Weight of the Moon

Perhaps by night there would be more water, Lusane had thought, believing that the rising moon might draw it down, but there was not. She must climb as high as she did by day, crisscrossing the thin stream at the lower places where people washed themselves and their clothes, and animals wet their muzzles and trampled and pissed, following the spiraling folds of the ravine whose walls grew higher and tighter around her, sometimes cutting off the moon. She sprang from rock to rock in the darkness, her bare feet sure on the rough boulders, until she reached the cleft where water spilled clear across a lip of stone, blushed in the light of the red moon rising. When the vessel was full she set it on the top of her head, her arms just slightly trembling with the effort. The bones of her back lined up one by one from the top of her head to the base of her spine as she straightened her knees to raise the water glittering with the red light of the moon.

She was not afraid. No one had taunted her with tales of djab or loup-garou, wild dogs or wicked men--she'd told no one she meant to go by night to bring the water. The night was still, empty, except for now and then the whistle of a bird. Descent was harder than the climb. She moved more slowly going down, placed her feet more carefully, her back always exactly centered under the rippling moonlit water.

The moon was still low when she reached her lakou. She caught her lip between her teeth as she broke the water from her head and crouched to set it on the ground. The little dog had risen when she crossed the cactus fence, and now he pushed his sharp nose into her palm. She trailed her fingers over his matchstick ribs, and the dog flopped over, presenting his belly to be rubbed. Lusane rolled her weightless head and smiled toward her grandmother, who sat on a stone by the door of the small clay house, her crooked stick in her swollen hands. The moon pushed up above the ridge of the tin roof and caught its own light shimmering in the clear plastic tank of water on the ground.

By the old mortar hollowed from a tree trunk, in the shadow of a young almond tree, her mother and her father quietly argued. Lusane's breath caught. Her father was always asleep at this time. But she knew that because of I'Armée Cannibale he did not want her mother to walk six hours down the mountain beyond Souvenance to reach the market of Gonaives by morning. Their voices were low, and though Lusane could have picked out the words, she left them senseless as the static that spooled from the small transistor radio her father turned between his hands. He turned away, and her mother reached to catch his elbow. For a moment they hung so, in balance, the red moon rising between them. Then her father broke away and went into the house.

Her mother stood rooted like a sapling, swaying slightly with the night wind, amid the whistling of the birds. At last she squatted and began to pack a bushel of bananes loup-garou into a wide enamel pan. Lusane stood up, above the five-gallon water tank she had delivered. The night air breathed across her face.

"W poté dlo déja." Her mother spoke without looking up. You already brought the water.

"Wi Mamanm."

"Têt bèf," her mother muttered. Stubborn. But she nodded toward another cracked white pan and the stalks of smaller, sweeter bananes Ti Malis beside it. "W'ap prete'm lafòs," she said, which might have been a compliment or a command or a simple statement: You lend me strength.

Lusane skipped into the house and groped for the pink dress and a fresh white head cloth. The close interior was loud with her brothers' snoring and smelled of their breath, but her father lay too still to be sleeping. She went out quickly, before he could stop her, shrugging into the pink dress and fumbling the buttons shut up to her collarbone.

By moonlight the pink dress looked yellow, and her mother's head cloth, which was yellow, appeared to be white. The two were alone for a long time on the dark road. The moon grew paler as it climbed above them, became more distant, smaller, colder. Down the center of the road the moon unrolled a wide bright ribbon, but her mother kept to the edge where the long darkness lay, stitching her shadow into the shadow of the trees. Lusane followed close behind. This road was a long way. Already five, six times the climb up the ravine to get the water. Her mother had told her she could not go to market because she must go to bring water by day, and for that Lusane had fetched the water this night. The pan with the bananes Ti Malis was not so heavy on her head as the water tank. Yet it was heavy. Still, her mother carried the heavier load, braced on top of her yellow mouchoir with an extra roll of cloth around the pan of bananes loup-garou.

"Sa w gegne you nou, cheri?" a man's voice grumbled out of the dark. Whatcha got for us, sweetie? A froggy, quivering thing climbed into Lusane's throat. There were stories, moun k'ap manjé moun, men who ate people at Kalfou Sansmaman. Some women who started down the mountain at midnight arrived at the market dressed out as meat.

