Mimi was at least four years younger than me and, not counting this sudden death she was saying she wanted, had more time ahead of her than I did. There were women in the stream who were ancient enough to be our great-grandmothers. Four of them were nearby, helping a few of the orphaned girls to wash themselves. Among the oldest women, one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.

The oldest cane-cutting women were now too sick, too weak, or too crippled to either cook or clean in a big house, work the harvest in the cane fields, or return to their old homes in Haiti. So they started off every morning bathing in the stream, and then spent the rest of the day digging for wild roots or waiting on the kindness of their good neighbors.

Mimi's face grew sad and serious as she observed the other women, especially Felice, a young woman, the housemaid of Don Gilbert and Dona Sabine, a rich Haitian couple who lived among the valley's well-to-do families. Felice had a hairy beet-colored birthmark like a mustache over her lip. She was reasonably pretty, but the birthmark was all you saw when you looked at her face.

Felice had been Joel's woman for some time. Kongo, Joel's father, had disapproved of the whole affair because he knew firsthand some of Felice's family history. In a moment of desperate hunger during the first years of the Yanki occupation, Felice's grandfather had stolen an old hen from the yard of Kongo's mother in Haiti. He couldn't bear having his son take up with a woman whose family had a thief for an ancestor, Kongo had said. There was always a risk that this type of thing could run in the blood. He didn't want to take any chances with his only heir.

Now Kongo was bathing in the middle of the stream, scrubbing his body with a handful of wet parsley, while the sun climbed up in the sky above his silver-tipped hair.

We used pesi, perejil, parsley, the damp summer morningness of it, the mingled sprigs, bristly and coarse, gentle and docile all at once, tasteless and bitter when chewed, a sweetened wind inside the mouth, the leaves a different taste than the stalk, all this we savored for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides of old aches and griefs, to shed a passing year's dust as a new one dawned, to wash a new infant's hair for the first time and-along with boiled orange leaves-a corpse's remains one final time.

The other men stood apart, giving Kongo more space than usual. He moved slowly as he scrubbed his wide shoulders and contorted himself to allow the parsley to brush over the map of scars on his muscular back, all the while staring at the water's surface, as though he could see more than his reflection there.

Sebastien and his friend Yves were standing closest to Kongo, nudging away those who wanted to pay their respects.

"I keep asking myself what Kongo's done with Joel's corpse," Mimi muttered in my ear, leaning forward.

No one would dare dispute Kongo, no matter what he had done with his son's body. He was the most respected elder among us. We all trusted him.

Kongo dropped the used parsley in the stream and raised his machete from the water. Holding his work tool up to the sun, he stroked the edge of the blade as though it were made of flesh. Kongo was still an active worker. He had toiled side by side with his son for more than a dozen cane harvests. Before the full harvest, during the dead season, Kongo, Joel, Sebastien, and his friend Yves had cleared tobacco fields together; on Sundays they cut down trees to make charcoal to sell.

"If one of our men had killed Kongo's son, they'd expect to die," Mimi said. "But since it's one of them, there's nothing we can do. Poor Kongo, this must be killing him inside. I say, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

A few more people arrived. They shed their clothes and squeezed into the spaces left in the water. Void of ceremony, this was a silent farewell to Joel, a quiet wake at dawn.

"Your people killed Joel rushing home to their twin babies, didn't they?" Mimi asked. "I hear this is how it happened."

"Yes. That's how it was."

"Beatriz thinks she'll be the godmother of one of the twins."

"The senor and the senora will decide."

"What Beatriz wants, she is often given."

"Do you always call her Beatriz?" I asked.

"I don't have to christen her 'Senorita' in your presence, do I?"

I thought of Senora Valencia, whom I had known since she was eleven years old. I had called her Senorita as she grew from a child into a young woman. When she married the year before, I called her Senora. She on the other hand had always called me Amabelle.

"I don't call her 'Beatriz' in her presence," Mimi explained. "But what would be so terrible if we did say only their Christian names?"

"It would demonstrate a lack of respect," I said. "The way you'd never call one of these old women by their names. You call them 'Man' even though they're not your mother."

Mimi flinched and looked down at her coffee bean bracelet. She seemed pained for a moment as she glanced at the old women, perhaps searching for her mother's smile beneath their scowls.

