Haiti Noir

Leaving the main road behind, they cut through a narrow dirt track with wooden houses enclosed by tall cactus fences. Claire trailed behind her father as he followed the smell of wet pine and burnt sugar in the air. A muddied rubber-booted man returning from the cane fields with an overburdened mule called out to them, “Paying a visit to the dead Mesye Gaspard and Manzè Claire?”

Gaspard nodded, as he did to everyone else who greeted him from then on.

The burial site was next to a cane field so vast that Claire couldn’t even see where it ended. Standing on the edge of the twenty or so cement crosses rising out of the hilly terra cotta earth, she forgot at first which one was her mother’s. Her father bent down and, using the end of his shirt, wiped a light coat of red mud off the letters of her mother’s name. She could only read the letters because she had just learned to write her name at school. Her mother’s name had also been Claire, Claire Narcis. Her father had decided to call her Claire Limyè Lanmè, Claire of the sea light, after her mother died.

Squatting there with one knee lodged in the moist earth, Gaspard spat on the end of his shirt, but could not produce enough saliva to further clean his wife’s headstone.

“Need some from you too,” he told his daughter, who at first hesitated then playfully obliged, digging deep into the back of her throat with adultlike grunts.

Next to her mother’s was a year-old grave with a polished gray cross that was smaller than the others. On the cross was a metal wreath, painted in pale blue and white with a brown angel carved on the front. It was the grave of a child.

This was one of many times that Claire wished she knew how to read and write more than her own name. Her father didn’t even know that much, so she couldn’t ask him to read the name for her, to tell her who the child was that her mother was now looking after in death.

Once her father was done wiping her mother’s headstone, covering the entire front of his shirt with the red earth, he sat down on the stone slab that in Claire’s mind kept her mother forever pinned to the earth.

Gaspard was mumbling, talking to himself as he sat there, seeming strangely at home among the dead, until he saw the fabric vendor.

The woman was wearing a white lace dress with a polka dot scarf wrapped around her head.

“I knew she would come today,” he said, quickly standing up.

Grabbing Claire’s hand, he pulled her forward, blocking the woman’s way. The woman peeked over his shoulder at the child’s grave with the angel wreath on top.

“Do you remember my daughter?” her father asked while nervously patting Claire’s shoulder.

“Please let me remember mine,” the woman said.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned four, the fabric vendor’s seven-year-old daughter, Rose, was riding in the back of a moto taxi with her teenage caretaker, when a private car rear-ended the motorcycle and sent Rose flying fifteen feet into the air, forcing her to land, headfirst, on the ground. Rose was plump, like her mother, and her hair was perfectly coiffed. The mother did it herself in playful and colorful designs, carving simple flower and butterfly shapes into the girl’s scalp. Those, like Gaspard, who witnessed the accident, swore that when Rose’s body ascended from the rear of the motorcycle, she almost seemed to be flying out of her primary school uniform-an azure pleated skirt and spotless white shirt with white tennis shoes and lace-topped ankle socks-raising both her hands and actually flapping them before she hit the ground.

It was not the first time Gaspard had seen an accident like this. This was a small and sometimes unlucky town and the narrow, mostly unpaved streets were crowded with motorcycles and cars. But none of the previous accidents had been so personally disheartening. He had expected Rose to scream at some point-just as the mothers and other spectators had rushed up to the spot, cradled their heads in their hands, and screamed-but the girl had not even made one sound.

The moto taxi had nearly reached the mother’s fabric shop when the accident happened, so it did not take long for word to reach the fabric vendor, who even before she was told the details was bent over and retching, looking only at the ground as she made her way through the stalled traffic toward where her child was lying, bloody and still, in the dust.

Gaspard had not seen such grief since the public high school in town had collapsed some years back, killing eightynine of the two hundred and twelve pupils enrolled there. The day of the moto taxi accident, however, the fabric vendor was the sole owner of that tragedy. The driver and Rose’s caretaker were miraculously fine, like those students and teachers who had merely crawled out of the rubble of the collapsed high school building some years back.