Continental Drift

Battérie Maçonnique

It’s as if the creatures residing on this planet in these years, the human creatures, millions of them traveling singly and in families, in clans and tribes, traveling sometimes as entire nations, were a subsystem inside the larger system of currents and tides, of winds and weather, of drifting continents and shifting, uplifting, grinding, cracking land masses. It’s as if the poor forked creatures who walk, sail and ride on donkeys and camels, in trucks, buses and trains from one spot on this earth to another were all responding to unseen, natural forces, as if it were gravity and not war, famine or flood that made them move in trickles from hillside villages to gather along the broad, muddy riverbanks lower down and wait for passage on rafts down the river to the sea and over the sea on leaky boats to where they collect in eddies, regather their lost families and few possessions, set down homes, raise children and become fruitful once again. We map and measure jet streams, weather patterns, prevailing winds, tides and deep ocean currents; we track precisely scarps, fractures, trenches and ridges where the plates atop the earth’s mass drive against one another; we name and chart the Southeast and Northeast Trades and the Atlantic Westerlies, the tropical monsoons and the doldrums, the mistrals, the Santa Ana and the Canada High; we know the Humboldt, California and Kuroshio currents — so that, having traced and enumerated them, we can look on our planet and can see that all the way to its very core the sphere inhales and exhales, rises and falls, swirls and whirls in a lovely, disciplined dance in time. It ages and dies and is born again, constantly, through motion, creating and recreating its very self, like a uroborous, the snake that devours its tail.

Seen from above, then, the flight of a million and a half Somali men, women and children with their sick and dying beasts out of the drought- and war-shattered region of Ogaden in the Horn of Africa would resemble the movement of the Southwest Monsoon Current, for instance, which in the heat of July moves slowly, almost imperceptibly out of the Red Sea just north of Ethiopia and Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean, where it joins the Northwest Monsoon Drift and dips southward along the subcontinent, by winter looping back again toward Kenya and Tanzania, bringing rain to Mombasa and Dar es Salaam and filling the great inland waterways and lakes. The movement of the Somalis would seem inevitable, unalterable and mindless; and because we would have watched it the way we watch weather, it would seem tragic. We could not argue over who was at fault or what should have been done; ideology would seem a form of vanity, a despicable self-indulgence. We would rise from our shaded seat in front of our hut alongside the dusty road that leads from the treeless Damisa hills in Ethiopia to our village near the trading town of Samaso in Somalia, and we would step forward onto the road with a cup of water and a small bowl of millet and whey for the family we have been watching approach for the last hour, a man, tall and gaunt, ageless, leading a half-blind camel with a pack of sticks tied to its back, and, coming along behind, a woman with a scrawny child in her arms, and behind her yet another cadaverous child. We let them sleep under their thin blankets beside our hut, and in the morning, as the sun breaks across the brown plain, give them bread and water and point the way southeast to Samaso, another thirty kilometers, and say the name of the man who is said to own a truck for transporting to the coast and the refugee camps there the people who come down from the hills, the Somali-speaking nomads who have raised cattle in that wilderness for a thousand years and who now must flee famine, drought and the war, the endless war between the Ethiopians with their Russian guns and Cuban allies and the soldiers of the Western Somalia Liberation Front. The man, his black skin cut through almost to the bone of his face with worry and fatigue, nods and repeats the name of the man with the truck. He will take you to Kismayu, we say, just as we told the others, for nearly every day they come. The camps are there, on the coast. There is food and shelter there, and people who will know how to cure your children of their sores. The man asks if there will be a price for this transportation. We shrug, as if we don’t know. He nods. He understands. Perhaps he will be able to sell his wretched camel. If not, he knows that one night soon, on the cold ground outside the tiny crossroads village of Samaso, they will die. First the children will die, then probably the man, and then the woman. And tomorrow or the day after that, another family will come down from the hills and will cross the dry, hot plain along the rutted road, will stop for the night beside our hut and in the morning will move on to the same fate.

