“It burns you, eh?” Ti Me laughed again. “Piman needs to be hot,” she said. “You take a whole string of peppers, ten strings even, and mix them with clairin. It has to be hot enough to warm up the dead.”

The woman with the jug stopped a few feet ahead of us, the crowd making room for her as she began to twirl and laugh and roll her hips. She splashed the liquid on her chest, poured it over her hands, rubbed it into her face. Someone handed her a long red pepper, and she took that, too, stuffing it into her left nostril. Another went in her ear, where it promptly fell out and onto the ground.

“That woman is ridden by a gede. The spirits found her, and she is their horse. They will move through her body. The dead are cold, but we can warm them up. He needs piman to warm him up.”

The woman began to hunch down lower, to sing and to dance faster. A few people in the crowd joined her, others laughed, and some began singing another song altogether. Above us, the sun hung low in the sky, and I could see, from the cemetery gate, the harbor with the light shining bright over it, the sea turned to waves of white light in the dusk.

I had thought when I came here, I would be able to become a new person. That I would become someone for whom it did not matter that I had failed my mother. And, I supposed, that had happened. I became a wife and a sister and a daughter to people who could not see me. But was that any better than what I had been at home, beside my mother? I thought now, It is useless. I had thought then, It is lost.

I looked at the crowd rejoicing in the graves. The man closest to me pulled a femur bone from on top of one of the tombs and waved it in the air in slow circles. A few people walked with goats on leads or held in their arms. The sound of laughter kept up all around me. It had gone from a shock to a comfort to something that warmed me on the inside, that made my blood beat, that at least told me I was alive.

Ti Me had given up her role as nurse to me and was now standing by herself, watching the men and women sing. Sometimes, she sang along loudly; other times, she kept beat with hand claps.