Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

“I went to school with his brother,” she says. “His father and mine were friends.”

We fail our practice tests, except Rézia, who gets seventy percent, enough to pass.

“It’s not normal,” I complain. “We studied as much as you.”

“Listen to the baby funeral singer,” Mariselle says, wrapping her manicured hands around the neck of her dark green wine bottle. “You have so much time ahead to redo these things, retake these tests, reshape your whole life.”

We drink too much and stay too long at the restaurant. Mariselle and I have grown used to the idea that we may never get diplomas out of the class.

Mariselle uncorks her second Pinot Noir of the evening. Rézia and I stick to the rum. We like the fiery, bitter taste and the way it makes us foggy right away. I know I’m ruining my voice, but who cares?

The people inside the little paintings are beginning to sway back and forth for the first time. Or is it my head that’s dancing? They walk past the borders and merge with our shadows on the wall.

“Let’s talk about something cheerful,” Rézia says. Her voice is slurred and she sounds sleepy. She’s the most drunk of the three of us, consuming more spirits in celebration for passing yet another practice test that Mariselle and I have failed.

“How does a person become a funeral singer, anyway?” Mariselle asks. She throws her hands across my shoulders. Cigarette ashes rain on my orange Salvation Army dress.

The first time I ever sang in public was at my father’s memorial Mass. I sang “Brother Timonie,” a song whose cadence rises and falls, like the waves of the ocean. I sang it through my tears, and later people would tell me that my sobs reminded them of the incoming tide. From that moment on I became a funeral singer.

Every time there was a funeral in Léogâne, I was asked to sing. I would sing my father’s fishing songs and sometimes improvise my own, right there, next to the coffin, in front of the family, at the funeral home or at the church. At other times, I would sing “Ave Maria” or “Amazing Grace,” if the family requested them. But I was always appreciated and well compensated.

“Tell me something cheerful,” Rézia objects with a mouth full of rice. “Enough about funerals. Enough!”

“Jackie Kennedy came to Haiti last year.” Mariselle perks up. She drops her empty glass on the table, breaking off a chunk at the bottom.

“Who’s she?” Rézia picks up the piece of glass and tosses it behind her.

“The wife of President Kennedy,” Mariselle explains. “The President Kennedy that all the used clothes in Port-au-Prince are named after.”

“Oh,” Rézia says, now taking swigs directly from the rum bottle. “He was so handsome.”

“She’s pretty too,” Mariselle says. “She spoke French. She lost her husband and two babies, yet she remained so beautiful. She made sadness beautiful.”

Pushing the damaged glass aside, Mariselle describes her encounter with Jackie Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy’s first husband, the president whom all the used clothes in Port-au-Prince are named after, had been dead for more than a decade when she came to Haiti. Her new husband was a Greek billionaire who’d had some business with our president. Mariselle’s first sighting of Jackie Kennedy was on the pier at the Port-au-Prince harbor when Jackie Kennedy walked off an enormous yacht, wearing pink Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt, a massive straw hat, and wide-rimmed sunglasses to guard her well-chiseled face. The wind almost blew her hat away. Almost blew her tiny body away, Mariselle recalled, but she held herself up and disembarked.

“My husband went to the pier to paint her portrait,” Mariselle says, wiping the wet glass and bottle rings off the table with her palms. “He asked her what she wanted in her painting. She said in that whispery baby voice that she wanted the harbor behind her, the cargo ships and fishing boats and a few Haitian faces on the pier. So my husband painted her on the pier and put me in the background. If you ever come across that painting, somewhere between the Port-au-Prince harbor and Jackie Kennedy, you will see me.”

My mother used to say that we’ll all have three deaths: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are put back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all. I sometimes hear a dog bark and I’m startled that it sounds a little like the dogs that roamed around me that day as I sat on the beach, watching my father’s fishing boat being hauled ashore without him in it.

My father used to love cockfights. He enjoyed the way the men would gather in a circle and pass a bottle of rum from hand to hand as they watched. This showed that animals were much smarter than men, he used to say, the way so many of us would congregate to watch two small birds.

He went to dogfights too, but he never enjoyed them as much. He could never get the howl of a dying dog out of his head. At least cocks were small, he said; we eat them, after all.

When I was a girl, I had a small notebook made of a few folded sheets held together by my mother’s embroidering thread. There I sketched some figures, which were drawn so close together that they looked like they were fighting one another on the page.

My mother was the one who first thought they were fighting. She also thought they were frightening, so she made me a rag doll because she believed I was seeing these little shadows at night and was afraid of them.

Night after night, I clung to this rag doll, whose crooked eyes my mother had drawn over the white cloth with a piece of charcoal. After my father was gone, I twisted the doll’s neck night after night. During the day, I crowded the pages in my notebook with more tiny faces, to keep me company in case my mother also disappeared.

Even though I’ve sung at a lot of funerals, I’m not necessarily a religious person. But I agree to Rézia’s idea to light candles so we can pass the real test.

Mariselle says we should pray to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. We add in there a prayer too, for our country.

“It’s not a lost cause yet,” Mariselle says, “because it made us.”

To that we toast, forsaking our rum for Mariselle’s Pinot Noir.

It feels like I’m drinking blood, not the symbolic blood of the sacraments, but real blood, velvet blood, our own blood.

I give them as keepsakes a few swatches of my mother’s embroidery. Threads of red clouds, omens for good luck.

Then Rézia asks me, “Why didn’t you go when you were asked to sing at the national palace?”

“Ordered,” I correct her. “I was ordered to go sing there.”

“Why didn’t you go?” Rézia persists. “If you had gone, maybe you’d still be home.”

I made a choice that I’d rather stop singing altogether than sing for the type of people who’d killed my father.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Rézia says. “Jackie Kennedy can go to Haiti anytime she wants, but we can’t.”

We won’t know for some time if we passed. Yet Rézia’s still shaking with post-test anxiety when we sit down, each of us with a bowl of leftover stew from the day’s menu.

Mariselle is wearing a set of gold bangles that, when she moves her arms, sound like the type of miniature gourd rattles you might put on a child’s grave.

“I finally unpacked my suitcases,” she says, “to celebrate.”

She’s gotten a job at a gallery not far from Rézia’s restaurant and will be selling paintings, some of them her husband’s.