In these years, the early 1980s, most events and processes that have been occurring for millennia continue to occur, some of them silently, slowly, taking place an inch at a time miles below the surface of the earth, others noisily, with smoke and fire, revolution, war and invasion, taking place on the surface. We measure the geological change in millimeters per annum, feel nothing move beneath our feet and conclude, therefore, that nothing has happened. By the same token, when we read in newspapers and hear from the evening news broadcasts that there is revolution in Iran, war in Iraq, foreign soldiers and tanks in Afghanistan, because each new day brings a surfeit of such news, blotting out the news of the day before, news of Israelis in Lebanon replacing accounts of Russians in Afghanistan, Americans in Grenada replacing Israelis in Lebanon, we conclude here, too, that nothing has happened.

The metabolic rate of history is too fast for us to observe it. It’s as if, attending to the day-long cycle of a single mayfly, we lose sight of the species and its fate. At the same time, the metabolic rate of geology is too slow for us to perceive it, so that, from birth to death, it seems to us who are caught in the beat of our own individual human hearts that everything happening on this planet is what happens to us, personally, privately, secretly. We can stand at night on a high, cold plain and look out toward the scrabbled, snow-covered mountains in the west, the same in the suburb of Denver as oustide a village in Baluchistan in Pakistan, and even though beneath our feet continent-sized chunks of earth grind inexorably against one another, go on driving one or the other continent down so as to rise up and over it, as if desiring to replace it on the map, we poke with our tongue for a piece of meat caught between two back teeth and think of sarcastic remarks we should have made to our brother-in-law at dinner.

While we stand and think of trivialities on the plain in Baluchistan, the crust of the earth, in plates, diverges, carves long, bottomless trenches beneath the sea between India and Antarctica and shoves the last, lost child of Gondwanaland north into Eurasia, attaches India and Pakistan to China, Afghanistan and Iran with such irresistible force that the subcontinent bends and dips down at the line of convergence, buckles and crumbles at the edges and heaps up, as if with the blade of a colossal shovel, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, a thousand miles of mountain peaks twenty and twenty-five thousand feet high, the very mountain peaks and passes we can see in the distance and have watched night after night all our brief, distracted lives.

And while we wait with one son, the eldest, and a brother-in-law from Peshawar who has told us of the money to be made leading rich Afghans down from the passes to the refugee camps, we hope that he is right, we hope that the Afghans will indeed be wealthy and will be eager to pay us handsomely for escorting them down the mountain pathways, where thieves hide and wait. But at the same time, we know the brother-in-law is wrong, for we have heard for years that the Afghans who flee into Pakistan are poor. It is the Iranians, we have heard, who are rich, the merchants who, crossing their border at Ruhak, face the desert and then the mountains of the Makran Range and turn south, heading for Karachi and the sea and eventually to America. Those who live down there, near the Iranian border, they are the ones who grow fat from escorting refugees, while we risk our lives up here with the Afghans for nothing.

But the brother-in-law, an arrogant man who had played professional football in Lahore and therefore believes he knows what we do not, has insisted that we can make a year’s money from a few days’ work with little risk, and to convince him that he is wrong (or so we have said to him) we have agreed to come up here with the boy, who is old enough to carry a rifle and walks behind us. Bandits, murderers, madmen — they live up here near the snow year-round and prey on travelers without guns, so we, the boy, and even the brother-in-law, make a show of our weapons.

As we climb closer and closer to the snow, we know that now they are watching us from behind rocks and from cliffs overhead. Then, after a long while of climbing, we emerge from a narrow defile, and before us, beneath a long, pale yellow ridge and in a large wedge of shadow, there is suddenly a mound of snow in the path, hard, old snow the shape and size of a collapsed tent, and we see the bodies in the snow, a woman and two men and a child, throats slashed, old blood pinking the whiteness around them, clothes partially wrenched off and torn back from frozen bodies, bags and cases opened and scattered, papers, clothing, household utensils tossed aside in an angry hunt for coins.

You see now, we say to the brother-in-law. They are poor.

He pulls thoughtfully at his mustache, and the boy comes up alongside him and sees the Afghans lying in the snow, and frightened, he turns in a slow circle, searching the rocks and crevices around us.

There are plenty more Afghans coming, the brother-in-law says in a low voice. But … perhaps another day would be better, he adds, and we turn and commence making our way back down the mountain to the village.

The brother-in-law is a fool. And we are a fool for not believing what we know is true, what we know with our deepest brain, the one embedded in the very center of our skull, where we know that forever, from the beginning of time, the only outsiders who have come through here and have needed us to help them have been poor, sad, frightened creatures running from some army.

