Senora Valencia's face became as pale as a bleached moon after her husband left her and went to bury their son's clothes. After much cajoling from Juana, she left her daughter in her cradle where she was sleeping and slipped into the bed where both her children had been conceived and born. Juana sat on the edge of this bed, stroking the senora's hands to soothe her to sleep. I stood near the patio doors and watched through a tiny opening in the louvers as Senor Pico dug a hole under the flame tree to bury Rafi's layette.

Doctor Javier held the kerosene lamp while the senor shoveled up another pile of dirt and threw it over his shoulders. A flow of muddy perspiration rolled from Senor Pico's forehead down to his chest. Some of the area boys gathered around to watch and offer help, thinking perhaps there might be a vigil, if not an all-night wake. Senor Pico declined their offer. He wanted to carry out the task himself, not allowing even Luis to dig, as would have been expected. He stopped to take a breath, then, glancing up at the stars, which seemed to be blinking and falling a lot more frequently that night, he removed his shirt and undershirt, and laid them on one of the lowest branches of the flame tree before proceeding with the digging.

"I would like to go to my son's burial," the senora told Juana.

"Do not concern yourself with this now," Juana said. "Put your mind on the girl child. The other one is already lost."

"Juana, please talk to me of Mami," Senora Valencia said.

Juana looked around the room, at the old Spanish clock that no longer chimed the hour but still showed the time correctly after so many years. She stared at the armoire with the orchids and the hummingbirds carved on the front, at the crucifix hung above the bed to protect the house from evil.

"There is too much to tell," Juana said, stroking the senora's hair.

"Tell me," the senora pleaded.

"She was so shy when she became a wife, your mami. She was almost frightened of your father, who was some years older. But this changed very quickly after she became friends with the other young wives like Dona Eva and Dona Sabine. And of course when you were born, your mother and father were completely happy. Your father was so very unhappy when your mother died. It had been a joyful time with the hope of a new brother for you, but your mother's labor was difficult. It was a breech birth and both your mami and the child lost their strength."

"More of Mami," she said. "Tell me more."

"Your mami was kind," Juana continued. "She was always patient with me, with Luis too. She treated us not like servants but the same way she did her friends. She was a good-hearted lady, your mami, and she cherished you very much."

Outside, the evening breeze blew out the kerosene lamp held by Doctor Javier. Luis cupped his hand around a long wooden match and lit the lamp again.

Senor Pico dropped Rafi's layette in the hole, a bedsheet and three frocks, each of which I had sewn and which young Rafi had worn only once.

"I have had dreams of what my son's face would look like," Senora Valencia said, "first at one, then at five, then at ten, fifteen, and twenty years old."

"I always had similar thoughts about you, Senora," Juana said. "I am so pleased to have seen you at all those ages."

"I feel sometimes," said Senora Valencia, "that I will never be a whole woman, for the absence of Mami's face."

Senora Valencia was asleep by the time her husband came into the room. I did not want to leave that night, but I knew that Sebastien would not come to visit me if the dead child was in the house. I had to go to him. Besides, Juana had chosen to spend the night at the foot of the four-poster canopy bed, to keep company with Rafi.

Luis walked back to his and Juana's house alone, though on this night more than any other he seemed to want his woman to himself. Papi remained in the parlor near the radio, listening for news of the war in Spain. Another Spanish city had fallen while young Rafi's coffin was being made.

I walked out into the night, past the ravine into which Joel had been thrown. Lemongrass and bamboo shoots lined the road. A breeze raced down the incline, the rustle growing louder as the grass blades bent towards the gorge at the bottom of the ravine.

In Don Carlos' compound, children roamed, circling a wooden food stand run by a Dominican woman named Mercedes and her two sons: Reinaldo and Pedro. Mercedes was said to be a distant relative of Don Carlos, a peasant woman with city ways.

A group of cane cutters stood in front of Mercedes' stand, buying liquor and joking with her and her sons. The older son, Reinaldo, worked as a guard in the cane fields during the day while his brother Pedro operated the cane press inside. Mercedes-and consequently Don Carlos, at least by rumor-had some relations from the interior campos who lived in the compound and worked as cutters in the fields, but Mercedes never openly claimed these people. "They are peasants who fell blind into this life of the cane," she said to anyone who asked. "They have no reason to live like pigs. This is their country."

The compound children hopped around Mercedes' stand near the chatting men who shoved them away from adult conversations with slaps on their bottoms and orders for them to go find their mothers, whether they had mothers or not. The children then ran off to play, dashing back and forth behind the flowered curtains that served as doors for some of the rooms. Women were cooking on blackened boulders and sticks behind the cabins, pouring cups of water over naked infants to wash them before the evening meal. They were singing work songs, but their voices were so tired, I could hardly make out the words or the melody. Some men were dozing off in their doorways. They startled themselves awake when anyone walked by. I squeezed myself between two young lovers seeking a comfortable dark corner, their usual sapodilla tree taken over by a small group of men arguing over a domino game. The game was stopped now and again so a player could defend a bad choice or a loss. Sebastien's friend Yves, who was with Sebastien and Joel when Joel was killed, was one of the domino players. Yves shaved his head to keep cane ticks out of his scalp. His Adam's apple was as large as a real apple, his legs too short for his lanky body.