"What does it matter if Beatriz and your lady become angry with us?" she said. "If they let us go, at least we'd have a few days of freedom before dying from hunger."

"There is your brother who counts on you," I said, wanting to halt this needless quarrel in light of the heavier pains in the air. "Even when he's buried in debt, he can always secure a meal from you."

"Or from you," she insisted.

"But you are his blood," I said. "With myself, if we quarrel, he won't eat from me."

"I thank you for reminding me why I'm so bound to the misery of that woman's house," she said. "When you and my brother set up house together, then perhaps I will be free."

Everyone watched Kongo as he emerged from the stream. He walked off, leaning on a broken broom handle that served him as a cane. Sebastien and his friend Yves, who had also been on the road when Joel was killed, followed behind Kongo, ready to catch him if the broom handle failed. Yves had a shaved head that shimmered as bright as Kongo's machete under the morning sun. He and Sebastien followed Kongo back to the compound.

"When will you and Sebastien start living in the same house together?" Mimi asked. "If my brother is too timid to ask, I can act as a go-between."

"Yesterday Juana called me a nonbehever because I don't normally pray to the saints," I said. "She asked me if I believed in anything, and all I could think to say was Sebastien."

"I'll have to tell Sebastien." Mimi splashed the water with her palms. The others turned to stare, cutting their eyes at her for seeming too joyful on such a day. She paddled the water with more force, making it rise up and shield her like a curtain of glass. She was like a naked statue in one of those fountains at the town square with water sprouting out of her navel and mouth.

"No sad faces," she said. "Joel's well enough where he is. He'd want us to be glad for him. We should give him a joyous wake to send his spirit on its way. He would want us to laugh and be grateful he's not here now."

Felice walked out of the stream and went to dress in the bushes. Mimi was one of the last people still left in the water.

"Mimi's only a child," I said, following Felice. "She didn't know what she was saying."

"This must be what it means to get old," Felice said, in her usual urgent voice, which sometimes blurred the words when she was speaking. She covered the hairy birthmark with her hands as she chose her words and forced them out. "I could hate no one when I was young. Now I can and I do."

Dropping her head onto my shoulder, she pressed her forearms into my ribs as she leaned against me. Her body felt heavy and limp; I was afraid she was going to faint and fall right there at my feet.

"Courage, dear one," I said, trying to hold her up.

"He was too young," she said, "and Kongo will not even let the others act in response to this."

"What can be done?"

"An eye for an eye, as Mimi says."

"No eye for no eye," I said. "We cannot start a war here."

"It would not be a war," she said, "only something to teach them that our lives are precious too."

"What will this do for Joel now?"

"Everything's lost to Joel," she said. "It's too late for him. But we should do something to keep them from taking others."

She pulled herself away from me, to stand on her own feet.

"We must leave it to Kongo," I said. "It is his son who died. He will know best what to do."

13.

Every night Sebastien talks in his sleep.

"Do you know what I would like to do?" he asks one night.

"Tell me what you would like to do." You feel masterful making a sleeping person respond while you, awake, question the person. In some ways it is a miracle, like being loved, or watching a parrot-such a small animal-repeat words that have just crossed human lips.

"I'd like to fly a kite," Sebastien answers in his sleep when I ask what he would like to do.

"What manner of kite?"

"A piece of clear paper over a bamboo spine, a girl's red satin ribbon for the tail."

"If I offer you my red satin ribbon?"

He turns over and buries his head in the pillow.

If I offer him my red satin ribbon?

No retort.

14.

Between the stream and Don Carlos' mill were the houses of those Sebastien called the non-vwayaje Haitians, the ones who were better off than the cane cutters but not as wealthy as Don Gilbert and Dona Sabine and their friends, the rich Haitians.

The stable non-vwayaje Haitians lived in houses made of wood or cement. They had colorful galleries, zinc roofs, spacious gardens, cactus fences with green vines crawling between the cactus stems. Their yards were full of fruit trees-mangos and avocados especially-for shade, nourishment, and decoration. They were people whose families had been in Alegria for generations: landowners, farmers, metalworkers, stonemasons, dressmakers, shoemakers, a married schoolteaching couple and one Haitian priest, Father Romain. Some of them had Dominican spouses. Many had been born in Alegria. We regarded them all as people who had their destinies in hand.