Yes, there are more coming, we say, when soon the descent is not so difficult and we can walk alongside one another again. And they will keep on coming until after we are gone and the boy is gone and even after that. And they will always be poor. You cannot help the poor, not when you also are poor. Let the bandits have them, we say.

I suppose you are right, the brother-in-law murmurs, which pleases us, but we say nothing of it to him.

Systems and sets, subsystems and subsets, patterns and aggregates of water, earth, fire and air — naming and mapping them, learning the intricate interdependence of the forces that move and convert them into one another, this process gradually provides us with a vision of the planet as an organic cell, a mindless, spherical creature whose only purpose is to be born as rapidly as it dies and whose general principle informing that purpose, as if it were a moral imperative, is to keep moving. Revolve around points and rotate on axes, whirl and twirl and loop in circles, ellipses, spirals and long curves that soar across the universe and disappear at last at the farthest horizon of our human imagination only to reappear here behind us in the daily life of our body, in our food, shit and piss, our newborn babies and falling-down dead — just keep on moving, keep breeding and pissing and shitting, keep on eating the planet we live on, keep on moving, alone and in families and tribes, in nations and even in whole species: it’s the only argument we have against entropy. And it’s not truly an argument; it’s a vision. It’s a denial in the form of an assertion, a rebuttal in the form of an anecdote, which means that it’s not a recounting, it’s an accounting; not a representation, a presentation.

The universe moves, and everything in it moves, and by transferring its parts, it and everything in it down to the smallest cell are transformed and continue. Water, earth, fire and air. To continue, just to go on, with entropy lurking out there, takes an old-fashioned, Biblical kind of heroism. That the seas move, that the waters flow from gulfs across whole oceans along continents and back again, is marvelous. That the continents themselves move, that they separate from one another, regroup and gather themselves into mountain ranges, plateaus, vast savannas and grassy veldts, is a wonder. That for beneath the deepest seas the grinding of the plates that carry those continents generates sufficient heat to melt rock and erupt in fiery volcanoes, making high, conical islands appear in the North Atlantic and South Pacific where, before, dark water for millennia rolled uninterruptedly, this is truly worthy of admiration. And what is marvelous to us, what fills us with wonder and admiration, we must emulate, or we die. If the stubborn determination of the Somali tribes to find food, water and peace, even though they must cross deserts alone to get there and must often perish along the way, seems to us marvelous, and if the Afghans’ willingness to face ice and snow and murderous bandits in the high passes of the Hindu Kush rather than let government soldiers enter their villages and shoot them for having given shelter one night to a few ragtag local mujahedeen guerrillas, if their decision to move away and start over elsewhere seems wonderful to us, and if the flight of a half-million starving Khmer peasants out of Kampuchea into Thailand, where they are greeted by sympathetic but terrified Thai officials who drive the Khmer back to where the Vietnamese army wages war against the scattered remnant of Pol Pot’s suicidal regime by burning the few remaining rice fields, if that persistent, relentless determination to go on knocking at the Thai gate until someone finally opens it moves us to admiration, then we must do the same. We must cross deserts alone and often perish along the way, we must move to where we can start our lives over, and when we get there, we must keep on knocking at the gate, shouting and pounding with our fists, until those who happen to be keepers of the gate are also moved to admiration and open the gate. We are the planet, fully as much as its water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.

A curious trait in humans, one that gives aid and comfort to the dark angels of entropy and makes it all the more difficult to establish here on earth once and for all a Heroic Age, is the ease with which we take everything personally. At sea level, we cannot even see the Gulf Stream; yet if it benefits us, we think it’s only right it does so. And standing on the earth, we cannot feel it move beneath our feet, but if we could, we would wonder what we had done wrong this morning and say ten Hail Marys, just in case. All the more, then, when a hurricane, namely familiarly Jean or Hattie or Allen, spins slowly north from the coast of Guyana, gathers force and moisture from the warm waters off Trinidad and Tobago, crosses the Lesser Antilles, destroys everything in its path and chews its way toward us, here, in the Greater Antilles, let’s say, for this we can see, this we can feel: the skies in the southeast darken slowly as ten-mile-high towers of cumulonimbus clouds cross the horizon, the air pressure drops so rapidly our heads ache, seabirds fly inland and disappear behind dark green jungle-covered hills, and the onshore breeze replaces the offshore breeze as if rushing from the island to greet the approaching wall of gray clouds: and it’s because we can see the hurricane with our eyes and feel it with our bodies (though it’s caused by something no more concerned with us and our individual and paltry fates than is the rotation of the earth) that we nevertheless take it personally. We make it “our” hurricane, and when we talk with tourists from America, we speak of “our” weather, just as the New Englanders among them speak with wry pride of blizzards and Californians brag about sunshine.

