Continental Drift полностью

Vanise and Claude hear them call and hail one another, however: Tyrone, you fetch me wood now, bwoy, or me beat you! And: Get dat dog from out de house! G’wan now, get ’im from de house, y’ hear? There’s a familiar enough roll to the words, the grumpy, early-morning sounds they themselves make back in Allanche, but Vanise and Claude can’t understand the words. It’s garble to them, as if the people are speaking backwards. The boy’s eyes open wide in wonder, and Vanise cocks her head, listens more closely. She hears music from a radio, not Haitian music, certainly, and nothing like it, either, not calypso or reggae or salsa. It’s a twangy, slow music, and though thinned by the cheap transistor radio inside the cabin, it’s unmistakably American country and western music. They’ve heard that sound before, now and then, from the radio and on records brought back on holidays from Port-au-Prince by cousins returning to the country intent on impressing those who refused or weren’t able to move to the city.

The boy says, Maybe this is America. Only not Miami, that’s all. Miami’s probably someplace near here, that’s all.

Vanise looks at him with scorn. America doesn’t look like this, she says in a low voice, almost a whisper.

But where are we, then?

Vanise shoves her face close to the boy’s and hisses. We’re in the center of a village, at a crossroads, and we’re eating our breakfast there! Anybody can see that. You can see that. She’s not angry at the boy, but she sends her words to him as if they had been heated and cast into cold water. Give me the jambosier, she says.

He passes her the fruit, and she tears off a fleshy chunk with her teeth. The baby, finished sucking at her breast, has fallen asleep and lolls back against her shoulder. Holding the rose apple with her teeth, Vanise buttons her blouse quickly and resumes eating. She hadn’t realized how hungry she had become, with all the excitement — first the fear of the boat ride and the sea, then the joy at the sight of land, and then the disappointment and anger, and now the complex fight to stave off being lost — and she’s almost startled by the intensity of her own hunger and the pleasure she takes from satisfying it. The boy, too, eats ravenously and with sudden joy.

When they have finished the fruit, the boy decides to risk another question. What are we going to do, Vanise? He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and studies the door of the house across the road from them.

We shall wait. She says it firmly, as if waiting were an action, like hiding or running away or building a house. She passes the boy the sleeping baby, which he holds expertly in the crook of his skinny arm, and she breaks off a leafless branch of the tree behind them, squats in the dust and begins to draw. As she draws, she prays in a broken way that she knows is amateurish and incomplete, but it’s all she can remember from her sister-in-law’s teaching. She knows the names of the cardinal points, and she addresses them properly: to the east, À Table; to the west, Dabord; in the north, Olande; and in the south, Adonai. She draws a long horizontal line from east to west in the dust, then two verticals, one long and one short, that cut the horizontal into three parts. She crosses herself, and while she draws elaborations and curls, circles and lines around the crossbars, she salutes the two trinities, first the Christian God, his son Jesus and the Holy Ghost, then les Mystères, les Morts, and la Marassa, the sacred twins.

Standing, she crosses her arms and examines the drawing at her feet, a vever for Papa Legba. Now, she says, we wait.

The boy relaxes and sits down on the low wall, the baby still in his arms. He’s no longer afraid. He did not know that his Aunt Vanise possessed so much rada knowledge, that she was a mambo, or he would not have been frightened before, when he did not know where they were. They will wait now, here at the crossroads under the sacred cottonwood tree, for old Papa Legba to help them.