That morning I thought of Sebastien's decision to leave the cane fields after the harvest as I greeted those of them who were already outside, some sitting in cane back chairs while they had their morning meal of bread and coffee, corn mush, and mangu, others marching around their property like sentinels before rushing out to their day's work. I saw Unel, a dwarfish stonemason, and called out to him. He waved back with a wide toothy smile. Unel had once rebuilt the workers' latrines in Senora Valencia's yard along with a group of friends he called his brigade.

Parents were walking their children to the one-room school started by Father Romain and a Dominican priest, Father Vargas. The flat cinder-block building was already too crowded, and the parents who were taking their young ones there complained as they did every morning about the limitations on their children's education.

"I pushed my son out of my body here, in this country," one woman said in a mix of Alegrian Kreyol and Spanish, the tangled language of those who always stuttered as they spoke, caught as they were on the narrow ridge between two nearly native tongues. "My mother too pushed me out of her body here. Not me, not my son, not one of us has ever seen the other side of the border. Still they won't put our birth papers in our palms so my son can have knowledge placed into his head by a proper educator in a proper school."

"To them we are always foreigners, even if our granmemes' granmemes were born in this country," a man responded in Kreyol, which we most often spoke-instead of Spanish-among ourselves. "This makes it easier for them to push us out when they want to."

"You heard the rumors?" another woman asked, her perfect Kreyol embellished by elaborate gestures of her long fingers. "They say anyone not in one of those Yanki cane mills will be sent back to Haiti."

"How can the Yanki cane mills save anyone?" the Dominican-born woman with the Dominican-born son replied. "Me, I have no paper in my palms to say where I belong. My son, this one who was born here in this land, has no papers in his palms to say where he belongs. Those who work in the cane mills, the mill owners keep their papers, so they have this as a rope around their necks. Papers are everything. You have no papers in your hands, they do with you what they want."

I thought of my own situation. I had no papers to show that I belonged either here or in Haiti where I was born. The children who were being taken to school looked troubled as they glanced up at their parents' faces, which must have seemed-if I remembered the way a parent's face looked to a child-only a few inches away from the bright indigo sky. I found it sad to hear the non-vwayaje Haitians who appeared as settled in the area as the tamarind trees, the birds of paradise, and the sugarcane-it worried me that they too were unsure of their place in the valley.

After joining the group, the stonemason, Unel, began to talk about Joel.

"Did you hear that they attacked an innocent man with an automobile and threw his corpse into a ravine?" Unel asked.

This is not the way it was, I wanted to say. But who was I to defend Senor Pico?

Many of them had heard about Joel, but this was not anything new to them. They were always hearing about rifles being purposely or accidentally fired by angry field guards at braceros or about machetes being slung at cane workers' necks in a fight over pesos at the cane press. Things like this happened all the time to the cane workers; they were the most unprotected of our kind.

"First it is someone like Joel, and then it will be someone like us," Unel said, showing a braver sentiment than the others, "unless we gather together to protect ourselves."

Don Gilbert and Dona Sabine had erected a circular wall along the road enclosing them inside their expansive villa. As we moved towards their gate, I saw Felice standing on one of the raised verandahs between the two arched stone staircases at the front of Dona Sabine's house. Dona Sabine stood in front of her, gesturing in our direction.

The people ahead of me all spun around to look at Dona Sabine. Each adult in turn pointed at his or her chest, asking with hand signals whom she wanted. Dona Sabine kept pointing until Unel realized that she was calling to him.

Unel broke away from the group and moved towards the tall wrought-iron gate to Dona Sabine's house. Her ten Dominican guards stood in a crowd at the gate, ready to defend her in case Unel proved dangerous. She waved them off and motioned for Unel to follow her and Felice past the foliage in her garden, the flowering bushes lined up in cropped rows, like schoolboys' new haircuts.

Felice looked up and gave me a quick shy smile as I walked past the gate, then returned her gaze to the amber-tinted mosaic designs on the path as she walked at Dona Sabine's side.