If, however, we are a poor, middle-aged woman with five children living in a daub-and-wattle cabin in the hill country of Haiti a few kilometers west of Port-de-Paix on the north coast, we know the hurricane comes because the loas have not been properly fed. It’s not that we have been bad; it’s that the quality of our attention has waned. We’ve forgotten the dead, les Morts, and les Mystères, we’ve neglected to feed them, and it’s not we alone who have been neglectful, this poor, solitary woman, let’s say, a woman with a husband gone off to America in a boat, not we alone, but all les serviteurs, all of us who serve the loas. It’s true, for a long time now we have not fed the loas, so today the hurricane comes to remind us that it is we who live for the dead and not the dead who live for us.

In early August our side of the island was struck by a hurricane. We learned too late that it was coming — not that we would have done anything differently had we known about it sooner, for it was too late to stop it, the waters had already been stirred. We would deal with the loas later, we said, for that is how it has been done in the past. There have been other hurricanes, and after they have passed over us, even before we have patched up our houses and repaired our gardens, we have fed the loas. This year, however, when the hurricane came, it was different, for things got confused. And though we did not think we were a part of the confusion, we watched it and slowly got drawn into it and soon began to behave as if we, too, were confused. Here is how it happened:

Our settlement is called Allanche and it is located behind the first line of hills on the northwest coast a few kilometers off the road from Port-de-Paix to Saint Louis du Nord, which, because Allanche is too small to be a market town, is fortunate, for the women can carry their baskets of yams, mangoes and breadfruit, their apricot mameys and jamelacs, over the ridge on narrow pathways down to the coast road early on the morning of market day, and if they cannot hail a truck or car or wagon for a ride into Port-de-Paix, it is still not too late to walk the other way to the smaller market town of Saint Louis du Nord and arrive there in time to sell most of their goods.

First it rained for several days, a breezy, late summer rain, warm and various, turning the leaves of the trees, like wet, silver-palmed hands, this way and that, as the breeze off the sea tumbled against the hills. All the wood got soaked through, and when their cookfires went out, the people slept long and late inside their houses and shops, waking to talk in low voices and to peer out the door again and again at the red ground still riddled and puddled from the stoop to the lane, dribbling down the lane and down the hillside in new streams that ran red as blood all the way to the sea. These were long, boring days of waiting, gossiping, thinking of food and of the past, fussing with children’s hair and guessing and arguing lightly about when the rain would stop and wood dry out so cookfires could be lit and yams baked again, damp clothes dried, bedding spread in the sunlight, children sent scurrying to the fields for greens and to the shop for a can of tinned beef or a box of yellow cheese. A few people in the settlement, Aubin, the police chief, Chauvet, the shopkeeper, and Placide, who owns a small truck, have kerosene stoves and were able to cook inside their houses. Soon the smell of their food cooking in the morning and again late in the day drifted through the settlement and set our stomachs to grumbling and made it difficult to keep our hearts from tightening with anger against everything — against our neighbors with their stoves, against our restless children, against the pair of uncooked yams in the corner on the floor, against the pair of chickens under the cabin scratching in the dirt and clucking quietly to each other, against the cold chunks of breadfruit crumbling in our mouths. We smelled a stew, a dense tangle of threads of tomato, chicken, onion and greens, and we looked across the dark room at each other’s faces, the small children lying on the bed, the boy by the window, the sister-in-law and her baby in the chair by the window, and it was difficult for us not to hate the world so much that we hated even each other, we who must live in this world.

Then the rain stopped. The wind died, and the sky seemed to lift: and lighten to a milky white. We smiled and stepped to the open doorway and looked at the yard, where everything dripped and glistened, as if the entire valley had all at once been plucked from under the sea by a gigantic hand and set down there between the blue-green mountains inland and the pearly sea beyond the hills. It was beautiful and newborn.

