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

“No. But this is a new world here, with new rules. He is making his. I am making mine. You know what mine will be.”

“Neither of your rules are new for me, or for your sister, or for Ti Me.” I thought of the banner at Cunningham College, with its list of what made men and what made women. “We have always lived under them, whether there or here.”

He turned back. I could feel his breath, hot on my face; he had brought himself as close to me as possible. “You are protected and cherished. I cherish you. And because of that, he will respect you,” he said. “You have my love and devotion and my promise to always protect you. And you live in a country where I am considered man enough to make that happen. It would not be so back at your mama’s house. You know that.”

“You do not understand.”

“What is there to understand?”

“You have freedom to define yourself, and I do not have any.”

“You would not be asking for this if you loved and trusted me,” he said. “It is the same with your mother. She did not trust me to wrap a bandage around a woman’s arm without her oversight. But I thought you were different than her. That you had a better sense of what was possible.”

I could feel his expectancy. But I did not want to give it to him. To give it to him would have been betrayal.

I sat up in bed, put my feet on the floor, and began the walk to the cooking shed.

In the shed, I slept on the worktable. There was a hole in the roof, through which you could see the stars. I fell asleep looking up at them and was awakened only when Ti Me came in and gasped.

“You scared me, mamselle.”

“I am sorry,” I said. “But I think I will stay here with you for a while, if you wish.”

“You have scared Monsieur Emmanuel. He and Ella searched the house for you and now he is walking the street, calling for you. You did not hear?”

“No.” I rolled over, onto my side.

“They are trying to find you.”

“Just let me rest here, please. You will not get in trouble. I will tell them I told you to let me sleep here.”

“You would be more comfortable upstairs.”

“Do you know, Ti Me, that when you are with child, your ribs float apart? Just like logs in a river. Float right apart.”

“You are ill, mamselle.”

“I only want to lie here for a little bit longer,” I said. “When Monsieur Emmanuel returns, I will go back upstairs.”

I could not see her expression in the dark, but I heard her turn to go back to the house. I felt the room grow cool around me. I could smell the peppers drying on strings on the wall. The grain of the worktable mixed with the blood of all the chickens cut and quartered. It was almost comforting. It reminded me of Mama.

“You will not get up?” It was Emmanuel standing over me, speaking in his softest tones.

“No.”

“You would sleep better inside.”

“It is good enough here for Ti Me.”

“She is not with child.”

You and your father see to that. “No, she is not.”

“Come,” he said. I felt him pull at the back of my smock.

I hunched down further, my knees bunched up against the squash of my lower belly. “I will not move. So do not try.”

“You are being ridiculous.”

“I am only asking to be left alone for a little while.”

He said something low to Ti Me, who sucked in her teeth. Then he was gone, and it was me and her, lying there in the dark, with the chicken feathers floating around us.

I turned around again to look at her.

“Is it true, Ti Me?”

She was quiet for a long time. I could hear her breathing into the straw pallet. Then she sighed.

“Emmanuel feels like a son to me,” she said. “Sometimes, he feels like a brother.”

“Bishop Chase did that to you, what Ella said.”

“It was not like that,” she said. “Miss Ella is young and misunderstands.”

“I do not think so.”

Quiet again. Finally, she said, “Bishop does many things to many girls. You know what a man is like. It is no good to wish for something different. It’s not possible.”

I listened to Ti Me’s breath slow for a long time. I listened to the night all around us. It was a queer thing that the night here in Haiti was not frightening. It was almost like a friend. I thought of lying in the Gradys’ parlor, overwhelmed by loneliness. Of the night around my mother’s house, always threatening to be broken by someone else’s need—the knock on the door, the summons of “Doctor, come quick!”

That was not part of the night here. Sleeping in the cooking shed meant I could hear the sounds from the street more clearly. The bray of a baby goat lost for a moment from its mother. The rising and falling hum of insect wings fluttering. And far away, the roll of the ocean. I imagined I could hear the creak of a ship there, too. Would I take it, if I could? And if I did, where would it carry me? I had once believed escape was possible.

Emmanuel had always accused me of not loving the country. But as I listened to the night, I realized I loved it. I loved this land. If there was an answer to any of this, it was in the hills and the water around me. I loved it maybe even more than Emmanuel did. I loved it enough to wish more for it and my life there than what Emmanuel or his father could imagine.

Here is how you live in the cooking shed.

You make sure to wake up each morning before Ti Me, to wipe down the table you slept on. You roll off the table very carefully—your belly is heavy by then. Before you decided