Her mother walked on without seeming to hear, her head held high beneath her load, her empty hands flowing smoothly around her hips like grass in running water. Her calm and the steadiness of her movement reduced the man and his voice to nothing, away in some other world and unable to reach them. The voice said something indistinct, then crumbled into hoarse laughter and was gone.

They were still walking. Since they had left their lakou they had said no word. Only they walked. How long by now it must have been. The moon was very bright and distant, a freezing pinhole in the curved sky. She did not understand how her mother could continue. Yet she would not disgrace herself. She followed in her mother's steps. At last, with the moon full overhead, she came to feel how a thread of its light shot through her burden and her brain, all down her spine to the bone of her heels; her body turned and flowed around its axis and so she was sustained and her load was lightened.

Now more women were coming out to join them, at Souvenance crossroads and the others they passed. Sometimes her mother gave them a low greeting, and Lusane was heartened by their numbers. Dawn broke as they reached the national road, and one of the women began to sing, and soon the others took it up. Lusane felt the song flower in her throat, and her step quickened, and she was dancing; they all were, singing and dancing the last little way across the alkali plain, past the holy white mound of Morne Saint Juste, into the freshening smell of the sea. When they came to Gonaives, the sun and moon were in the sky together.

Today they sold well, as her mother had argued--today their fruit brought higher prices when many women were afraid to come down from the hills. Lusane could count change; she had been to school, and she bargained fiercely over her stalks of tiny sweet bananas, though if a boy winked at her she felt herself flush and wriggle, acutely conscious (continued on page 136)Moon(continued from page 82) of her new breasts shifting against the pink cloth, beneath the red buttons. The bills they handled were as wrinkled and illegible as elephant hide, but their value could be told by size, and Lusane passed the large ones to her mother, whose deft fingers tucked them under the red sash.

Her mother was pleased and bought them hot, spicy acras to eat and a stalk of sugarcane to chew. She bought a bolt of cloth and a paper of needles, a spool of thread, a small bag of rice, hot peppers and coffee beans, and still there was money under the red sash. There still were bananes loup-garou to sell, though not so many, and it was hardly noon. Lusane had sold the bananes Ti Malis; her pan was empty.

The market crowd poured over them, thick and sluggish as cane syrup; now and then a bubble flowed by in the stream, containing two or three men of the Cannibal Army. They had no uniforms, but their head cloths marked them, and the small machine guns and rigwaz whips they carried. Naturally people gave them room. When the hard lenses of their sunglasses beetled across her, Lusane did as her mother had done, walking in the shadows of the dark road, and felt herself invisible to them until they passed.

The tenor of the market babble changed, as birdsong changes its tune before rain, but Lusane barely had time to notice before everyone surged up, shouting, smacking one another with baskets and stools; a water seller's tray of tin cups fell. Her mother snatched at Lusane's arm, then turned to draw her into her train. They were moving together in the human wave, which was so turbulent that her mother was not able to raise her enamel pan to her head; she carried it before her in both arms. Then Lusane realized she had failed to pick up her own pan, which was a catastrophe, though it had been empty. She tried to turn back, but in the stampede it was hopeless, and if she stopped for anything she would be trampled. Someone had already stolen the pan. Lusane began to cry, but the tears were shocked out of her when she faced forward: The red sash on the blue dress was nowhere.

A rattling sound, like the wind through dry cane but horribly louder, brought dreadful screams in its wake. All at once Lusane was the only person standing in the white, dusty street, though some of the CIMO men were lying down in front of the hissing tires of their trucks. They were dead when they lay down like that, their arms and legs all crooked. She found her mother, not far away, or at least there was the blue dress with the red sash, but the head cloth was the wrong color, dark and wet.

Someone was crying, with frightening wails, like herself outside her body, only Lusane did not want to cry. She was only trying to think what to do, and then she knew. Besides the high keening, someone was shouting to her to get down, to get off the street, and she dropped to her knees, then to all fours, and found the pan where her mother had dropped it and turned it upright to collect the contents: the paper of needles, the bolt of cloth.... The thread had partly unrolled in the spill, and she wound it up carefully, sitting back on her heels to do it, finally catching the loose end in the notch on the spool that was meant to retain it. The wind-in-cane-leaves sound came again, this time with a noise like wasps around her ears. More voices screamed at her to get out of the street.