Then, before we could stop him, the boy darted around us and ran down the path, quickly gone, eager to see his friends and walk with them to Port-de-Paix, where they follow older boys and men who teach them how to make a little money doing things we will not permit them to do here in Allanche. We cannot keep them here, where they have no land to raise a crop and yet have no other way than farming to earn money for their families or themselves. These days all the boys soon go away to the towns and cities, even to Port-au-Prince, where, without their mothers and fathers, they become drunkards and pimps and beggars and even worse. Most of them never come back.

Aubin — the chief of police, he’s called, though he has no assistant — came down the lane from his office, which is also his home, and as he passed the cabin, he called out, You should shutter your window, ladies, and lock your door! This is the start of a hurricane!

He came to the window and peered in at us. He was wearing his cap and the jacket of his uniform, so we knew this was official business, this warning, even though he often called on us or shouted hello when he passed by, for the sister-in-law, Vanise, is the mother of his child and he enjoyed keeping track of the child, although he no longer cared for the mother, who, despite her youth, had grown thin and sour-faced and silent, except when she talked to us or to her baby.

It’s a big one, a strong blow, he said, and puffing his round brown cheeks, he blew a gust of wind into the darkness of the cabin—pfff! — and laughed.

Then he was serious, for he saw we were frightened and alone, and he said he’d heard it on his radio. Everyone should just stay inside their cabins and wait out the storm, he said. It’ll pass over the island in a few hours. Where’s your boy? he asked us, and when he learned that the boy had left as soon as the rain stopped, he seemed concerned for a second. The roads have washed out, he said. He’ll have to turn back. There’s no road to Port-de-Paix anymore, it’s buried in mud off the hills, he said. I heard it on my radio.

We listened in silence to him, and so he said, Pray he gets back before the hurricane strikes. Or he’ll come home dead in a box. He said this with a cheerfulness we have grown used to, for he does not want the boys to come back at night, or ever. He wants them to disappear into the towns and not cause him trouble anymore.

And your husband, do you hear from him in America? Aubin asked. Does he send you money still? He smiled like a snake, no lips, no teeth. He’s been gone a long time now, eh? Must be a rich man by now. He laughed, as if he had told a joke. Or else in jail. They put Haitians in jail in America, you know. I heard that on my radio too.

We said nothing, for though it was true, we had not heard a word from the man in over a year, we also knew he was not in jail, for he had sent us money, American money, for almost two years, which we had hidden away, as he wanted us to do, for the time when we would be able to go to America to join him there. We knew that in the last year someone had been stopping his letters and removing the money from the envelopes, someone in the settlement, probably, who had learned somehow that he was sending us the money he earned taking care of a golf course in Florida. We had brought his first letter, after taking the money from it, to Berthe Moriset, a woman in the settlement who reads letters for people, and she had read his instructions to us to save the money and spend it only “in emergency,” which we understood to mean only when we were ready to come to America, but when we heard those words from Berthe’s lips, we knew we had made a mistake in taking the letter to her, for now everyone would know. After that, we took out the money and burned the letters unread. Two more letters came, and then, for a year, no more. But we knew, even so, the man was not in jail.

What about you? Aubin asked Vanise. She sat in a clump of shadow in the far corner of the cabin, looking down at the infant in her lap as if its father were not present. She did not respond, so he shouted her name, Vanise! What about you? Does the baby do well?

We explained for her that there was no food, for we had been inside since the rain started and had not been able to find dry wood for the fire to bake the yams or cook one of the chickens.

Aubin looked at us as if we were all children and said that we should have stored wood under the house, but when we tried to explain that it was very difficult to find enough deadwood to store it against the future, he waved us silent. He’s a busy man, Aubin, and does not want to be troubled by our difficulties.

Go to my office, he told the eldest of the daughters on the bed. Fetch an armful of sticks from under the building so your mother can make a fire and cook food for you. This is shameful, he said. A house with no man in it …, he muttered in disgust. We did not hear the rest, for he was gone.

But it did not matter what Aubin thought or said, for we knew, with the hurricane coming, with the boy gone and the road washed out, with all the danger and with the suffering yet to come, after the suffering we had already gone through, it was clear that the loas were hungry, and we said to one another that as soon as the hurricane was over, we would go to Cabon or Bonneau with one of the chickens and make a service for their feeding.