I motioned to a boy who was playing with pebbles on the ground at their feet. He was a beautiful child with a long manly face. He skipped from foot to foot, fidgeting while standing in front of me. I handed him the goat bones Luis had cut for me the night Senor Pico had come home. He smiled as he thanked me, pulled on the unraveling hem of his short pants, then ran off to show the other children his prize.

Felice was sitting on the doorstep in front of Kongo's room, her fingers trembling as she picked at the birthmark beneath her nostrils.

"Kongo here?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Why don't you go inside and sit with him?"

"He won't receive me," she said.

I peeked through the bit of palm frond that served as Kongo's door. The room was dim, except for an oil lamp at his feet. There were two old mats facing each other on the dirt floor and a pile of half gourds and earthen jars in the middle. Kongo sat on his own mat, squeezing a rare, precious, ball of flour dough in and out of the spaces between his fingers. He cursed the flour, murmuring that nothing ever took shape the way one wanted it to.

Felice motioned for me to go to Kongo. "I know he will receive you," she said.

"Old Kongo?" I called from the doorway. "It's Amabelle, come to see you."

Kongo moved aside the scrap of palm frond and let me in. I walked over to the mat where his son Joel had once slept. A pair of clean dark pants and a bright yellow shirt were laid out as though Joel had set them down to be grabbed in a hurry. I leaned towards the old man to better see his face.

"Too dark?" he asked.

"A little," I said.

"M'renmen darkness," he said. "In sugar land, a shack's for sleeping, not for living. Living is only work, the fields. Darkness means rest."

"Darkness is good," I said, simply to agree.

"Is she still there?" he asked of Felice. "I told her to leave, I did, but she won't go. She can't stay all night. I don't want her to stay."

Felice stirred and cleared her throat as though to remind Kongo that she was listening.

"You the woman who's with Sebastien?" he asked. "You Amabelle?"

"Yes."

"When he was killed, my son, Sebastien found the clothes you see next to you, to bury him in. Brought me a pile of wood, Sebastien did, to make a coffin for my son. Sebastien, he is like my own blood."

"Condolences," I said. "I am sad for the death of Joel."

He plopped the dough on the ground and pounded it with his knuckles.

"I was asked to make a request of you," I said. "Don Ignacio, the elder at the house where I am, would like to come see you."

He removed his hand from the dough and concentrated on digging the flour out from underneath his fingernails. Then he reached into his pocket for snuff and took a pinch.

"That is a strange request, Amabelle," he said. "What do they want with me, these people?"

"Don Ignacio wishes to talk to you of Joel's accident."

"I don't know if it was an accident, Amabelle. He was not one to die so easy, my son." He raised his face towards the ceiling to keep the snuff from sliding from his nose down to his chin. Outside Felice cleared her throat again, this time it sounded like she was crying.

"The elder, Papi, he would like to pay for Joel's funeral," I said.

"No funeral for Joel," he said. "I wanted to bury him in our own land where he was born, I did, but he was too heavy to carry so far. I buried him where he died in the ravine. I buried him in a field of lemongrass, my son." He lowered his head, letting the tobacco mix drop to his chest. "He was one of those children who grew like the weeds in the fields, my son. Didn't need nobody or nothing, but he did love his father. It wasn't ceremonious the way I buried him, I know. No clothes, no coffin, nothing between him and the dry ground. I wanted to give him back to the soil the way his mother passed him to me on the first day of his life."

I could hear the children outside drawing sticks to decide who should have the first turn at playing with the goat bones. I no longer heard Felice.

"Of all the things he's done, my son," Kongo was saying, "of all the ways I've seen him be, I'll never forget how he looked when he was born. So small he was, so bare, so innocent."

He picked up the dough again and crushed it between his fingers.

"You shouldn't spend too much time with this old man," he said. "I don't want to push you out, but kite'm. Go see Sebastien now."

"What word should I bring to Don Ignacio?" I asked.

"Tell him I am a man," he said. "He was a man, too, my son."

Sebastien was sitting in a corner in his room, rubbing an aloe poultice over some blisters along his calves.

"The body forgets how chancy a cane fire can be," he said, handing me the ointment.

Sebastien had a bunch of carbuncles over his hips and belly. As I rubbed the poultice on them, I didn't feel as though I was touching him. It was more like touching the haze of anger rising off his skin, the tears of sadness he would not cry, the move san, the bad blood Joel's death had stirred in him.

"There are new ticks in the fields with this harvest." He groaned while turning over for me to rub the ointment onto his back.

Papi's cedar planks were lined up against the back wall. The planks were glowing, even in the faint light. Papi's madder glaze had filled the grain in a way that made the surface sensitive both to the shadows and to the light. From the floor you could see the imperfections in the finish, the shading differences, places where the tint didn't match because Papi had waited too long before adding another coat, or where he had by chance brushed backwards, against the grain.

