The Dew Breaker

by Edwidge Danticat

  Regrets? Did he have any? What would be the meaning of life, or death, without some lingering regrets?

  Maybe he shouldn’t have preached those “sermons to the beast,” as he liked to think of them. But someone needed to stir the flock out of their stupor, the comfort that religion allowed them, that it was okay to have wretched lives here on earth so long as Heaven was glowing ahead. Maybe his death would do just that, move his people to revolt, to demand justice for themselves while requesting it for him. Or maybe his death would have no relevance at all. He would simply join a long list of martyrs and his name would vanish from his countrymen’s lips as soon as his body was placed in the ground.

  Oh, what a great sermon he could have preached about this, but alas he would never be able to. There would be no resurrection. He wouldn’t sprout wings and soar to the clouds, vomit the bullets, whole, out of his mouth. The battle would be someone else’s to fight from now on. And yet he had not been completely defeated. The wound on the fat man’s face wasn’t what he had hoped; he hadn’t blinded him or removed some of his teeth, but at least he’d left a mark on him, a brand that he would carry for the rest of his life. Every time he looked in the mirror, he would have to confront this mark and remember him. Whenever people asked what happened to his face, he would have to tell a lie, a lie that would further remind him of the truth.

  8

  Anne had no idea where she was finding all this strength to run, but as she raced toward the barracks, she felt as though she were parting the night around her, creating a new path with every leap. She was speeding by everything so fast that it all became a dusky blur, all darks and grays, barely any shadows. She left Rue Tirremasse to join Rue du Peuple, the people’s street, then Rue des Miracles, the street of miracles, and then Rue de l’Enterrement, burial street. She passed the archives building, the public school, Lycée Pétion, the old cathedral. As she neared Casernes, she charged through a pitiful pack of emaciated dogs fighting over scraps of garbage in the middle of the street. They joined her in her run for a while, then scattered and reunited, returning to the same refuse pile.

  The streets were otherwise so empty that she felt she was the only person still alive in the entire city and that thought kept her running, and she would continue to run until something was able to stop her.

  9

  Rosalie rushed into the fat man’s office, squatting in firing position. Behind her was a large cadre of military officers and militiamen, all with pistols and rifles drawn. The fat man was bent over his dead prisoner, checking for throbbing arteries in his neck. His face was covered with blood, and as he staggered to his feet he needed help from his colleagues to stand and lean against his desk.

  “What have you done?” Rosalie shouted, her pistol aimed at his head.

  “He attacked me,” the fat man replied, catching his breath.

  “How could you let this happen?” Rosalie slowly lowered her pistol. She seemed aware that all the wardens and militiamen were watching her and taking note of her reaction. She was like the queen of a fire ant nest. If she needed to, she could leave the other ants behind to attack, but she didn’t. Not yet.

  “I told you to let him go,” she said.

  When he looked down at the preacher’s corpse, his arms and legs spread out, a puddle of blood growing around his torso, the fat man wanted to vomit. Since he’d disobeyed the palace’s orders twice now, it was possible that he would be arrested, even executed.

  He took a few steps away from the body. Stumbling past his colleagues, he tottered through the prison corridor, and soon he was out in the yard where the prisoners were allowed an hour in the sunlight each day.

  “Where are you going?” Rosalie was following him.

  He kept on walking until he’d crossed the entire yard, shuffling through a smaller building until he was outside again, this time in a patch of dried-out dandelion weeds near the front gates. It was only then that he emptied his stomach and once he’d begun, it seemed as if his retching would never stop.

  At first he was alone out there near the gates; then Rosalie and the others joined him, circling him.

  When there was nothing left in his stomach, Rosalie leaned toward him and said, “You’re not well. I’ll take you home.”

  “I’ll get there myself,” he said.

  Then Rosalie signaled for the gatekeeper, whom the wardens had nicknamed Legba, to open the gates to let him out.

  “You should be all right,” Rosalie said, patting him on the back. “I’ll think of something to explain all this.”

  He didn’t feel reassured. Ultimately she would do what was best for her, taking responsibility if the president changed his mind once again and applauded the preacher’s death or leaving the blame on him if she was reproached.

  He walked out through the front gate thinking he was going to be shot in the back, either by his colleagues or by Legba, the gatekeeper. However, he managed to cross the threshold alive.

  Once he was out on the street, he felt for his face, finding his fingertips delving inside his own flesh, as though he’d been wearing a rubber mask that was peeling away. Following the contour of the prison wall, he continued walking until he thought he was out of the range of fire, then stood at the corner on the edge of the block where the prison ended and the rest of the neighborhood began.

  What would he do now? Where would he go? He should go to a hospital, but would he be safe there?

  He felt another urge to retch, but even as his body tried its best to pour out his stomach contents, nothing came out. Then something hit him, something like a large, blind animal fleeing at a hundred miles per hour.

  It was a woman, a madwoman it seemed. She was wearing a white satin nightgown that looked like a full slip. The nightgown was entirely soaked with sweat that glued it to her bony body. Her short hair was wild, as though each strand were standing up in protest, her eyes filled with rage and confusion.