This seemed to lighten Vanise’s load of woe. She stood, placed her infant son on the bed with the other children and made for the door, saying she would kill the remaining chicken, the one not saved for the houngan, and pluck it, and when the daughter returned from Aubin’s with the sticks for the fire, we would cook it and have food to eat during the hurricane.

But this was not to happen. The girl quickly returned from Aubin’s house empty-handed and weeping, for she had been greeted there by Aubin’s wife, who knew of his child with Vanise. Aubin’s wife, a sharp-tongued woman, shouted at the girl that she would not feed her husband’s mistress and bastard and sent her away with threats of a beating.

Swiftly, Vanise descended into gloom again, and despite our wishes to remain optimistic, we followed her there, and before long, we were all once again sitting in the damp shadows of the cabin staring at the ceiling or looking out the door and window, lost in the floating world of our thoughts, as if the world where there was a hurricane coming and our son out somewhere in it and where there was no food to eat, no dry firewood, no dry clothes or bedding, as if that world did not exist.

But, of course, it did exist, and soon the sky darkened again and the rain returned, furiously now, as if angered by delay, pushed by a strong wind out of the sea, until in a short time the rain seemed not so much dropped from the sky above as driven straight at us, a pressing, milky wall of rain that bent the trees, turned the palms inside out, ripped palmettos and stripped shrubs from the ground and pitched them against the bowed trunks of the larger trees, the cabins and the rocks, where they clung for a few seconds, then got torn loose and sent flying in pinwheels over the rough ground to the next tree or outcropping in their path. The noise was immense, a howling, like a beast made nervous and then frantic, a beast crazed by the drumming of the rain against the tin roof and shuttered window and closed door of the cabin. The children cried, and we adults tried to calm them, but we, too, were frightened, because it did not seem to us that the cabin could hold itself against the force of the wind and rain, even though it had stood against many hurricanes over the years. The children knew we were frightened, despite our soothing, reassuring words, so they wept all the louder, their small wails swallowed instantly by the howl of the wind.

The day became night, and we lit a candle, though we had nothing to see. The wind continued as before, but slowly it shifted the direction it came from, moving from off the sea around to the north, until by midnight it was raging like a huge river down the valley that runs between the hills on the east and the mountains on the west. It was pummeling us from the front now, instead of from the side, and the trees that had been bowed in one direction were bent in another and, weakened, even the large thatch palms began to break off and fall. The children by this time were asleep, exhausted by their fear and weeping, and we were glad they could not hear the trunks of the trees snap and split, the ongoing roar of the wind and rain, the hammering on the roof and against the shutter and the door.

We woke, though we did not know we had fallen asleep, when suddenly the door was thrown back, and the wind seemed to toss the shadow of the boy, our son, into the room. He shoved the door shut again and tied it, then turned to us and said for us to light another candle, he wanted us to see what he had brought home. He was soaked through, dripping and shiny in the flickering yellow light of the room, and his face was bright and smiling.

Vanise lit a candle and came close to the boy, and when he held a bundle out to her, she said, Oh! She said it strangely, a mixture of relief, surprise and fear. When she stepped back, we could see that the boy was holding a large ham, the entire smoked leg of a pig, the kind of ham we had never seen before except in the pictures in magazines that people sometimes get from tourists or when they go to Port-au-Prince. A ham! An American ham!

And here is where we made our mistake, for we woke the children and immediately set to cutting off chunks of the ham, adults and small children alike, devouring it like starved animals. We laughed and grabbed and stuffed the salty meat into our mouths with our hands. Then, as our hunger lost its rage, we slowed and found ourselves nibbling and picking at the pink, grainy ham, now and then drinking water from the gourd, and we began to ask the boy where he had found the ham, who had given it to him?

He showed us a face that knows a secret, and for a while, despite our jokes and coaxing, would not tell us, for he was proud that he had brought this food home and wanted to enjoy our gratitude as long as he could. Finally, when we commanded him to tell us where he got the ham, he told us that he had taken it from a truck turned over in a mud slide on the road to Port-de-Paix, and then, as he expected, we were not as happy with the gift as before.

What truck was this?

A truck. Just a van. A van upside down in the mud, with the doors wide open and the rain coming in.

And where was the driver?

Gone, Maman.

Gone? He left his van and this American ham behind?

There were many hams, he said. Other kinds of meat, too. All wrapped in paper and scattered all over the place, inside the van and falling out into the mud and rain.

