Sure enough, hanging from the wood was a gold chain with a pendant for la Virgen de la Altagracia on one side and a Dominican flag on the other. The virgin glistened under the light of the moon like a magic talisman with its own internal light.
“That’s mine!” Jose yelled with such conviction that the young woman immediately handed him the chain. “I was loading this pile on the truck this morning when I noticed I no longer had my chain,” he explained as he took it from her.
This much was true. He had worked with the wood crew for the last two days, cutting and loading the cedar for tonight’s event. What his boat mates did not know was that the chain belonged to his friend Luis, whose family had reported him missing two days ago when he did not return home after his fracas with Jose.
At that moment, “El Niágara en bicicleta,” a song by Juan Luis Guerra, burst from Jose’s pocket. As Jose answered his phone, the loading of the boat resumed. At the other end of the line, he heard the familiar sound of his mother’s voice. With a deep exasperated sigh, he said, “Qué pasa?”
His mother was worried. She had received a call from the police asking about her son. Apparently, witnesses of the fight at Club Juan Pablo Duarte had spoken to the agents investigating Luis’s disappearance and therefore Jose had become a person of interest.
Luis’s words, “Todos somos negros,” repeated in Jose’s brain like a broken record.
“Jose,” his mother was asking, “did you have anything to do with Luis’s disappearance?”
“Por favor, mamá, don’t believe the worst,” Jose replied. “Luis is probably partying in New York or Boston and has not bothered to call.”
Any other time he would have been mortified at the prospect of lying to his mother. But now he felt completely justified: she had lied to him all his life about his father. He knew. He had been there when Luis uttered his last words, nearly drowned by the sound of the wood chipper: “Jodio negro.” You damned negro.
“When are you coming home?” his mother asked him.
“As soon as the fires are out,” he said. Then he bade her farewell, “Okay, okay, okay!” When he hurriedly pressed the red bar of the iPhone, he noticed the cuticle of his index finger was stained red.
*
The skipper whistled with two fingers in his mouth to signal that it was time to return to the fires. The boat was loaded and the pyres were hungry for fresh wood. Barnaby Evans, the artist and director of WaterFire, stood on the other bank of the river forming a giant V with his arms to convey his impatience with the volunteers. When the skipper noticed the boss, he waved and nodded, signaling that he understood and was on the case. It was Jose’s turn to be in the front of the boat leading the effort of rekindling the fires. As the boat slowly approached the floating cauldron, the line of volunteers on the side loaded the wood onto the fire with a solemnity very much in tune with the piped-in music.
Jose was distracted by his thoughts, so there was a slight delay in loading the logs onto the next bonfire.
“Wake up, Jose!” the skipper screamed.
But his mind had drifted back to forty-eight hours earlier when Luis came to visit the lumberyard where Jose was preparing the cedar. Long, slender red logs had to be cut into cylindrical pieces and then split, ready for lighting. As he cut his last log he heard the familiar greeting from his friend. Luis had a somber face and his shoulders were rolled forward with the weight of a truth he had been carrying for a long while.
*
The fight the day before was the final straw for Luis, and he could no longer hold his peace. He had come upon the truth of Jose’s father during his last trip to the DR when he was inquiring about his citizenship status. Luis was in the final steps of obtaining his dual citizenship, something he cherished enormously, dreaming of a day when he could return to the land of his ancestors full of money and respect. Born a US citizen from Dominican parents would have been a slam dunk the year before, but now, after the constitutional court had revoked his parents’ citizenship, he had to reapply under a different class: a Haitian. As he was researching his grandparents’ entry into the country, he met his Uncle Frantz, still living in the house where his ancestors first set foot in the country to work in the sugarcane fields. Luis was delighted by the stories his uncle shared, until the conversation turned to people they both knew.