Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

“I sent for Claude,” his aunt announced. “He’s the one I was telling you about, one of the boys who was sent back.”

Claude was sitting next to his aunt, on the top step in front of the house, dipping his bread in the coffee Old Zo’s daughter had just made.

“Claude understands Creole and is learning to speak bit by bit,” his aunt said, “but he has no one to speak English to. I would like you to talk with him.”

Claude was probably in his late teens, too young, it seemed, to have been expatriated twice, from both his native country and his adopted land. Dany sat down on the step next to Claude, and Old Zo’s daughter handed him a cup of coffee and a piece of bread.

“How long have you been here?” he asked Claude.

“Too long, man,” Claude replied, “but I guess it could be worse. I could be down in the city, in Port, eating crap and sleeping on the street. Everyone here’s been really cool to me, especially your aunt. She’s really taken me under her wing.”

Claude flapped his heavily tattooed arms, as if to illustrate the word “wing.”

“When I first got here,” he continued, “I thought I’d get stoned. I mean, I thought people would throw rocks at me, man. Not the other kind of stoned. I mean, coming out of New York, then being in prison in Port for three months because I had no place to go, then finally my moms, who didn’t speak to me for the whole time I was locked up, came to Port and hooked me up with some family up here.”

His aunt was leaning forward with both hands holding up her face, her white hair braided like a crown of gardenias around her head. She was listening to them speak, like someone trying to capture the indefinable essence of a great piece of music. Watching her face, the pleasure she was taking in the unfamiliar words made him want to talk even more, find something drawn-out to say, tell a story of some kind, even recite some poetry, if only he knew any.

“So you’re getting by all right?” he asked Claude.

“It took a lot of getting used to, but I’m settling in,” Claude replied. “I got a roof over my head and it’s quiet as hell here. No trouble worth a damn to get into. It’s cool that you’ve come back to see your aunt, man. Some of the folks around here told me she had someone back in New York. I had a feeling when she’d ask me to speak English for her.”

Claude reached down and picked up a couple of pebbles from the ground. It seemed to Dany that he could easily crush them if he wanted to, pulverize them with his fingertips. But instead he took turns throwing them up in the air and catching them, like a one-handed juggler. “It’s real big that you didn’t forget her, that you didn’t forget your folks,” he went on. “I wish I’d stayed in touch more with my people, you know; then it wouldn’t be so weird showing up here like I did. These people don’t even know me, man. They’ve never seen my face before, not even in pictures. They still took me in, after everything I did, because my moms told them I was their blood. I look at them and I see nothing of me, man, blank, nada, but they look at me and they say he has so-and-so’s nose and his grandmother’s forehead, or some shit like that.” One of Claude’s pebbles fell on the ground, missing his hand. He did not bend down to pick it up, but threw the others after it. “It’s like a puzzle, a weird-ass kind of puzzle, man,” he said. “I’m the puzzle and these people are putting me back together, telling me things about myself and my family that I never knew or gave a fuck about. Man, if I’d run into these people back in Brooklyn, I’d have laughed my ass off at them. I would’ve called them backward-ass peasants. But here I am.”

His aunt was engrossed, enthralled by Claude’s speech, smiling at times while the morning rays danced across her eyes, never penetrating her pupils. He was starting to think of his aunt’s eyes as a strange kind of prism, one that consumed light rather than reflected it.

“I can’t honestly say I love it here,” Claude seemed to be wrapping up, “but it’s worked out good for me. It saved my life. I’m at peace here, and my family seems to have made peace with me. I came around; I can honestly say I was reformed in prison. I would’ve been a better citizen than most if they hadn’t deported me.”

“You still have a chance,” Dany said, not believing it himself. “You can do something with your life. Maybe you’re back here for a reason, to make things better.”

He was growing tired of Claude, tired of what he considered his lame excuses and an apparent lack of remorse for whatever it was he’d done.

“How long will you be staying?” Claude asked.

“A while,” Dany said.

“Is there anything you want to do?” Claude asked. “I know the area pretty well now. I take lots of walks to clear my head. I could show you around.”

“I know where things are,” Dany said. “And if I don’t remember, my aunt can-”

“It’s just with her not being able to see-”

“She can see, in her own way.”

“Cool, man. I was just trying to be helpful.”

Even with the brusque way their conversation ended, Claude seemed happy as he left. He had gotten his chance to speak English and tell his entire life story in the process.

After Claude’s departure, Old Zo’s daughter came up and took the empty coffee cup from Dany’s hand. She lingered in front of him for a minute, her palm accidentally brushing against his fingertips. At times, she seemed older than she looked. Maybe she was twenty, twenty-five, but she looked twelve. He wondered what her story was. Were those children he had seen in Old Zo’s yard hers? Did she have a husband? Was he in the city? Dead?

She hesitated before stepping away, as though she gave too much thought to every move she made. When she finally walked away, Dany’s aunt asked him, “Do you know why Claude was in prison?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Do you know what his people say?”

“What do his people say?”

“They say he killed his father.”

That night, Dany dreamed that he was having the conversation he’d come to have with his aunt. They were sitting on the step where he and Claude had spoken. He began the conversation by recalling with his aunt the day his parents died.

He was six years old and his father was working as a gardener in Port-au-Prince. The night of the explosion, he had been at home with his parents and his aunt, who was visiting from Beau Jour, when they heard a loud crash outside. His father went out first, followed by his mother. Dany was about to go after them when he heard the shots. His aunt grabbed him and pinned him to the ground, but somehow he managed to wiggle out of her grasp.

Outside, most of the wooden porch was already on fire. The smoke was so dense he could barely see his parents, his mother slumped over his father on the ground.

Behind him the front door was covered in flames. He ran out to the yard and called out for his aunt at the top of his lungs.

“Shut up now or I’ll shoot you too!” someone was shouting from the street.

It was a large man with a face like a soccer ball and a widow’s peak dipping into the middle of his forehead. The man was waving a gun at him as he opened his car door, and he only lowered the gun to drive away. His aunt then crawled out of the house and away from the porch, coughing the smoke out of her lungs. She was unable to see.

He dreamed his aunt saying, “Yes, this is how it happened, Da,” then urging him to elaborate on what he’d begun to tell her before Old Zo and his daughter had walked into her house. “You said you saw that same man in New York, Da? Are you sure it was him?”

The man who had killed his parents was now a barber in New York. He had a wife and a grown daughter, who visited often. Some guys from work had told him that a barber was renting a room in the basement of his house. When he went to the barbershop to ask about the room, he recognized the barber as the man who had waved the gun at him outside his parents’ house.