowed cheekbones and high round bounty of salt-and-pepper hair that he was experiencing his own share of uncertain joy. He seemed like a different person, the older brother-no, the grandfather-of the man he once was, the man who had taught the children about the properties of the wind and the invisible substances in the air by flying kites.

I didn't know where the sister was that day but she was not with him or with us, those of us who took to the once fire-engulfed streets of the Cap to clank pots and cans and sing to celebrate the Generalissimo's passing.

Yves came home from the fields to wander in and out of the small crowd, nibbling at his lower lip as though he wanted to weep for every scream of our happiness.

Man Rapadou and I walked arm in arm, her body nimble and spry as she entered the last years of her eighth decade.

Man Rapadou had been essential to me in the simple routine of my life. We'd wake up together at the same time every morning after Yves had left for the fields and she would help me with my sewing. I treasured my sewing; I enjoyed feeling my index finger cramped inside the thimble, found many hours' pleasure in watching the needle rise and fall, guarding the fragile thread with caution as it snaked through the cloth. I never used machines because that would have taken away a great part of the physical enjoyment.

Every morning at dawn, Man Rapadou and some of the women from the yard would go to market and bring back fresh ingredients for a meal that wasn't ready until late afternoon, closer to the time when Yves came home. Even though she knew he ate elsewhere, or maybe even had another woman looking after him, she still treated him like he was her helpless boy who had just enough strength to make his father's land come alive.

As his fortune had grown, Yves had added four more rooms to the courtyard, two of them mine and mine alone. (His mother did not want to move elsewhere and leave her old relations and happy-sad memories behind.) There were times when I shut myself in those two rooms that were mine and took to bed for months, times when I had too much lint in my throat, or an aching arm that prevented me from sewing, when the joint of my knee would throb, and the ringing in my ears would chime without stop. Other than those moments, the Generalissimo's death was the only reprieve from my routine of sewing and sleeping and having the same dreams every night.

"Oh, Man Amabelle, look at you doing the kalanda," someone called out from the crowd in front of the cathedral.

I didn't even realize I'd been dancing. Didn't even know I could dance. Still, it wasn't the compliment I heard but the title belonging to an elder-a "Man" like Man Irelle, Man Denise, or Man Rapadou-before my name.

I saw young men and women leaping with maracas and tambourines that day who were not yet born when I'd returned, and I felt time slither around me in a way it didn't when I was alone with Man Rapadou and her people in the courtyard.

Yves walked ahead of all of us, staying out of the crowd spilling over into the shops. He seemed younger than he was; with a sunken chest and narrow waist, he looked like he had lived through one or two famines. He had gone back to shaving his head bowl-bald even though he no longer had any reason to fear collecting cane ticks in his hair.