The Farming of Bones Read Online Free PDF

Never had a name. My Luis, he loves children. If they could grow out of the ground, he would have grown one for me long ago. At this moment in life, a woman asks herself: What good is all this flesh? Why did I have this body?”
    Juana and her sisters had been raised in a convent school where their mother was the cook. She was going to be a nun like her two sisters until she met Luis. She and Luis left together and settled in the valley. Juana thought she couldn’t have children because she had abandoned her calling. Even her lost pregnancy must have seemed like a deserved punishment from a God she had defied.
    “Look at me,” she said, rotating her arms as though she were ironing. “I have no need to cry for myself. I must cry for Doña Rosalinda, who died in the attempt to bring a second child into the family. And I must cry for Señora Valencia, who’s without her mother on this day.”

7
    One night, in the awakened dark, when he is missing his father, Sebastien asks, “What was it that you admired most about your father?”
    I pretend that I cannot remember, but he insists. “Please tell me, Amabelle, I wish to know this.”
    “My father’s name was Antoine Désir,” I say because I know he will ask it again. “I always heard people call him Fre Antoine, Brother Antoine, like they called my mother Man Irelle, Mother Irelle. My mother was older than him, I believe, and some say she looked it.”
    “Tell me what you liked most about him, your father.” Sebastien’s voice is more hesitant than usual, it’s as though he really does not want to know, like he would rather I say I never had a father, but he knows I had one, whom I lost like he lost his.
    “My father was joyful, contrary to my mother’s quietly unhappy ways,” I admit. “He used to pick me up and try to throw me up in the air, even when I became too heavy to be carried, even when everything he did ceased to seem like a miracle to me. He liked to make like he was going to eat my food if he finished his plate before I finished mine. He spent a lot of time doing the birthing and healing work. He was always looking for some new way to heal others, searching for cures for illnesses that he had not yet even encountered. Aside from the birthing and healing work he and my mother did together, he spent a lot of time outside the house trying to help other people plow their fields and dig waterways to their land. I was always very jealous of the time he spent on other people’s land.”
    I can tell, he is ready. He wants me to ask about his dead father. I can tell by the endless pause after I’m done speaking, the way he opens his mouth now and again and then only sighs as if to ask himself where he could possibly make himself begin.
    “How did the hurricane find your father?” I end up saying. It is not the gentlest or most deft way to ask, but I believe it will help him speak.
    He opens his mouth a few more times and moans.
    “If you let yourself,” he says finally, “you can see it before your eyes, a boy carrying his dead father from the road, wobbling, swaying, stumbling under the weight. The boy with the wind in his ears and pieces of the tin roofs that opened the father’s throat blowing around him. The boy trying not to drop the father, not crying or screaming like you’d think, but praying that more of the father’s blood will stay in the father’s throat and not go into the muddy flood, going no one knows where. If you let yourself, you can see it before your eyes.”

8
    Señor Pico Duarte bore the name of one of the fathers of Dominican independence, a name that he had shared with the tallest mountain on the island until recently, when it was rechristened Pico Trujillo after the Generalissimo. Yet, at thirty-six years of age, Señor Pico Duarte was still shorter than the average man, even in his military boots, which seemed to add height to the other officers. With his honey-almond skin and charcoal eyes, he was the one that baby