  After she’d slammed her body into his, she stopped and looked up at his lacerated face. He hoped she wasn’t someone he’d harmed or nearly killed, someone who’d been in the torture chamber adjacent to his office, for he wanted sympathy, compassion from her. He wanted her to have pity on him, take him to her house and bandage him. Even if she despised him for some reason or another, he wanted her to help him, so he quickly mouthed the word “Tanpri,” Please, and heard the same word come out of her mouth at the same time, and he remembered how his mother used to say that when you spoke the exact same words as someone else at the exact same time, it meant that the two of you would die on the same day. He hoped that his plea merging with hers wouldn’t lead to her dying sooner than she was supposed to. Who was she, anyway? Was she a mother, a wife, a sister who was keeping a vigil for someone? Was she the one who called out “Jean” each time a new prisoner was brought in, the one in whose direction the officers and militiamen often shot?

  He felt dizzy and, forgetting his own massive size and the fact that he could easily slam her down to the ground with his weight, he leaned toward her. She opened her arms and somehow managed to catch him and hold him upright. She was still looking closely at his face, her hands reaching over to touch his wounds in a way that seemed both healing and curious. She grabbed his head and sobbed in his hair.

  “In there,” she said. “I need to go in there.”

  “People who go in there,” he said slowly, “don’t come out.”

  At that moment he would have done anything to keep her with him. Besides, he wasn’t lying. If she went in there, at that time of night, the men would make her all kinds of false promises, then have their way with her.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Quickly.”

  She looked at his face again, reached up and picked a few large splinters out of the wound, then followed him.

  His home wasn’t too far away. They walked fast, hurrying past the soccer stadium and the cemetery. Her body stiffened and she seemed to hold her breath until they passed the cemetery. He decided not to question
her about that. Perhaps if she weren’t a little mad, she wouldn’t have been helping him at all.

  10

  When he got home, he stumbled onto the bare mattress on his bedroom floor and fell asleep. He didn’t care whether or not he bled to death, didn’t care about the cuts on his swelling face. He was happy she was there to watch him sleep or maybe even crawl up next to him and share his bed. In the morning, he would make all the important decisions that needed to be made, but for now all he wanted to do was slip into the kind of slumber from which it seemed there would be no awakening.

  11

  His face had stopped bleeding, but it was now covered with several layers of blood. She watched as the tint of the blood faded from bright red to dark brown to almost black.

  The sun was coming up with a gentleness that surprised her. It was the reverse of what was happening to his face. First the black mist dulled to gray, then to the slight orange tint of a sunrise, then finally to the sheerness of glass.

  From his louvered window, she watched an early-morning funeral procession on its way to the cemetery. There was no fanfare, no musical band accompanying the hearse and the family members walking behind it. Perhaps these people, who looked as though they were muffling their sobs with their dark handkerchiefs, were indigents who couldn’t afford a more elaborate afternoon funeral and were so ashamed of this that they preferred to bury their loved one when most people were still asleep.

  Once the funeral procession had passed, she looked around his house for something to clean his even more enlarged face. The house was mostly empty save for the mattress he was lying on, a few pieces of clothing scattered here and there, some toiletries in the bathroom, and a few rusty forks and spoons in his kitchen. There was nothing with which to dress his wound. So she decided to go out and find a few pieces of ginger, a small bottle of honey, and some yerba buena with which to make an infusion for him.

  On the street she did her best to avoid the cemetery. There were a few people out already, hurrying as if they were late for appointments made for the night before. She lowered her head as these people walked by her, staring.

  There were only a few vendors in the open market when she arrived. The first one she approached, a skeletal dwarf with a large head, had a radio on, which was reporting some news from the night before. He had the ginger, yerba buena, and honey she needed, but she had no money to pay for anything. She didn’t even have any clothes on, aside from her nightgown.

  The vendor told her she could have these things if she would come back later and pay him. They weren’t expensive, just five gourdes total, for everything.

  “Are you buying these for a sick person?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  It occurred to her that maybe he was giving them to her because he thought she was a healer or a madwoman who all of a sudden was sobbing.

  12

  He was dreaming. Once again he was a boy in Léogâne, and he and his mother were working together in her garden. It was a cool morning and the sun was just rising, a golden mist surrounding them.

  The earth was warm and moist when he touched it, the seedbeds smelling of decaying vegetable peel. As the sun rose higher in the sky, he could hear cocks crowing, dogs barking, birdcalls, and wings flapping, and his father gently moving toward his mother and himself to quietly watch them work before heading out to one of his early-morning mason lodge meetings.

  Once more he was alone in the garden with his mother. Her long thick black hair, freed from the dark rag she usually kept it wrapped in, rose and fell on her shoulders in the morning breeze. Around them the seeds they’d planted together had magically taken root and were turning into trees—mango, papaya, guava, and avocado trees. From among the roots, herbs, and healing weeds, his mother reached down and plucked a bundled fern, a fèy wònt, a mimosa pudica or shame plant. She took one of his hands and guided it toward the tiny leaflets. When his index finger touched the prickly spine, the little leaves collapsed onto themselves as if to shut him out. She motioned for him to wait a while, for she never spoke in his dreams, and magically the leaves turned outward and reopened. She encouraged him to try this a few more times, tapping the shame plant to watch it close, then open and close once more. Then she handed him a sprig, motioning for him to hold on to it.

