Dona Malbranche died the day after she turned seventy- a gift from God, as far as the old woman was concerned. The frown on her face was a perfectly inverted grin. “Ki te mele m.” She had drawn her lips tight on the “m” to intercept her final breath. “Ki te mele m,” she used to tell Bob Barker and Oprah-her companions and life’s witnesses. She no longer cared.
When Foufoune returned from another double shift and found Gwo Manman slumped over the chair, her instincts as a nurse rose up like a tsunami. She lunged toward her mother, determined to pry her loose from Death’s stubborn grip, but her limbs had as much life left in them as dried gourds. Foufoune dialed emergency, saying, “Hurry, please hurry.” The bottle of lwil maskreti clutched in her mother’s hand had spilled on her good rug. “Please, please hurry!” Within minutes the apartment was flooded with strangers in uniforms. Everyone shook their heads sympathetically. Foufoune sniffled and sobbed as she unclasped the gold necklace which Gwo Manman never would have parted with while she was alive. It had been a Mother’s Day present from her other daughter, Miriam, who still lived in Puits Blain. Foufoune continued to sob as her mother’s lifeless body was carted away; suddenly stung was she by the realization that if Gwo Manman had had a choice, she would have been savoring breadfruit grown on her own little patch of land in Puits Blain, instead of dying alone abroad.
Foufoune put off calling her sister for last, hoping someone would do her the favor of forwarding the news. No one did, of course; the call was hers to make. She adjusted her earpiece with trembling fingers. Her sister would answer momentarily, and sever the sliver that was her last nerve. Miriam had always sided with Gwo Manman: The woman is old enough to know where she should live. She’s not a child. If she doesn’t want to live in the States, you must respect that.
Foufoune had considered sending her mother back, but after just a few weeks in the States it was already too late. America did not agree with Gwo Manman. She had an allergic reaction to the very air. She changed as soon as she left the island. At first Foufoune thought her mother was just homesick and would overcome it soon, but Gwo Manman’s condition steadily worsened. When after several months Gwo Manman grew even more despondent and sickly, Foufoune had her seen by the best physicians she knew. And out came the diagnosis she dreaded: onset dementia, Alzheimer’s. She knew all too well how those diseases ravaged the mind.
“I never got sick back home,” Gwo Manman argued, even after Foufoune was careful enough to make up the best lie rather than translate what the doctors had said. “I wasn’t sick until I started to live à l’étranger,” Gwo Manman maintained.
“You have the flu,” Foufoune explained. “A very bad strain. You’ll get better soon.”
Miriam was singing along to an old Coupe Cloue tune while stirring a bubbling pot of cornmeal when the phone in her apron pocket rang. She set down the long-handled wooden spoon and turned off the radio. A light rain was falling, rinsing the dust off the flamboyant branches over her porch as well as the splotches of blood where she had cleaned goat meat the night before.
“Alo.” Miriam had decided she would send the caller away, or else risk having too many lumps in her signature dish which today she would serve with black beans and salted herring. Customers would start arriving soon for their noonday fix. She would not disappoint them. The goat meat she painstakingly cleaned was now marinating in a special concoction. By nightfall, every bit would be gone. People would come from far away for a taste. Kenold and most of the other guys who sold those brightly painted canvases up the street from the lycée and Anne-Marie Javouhey elementary stopped by Miriam’s for food on their way home. In all the years since she quit a back-breaking factory job to open the eatery, she had never let her customers down.
“Alo?” Miriam repeated, annoyed. Jean-Jean, the man she hired to clean the latrine behind her house, walked by with his shovel in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Miriam’s house was equipped with indoor plumbing, but she kept the old relic behind the house for customers. Miriam’s thoughts shifted to the days when hers was the only household in all of Puits Blain with a telephone. Nowadays, everyone had phones: maids, stall keepers at the marketplace, farmers, tap tap drivers, even Jean-Jean-a man whose profession required him to work under the cover of night when no one would see or judge him.
“M-m-i-s-s Mi-ria-m,” he stuttered, his head bent low due to chronic humiliation, “I’m c-coming tonight to start that j-job for you.”
“Kapitèn Poupou!” a group of giggling children saluted Jean-Jean. Ashamed, he pretended not to hear.
Miriam nodded. Now was not the time to explain why the job would have to be postponed. She would speak to Jean-Jean later. Perhaps she should have him seal that hole and make the old latrine disappear like the thatched huts and tincovered shacks that used to populate the area. Puits Blain was no longer an idyllic haven. The kenèp groves were gone. The cornfields had been replaced by top-heavy palaces with high walls surrounding them. Tightly clustered wannabe mansions and the ever-expanding bidonvilles did not spare a single sapling. On the upside, there was now a Culligan water depot just steps from her porch, making it much easier to run her business. The cyber café halfway down to Kay Peshòt-right in that spot where Papa Malbranche used to tether his blind horse-stayed packed with those seeking escape via the Internet. Hotel Flamboyant’s sparkling point of light stood on land where, it was said, a girl once turned herself into a mabouya to escape a beating. Miriam’s umbilical stump was buried under the flamboyant tree in her front yard. So was Foufoune’s, but that meant precious little to her sister. The dirt path where Gwo Manman used to ride her mule was now a bustling artery that accommodated the United Nations’ fleet of tanks hellbent on keeping Haiti safe. Minustah soldiers manned every few feet, catching gang members before they could disappear into the convoluted alleyways. Gone were the days when Puits Blain did not need guarding. Yes, Miriam resolved, it would be best to have Jean-Jean seal the latrine and demolish the decrepit wooden shack surrounding it once and for all. Anyone could hide in there. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? Her customers would have to manage without it. Miriam shook her head. Her old Puits Blain no longer existed, but unlike her sister, she would never abandon her ancestral land to live elsewhere.
“Alo,” Miriam said a third time, keeping one eye on her steaming pot of cornmeal. She realized by the loaded silence on the other end that it was Foufoune. Gwo Manman’s children knew each other so well that they needed to maintain at least one ocean between their respective homes. Same mother, same father, same ancestral blood in their veins, but those two had even less love for each other than a goat and a butcher. Foufoune liked to think she was accidentally switched at birth. Nothing else could explain why her blood turned to ice whenever she even thought about her sister. Hatred raged inside of them like a parasitic cancer. The disease spread over the years, taking control of their lives, until one could no longer bear the sight of the other.
“It breaks my heart that my only two children cannot get along,” Gwo Manman often lamented.
“I have no problem with my sister,” Foufoune would lie to appease her mother. But to her friends, Foufounce would say: “Miriam is jealous of me because I made it and she’s nothing.”