"Yves, Joel, and me, we were walking along when an automobile hit Joel and sent him into the ravine."

"And you? Did you break any bones?" I asked, as if this were the only way in which a person could be wounded, only when his body was almost crushed, pulped like the cane in the presses at the mill.

"Yves and I were lucky," he said. And then I thought how truly fortunate he was. He was not crying or yelling or throwing rocks at the house, or pounding a tree stump against the side of the automobile that had killed his friend. Perhaps the truth had not yet touched him deeply enough. But, then, he had seen death closely before.

"What's Kongo doing?" I asked. Perhaps Sebastien was staying calm by thinking of the next step, the next action.

"The first thing is to put Joel's body in the ground," he said.

"Does Kongo know whose automobile hit Joel?"

"At this time, all he knows is that his son is dead. He needs to make a coffin. Don Carlos won't pay for a burial."

Luis and Papi had gone to bed. I led Sebastien behind the latrines. There Papi had a stack of cedar planks that he used for his leisure occupation, making tables and chairs and building miniature houses. Sebastien took four long boards, stained and polished, enough to build a coffin for a grown man.

I offered to help him carry them, but he refused.

"You stay," he said. "I will come back."

I looked down at the yams, leaning against the wall where I had laid them soon after he had given them to me.

"With all this, you had time to bring these yams?" I asked.

"You stay here until I come back," he said, "don't try to go anywhere."

I heard him breathing hard, struggling with the weight of the wood as he hauled it away. I went back to my room, lay down, and waited for his return.

Poor Kongo. Condolences, Kongo. Two new children came into the world while you have to put your son in the ground.

9.

It is a Friday, market day. My mother, my father, and me, we cross into Dajabon, the first Dominican town across the river. My mother wants to buy cooking pots made by a Haitian pot maker named Moy who lives there, the best pot maker in the area. There is a gleam to Moy's pots that makes you think you are getting a gem. They never darken even after they have been used on outdoor cooking fires for years.

In the afternoon, as we set out to wade across the river again with our two new shiny pots, it starts to rain in the mountains, far upstream. The air is heavy and moist; a wide rainbow arc creeps away from the sky, dark rain clouds moving in to take its place.

We are at a distance from the bridge. My father wants us to hurry home. There is still time to cross safely, he says, if we hasten. My mother tells him to wait and see, to watch the current for a while.

"We have no time to waste," my father insists.

"I'll carry you across, and then I'll come back for Amabelle and the pots," my father says.

We walk down from the levee. My father looks for the shallows, where the round-edged rust-colored boulders we'd used before as stepping stones have already disappeared beneath the current.

"Hold the pots," my mother tells me. "Papa will come back for you soon."

On the levee are a few river rats, young boys, both Haitian and Dominican, who for food or one or two coins, will carry people and their merchandise across the river on their backs. The current is swelling, the pools enlarging. Even the river rats are afraid to cross.

My father reaches into the current and sprinkles his face with the water, as if to salute the spirit of the river and request her permission to enter. My mother crosses herself three times and looks up at the sky before she climbs on my father's back. The water reaches up to Papa's waist as soon as he steps in. Once he is in the river, he flinches, realizing that he has made a grave mistake.

My mother turns back to look for me, throwing my father off balance. A flow of mud fills the shallows. My father thrusts his hands in front of him, trying to keep on course. My mother tightens her grip around his neck; her body covers him and weighs him down at the same time. When he tries to push her up by her legs, a cluster of vines whisks past them; my mother reaches for the vines as though they were planks of a raft.

As the rain falls, the river springs upwards like an ocean riptide. Moving as close as they can to the river's edge, the boys throw a thick sisal rope to my parents. The current swallows the rope. The boys reel it back in and wrap it around a boulder. The knot slides away from the boulder as soon as it leaves their hands.

The water rises above my father's head. My mother releases his neck, the current carrying her beyond his reach. Separated, they are less of an obstacle for the cresting river.

I scream until I can taste blood in my throat, until I can no longer hear my own voice. Yet I still hold Moy's gleaming pots in my hands.

