Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

He was glad when he heard his aunt’s voice, calling his name. The crowd parted and she appeared, pudgy yet graceful in a drop-waist dress. Her face was round and full, her skin silken and very black, her few wrinkles, in his estimation, more like beauty marks than signs of old age. Two people were guiding her by the elbows. As they were leading her to him, she pulled herself away and raised her hands in front of her, searching for him in the breeze. He had almost forgotten that she was blind, had been since the day of the fire that had taken his parents’ lives.

The crowd moved back a few feet as he ran into her arms. She held him tightly, angling her head to kiss the side of his face.

“Dany, is it you?” She patted his back and shoulders to make sure.

“I brought him here for you,” the old man said.

“Old Zo, why is it that you’re always mixed up in everything?” she asked, joking.

“True to my name,” the old man replied, “I’m a bone that fits every stew.”

The crowd laughed.

“Let’s go in the house,” his aunt told him. “It’s hot out here.”

As they started for her front door, he took her hand and tried to guide her, but found himself an obstacle in her path and let go. Once they were inside, she felt her way to her cot and sat down on the edge.

“Sit with me, Da,” she said. “You have made your old aunt a young woman again.”

“How are you?” He sat down next to her. “Truly?”

“ Truly fine,” she said. “Did Popo tell you different?”

For years now, he’d been paying a boyhood friend in Port-au-Prince, Popo, to come and check on her once a month. He would send Popo money to buy her whatever she needed and Popo would in turn call him in New York to brief him on how she was doing.

“No,” he said. “Popo didn’t tell me anything.”

“Then why did you come?” she asked. “I’m not unhappy to see you, but you just dropped out of the sky. There must be a reason.” She felt for his face, found it, and kissed it for what seemed like the hundredth time. “Were you sent back?” she asked. “We have a few boys here in the village who have been sent back. Many don’t even speak Creole anymore. They come here because this is the only place they have any family. There’s one boy not far from here. I’ll take you to visit him. You can speak to him, one American to another.”

“You still go on your visits?” he asked.

“When they came to fetch me, I was with a girl in labor,” she said.

“Still midwifing?”

“Helping the midwife,” she replied. “You know I know every corner of these mountains. If a new tree grows, I learn where it is. Same with children. A baby’s still born the same way it was when I had sight.”

“I meant to come sooner,” he said, watching her join and separate her fingers like tree branches brushing against each other. Both her hands had been burned during the fire that had followed the explosion at his parents’ house, but over the years the burn marks had smoothed into her skin and were now barely visible.

“I knew that once the time was right you’d come back,” she said. “But why didn’t you send word that you were on your way?”

“You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t just drop out of the sky. I came because I want to tell you something.”

“What is it, Da?” she asked, weaving and unweaving her fingers. “Are you finally getting married?”

“No,” he said. “That’s not it. I found him. I found him in New York, the man who killed Papa and Manman and took your sight.”

Why the old man chose that exact moment to come through the door he would never know. Perhaps it was chance, serendipity, or maybe simply because the old man was a nosy pain in the ass. But just then Old Zo came in, pushing the mortar-and-pestle girl ahead of him. She was carrying a covered plate of food.

“We brought you something to refresh you,” he told Dany.

His aunt seemed neither distressed nor irritated by the interruption. She could have sent Old Zo and the girl away, but she didn’t. Instead she told them to put their offering on an old table in the corner. The girl quietly put the plate down and backed out of the room, avoiding Dany’s eyes.

“I hope you’re both hungry,” the old man said, not moving from his spot. “Everyone is going to bring you something.”

Clusters of food-bearing people streamed in and out of the house all afternoon. He and his aunt would sample each plate, then share the rest with the next visitor until everyone in the valley had tasted at least one of their neighbors’ dishes.

By the time all the visitors had left and he and his aunt were alone together, it was dark and his aunt showed no interest in hearing what he had to say. Instead she offered him her cot, but he talked her into letting him have the sisal mat she’d spread out on the floor for herself.

She fell asleep much more quickly than he did. Mid-dream, she laughed, paid compliments, made promises, or gave warnings. “Listen, don’t go too far. Come back soon. What a strong baby! I’ll make you a dress. I’ll make you coffee.” Then she sat up in her cot to scold herself, “Estina, you are waking the boy,” before drifting once again into the images in her head.

In the dark, listening to his aunt conduct entire conversations in her sleep, he realized that aside from blood, she and he shared nocturnal habits. They were both palannits, night talkers, people who wet their beds, not with urine but with words. He too spoke his dreams aloud in the night, to the point of sometimes jolting himself awake with the sound of his own voice. Usually he could remember only the very last words he spoke, but remained with a lingering sensation that he had been talking, laughing, and at times crying all night long.

His aunt was already awake by the time he got up the next morning. With help from Old Zo’s daughter, who seemed to have been rented out to his aunt for the duration of his visit, she had already set up breakfast on the small table brought out to the front gallery from inside the house. His aunt seemed restless, almost anxious, as if she’d been waiting for him to rise for hours.

“Go wash yourself, Da,” she said, handing him a towel. “I’ll be waiting for you here.”

Low shrubs covered in dew brushed against his ankles as he made his way down a trail toward the stream at the bottom of the fall. The water was freezing cold when he slipped in, but he welcomed the sensation of having almost every muscle in his body contract, as if to salute the dawn.

Had his father ever bathed in this stream? Had his parents soaked here together, in this same spot, when they’d come to stay with his aunt? He had so little information and so few memories to draw on that every once in a while he would substitute moments from his own life in trying to re-create theirs. But lately what was taking up the most space in his mind was not the way his parents had lived but the way they had died.

A group of women were coming down the path toward the river with calabashes and plastic jugs balancing on top of their heads. They would bathe, then fill their containers further up, closer to the fall. He remembered spending hours as a boy watching the women bathe topless, their breasts flapping against their chests as they soaped and scrubbed themselves with mint and parsley sprigs, as if to eradicate every speck of night dust from their skin.

When he got back to his aunt’s house, he had a visitor, a short, muscular boy with a restrained smile and an overly firm handshake. The boy’s brawny arms were covered with tattoos from his elbows down to his wrists, his skin a canvas of Chinese characters, plus kings and queens from a card deck. One-Eyed Jack, Hector, Lancelot, Judith, Rachel, Argine, and Palas, they were all there in miniature, carved into his nut-brown skin in navy blue and red ink.