"Senor Pico's son died today," I said.

"This is what I heard," Sebastien said, his voice rising with a smile as though it were not a sad thing at all.

"You should not rejoice for something like this," I warned. "He was only a child."

"I am not rejoicing," he said. "And even if I was-"

"It would not be right," I said. "We would not have wanted them to rejoice when Joel died."

Silence was his most piercing weapon when he was angry. He said nothing for some time.

"Who are these people to you?" he asked, pushing at a few of the boils until the blood and pus bubbled to the surface. "Do you think they're your family?"

"The senora and her family are the closest to kin I have," I said.

"And me?" he asked.

"You too," I said, wanting to announce that he came first.

"We'll see," he said.

I thought of what Mimi had suggested in the stream the day after Joel had died. An eye for an eye, she had said. Did one only have to wish for it to make it true?

"What are you going to do with Papi's wood?" I asked.

"What am I going to do with what wood?" he asked.

"This wood," I said, pointing behind him. "The wood I gave you for Joel's coffin."

"Kongo didn't make use of it," he said. "Maybe I'll keep it for the next time somebody dies."

He sat up and leaned against the gray cement wall, looked at the doorway through the scarred fingers laced over his face. Yves yawned loudly from outside, waiting for the right moment to come in and bed down for the night.

Sebastien rose, put on his clothes, and walked me back out into the night. We said nothing to each other as we walked to Senora Valencia's house. On the way, we walked past the ravine where Joel had been buried. A fast breeze darted through the bamboo and lemongrass on either side of the road, blowing through them like a chorus of flutes and whistles.

Felice was ahead of us on the road, pacing back and forth over the steep edge of the ravine. Her posture as she tipped towards the gorge reminded me of myself standing at the river's brim the day my parents had drowned.

Sebastien and I accompanied Felice back to the gates of Dona Sabine's house. She went along with us, glad, I thought, to have been found.

The next morning, before dawn, while everyone was still asleep, Juana and I watched from the doorway of the old sewing room as Senor Pico padded his son's coffin with a pile of clean sheets from his wife's armoire and placed him in the casket. The senor was wearing his ceremonial khakis with his cap set in perfect alignment with his seashell-shaped ears. When he looked up, he seemed surprised to see Juana and me standing there.

"You have not slept at all, Senor," Juana reminded him.

"You should wake the senora now," he said.

Senora Valencia got up to drape a web of fragile lace over her son's colorfully painted coffin. Papi and one of the senora's maternal relations held the other end of the heirloom lace-bordered sheets, helping her to fold the cloth small enough to cover the casket without trailing onto the ground.

Senora Valencia bent down to kiss the coffin through the sunflower design of the lace and then walked back to her room. Her daughter was sleeping in her cradle. She picked her up and took her to her bed.

Senor Pico and Papi together carried the coffin away.

Once the casket was in the first automobile, Senor Pico came back to the bed where his wife sat with her daughter cradled against her chest. He removed his cap and placed it between his right armpit and elbow. Brushing his lips against his wife's forehead, he avoided his daughter's tiny hand, which she intuitively held out towards her father as if in recognition of his face or to ward off the stinging expression of disfavor growing more and more pronounced on it each time he laid eyes on her. Her gesture was like her own way of making amends for having lived in her brother's place, as if to say that she, too, wanted to be present for the burial and watch her brother's descent into the nothingness they had once shared as two.

"Don't be anxious, everything will go perfectly well," Senor Pico assured his wife as though he was discussing yet another military operation.

Senora Valencia watched her husband march out of the room. As his Packard pulled away, she covered her ears with both hands to protect herself from the noise. She then raised her daughter's face to her chin, closing her eyes to feel the child's breath against her cheek.

Once Juana took over the care of Rosalinda, Senora Valencia defied Juana's commands to lie in and rest and went out to sit on the rocker on the verandah outside her room. The sun had just risen over the valley, the dew still lingering in the curved petals of Papi's prettiest red lantern orchids. On the balcony, Senora Valencia made an altar for her son with two handfuls of white island carnations-which she chose and I fetched for her from her father's garden-and an unlit candle, which she had been saving to light in church, after a Mass.

We watched as Father Romain hurried past the house, as though on his way to administer last rites somewhere. Soon after him, my friends came drifting by on their way to the fields. Kongo led the group as usual, with Sebastien and Yves close behind.

Senora Valencia leaned forward on the balustrade as if to better see the orchids down below.

"Amabelle, you know some of the cane people?"

"Yes, Senora."

"Go and ask them-the ones who just walked by-to come and have un cafecito with us."

"All of them?"

"As many as will come."

I was breathless when I reached the almond tree road. A few ripe almonds had fallen off the branches. The seeds were cracked open, half buried in the soil. The broken fruits oozed a ruddy juice, which made it seem as though the ground was bleeding.