Where did the driver go? Did you see him?

We saw him…. He was dead. He was inside the van on the floor in front, and his head was all bloody from where he’d hit the windshield when the van turned over from the mud. It must have been hit by the mud when the side of the hill above the road loosened and came rushing onto the road.

Are you sure he was dead?

Yes, the boy said quietly.

Where is the rest of the meat, all the other hams and packages? And who owns them?

Some are still there. We only took what we could carry. There’s nothing wrong. The driver was a stranger, he’s dead.

But who owns this meat? we asked the boy, who was now afraid that we were angry with him. Whose van is it? What did it say on the sides? Whose sign is on it?

The boy did not know whose van it was, and even if there had been a sign on it, he could not have read it anyhow. He just looked up at us, wide-eyed, and shrugged and said, It’s all right. It’s all right, Maman.

But it was not all right. The ham belonged either to a rich man or to someone in the government or possibly to a hotel or restaurant in Port-de-Paix or Cap Haitien, and now we had eaten fully half of it.

The white circle of bone that ran through the center of the meat stared from its pink nest like an accusing eye.

Vanise said in a low voice, Aubin will find out. He’ll find out, and he’ll come here and take away your son to punish him and you. And he’ll take away my baby to punish me. She began to tremble and then to weep.

The boy said, No, it’s all right. It’s all right! he insisted, but his eyes were wet with fear now, for he, like all of us, knew that such things happen easily. There was his friend, Georges Le Rouge, who had asked the American family he worked for one winter to intercede with the police so he could take his driver’s test for a chauffeur’s license without paying the bribe, and Georges had disappeared the week after the Americans left. Aubin said they had taken him to America with them, but we all knew the truth. And there was the sad affair of the family of Victor Bonneau, whose eldest son went to Port-au-Prince and got mixed up with the people who ran the newspaper that people were not supposed to read. And we all knew Adrienne Merant before her brothers ran off to Santo Domingo, knew her when she was pretty, and knew her afterwards, when the soldiers brought her back to Allanche from Port-au-Prince. People disappeared, or people were changed, and though sometimes it was clear that there were good reasons, it was also clear that sometimes it was only because they had made a mistake no greater than ours. And sometimes it was only because they happened to know or be related to someone who had made a mistake no greater than ours. The boy was wrong to insist that we had done nothing wrong, and he was right to be afraid, and Vanise was no doubt right to weep, and we, we were right to do what we did then.

We had not noticed it, but the storm had gone silent. The wind and rain had stopped, and the only sound was the drip of the water off the roof and the gurgle of the candle in the dish. It would come again, we knew. The hurricane always stops midway like this, as if to catch its breath, and then the wind turns and continues for another few hours, until, exhausted from having beaten the earth so long, it moves reluctantly away.

Our voices and the sounds of our movements suddenly sounded loud and harsh. The smaller children and Vanise’s infant slept in a heap on the bed, while we sat around the small table next to the shuttered window, with the candle and the half-eaten ham and the gourd between us, and whispered, trying not to offend our ears with the crackling sounds of our own voices, lips and teeth.

Vanise, though seated at the table, was a bundle of short movements, her bony chest with its oversized, new mother’s breasts heaving, her fingers tying and untying themselves rapidly as if she were at once knitting and tearing apart a baby’s cap. Aubin will come tomorrow and take us away, she said in a thin voice. Or the police in Cap Haitien will make him do it, or the soldiers. They will find the van, and they’ll know. As soon as Aubin remembers that the boy and his friends were on the road during the storm, he’ll know they took the meat from the van. They’ll all know, and then he’ll come here, and no matter what we tell him, he’ll know the truth.

She was right. When you deal with people like Aubin, people who have power over you, it’s not enough to lie. You also have to be believed. We could bury the ham deep in the earth way back in the bush, and Aubin would still know that our son had come home in the hurricane with stolen meat and we had eaten it. The only way we could both lie and be believed was if the son was not at home, if, when Aubin arrived, the boy was gone, never to appear at home again. Then, though Aubin would be angry at the boy, he might leave Vanise and her infant and the rest of us here to ourselves. Of course, if he ever found the boy afterwards, if he saw him accidentally in Port-de-Paix some night or caught him walking along the road to Cap Haitien early one morning, he would arrest him, because the boy’s not having come home immediately after the hurricane would mean that any lie he later told concerning the meat would not be believed.