She scooped up the coffee, still intact. The rice bag had split open along a seam, and under the fire of the noon sun the grains were almost indistinguishable from the white dust. She scooped a handful, but it was half gravel, pebbles jingling when she dropped it in the pan. Leave it, then. She dragged the pan back toward her mother. When she crawled that way, she saw the men of the Cannibal Army crouching behind a wrecked cargo container and the chassis of a ruined truck, firing at the CIMO men, who were behind her now. One of the Cannibal Army rose to a half crouch and waved his rigwaz furiously that she should leave the street--then he spun away, as if an invisible hand had snatched his shoulder. The wasps whined again around her ears. She straightened her mother's legs; the limbs were still flexible; she could do it.

It was hard to let go of the strong bare feet, but she made herself release them. No more mistakes after losing the pan. The feet were still warm, but she let them go. White dust was in her mother's open eyes, and with her thumb she rolled them shut. It was all out of order--it should have been her grandmother who died before her mother, and then the houngan would come up from Souvenance for dessounen, to shepherd the spirit out of her grandmother's head and make it safe. She let the thought go and weighted her mother's eyelids with two small flat stones that had fallen in the pan when she tried to gather the rice, then sat on her heels to look at the face, calmer now with the eyes closed. This time when the wasps sang by one stung her cheek, and she flinched and lowered herself, gathering her mother's hands and folding them across the breastbone. Again, it was difficult, hard to let go. Her mother's ribs felt frail as the dog's.

She remembered to slip her fingers under the red sash for the sweaty fold of worn-out paper money. It made her nauseous for a second to think how close she'd come to forgetting. She herself had no pockets and no sash. She thought and then crawled forward and unfastened the bloody cloth from her mother's head. With her own white mouchoir, she covered her mother's face. Then she stood up and turned into the wind from the sea. They had meant to walk down to the port after the market, to see the boats on the water along the promenade of the Bicentenaire. She let her mother's cloth flag back in the wind and then began to fasten it to her own head. The shooting had stopped, and the screaming had stopped, and even that wailing woman's cry had stopped. As she finished the knot at the back of her head, she tucked the money in just above it, under the cloth and hidden by the twist of her hair, where she could feel the packet pressed between the tendons of her neck. She crouched and carefully set the enamel pan on her bound head.

The shooting resumed as she stepped forward. Now she could see that the Cannibal Army was firing from the upper galleries of the houses on both sides of the street, as well as from its barricade behind her and even from points beyond where the CIMO trucks lay crippled. She did not increase her pace. The pan was so lightly loaded it might easily topple. She stepped deliberately, laying her bare feet soft in the white dust. Her empty hands swam free around her hips.

When she reached the shadow of the galleries, the people cowering there moved back to give her room. She walked. Her head was hollow like a gourd; only her feet remembered the way. The Commissariat was burning now, where they had passed before, and the restaurant across the street was burning. The air was black with smoke of burning tires.

•

On the way out of town she began to cry, so hard that she was blinded, and she staggered unconsciously toward the middle of the road. A police truck, screaming away to the north, nearly ran her down. Then she made herself stop crying. She could not move if she was blind, and she knew if she stopped moving she would die. She didn't know how it would happen, but she knew that it would. She kept on walking, her eyes parched and hot. Blood from the crease on her cheek dried at the corner of her mouth; from time to time her tongue rasped over it. The burnt-rubber smell began to fade, but all the air was charged with the alkali dust, spun up by cars and trucks and motorbikes and the hooves of donkeys and running feet, as everyone rushed as fast as they could out of Gonaives.

Lusane's bare feet burned on the shattered asphalt. Then they went numb. The money pushed into the back of her neck like a thorn. It was strange how heavily the pan pressed her down when after all it held no real weight: the needles, thread, cloth and a few coffee beans--she hadn't collected the hot peppers, she remembered with an awful shock, had seen them nowhere near her mother's body. Strange how it seemed the weight would crush her, as if the whole white moon had fallen into her enamel pan, rocky and dry and hard and huge as the desert mound of Morne Saint Juste.