Dona Sabine had once been a famous dancer who had traveled everywhere in the world. Her husband owned a rum enterprise, which had been in his family for five generations, first on Haitian soil and then on what became Dominican soil during the two governments' land exchanges some years before. Dona Sabine herself was a short woman, thinner than was perhaps beneficial to her health. From behind she looked more girlish than most girls, but each of her steps was like a long practiced dance. Now her elegant feet were engulfed in large cowhide slippers that probably belonged to her husband. Her hands were weighted down by a ring on every finger, except the thumbs. It was as though she were wearing all the jewels she owned, guarding them on her person rather than sheltering them in a cache.

Unel followed her and Felice up the covered passageway to the main house. She likely had some work for him to do. Dona Sabine's husband, Don Gilbert, was standing out in the sun in a beige nightshirt, shouting orders to a large group of people who were scattered about the garden. When he looked up to see Unel, his wife blew him a silent kiss, which he returned with a wave of his hand.

In spite of their smiles and kisses, there was a feeling of distress about the place; it was as though another Yanki invasion was coming. I had never seen so many people working for Don Gilbert and Dona Sabine: clusters of anxious faces peering out from everywhere in the garden, people who looked tired and ill, some with bandages on their shoulders and pieces of clothing acting as slings to hold up their arms.

On the way back to Senora Valencia's house, I stopped at the parish school to visit with Father Romain. Father Romain was younger than most of the priests I had seen. He was dressed in his cassock, running through the yard with a large ring-shaped kite giving his pupils a lesson on the principles of light and colors, terrain and landscape, earth and sky, and the precise direction of the wind at the exact place in which they were standing.

"It is Amabelle," he said, handing the kite to one of the older boys to fly, "she who is from the same village of the world as me, Cap Haitien, the city of Henry Ps great citadel."

Father Romain always made much of our being from the same place, just as Sebastien did. Most people here did. It was a way of being joined to your old life through the presence of another person. At times you could sit for a whole evening with such individuals, just listening to their existence unfold, from the house where they were born to the hill where they wanted to be buried. It was their way of returning home, with you as a witness or as someone to bring them back to the present, either with a yawn, a plea to be excused, or the skillful intrusion of your own tale. This was how people left imprints of themselves in each other's memory so that if you left first and went back to the common village, you could carry, if not a letter, a piece of treasured clothing, some message to their loved ones that their place was still among the living.

Priests were not excluded from this, and Father Romain, though he was devoted to his students, missed his younger sister and his other relations on the other side of the border. In his sermons to the Haitian congregants of the valley he often reminded everyone of common ties: language, foods, history, carnival, songs, tales, and prayers. His creed was one of memory, how remembering-though sometimes painful-can make you strong.

The children crowded around him, yanking at his fingers, begging him to continue with the kite-flying class. He calmed them by taking turns touching each of their heads. When he had tapped all the children, he reached over and stroked my hand, and removing his instructor's spectacles to look straight into my eyes, he told me, "I am needed, Amabelle."

"Certainly I see that, Father," I said.

"I have already told this to Kongo," he said. "Please tell Sebastien for me, too. I am sad for Joel's death. These things happen too often. People die unfairly, innocently. His father will need kind words from all of us."

"Thank you, Father," I said, feeling that he had given me what I had come for, a fresh measure of hope.

"Thank you for your visit, Amabelle."

His students dragged him away, fighting for control of the kite string.

Walking up the hill to Senora Valencia's house, I saw Doctor Javier's sister, Beatriz. She was wearing an old green sundress and twirling a matching parasol above her head. The morning breeze went through her skirt, raising it above her knees, but she did not seem to notice.

Beatriz walked into the parlor where Papi was sitting near the radio, listening for word from Spain. He had his notebook on his lap, in which he scribbled a few words, looked up, then scribbled again, between loud fits of coughing.

Beatriz kissed Papi on the cheek, showing him a kindness she reserved only for old men who had no interest in marrying her. Papi kept his eyes on his notebook and continued to write. Beatriz picked a wicker sofa across from him and sat down. She swung her long braid from her back to her shoulder. The end of the braid landed on the closed parasol on her lap. "Papi, you haven't strolled past our house in some time." She played with the braid while talking.