Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

“You’re deserving,” she said, using an old-fashioned way of acknowledging his gratitude.

She was no longer avoiding his eyes, as though his grief and stomach ailment and the fact that he’d asked her real name had rendered them equals.

He got up and walked outside, where many of his aunt’s neighbors were sleeping on mats on the porch. There was a full moon overhead and a calm in the air that he was not expecting. In the distance, he could hear the waterfall, a sound that, once you got used to it, you never paid much attention to. He walked over to the mausoleum, removed his shirt, and began to wipe it, starting at the base and working his way up toward the flat top surface and the cross. It was clean already. The men had done a good job removing the leaves, pebbles, and dust that had accumulated on it while they were opening his aunt’s slot, but he wanted to make sure it was spotless, that every piece of debris that had fallen on it since was gone.

“Need help?” Claude asked from a few feet away.

He’d been sitting on the porch with some of the men.

Dany threw his dusty shirt on the ground, climbed on top of the mausoleum, and sat down. His aunt’s body would be placed in one of the higher slots, one of two not yet taken.

“Excuse me,” Dany said, “for earlier.”

“I understand,” Claude said. “I’d be a real asshole if I got pissed off at you for anything you did or said to me at a time like this. You’re in pain, man. I get that.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it pain,” Dany said. “There’s no word yet for it. No one has thought of a word yet.”

“I know, man,” Claude said. “It’s a real bitch.”

In spite of his huge muscles and oversized tattoos, Claude seemed oddly defenseless, like a refugee lost at sea, or a child looking for his parents in a supermarket aisle. Or maybe that’s just how Dany wanted to see him, to make him seem more normal, less frightening.

“I hear you killed your father,” Dany said.

The words sounded less severe coming out of his mouth than they did rolling around in his head. Claude pushed both his hands into his pants pockets and looked off into the distance toward the banana groves.

“Can I sit?” he asked, turning his face back toward the mausoleum platform, where Dany was sitting.

“I didn’t mean to say it like that,” Dany said. “It’s not my business.”

“Yes, I killed my old man,” Claude said in the same abrupt tone that he used for everything else. “Everyone here knows that by now. I wish I could say it was an accident. I wish I could say he was a bastard who beat the crap out of me and forced me to defend myself. I wish I could tell you I hated him, never loved him, didn’t give a fuck about him at all. I was fourteen and strung out on shit. He came into my room and took the shit. It wasn’t just my shit. It was shit I was hustling for someone else. I was really fucked up and wanted the shit back. I had a gun I was using to protect myself out on the street. I threatened him with it. He wouldn’t give my shit back, so I shot him.”

There was even less sorrow in Claude’s voice than Dany had expected. Perhaps Claude too had never learned how to grieve or help others grieve. Maybe the death of a parent early in life, either by one’s own hand or by others, eliminated that instinct in a person.

“I’m sorry,” Dany said, feeling that someone should also think of a better word for their particular type of sorrow.

“Sorry?” Claude wiped a shadow of a tear from his face with a quick swipe of the back of his hand. “I’m the luckiest fucker alive. I’ve done something really bad that makes me want to live my life like a fucking angel now. If I hadn’t been a minor, I’d have been locked up for the rest of my life. They might have even given me the chair. And if the prisons in Port had had more room, or if the police down there were worth a damn, I’d be in a small cell with a thousand people right now, not sitting here talking to you.”

Claude threw his hands up in the air and, raising his voice, as if to call out to the stars slowly evaporating from the sky, shouted, “Even with everything I’ve done, with everything that’s happened to me, I’m the luckiest fucker on this goddamned planet. Someone somewhere must be looking out for my ass.”

It would be an hour or so now before Dany’s aunt’s burial at dawn. The moon was already fading, slipping away, on its way to someplace else. The only thing Dany could think to do for his aunt now was to keep Claude speaking, which wouldn’t be so hard, since Claude was already one of them, a member of their tribe. Claude was a palannit, a night talker, one of those who spoke their nightmares out loud to themselves. Except Claude was even luckier than he realized, for he was able to speak his nightmares to himself as well as to others, in the nighttime as well as in the hours past dawn, when the moon had completely vanished from the sky.

Beatrice Saint Fort was lying down for one of her midday siestas when a journalism intern arrived at her new house in Far Rockaway, Queens, to interview her for a short feature on her last day as a bridal seamstress. The intern, a striking Haitian American girl with waist-length, amber-hued dreadlocks and a gold loop in her right nostril, had to knock several times before Beatrice finally made it to the front door in a green flannel nightgown and matching rabbit-shaped slippers. Beatrice held the door half open, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, while barring the entrance with her wispy frame. A petite, wasp-waisted woman, Beatrice had shoulders that curved, and she bent forward as though she’d spent too much time searching for things on the ground.

“My name is Aline Cajuste,” the intern said. “I called yesterday and you told me to come at two?”

“Oh,” Beatrice said, running her long, veined fingers over the rainbow cap that covered her bullet-shaped head.

“May I come in?” Aline asked.

“Sure,” Beatrice said. In spite of her size she had a loud, commanding voice, like someone who was accustomed to giving orders. “Have a seat while I get myself ready.”

A half hour later, a more youthful-looking and made-up Beatrice emerged, wearing a purple tunic dress and a curly bronze wig pinned to her scalp. Putting aside a profile of the actress Gabrielle Fonteneau that she was reading from her own newspaper (“A model of the kind of uplifting articles you should attempt,” her editor in chief, Marjorie Voltaire, had said), Aline looked up from the plastic-covered couch near the window where she’d sat since Beatrice had disappeared and politely asked, “May we begin?”

“Sure,” Beatrice said, “but first let me make you some coffee.”

Before Aline could refuse the coffee, Beatrice vanished behind the louvered door separating the living room from the rest of the house, giving Aline another chance to look around and jot down a few notes.

The living room was bare enough to make setting up the piece an easy task. Aside from some taped boxes piled in a corner, there were only the couch and a glass coffee table. On the wall was a picture of Jesus, neither white nor black, but somewhere in between, and beneath it a headless dressmaker’s model covered with a beaded lace gown.

“Can I help?” Aline called from the living room.

“Don’t move,” Beatrice called back. “I won’t be long!”

By Aline’s watch, it took Beatrice another twenty minutes to make the coffee. When Beatrice finally resurfaced, Aline promised herself she wouldn’t let the woman out of her sight again until they’d completed the interview.

“Okay.” Beatrice sat down on the couch, watching Aline. “Tell me, is this the best coffee you’ve ever had?”