When at last she turned from the national road there was shade, though the ascent grew steeper. She had been climbing all the way from Gonaives, and she could not think of all the hills that were still to climb, nor of one battered foot falling after the other. That was too hard. She must be with the chord that rang from her loaded head to the base of her heels and kept her flowing constantly forward. Last night the moon had borne her up, and now she felt her load release as she moved deeper into the green shade, surrounded by her mother's spirit as if after all the houngan Bien Aimé had come up from Souvenance to bring that spirit back from beneath the flood so it would be in every cup of water Lusane carried, below the surface of any pool, on the other side of every mirror, beneath each fold of a white cloth. Her mother was parting the way before her, as she had done when she walked in life. She was behind and above and around her, too, invisibly present like the vanished moon.

Wherever Lusane walked, the people gave way for her. At Souvenance crossroads she was tempted to turn; she knew every step of the way that would carry her to that lakou, through the gate where Attibon Legba, keeper of the crossroads, slept in the piled stones, beyond the houses and across the cornfield into the orb of cool green beneath the grand old couple of trees where the ancestral spirits named Mawu-Lisa rested. But she had already gone beyond the crossroads. At once a number of things became clear to her, though without pain in the spirit eye: her father's anger and his fear, his gesture at the red moon rising. That man of the Cannibal Army had risen to try to save her life and taken a bullet in the shoulder for it. She remembered that Bien Aimé, the well-loved one, was dead; there was another houngan now at Souvenance, and still she felt his presence with her mother's spirit and all les morts et les mystères, breaking gravity from her back and floating her uphill, upstream.

Kalfou Sansmaman was still to pass. There, last night's voice was made visible: a man, maybe just a boy with a frog in his throat and a green jungle hat and an old AK-47.

Sa w gegne pou nou, cheri?

His eyes slid over her breasts and thighs as she rose toward him, but she saw herself in the spirit eye, five years old and climbing the ravine to carry water under the incandescent sun. In the low ground a long-horned, wraithlike cow licked the wet gravel, and a little higher a naked youth lay on his side by the weak stream to wash himself as best he could, his eyes turned inward so he would not be ashamed.

"W pa wé'm?" He shook the gun and struck himself in the chest with his free hand as she came nearer. Don't you see me? When she had gone by he turned and ran to pose himself a dozen yards uphill from her so that she must pass him another time. The spirit eye found her child self at the head of the ravine, the clear five-gallon tank centered on her head. She had made only her first few steps of the descent when two boys, neither larger than she, stopped her and demanded water. She smiled and made them a deep curtsey so they might serve themselves from a white saucer floating in the tank. One boy tasted the water and offered it to his friend and spat and sloshed the rest of the saucerful into the stream that whispered around their feet. Then both of them turned away from her without a word. The whole time she'd been smiling at them as charmingly as she knew how, but today she wasn't smiling, and she wasn't going to bend her knees, and she wasn't going to offer her belly like a dog. She walked into the black hole of the gun.

There was the click of a chambered round, and another man knocked down the barrel. "W pa wé lespri ave'l?" he said as Lusane passed. Don't you see the spirit with her? Lusane didn't hear it. She walked on.

•

A ghost of daylight still remained when she reached her lakou and pushed open the rickety weave of sticks and wire that served as a gate in the waist-high cactus. The radio squawked in her father's hands: "Government forces driven out of Gonaives." He jumped up when she entered, and his large eyes read the story from her mother's bloody head cloth. Maybe he had already known, for he covered his face only for a moment before he came to take her hand. Her brothers were lifting the load from her head, which was something she had never known them to do, and her grandmother limped up and kissed both her cheeks and loosened the knot of the bloodstained cloth, passing the packet of money before Lusane's eyes so she would know that the money was safe. Lusane was sitting on the stone. The little dog licked her bruised feet, and one of her brothers brought water from the tank so that her grandmother could begin to wash the blood out of her hair. Another brother raised a cup to her cracked lips. She swallowed, then leaned back and rolled her head, loosening the muscles where the money had pressed, letting the ache come out of her back. She let the hands of her family hold her, but the weight of the moon was still on her.

She Trieo to turn back, but in the Stampeoe it was Hopeless, and if she Stopped to return for anything she would be Trampleo

White dust was in her mother's open eyes, and with her thumb she rolled them shut.