Haiti Noir

Claire Limyè Lanmè latched on quickly and emptied both the fabric vendor’s breasts while Rose, the woman’s daughter, looked awestruck and grief-stricken as though she had not been aware until that moment that this was something her mother could do for anyone but her.

Gaspard thought he might bring Claire to the fabric vendor every day, but after smiling and cooing at the baby and stroking her tiny elbow, the woman’s face tightened as she handed his daughter back to him, giving him the scowl one might imagine she reserved for her credit-seeking customers.

Pointing to the sleepy three-year-old sitting next to her, the fabric vendor said, “My child needs my milk.”

He did not say it, but he was thinking that his child and hers were now milk sisters. The fabric vendor had offered his baby her breasts. He could now freely ask her to be his child’s godmother. She certainly had the means. She had a big house in the hills overlooking the beach and a cook and a yardman to see after her every need. The only thing Gaspard didn’t like about her was her reputed loose ways, her rumored love for several men at once, her renowned insatiable longing for other people’s husbands. Still, because she had money and the shop, and because her father had once been the justice of the peace of the town, she had also inherited her own private pew at the cathedral down the street from the fabric shop. Gaspard’s wife had come to the shop often, sometimes to buy fabric for the undertaker she sewed for and other times to barter her hand-embroidered little girls’ dresses. Gaspard now wondered if his wife and the fabric vendor had ever spoken at length. Did they ever talk as more than client and customer? As potential young mothers?

While he stood there, near the shop’s entrance, rocking the contented baby in his arms, he thought that if he waited long enough the woman might change her mind and let his daughter come again to nurse. Instead, she reached into her skirt pocket and fished out a few bills and pushed them toward him.

“Do you have any other family?” the fabric vendor asked, while stroking her own daughter’s perfect hair. “A sister?” Before he could answer, she added, “If you don’t have a sister, you should send her to your wife’s people.”

He hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t thought much in that direction at all. The child had taken the mother away. Now there would be no mother. That’s all he’d been able to concentrate on for more than a few minutes. She was right, though. He could not do it himself. He couldn’t even feed her.

“Do you have a place to lay her body, your wife?” she asked, steadying her fidgeting daughter’s hands in hers. “You can, if you like, make use of a burial site in the cemetery where I have some open land.”

When he left the parlor, he walked back home, with the child, where the frantic midwife was waiting with the bottles and powder and purified water, which along with the funeral expenses would wipe out most of his dead wife’s savings.

“You went out with this san manman child after dusk?” the midwife chided.

The next day, when his wife’s sister arrived for the funeral, he simply gave the baby to her along with the little money he had left. He was relieved not to have to worry about her for a while.

He worked harder, spent more time at sea so that he’d have enough to send for her care, but he never visited her, nor did he ask for her to be brought to him for visits. But as her third birthday approached, he felt he was ready to see her again. So he asked that she arrive on her birthday. And she did, looking long and thin and just like her mother. He had a pink ruffled muslin dress sewn for her that he would have replicated in a larger size each year. Her mother had made her one just like it, imagining that she would wear it for her first birthday. He had sent her off with it, not knowing whether they’d even put it on her. He wished now that his wife had been prescient about her own death, like so many people’s relatives claim to have seen them be. She had never told him what he might do with their daughter should anything happen to her.

The night of Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin’s seventh birthday, there was an informal vigil on the beach for the rogue wave victim, Gaspard’s fisherman friend, who was now considered lost at sea. Even though a full moon gleamed overhead, Gaspard and a few of the other fishermen had made a bonfire, and over the fisherman’s widow’s occasional wails they sat on the warm sand and drank kleren, played cards and dominoes, and told stories, just as they would at an official wake.

Dozens of townspeople came by the beach, bringing, as was the custom, small amounts of money to the fisherman’s widow. The town’s mayor came too, fearful that the way the fisherman died might be the very first sign of something more potentially and geographically tragic and widespread in the days and weeks to come.