Russell Banks - Continental Drift

And here is where we made our mistake, for we woke the children and immediately set to cutting off chunks of the ham, adults and small children alike, devouring it like starved animals. We laughed and grabbed and stuffed the salty meat into our mouths with our hands. Then, as our hunger lost its rage, we slowed and found ourselves nibbling and picking at the pink, grainy ham, now and then drinking water from the gourd, and we began to ask the boy where he had found the ham, who had given it to him?

He showed us a face that knows a secret, and for a while, despite our jokes and coaxing, would not tell us, for he was proud that he had brought this food home and wanted to enjoy our gratitude as long as he could. Finally, when we commanded him to tell us where he got the ham, he told us that he had taken it from a truck turned over in a mud slide on the road to Port-de-Paix, and then, as he expected, we were not as happy with the gift as before.

What truck was this?

A truck. Just a van. A van upside down in the mud, with the doors wide open and the rain coming in.

And where was the driver?

Gone, Maman .

Gone? He left his van and this American ham behind?

There were many hams, he said. Other kinds of meat, too. All wrapped in paper and scattered all over the place, inside the van and falling out into the mud and rain.

Where did the driver go? Did you see him?

We saw him…. He was dead. He was inside the van on the floor in front, and his head was all bloody from where he’d hit the windshield when the van turned over from the mud. It must have been hit by the mud when the side of the hill above the road loosened and came rushing onto the road.

Are you sure he was dead?

Yes, the boy said quietly.

Where is the rest of the meat, all the other hams and packages? And who owns them?

Some are still there. We only took what we could carry. There’s nothing wrong. The driver was a stranger, he’s dead.

But who owns this meat? we asked the boy, who was now afraid that we were angry with him. Whose van is it? What did it say on the sides? Whose sign is on it?

The boy did not know whose van it was, and even if there had been a sign on it, he could not have read it anyhow. He just looked up at us, wide-eyed, and shrugged and said, It’s all right. It’s all right, Maman .

But it was not all right. The ham belonged either to a rich man or to someone in the government or possibly to a hotel or restaurant in Port-de-Paix or Cap Haitien, and now we had eaten fully half of it.

The white circle of bone that ran through the center of the meat stared from its pink nest like an accusing eye.

Vanise said in a low voice, Aubin will find out. He’ll find out, and he’ll come here and take away your son to punish him and you. And he’ll take away my baby to punish me. She began to tremble and then to weep.

The boy said, No, it’s all right. It’s all right! he insisted, but his eyes were wet with fear now, for he, like all of us, knew that such things happen easily. There was his friend, Georges Le Rouge, who had asked the American family he worked for one winter to intercede with the police so he could take his driver’s test for a chauffeur’s license without paying the bribe, and Georges had disappeared the week after the Americans left. Aubin said they had taken him to America with them, but we all knew the truth. And there was the sad affair of the family of Victor Bonneau, whose eldest son went to Port-au-Prince and got mixed up with the people who ran the newspaper that people were not supposed to read. And we all knew Adrienne Merant before her brothers ran off to Santo Domingo, knew her when she was pretty, and knew her afterwards, when the soldiers brought her back to Allanche from Port-au-Prince. People disappeared, or people were changed, and though sometimes it was clear that there were good reasons, it was also clear that sometimes it was only because they had made a mistake no greater than ours. And sometimes it was only because they happened to know or be related to someone who had made a mistake no greater than ours. The boy was wrong to insist that we had done nothing wrong, and he was right to be afraid, and Vanise was no doubt right to weep, and we, we were right to do what we did then.

We had not noticed it, but the storm had gone silent. The wind and rain had stopped, and the only sound was the drip of the water off the roof and the gurgle of the candle in the dish. It would come again, we knew. The hurricane always stops midway like this, as if to catch its breath, and then the wind turns and continues for another few hours, until, exhausted from having beaten the earth so long, it moves reluctantly away.

Our voices and the sounds of our movements suddenly sounded loud and harsh. The smaller children and Vanise’s infant slept in a heap on the bed, while we sat around the small table next to the shuttered window, with the candle and the half-eaten ham and the gourd between us, and whispered, trying not to offend our ears with the crackling sounds of our own voices, lips and teeth.

Vanise, though seated at the table, was a bundle of short movements, her bony chest with its oversized, new mother’s breasts heaving, her fingers tying and untying themselves rapidly as if she were at once knitting and tearing apart a baby’s cap. Aubin will come tomorrow and take us away, she said in a thin voice. Or the police in Cap Haitien will make him do it, or the soldiers. They will find the van, and they’ll know. As soon as Aubin remembers that the boy and his friends were on the road during the storm, he’ll know they took the meat from the van. They’ll all know, and then he’ll come here, and no matter what we tell him, he’ll know the truth.

She was right. When you deal with people like Aubin, people who have power over you, it’s not enough to lie. You also have to be believed. We could bury the ham deep in the earth way back in the bush, and Aubin would still know that our son had come home in the hurricane with stolen meat and we had eaten it. The only way we could both lie and be believed was if the son was not at home, if, when Aubin arrived, the boy was gone, never to appear at home again. Then, though Aubin would be angry at the boy, he might leave Vanise and her infant and the rest of us here to ourselves. Of course, if he ever found the boy afterwards, if he saw him accidentally in Port-de-Paix some night or caught him walking along the road to Cap Haitien early one morning, he would arrest him, because the boy’s not having come home immediately after the hurricane would mean that any lie he later told concerning the meat would not be believed.

There was nothing else to do, it seemed. The money was pressed between the two layers of floorboards under the bed, as thin as a newspaper between two short boards that came up easily, though they had not been lifted in over a year, not even to count. We used to count the money often, once a month, even. We would go over the stacks of green paper, ones, fives, tens and twenties, hungrily in late night candlelight with the door tied shut and the window covered, counting it and adding it up and dreaming over it, while we waited for the distant moment when we could go down to the fishing villages west of Port-de-Paix and make our arrangement with the men who own the boats and carry people over to the Bahamas and then to America and be there with our husband.

The candle fluttered, and we noticed that the wind and rain had resumed and were building to a roar again. The boy sat limply on a stool by the wall, his chest collapsed and his hands resting heavily on his knees. His face was blank, dark and withdrawn to a secret place of shame way inside him.

Lift the boards under the bed, we instructed him, and bring the money. Quickly.