I walk down to the sands to throw the pots into the water and then myself. The current reaches up and licks my feet. I toss the pots in and watch them bob along the swell of the water, disappearing into the braided line that is the river at a distance.

Two of the river boys grab me and drag me by my armpits away from the river. Their faces seem blurred and faraway through the falling rain. They pin me down to the ground until I become still.

"Unless you want to die," one of them says, "you will never see those people again."

10.

When Sebastien returned from the compound that night, he was wearing a clean shirt and had washed most of the grass from his beard and face. He sat and leaned back against the wall, watching a lizard dash across the ceiling. I made room for him to lie down on the mat next to me.

"Senor Pico's at home now," I said. "You have to be careful coming and going."

"At this moment, what I want more than anything is for Senor Pico to try and strike me," he said, in an angry tone that I was not used to. Perhaps it was all becoming more familiar to him now. His friend had died. He could have died. We were in the house of the man who had done it. Sebastien could go in and kill him if he really wanted to.

"Senor Pico has rifles," I reminded him, "and we are on his property."

"Is the air we breathe his property?" he asked.

"How was Kongo?"

"No one can find him," he said.

"Where did he go?"

"After we brought the body to him-"

"What condition was the body in?" I asked, regretting the words as soon as they left my mouth.

"He fell from a great height into the ravine," he said.

"What did Kongo do with the body?"

"He let a few people see," he said calmly. "Then Yves and I helped him take Joel down to the stream. We washed him and cleaned off all the blood and brought him back to Kongo's room. Kongo said he wanted to stay alone with the body, then while I was waiting here to enter your room, he took it away."

It was hard to imagine Kongo hauling Joel very far on his back. Joel was much taller and larger-boned, the kind of man who was called upon to pull an oxcart full of cane when the oxen were too fatigued to do the job.

"They say a son's never too big to be carried or beaten by his father," Sebastien said, rubbing a balled fist against his swollen eye. "If Kongo carried off Joel by himself then there's more truth to that than I thought."

"Maybe Kongo wished to say his farewell alone," I said, raising his fist from his eye.

"The others have been out looking for him," he said. "I think he took Joel's body away because he wants us to let him be. I'm going to respect his wishes. He'll come back when he wants."

He ran both his hands up and down my back. He had been this way the whole year we'd been together. His favorite way of forgetting something sad was to grab and hold on to somebody even sadder.

"You're sweating," he said, letting his fingers slide along my spine.

"I had my dream of my parents in the river," I said.

"I don't want you to have this dream again," he said.

"I always see it precisely the way it took place."

"We'll have to change this thing, starting now." He blew out the lamp. The room was pitch black. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened for his voice.

"I don't want you to dream of that river again," he said. "Give yourself a pleasant dream. Remember not only the end, but the middle, and the beginning, the things they did when they were breathing. Let us say that the river was still that day."

"And my parents?"

"They died natural deaths many years later."

"And why did I come here?"

"Even though you were a girl when you left and I was already a man when I arrived and our families did not know each other, you came here to meet me."

His back and shoulders became firm and rigid as he was concocting a new life for me.

"Yes," I said, going along. "I did wander here simply to meet you."

"I don't give you much," he said, "but I want you to know that tomorrow begins my last zafra. Next year, I work away from the cane fields, in coffee, rice, tobacco, corn, an onion farm, even yucca grating, anything but the cane. I have friends looking about for me. I swear it to you, Amabelle, this will be my last cane harvest, just as it was Joel's."

I knew he considered Joel lucky to no longer be part of the cane life, travay te pou zo, the farming of bones.

"Tonight, when Yves and me, we carried Joel's corpse into the compound," he said, "I thought about how both Yves' father and my father died, his father organizing brigades to fight the Yanki occupation in Haiti and my father in the hurricane."

I reached up and pressed my hands against his lips. We had made a pact to change our unhappy tales into happy ones, but he could not help himself.

"Sometimes the people in the fields, when they're tired and angry, they say we're an orphaned people," he said. "They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don't belong anywhere and that's us. I say we are a group of vwayaje, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are."

11.