  His dream abruptly ended with the sound of his front door being opened and shut. He sat up quickly to receive his visitor, reaching for his .38 where he usually kept it on the floor near the mattress by his head. But he didn’t find it there. Emptied of bullets, it had remained, like his car and his hidden money, at the barracks. Then the events of the previous night came back to the forefront of his mind. The wait. The church. The minister. The shots. His throbbing, itching face, which felt as though it were being clawed. And this woman, this woman who had opened and closed his door, this woman who was standing there in a nightgown or a slip, covered with dirt and blood (his blood?), her eyes reddened, her face streaked with tears. This woman, she was holding a bottle of honey, three pieces of ginger, and a sprig of yerba buena that she probably meant to pound into some concoction to place on the wound on his face. This woman? Who was she again?

  He was afraid to ask her name, afraid that he would recognize it. Maybe she was someone he’d been with before, someone he’d once brought home when he was too drunk to remember.

  He was relieved when she asked a question first. And though she looked shell-shocked and insane, her voice didn’t sound it. It was as calm as a stream or one of those tranquil brooks his mother was repeatedly taking him to in his dreams.

  “What did they do to you?” she asked.

  This was the most forgiving question he’d ever been asked. It suddenly opened a door, produced a small path, which he could follow.

  “I’m free,” he said. “I finally escaped.”

  Her posture was crooked, but her mind seemed clear. She had placed her wares on the floor, laid them out one by one at the foot of the mattress.

  One day he would try to make her understand why he’d put it like that. In many ways it was true. He had escaped from his life. He could no longer return to it, no longer wanted to.

  He would tell her the real truth later, much later, once he’d told her a series of other things, about his mother, his father, the garden, Léogâne.

  What made him think there would be a later? Why was he so sure that she wasn’t going to walk out on him in the next minute, the next hour, even the next day? Because she also looked as though there was something she was anxious to tell. Perhaps it was the thing that just then was making her cry. Or maybe it was the answer to those very questions that he so wanted to ask: Why had she been outside the prison so late at night? Who was she waiting for?

  It was obvious that she now felt she’d been there to save him, to usher him back home and heal him.

  13

  It would be impossible to explain all that followed, to her daughter or to anyone. It wasn’t that she thought the fat man was her half brother, the one who’d disappeared into the sea so long ago, that this girth, this vastness was something the youngest child in her family had garnered from his lost years of inhaling seawater and weeds. It wasn’t that she thought he’d emerged from the cemetery, enlarged by the bones and souls of other ghosts. It wasn’t that she believed he could help her find her stepbrother, the minister, the one they’d just arrested and taken to jail the night before. It wasn’t that she was thinking of the selfsacrificing martyrs who now made miracles possible: Saint Rose de Lima, who’d sanded and blistered her face with peppers to avoid vanity; Saint Veronica, who wiped floors with her tongue; or Saint Solange, who, after being decapitated, had carried her own head to a church altar. It wasn’t even that it had occurred to her that if he wasn’t one of her brothers he was surely someone else’s, who had just surfaced from another kind of grave. Maybe it was none of these things. Maybe it was all of them. Plus a hollow grief extended over all these years, a penance procession that has yet to end.

  A f
ew minutes later, when he got his landlord, the doctor, out of bed to sew his face, she watched from a corner as the doctor pulled a silver thread in and out of his skin. It seemed like some kind of torture, the type you might inflict on someone you truly hated, but he didn’t seem very pained from it. Heeding the doctor’s warning that if he grimaced too much or insisted on smoking a cigarette while his wound was being sewed, his face would heal in a way that would make him look like a monster, he remained still until the doctor was done.

  She couldn’t easily remember when she’d first heard that her stepbrother, the preacher, had died. It might have been from the vendor’s radio, the one that was giving the news that morning. Or it may have been from the doctor’s casual chatter, something about “a preacher from Bel-Air killing himself at Casernes.” But she’d slipped out of her own body then, just as now.

  When her daughter called her from Lakeland after her husband’s confession to ask, “Manman, how do you love him?” she was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a piece of pie. It was not what she thought she’d be doing when that question finally came. Like her husband, she’d thought she might be on a trip, some kind of journey with her daughter. She had imagined the two of them, just the girls, on the ocean, on a cruise liner or some other place from which her daughter couldn’t escape. But here they are, thousands of miles apart and not even looking into each other’s eyes as she attempts an explanation.

  “He tell you?” Instead she replies with another question.

  “Yes,” the daughter says. Her voice is cold and dry, unlike the high-pitched shrill it was when she’d been so worried about her father’s disappearance earlier. From the tone of her daughter’s voice, she gathers that their child is already passing judgment on them. And she hasn’t even heard the whole story.