Douen Mother

Description: (Sold to Abyss and Apex 2006)

(Copyright R.S.A. Garcia 2006)

Douen Mother

Watch her good, they said to her husband.  The old ones who came to the wake that evening, wearing their black skirts and their white shirts.  Heads covered with pieces of silk decorated with blue, yellow, green, red flowers.  They think she is dead to their talk and their bright-eyed concern.  They feel safe to grip Stewart’s hand as he passes around the coffee, the biscuits and cheese, the rum for the men standing on the veranda outside.

Watch her good, an’ don’ let her go in the forest, they whisper, one after the other.  Young mother like that, to lose a child is a terrible thing.  The forest does wait for that.  Get water from the river for yourself.  Don’ let her go until she better.

As if she will ever be better.

She sits by the door, open to the gathering evening and the stream of guests and sympathizers, macos who only want to see so they can pass the gossip, family, friends and neighbours.  She watches her husband do the job that is hers by right and feels hand after hand press hers, barely hearing the condolences murmured into her ear.

She knows that none of them understand.  Outside, the dry January wind freshens and pushes the leaves in the trees against each other.  They whisper like naughty children.  Wood creaks under the low talk the men of the village make as they smoke their cigarettes and sip their rum and coke.  Soon the heat of the day will give way to the chilly Caribbean night, with countless stars jostling for primacy in the ink-blue sky.

Her baby will never know these sights and sounds.  Never feel the wind on his face as she rocks him in her granny’s chair on the veranda.  All she has ever wanted is the chance to be the woman in her dreams that rocks her baby to sleep.  None of that now, and the doctors say, never again.  The pain that slips between her ribs makes her catch her breath and sit up straight.

She wonders for the thousandth time what would have happened if she had promised…

The old ones watch and whisper:  She not looking right, oui.  That dress fit her good, good at Jo-Jo wedding, and now look how it hanging.  Stewart better keep a good head on he shoulders before the Douen make off with he wife.

Douen.  The word fills her with cold, with a dull sort of apprehension.  She listens, wondering how they know.  How they have guessed.  But the talk swings to something else.  To the hot dry season, and the sickness Gopaul’s cows have that making them drop down jus’ so.

She relaxes, her iron resolve a hard, warm nugget that she nurses in her breast.  Nurses like the baby boy she’s lost, just five days out of her womb.

Outside, the trees whisper.

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Whisper and talk as the setting sun turns the undergrowth into a deep green blur, and orange rays slant between branches.  The river talks to itself, murmuring over rocks and the silt bed.  She bends down to collect the bit of blue soap her mother forgot, and some animal leaps from the water in a sleek line, splashing her bare feet with cool droplets under the knee-high hemline of her battered home dress.

She grins, watching the sparkle that lingers on the river, before turning to start back through the forest to her village on the other side.

That’s when she sees a small, pale-brown hand slip away from the leaves to her left, hears the rustle of the bush falling back into place.

“Hello?” she says, her eight-year-old voice small in the listening silence.  The birds that sang so stridently before have fallen still.  “Somebody there?”