The Farming of Bones Read Free

made the sign of the holy cross from her forehead down to the sweaty cave between her swollen breasts. It was an especially hot morning. The air was heavy with the scent of lemongrass and flame trees losing their morning dew to the sun and with the smell of all the blood the señora had lost to her children. I refastened the closed patio doors, completely shutting out the outside air.
    “Will you light a candle to La Virgencita, Amabelle? I promised her I would do this after I gave birth.”
    I lit a white candle and set it on the layette chest beside the cradle that had been the señora’s own as a child.
    “Do you think the children will love me?” she asked.
    “Don’t you already love them?”
    “I feel as if they’ve always been here.”
    “Do you know what you will name them?”
    “I think I’ll name my daughter Rosalinda Teresa to honor my mother. I’ll leave it to my husband to name our son. Amabelle, I’m so happy today. You and me. Look at what we have done.”
    “It was you, Señora. You did this.”
    “How does my daughter look? How do you find my dusky rose? Does she please you? Do they please you? She’s so small. Take her, please, and let me hold my son now.”
    We exchanged children. For a moment Rosalinda seemed to be floating between our hands, in danger of falling. I looked into her tiny face, still streaked with her mother’s blood, and I cradled her more tightly in my arms.
    “Amabelle do you think my daughter will always be the color she is now?” Señora Valencia asked. “My poor love, what if she’s mistaken for one of your people?”

 
    3
    In the awakened dark, Sebastien says, if we are not touching, then we must be talking. We must talk to remind each other that we are not yet in the slumbering dark, which is an endless death, like a darkened cave.
    I tell him that I would rather he touch me, stroke me in all the same places, in all the same ways. He is too tired, he says, so we must talk. Silence to him is like sleep, a close second to death.
    He asks about my family, what my parents were like when they were alive.
    “What was it you admired most about your mother?”
    At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it’s never been an infant’s whimper, a boy’s whisper, a young man’s mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me.
    “Tell me what you liked most about your mother?” he asks again, when I spend too much time admiring the voice and not answering.
    “I liked her tranquility,” I say. “She was a woman who did everything slowly, in her own time, as my father liked to say. She was a woman of few words. When she did speak, her words were direct and precise. ‘The baby’s old nest took its time coming out. It was like another child altogether.’ She was a stern-faced woman with a half gourd for a forehead, that is to say, her forehead was big, high and wide, like mine, a sign of a good mind, some say. She didn’t show a lot of affection to me. I think she believed this was not a good way to raise a girl, who might not have affection the rest of her life. She also didn’t smile often.”
    “You don’t smile often.”
    “She was a thin woman like me. I think I look like her, but I do smile more.”
    “Are you smiling now?” I can hear him smiling in the dark. The smile blends into his voice, slightly halting his speech now and then.
    His fingers slice the air towards me. Before his hands land on either side of my waist, I’m already squealing and cackling like a sick hen, already feeling as if I’m being tickled.
    “Tell me something more of your mother,” he says, once the tickling and more squealing have stopped. “Tell me what her name was.”
    “Her name was Irelle Pradelle,” I say, “and after she died, when I dreamt of her, she was always smiling. Except of course when she and my papa were