Her father put an end to the woman’s questioning by making a joke about the mayor’s victory and how many bad speeches Gaspard would be forced to suffer through if he remained in town. This made the woman’s jingly laugh sound as though it were coming out of her nose. Reaching closer to the kerosene lamp, Claire expertly captured a spotted tiger moth between her palms, not sure whom she wanted to imagine it to be, the fabric vendor or her father.
The good news, though, was that this would be the only day her father would do this for a year. The rest of the year, he’d act as though he would always keep her, letting life go on as usual. During the week, she’d go to the Protestant preschool where she had received a charity scholarship, requiring her father to only pay a few Haitian dollars a month. At night, she would sit by the lamp and try not to be distracted by the moths as she recited the alphabet out loud. He would enjoy the singsong and her hard work and would miss it during her holidays from school. The rest of the time, he would go out to sea at the crack of dawn and always come back with something for her to eat. He’d talk about going to work in construction or the fishing trade in the neighboring Dominican Republic, but he would always make it sound as though it was something the two of them could do together, not something he’d have to abandon her to do. But as soon as her birthday would come, he would begin talking about it again, chèche lavi, going away to make a life for himself, placing her with someone, finding her a family. His and his dead wife’s relatives, whom they’d left behind in the hills, had it even harder than he did. Rather than a nearly barren sea, they had the dry eroded earth to contend with and already too many mouths to feed. If he died they would take the girl, but only because they had no choice, because that’s what families do, because fòk youn voye je sou lòt. We must all look after one another. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
That night after the fabric vendor left, colorful sparks rose up and filled the night sky before fading and plummeting into the sea. With cannonlike explosions, the mayor was celebrating his victory with fireworks. Still lying on her foam mattress as her father snored on his across the room, Claire couldn’t help but feel like she was the one who’d won.
The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned five was a Sunday, so she and Gaspard walked to the beach in the morning, watching a sandy pool that had formed, where a group of children splashed inside a ring of brown water then plunged into the sea to rinse themselves. Claire wore the pink muslin sundress, which Gaspard had ordered made for her in the same color and style but a slightly smaller size the year before. The afternoon air felt sticky on her skin as though they were trapped in one of the many humid air pockets where the sea breeze met the stifling heat of the town. Moving away from the beach, Gaspard motioned toward town. Even before they turned their backs to the sea, Claire knew that, just like the previous year, they’d be visiting her mother’s grave.
The main road was crowded with pedestrians either dodging or hailing moto taxis and tap taps. Gaspard held his nose up and sniffed the air, breathing in the scent of soft tar on an asphalted stretch. Raising his arm to respond to the occasional greeting, he kept walking at a steady clip, daring her to keep up. Passing a Vodou temple with pictures of Catholic saints doubling as lwas, he pointed out, just as he had many times, the glowing face of a pale Mater Dolorosa and said, “The goddess of love, èzili Freda, your mother liked her.”
Claire had never seen a picture of her mother. There were simply none. If not for the class portrait at the Protestant school, which her father had not purchased, there would be no pictures of her either.
Leaving the main road behind, they cut through a narrow dirt track with wooden houses enclosed by tall cactus fences. Claire trailed behind her father as he followed the smell of wet pine and burnt sugar in the air. A muddied rubber-booted man returning from the cane fields with an overburdened mule called out to them, “Paying a visit to the dead Mesye Gaspard and Manzè Claire?”
Gaspard nodded, as he did to everyone else who greeted him from then on.
The burial site was next to a cane field so vast that Claire couldn’t even see where it ended. Standing on the edge of the twenty or so cement crosses rising out of the hilly terra cotta earth, she forgot at first which one was her mother’s. Her father bent down and, using the end of his shirt, wiped a light coat of red mud off the letters of her mother’s name. She could only read the letters because she had just learned to write her name at school. Her mother’s name had also been Claire, Claire Narcis. Her father had decided to call her Claire Limyè Lanmè, Claire of the sea light, after her mother died.
Squatting there with one knee lodged in the moist earth, Gaspard spat on the end of his shirt, but could not produce enough saliva to further clean his wife’s headstone.
“Need some from you too,” he told his daughter, who at first hesitated then playfully obliged, digging deep into the back of her throat with adultlike grunts.
Next to her mother’s was a year-old grave with a polished gray cross that was smaller than the others. On the cross was a metal wreath, painted in pale blue and white with a brown angel carved on the front. It was the grave of a child.
This was one of many times that Claire wished she knew how to read and write more than her own name. Her father didn’t even know that much, so she couldn’t ask him to read the name for her, to tell her who the child was that her mother was now looking after in death.
Once her father was done wiping her mother’s headstone, covering the entire front of his shirt with the red earth, he sat down on the stone slab that in Claire’s mind kept her mother forever pinned to the earth.
Gaspard was mumbling, talking to himself as he sat there, seeming strangely at home among the dead, until he saw the fabric vendor.
The woman was wearing a white lace dress with a polka dot scarf wrapped around her head.
“I knew she would come today,” he said, quickly standing up.
Grabbing Claire’s hand, he pulled her forward, blocking the woman’s way. The woman peeked over his shoulder at the child’s grave with the angel wreath on top.
“Do you remember my daughter?” her father asked while nervously patting Claire’s shoulder.
“Please let me remember mine,” the woman said.
The day Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned four, the fabric vendor’s seven-year-old daughter, Rose, was riding in the back of a moto taxi with her teenage caretaker, when a private car rear-ended the motorcycle and sent Rose flying fifteen feet into the air, forcing her to land, headfirst, on the ground. Rose was plump, like her mother, and her hair was perfectly coiffed. The mother did it herself in playful and colorful designs, carving simple flower and butterfly shapes into the girl’s scalp. Those, like Gaspard, who witnessed the accident, swore that when Rose’s body ascended from the rear of the motorcycle, she almost seemed to be flying out of her primary school uniform-an azure pleated skirt and spotless white shirt with white tennis shoes and lace-topped ankle socks-raising both her hands and actually flapping them before she hit the ground.
It was not the first time Gaspard had seen an accident like this. This was a small and sometimes unlucky town and the narrow, mostly unpaved streets were crowded with motorcycles and cars. But none of the previous accidents had been so personally disheartening. He had expected Rose to scream at some point-just as the mothers and other spectators had rushed up to the spot, cradled their heads in their hands, and screamed-but the girl had not even made one sound.
The moto taxi had nearly reached the mother’s fabric shop when the accident happened, so it did not take long for word to reach the fabric vendor, who even before she was told the details was bent over and retching, looking only at the ground as she made her way through the stalled traffic toward where her child was lying, bloody and still, in the dust.