Edwidge Danticat - Krik? Krak!

"I see you," she saidin Creole. "How can that be nothing?"

"Peace, let her go," I said.

"You are a coward," she told him.

He lowered his head so he was staring directly into her eyes. He twisted her arm like a wet rag.

"Peace, have mercy on her," I said.

"Let her ask for herself," he said.

She stamped her feet on his boots. He let go of her hand and tapped his rifle on her shoulder. Emilie looked up at him, angry and stunned. He moved back, aiming his rifle at her head, squinting as though he was going to shoot.

"Peace!" I hollered.

My eyes fell on Raymond's as he walked out of the field. I mouthed the word, pleading for help. Peace. Peace. Peace.

"They'll go," Raymond said to Toto.

"Then go!" Toto shouted. "Let me watch you go."

"Let's go," I said to Emilie. "My grandmother will be mad at me if I get killed."

Raymond walked behind us as we went back to the road.

"The password has changed," he said. "Stop say-ing peace.'"

By the time I turned around to look at his face, he was already gone.

Emilie and I said nothing to each other on the way back. The sound of bullets continued to ring through the night.

"You never look them in the eye," I told her when we got to the yellow house doorstep.

"Is that how you do it?"

I helped her up the steps and into the house.

"I am going to sew these old pieces of cloth onto my mother's blanket tonight," she said.

She took a needle from my grandmother's bundle and began sewing. Her ringers moved quickly as she stitched the pieces together.

"I should go," I said, eyeing the money still on the table.

"Please, stay. I will pay you more if you stay with me until the morning."

"My grandmother will worry."

"What was your mother's name?" she asked.

"Marie Magdalene," I said.

"They should have given you that name instead of the one you got. Was your mother pretty?"

"I don't know. She never took portraits like the ones you have of yours."

"Did you know those men who were in the yard tonight?"

"Yes."

"I didn't fight them because I didn't want to make trouble for you later," she said. "We should write down their names. For posterity."

"We have already had posterity," I said.

"When?"

"We were babies and we grew old."

"You're still young," she said. "You're not old."

"My grandmother is old for me."

"If she is old for you, then doesn't it matter if you get old? You can't say that. You can't just say what she wants for you to say. I didn't get in a fight with them because I did not want them to hurt you," she said.

"I will stay with you," I said, "because I know you are afraid."

I curled my body on the floor next to her and went to sleep.

She had the patches sewn together on the purple blanket when I woke up that morning. On the floor, scattered around her, were the pictures of her mother.

"I became a woman last night," she said. "I lost my mother and all my other dreams."

Her voice was weighed down with pain and fatigue. She picked up the coins from the table, added a dollar from her purse, and pressed the money into my palm.

"Will you whisper their names in my ear?" she asked. "I will write them down."

"There is Toto," I said. "He is the one that hit you."

'And the one who followed us?"

"That is Raymond who loves leaves shaped like butterflies."

She jotted their names on the back of one of her mother's pictures and gave it to me.

"My mother's name was Isabelle," she said, "keep this for posterity."

Outside, the morning sun was coming out to meet the day. Emilie sat on the porch and watched me go to my grandmother's house. Loosely sewn, the pieces on the purple blanket around her shoulders were coming apart.

My grandmother was sitting in front of the house waiting for me. She did not move when she saw me. Nor did she make a sound.

"Today, I want you to call me by another name," I said.

"Haughty girls don't get far," she said, rising from the chair.

"I want you to call me by her name," I said.

She looked pained as she watched me moving closer to her.

"Marie Magdalene?"

"Yes, Marie Magdalene," I said. "I want you to call me Marie Magdalene." I liked the sound of that.

"Get it! Kill it!"

The cock fight had just begun. Princesse heard the shouting from the school yard as she came out of class. The rooster that crowed the loudest usually received the first blow. It was often the first to die.

The cheers burst into a roar. As Princesse crossed the dusty road, she could hear the men shouting. "Take its head off! Go for its throat!"

At night, closed ceremonies were held around the shady banyan tree that rose from the middle of an open hut. However, during the days the villagers held animal fights there, and sometimes even weddings and funerals. Outside the fight ring, a few women sold iced drinks and tickets to the Dominican lottery.

There was an old man in front of the yard smoking a badly carved wooden pipe.

"Let's go home," his wife was saying to him as she balanced a heavy basket on her head.

"Let me be or I'll make you hush," he shouted at her.

He dug his foot deep into the brown dusty grass to put a spell on her that would make her mute.

The wife threw her head back all the way, so far that you could have cut her throat and she wouldn't have felt it. She laughed like she was chortling at the clouds and walked away.

The man blew his pipe smoke in his wife's direction. He continued to push his foot deep into the grass, cursing his wife as she went on her way, the basket swaying from side to side on her head.

"What a pretty girl you are." The old man winked as Princesse approached him. The closer Princesse came, the more clearly she could see his face. He was a former schoolteacher from the capital who had moved to Ville Rose, as far as anyone could tell, to get drunk.

The old man was handsome in an odd kind of way, with a gray streak running through the middle of his hair. He sat outside of the cockfights every day, listening as though it were a kind of music, shooing away his wife with spells that never worked.

There was talk in the village that he was a very educated man, had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. The word was that such a man would only live with a woman who carried a basket on her head because he himself had taken a big fall in the world. He might be running from the law, or maybe a charm had been placed on him, which would explain why every ordinary hex he tried to put on his wife failed to work.

"How are you today?" he asked, reaching for the hem of Princesse's dress. Princesse was sixteen but because she was very short and thin could easily pass for twelve. "Do you want to place a wager on the roosters?" he asked her jokingly.

"No sir," she said as she continued on her way.

The old man took a gulp from a bottle filled with rum and leaves and limped towards the yard where the fight was taking place.

The roosters were whimpering. The battle was near its end. There was another loud burst of cheers, this one longer than the last. It was the sound of a cheerful death. One of the roosters had lost the fight.

Princesse was on her way to keep an appointment with Catherine, a painter from Guadeloupe. A row of houses in Ville Rose was occupied by a group of foreigners. Princesse had met a few of them through the teachers at her school. The students in her class were rewarded for good grades by being introduced to the French-speaking artists and writers who lived in the ginger-bread houses perched on the hills that overlooked Ville Rose's white sand beaches.