There was nothing else to do, it seemed. The money was pressed between the two layers of floorboards under the bed, as thin as a newspaper between two short boards that came up easily, though they had not been lifted in over a year, not even to count. We used to count the money often, once a month, even. We would go over the stacks of green paper, ones, fives, tens and twenties, hungrily in late night candlelight with the door tied shut and the window covered, counting it and adding it up and dreaming over it, while we waited for the distant moment when we could go down to the fishing villages west of Port-de-Paix and make our arrangement with the men who own the boats and carry people over to the Bahamas and then to America and be there with our husband.

The candle fluttered, and we noticed that the wind and rain had resumed and were building to a roar again. The boy sat limply on a stool by the wall, his chest collapsed and his hands resting heavily on his knees. His face was blank, dark and withdrawn to a secret place of shame way inside him.

Lift the boards under the bed, we instructed him, and bring the money. Quickly.

He looked up, not understanding.

You heard. Do it.

He got up and crawled under the bed and soon was grunting and yanking at the boards there. Vanise studied him patiently, as if she were a grand lady and he retrieving a piece of dropped jewelry. She understood what he was doing and why, though he did not, and she seemed almost ready to smile. But that is because she had suffered more than he. He was merely for the first time in his life truly afraid. It was different for Vanise. Long ago, when her mother had died and then her father, and then all her brothers and sisters had died except the one who was the father of the boy, she had ended up living alone in a cabin outside Saint Louis du Nord letting men visit her and pay for her time and laughter and young girl’s body. She had passed through fear then as if through flame to the other side, where resignation abides, and then she had become Aubin’s favorite jeunesse for a while. He brought her back up here to Allanche, where he got a baby on her, and for a while she stepped back from resignation and began to learn how to be a serviteur and feed the loas, until Aubin grew tired of her, and a new, worse thing happened to her spirit, for she stood now on the further side of resignation, where people, especially women, laugh and cry too much and too often, where nothing matters and a second later everything matters. She was emptied out, and although we could love her, we could not trust her. All of us, even Vanise herself, knew that we would live better if we sent her away, but we also knew that she would not leave now unless for a better, safer place.

The wind and rain returned and beat on our heads until morning. We knew we would survive the hurricane, but we prayed to the Virgin and to our mait’-tête, while Vanise and the boy put their few articles of clothing and the uncooked yams and the remainder of the American ham into two small baskets, as if they were going to market in Port-de-Paix at dawn. We prayed on our knees with all the proper words we could remember, which were not so many as we would have liked, for we were no mambo or houngan or even a bush priest, a prêt’ savanne, nor could we go out in the storm and find one to pray for us, nor would we have done so, even if the night were serene, for what Vanise and the boy and Vanise’s baby were about to do could not be told to anyone yet.

The rain stopped, and the wind turned to gusts that came and went, and soon it was silent, and we began to hear hungry seabirds returning from the hills, crossing overhead toward the sea. We opened the door, and a gray block of light from the east fell into the cabin. It was morning. The hurricane had passed, and there was a sudden swelling of joy in our bodies, a warm, filling breath of pleasure, even though we knew that, with dawn, the boy and his aunt and her baby would leave us and that, no matter what happened to them in their journey, we would not see them again. We wrapped the money in a square of scarlet cloth and handed it to Vanise.

The fisherman named Victor in Le Mole is the one that people say carries people over to America. That is how the others left. That is how your brother got to Florida.

The girl looked down at her baby in her arms and smiled a strange, grim smile.

The boy said, Maman? When will you come?

Soon. When there is more money for it. Soon.

He looked at his sisters on the bed and crossed to them and silently patted each on her sleeping head. Then he went to stand by the door. Come on, Vanise. We’ll have to pass a lot of people on the road, and the sooner we pass them the better.

Vanise turned away from us and strolled toward the door as if she were going to a dance. Then they were gone. The boy, who was stepping into manhood sooner than he was ready, was gone. The girl and her baby were gone. The money was gone. We remained, and the small children, they remained. The storm was over. Under the house the chickens fluttered and scratched. Aubin had dry wood he would give us if we promised to repay him quickly, but we could not go there, not yet. We would stay hungry a little longer, and perhaps by evening some of our own wood would be dry enough to burn. Then we would kill a chicken and cook it and eat it.