Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

En route to the capital that morning, he smoked his first pipe and drank three cups of homemade moonshine. One of the silent objectors who had been trying to numb himself before the rally had passed the pipe and kleren to him. With that first smoke and the public drinking of what he now considered inferior liquor, he felt himself transformed into an adult.

When he got to the city, he followed the throng of people to the vast, meticulously trimmed lawn of the national palace. He was mesmerized by the procession of humanity, standing before the whitest and biggest building in the whole country. Decorating the palace terraces were men with rifles, men dressed in uniforms with golden ropes like those he’d studied in pictures of the fathers of the independence in his own boyhood history book. And finally the president, slipping out onto the balcony dressed like a guardian of the cemetery in a black suit and coattails, a black hat, a.38 visibly attached to his belt, and a rifle at his side.

When he saw the president’s ashen, spectacle-adorned face, he decided he would never go back home. He finally believed his father’s oft-repeated declaration that his son would never work the land, never carry a knapsack on his shoulders or a machete in his hand.

He listened for hours as the president read what seemed like a hundred-page book, in perfect nasal French. From the entire speech, he managed to retain only a few lines. If anyone tried to topple him, the president threatened, blood would flow in Haiti as never before. The land would burn from north to south, east to west. There would be no sunrise and no sunset, just one big flame licking the sky. He also remembered the tall tan woman in a teal dress at the president’s side, the president’s wife, fresh and buoyant as an azalea floating in a stream, staring uninterested down at the crowd. He had wondered if she had a handgun under her dress and wouldn’t have been surprised if she did. He didn’t move his head the whole time the president was speaking.

After the third, fourth, or fifth hour of the speech, he found himself dreaming. He thought he saw a flock of winged women circling above the palace dome, angry sibyls ranging in hue from cinnamon, honey, bronze, sable, to jet-black, hissing through the rest of the speech.

Later he would tell one of the many women he’d eventually take to bed, “I thought they were angels, caryatids, maybe a soul for each of us standing there in the sun.”

And the woman would reply, “You can’t afford to be a spiritual man.”

The boy was standing there not moving, even after he had given him the money. He pulled an additional fivegourdes bill from his pocket and handed it to the kid. He suddenly wanted to have some company, so he decided to engage the boy in conversation. There was a part of him that wished he could buy that child a future, buy all children like that a future. Perhaps not the future he would have himself, not the path his life would take, but another kind of destiny.

“What do you study?” he asked.

The boy replied, “History.”

And he requested that the boy recite for him the lesson of the day. The boy stuttered and appeared nervous, as if recalling school punishments, rulers on the knuckles, harsh words from the teachers for not getting his lessons right.

He asked to see the boy’s palms, for you could always tell how bright a student was, or how good he was at memorizing his lessons, by examining his palms and knuckles for ruler calluses and splinter marks.

The boy’s hands were calloused indeed, but maybe it wasn’t because he was dumb. Maybe it was because he didn’t have the proper light in his house or because he had a book with missing pages or because he didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast every morning.

He gave the boy yet another five gourdes and told him to go away. Too much was gathering in his head now around the kid’s fate. He watched as the boy bought himself a pack of gum and two cigarettes, green Splendides, menthol. The boy inhaled deeply and exhaled with equal ability, forming a series of cloudy rings in the air. He then bought a handful of goat meat and fried plantains and shared them with five of his young friends, who were also milling around beneath the street lamp sharpening the tips of their pencils with razor blades as they recited their lessons to one another.

The boy would later tell a Le Monde journalist, “We saw him sit there all afternoon. I bought him cigarettes. With the money he gave me extra, I bought supper and candy and shared with my friends.” But the boy would not mention the two loose cigarettes he had purchased for himself.

With the smoke clouding his lungs, he tried to forget about the boy by concentrating on his longing for a bottle of rum. He yearned for dominoes, a card game, sweet words, a bare thigh to run his hand up and down on, some close dancing, and a girl to polish his expensive belt buckle with the tip of her belly button. But all this would have to wait until the preacher was dead. And so he watched the boys suck the marrow out of the fried goat bones until the bones squeaked like whistles and clarinets and he thought of how hungry he’d been after the president’s speech, when the crowd was left to find its own way home and when one of the many men in denim who were circling the palace that day had approached him and asked him whether he wanted to join the Miliciens, the Volunteers, what later would be called the macoutes. He had gotten an identification card, an indigo denim uniform, a homburg hat, a.38, and the privilege of marching in all the national holiday parades.

He didn’t like the uniform. He thought it made him look like a dancer in a folklore show. And so he asked to wear regular clothes, eagerly provided for him when he appeared at the rich merchants’ shops and showed his Volunteers membership card. His favorite line for them was, “I volunteered to protect national security. Unfortunately, or fortunately as you like, this includes your own.”

With these words, restaurants fed him an enormous amount of food, which he ate eagerly several times a day because he enjoyed watching his body grow wider and meatier just as his sense of power did. A doctor, his landlord, gave him two rooms on the lower floor of a two-story house for free. Bourgeois married women slept with him on the cash-filled mattress on his bedroom floor. Virgins of all castes came and went as well. And the people who had looked down on him and his family in the past, well, now they came all the way from Léogâne to ask him for favors.

Dressed in their best city outfits, they arrived at the dark little office he closed off for himself in one of the back cells at the military barracks and called him “Sergeant,” “Colonel,” “General.” Some even blasphemously ennobled him “Little President.”

“It’s been ten days,” they would say, “since my son was taken.”

“My daughter is gone,” they’d sob. “And I know it was not of her will.”

Whenever he wanted to, he could solve their problems by simply writing a note to the Léogâne chiefs, who, because he was located in the capital and could read and write, deemed his position above their own.

He made a few trips a month to Léogâne, to visit his father, whose insanity manifested itself in his walking naked to the marketplace twice a week, clutching a rock in each fist.

Once when he was in Léogâne, he went and talked to each of the officials who’d taken over his father’s land. He told them all, “We’re all the same now, but I’ll never forget what you did to my parents. Now I’m the one everyone comes to in the capital. A closed mouth doesn’t catch flies, so I won’t say any more. But watch yourself.”

It was a simple monologue that, even though it didn’t get him back all their land, regained his father the house where both he and the father were born and stopped the requests for favors from the hometown for a while.