I am sick in bed with a fever that makes my body feel heavier than a steel drum filled with boiling tar. I sense myself getting larger and larger and at the same time more liquid, like all the teas and syrups my mother pours into me. My father says that I am in fact becoming smaller, shrinking closer to my bones, and there is little that is liquid in me that the fever does not dry up.

"It is a sickness we brought home to her from someone else," my mother concludes while standing over me one day, her lips puckered, her mouth switching from side to side as it always did when she was in deep thought. "I suppose it might be the young girl we treated two weeks ago, you remember?"

My mother makes me a doll out of all my favorite things: strings of red satin ribbons sewn together into the skin, two pieces of corncob for the legs, a dried mango seed for the body frame, white chicken feathers for flesh, pieces of charcoal for the eyes, and cocoa brown embroidering thread for the hair.

There are times when I want to be a girl again, to touch this doll, because when I touch it, I feel nearer to my mother than when her flesh is stroking mine in the washbasin or in the stream, or even when she's reaching down to plop down a compress heavy with aloe on my forehead.

As I lie in bed with my doll and my fever, during the few moments when I'm alone, the doll rises on her corncob feet, yanks several strands of her thread hairs and uses them to jump rope. She sings my favorite rope jumping songs, plays with my osles, and says, "You will be well again, ma belle Amabelle. I know this to be true." Her voice is gentle, musical, but it echoes, like she's speaking from inside a very tall bottle. "I am sure you will live to be a hundred years old, having come so close to death while young."

While I am watching her play, I want to give the doll a name, but I don't remember names other than my own, and that one only because I've just heard her say it while addressing me.

When I am well, like the doll said I would be, I ask my mother, "What name should I give to this doll who walked about the room and played for me, and looked after me when I was sick?"

"There is no such thing and no such doll," my mother says. "The fever made you an imbecile."

12.

The sweet fleeting smell of lemongrass at dawn has always been my favorite scent. Standing at the top of the hill, I saw Luis in front of his house, using a flour-sack rag to wash Joel's blood off one of the two automobiles owned by Senor Pico, Packards they called them, the type of vehicle the Generalissimo himself loved to be driven in at that time.

I walked to the stream behind the neighboring sugar mill where the cane workers bathed at daybreak, before heading out to the fields. It was the first day of a new cane harvest. The stream was already crowded, overflowing with men and women, separated by a thin veil of trees.

Everyone was unusually quiet, even in their whisperings. Instead of the regular loud morning chatter, there was only the sound of hummingbirds chirping, the water gurgling, circling around all the bodies crammed into its path.

I waved to Mimi, Sebastien's younger sister. She slid her face in and out of the water, making bubbles with her mouth. Mimi had followed Sebastien to the valley when he'd moved here four years earlier. These days she worked as one of the maids of Dona Eva, the widowed mother of Doctor Javier and Beatriz.

"This afternoon Dona Eva is having a Mass and a sanco-cho for the anniversary of her birth," Mimi announced. My feet floated above the warm pebbles at the bottom of the stream. It was as if nothing else of much importance had taken place, and for want of other information she had announcements from her mistress' life to share. "The dona is fifty years old. Will your people be coming to her Mass?"

Mimi always called Senora Valencia and Senor Pico "moun ou yo," my people, as though they worked for me. While pedaling in the stream, she ceremoniously raised her arms above the surface of the water and picked a small leaf off my nose. On her right hand, she had a bracelet made of coffee beans, painted in yellow gold and threaded on a string, just like Sebastien's. It was something their mother had made them for safety and luck before they left her on the other side of the border after the hurricane had killed their father.

Thinking of the fiftieth anniversary of Dona Eva's birth being on the first day since Joel's death, and that perhaps I would never have a chance to utter a farewell to Joel's closed eyes, I murmured to Mimi, "Do you think you and I will live long enough to be as old as Dona Eva?"

"I don't want to live so long," she answered in her usual abrupt manner. "I'd rather die young like Joel did."

"Do you really want to end like that, in a ravine?" I whispered to her so the others would not hear.

"I'd rather have death surprise me," she said loudly. "I don't want to wait a long time for it to come find me."