Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

her eyes tight. I did not sit beside her. What Emmanuel could not see would not hurt him. Instead, I stood at the back of the church beside Ti Me. It was not even noon, and the room was already too warm.

By the afternoon, my knees wobbled from standing and the noise outside was overwhelming. Bishop Chase raised his voice until he was hoarse, but it did not matter. Outside was a great rush of laughter and footsteps and singing.

I glanced over at Ti Me, who had stopped listening to the bishop altogether. Her face was turned toward the street. The expression on it was one of such open longing I felt a rush of pity. It did not seem fair that Ti Me should also be punished by my husband’s sense of propriety.

I tapped her on the shoulder, and she startled.

I smiled, though, and whispered, “Ou vle ale la?”

She looked at me for a moment, as if deciding something.

I pointed out the doors, where a woman, her face streaked with white powder, her skirts hiked to her hips, was running past, a little boy laughing, trying to keep up with her.

Ti Me nodded, once. I took her hand and walked the two of us out of the church.

As the doors swung shut behind us, I heard the men and women inside begin to rustle, the priest call for us to return, and the whoosh of Bishop Chase’s robes as he stood up from his seat.

I had finally done something to provoke a reaction from him, and I could not stop smiling as Ti Me and I ran through the streets in the sun.

“Ki kote li ye?” I panted. Where is it?

“Simityè a,” she said. The cemetery. And then she squeezed my hand.

The graveyard in Jacmel was a little bit above the city, in the hills, so that the dead had a view of the ocean and the living in the town below them. In those days, it was not as big as it would become, but it was still an impressive place. The graves there were aboveground stone mausoleums. Some had columns and porticos; others were nothing more than solemn boxes with tops to shift off when the dead were buried. It was not like our graveyard back home, with its little pebbles, that I cut the grass from. Who is cleaning father’s grave now that I’m gone? I wondered as we ran.

I thought of my mother, now left to tend two graves alone for the rest of her days, and felt a flush of shame, again—at my hasty marriage, at my foolishness. But I did not have time to feel sorry for myself, because as we drew closer, we were swept up by the crush of people at the cemetery gate, jostling one another, pressing close, hoping to get in and join their friends.

A man stood at the gate, his face dusted in white chalk, a top hat on. On his nose was balanced three pairs of spectacles, all with the glass missing. He had stuffed white cloth into his ears and mouth, like we do whenever we prepare a body for burial. He removed his cloth only to speak in a nasally, high-pitched singsong that I could not understand. Beside him was another man, taller, who was inspecting everyone who came past. All around us, everyone was eager for his scrutiny.

I nudged Ti Me. “Kiyès li ye?”

She snorted. “You talk to me in English. It will be easier.”

“Who is that?”

“Papa Gede,” she said. “And Brave Gede. Papa Gede, he wears the top hat, he is the first man who ever died in this world. He knows what happens to us in the land of the living, and he knows what happens to those in the land of the dead. The man next to him, that is Brave Gede. He guards the graveyard and keeps the dead inside. He keeps the living out. He decides who enters today to play with the dead.”

“Will he let us in?”

Ti Me snorted again. She walked faster, through the crowd. I had no choice but to follow her.

When we reached the gate, the man in the spectacles widened his eyes and the taller man threw back his head. Both of them laughed as we approached and began to yell even louder. But whatever they were shouting did not frighten Ti Me; she began to laugh, too. And both men waved their hands, as if to say You shall pass, and Ti Me stepped boldly into the cemetery.

I tried to follow, but as I did, one of the men yelled something again, in that sharp, nasally voice, so strange.

Ti Me laughed to herself but kept moving.

“Why does he talk like that?” I asked her as I hesitated just past the entrance. I could feel the heat of the crowd pressing against my back.

“He speaks in the voice of the dead,” Ti Me said. “The dead all sound like that.”

“What did he say?”

“I will tell you after, mamselle.”

In the graveyard, people were crowding around two tombs, pressing forward, laughing, singing. Some were resting against the walls of the dead, others placing bowls of food and drink on the tops. “These are the tombs of the first woman who died, Manman Briggette, and her husband,” Ti Me said. “And here is the tomb of the first to die by the hand of man, and there is the first murder. They are all here to call up the dead.”

All around us was the sharp smell of rum. A woman danced past, a jug held high above her head, the liquid sloshing out, down her arm, on her face. Some of it sprayed on me. I coughed when it touched my lips.

“It burns you, eh?” Ti Me laughed again. “Piman needs to be hot,” she said. “You take a whole string of peppers, ten strings even, and mix them with clairin. It has to be hot enough to warm up the dead.”

The woman with the jug stopped