THE FARMING OF BONES.

• Author: Danticat, Edwidge
• Position: Excerpt - Fiction

It is a Friday, market day. My mother, my father, and me, we cross into Dajabon, the first Dominican town across the river. My mother wants to buy cooking pots made by a Haitian pot maker named Moy who lives there, the best pot maker in the area. There is a gleam to Moy's pots that makes you think you are getting a gem. They never darken even after they have been used on outdoor cooking fires for years.

In the afternoon, as we set out to wade across the river again with our two new shiny pots, it starts to rain in the mountains, far upstream. The air is heavy and moist; a wide rainbow arc creeps away from the sky, dark rain clouds moving in to take its place.

We are at a distance from the bridge. My father wants us to hurry home. There is still time to cross safely, he says, if we hasten. My mother tells him to wait and see, to watch the current for a while.

"We have no time to waste," my father insists.

"I'll carry you across, and then I'll come back for Amabelle and the pots," my father says.

We walk down from the levee. My father looks for the shallows, where the round-edged rust-colored boulders we'd used before as stepping stones have already disappeared beneath the current.

"Hold the pots," my mother tells me. "Papa will come back for you soon."

On the levee are a few river rats, young boys, both Haitian and Dominican, who for food or one or two coins, will carry people and their merchandise across the river on their backs. The current is swelling, the pools enlarging. Even the river rats are afraid to cross.

My father reaches into the current and sprinkes his face with the water, as if to salute the spirit of the river and request her permission to enter. My mother crosses herself three times and looks up to the sky before she climbs on my father's back. The water reaches up to Papa's waist as soon as he steps in. Once he is in the river, he flinches, realizing that he has made a grave mistake.

My mother turns back to look for me, throwing my father off balance. A flow of mud fills the shallows. My father thrusts his hands in...