The Dew Breaker

by Edwidge Danticat

  “It’s time for the service,” he said to the deacons, while stroking the front cover. “I don’t think you three should walk with me to the church tonight. I’ll walk alone.”

  The senior deacon stretched his body upward, extending his right hand toward the preacher’s face. For a brief second the preacher thought his friend was going to slap him, or perhaps signal to the sons, the preacher’s godchildren, to grab and bind him, but all the elder did was remove an errant black string from the preacher’s shoulder. Still, finding the string seemed like a slight ploy, something to delay them, to earn one more minute, to keep him inside the house a bit longer.

  The preacher tapped the Bible against the elder deacon’s lowered arm, signaling him and his sons to remove themselves from his path.

  When it seemed like there was nothing else to do, the deacons stepped aside and allowed him to walk through the doorway. Once the preacher had carefully padlocked his front door, the three men reluctantly followed him across the shaky wooden bridge over the narrow rain canal that separated his house from the unpaved street.

  As usual, Rue Tirremasse was muggy, dusty, and loud, and seemed much brighter than it should have with only one distant street lamp in sight. The preacher waved to his neighbor across the street, an old man who sold cassava bread bathed in homemade peanut butter from a stall in front of his house.

  A konpa song praising the government ( you have led us/you have fed us was the chorus) blared from the makeshift barbershop operating out of someone’s living room in the house next to the old man’s. Two young men were sitting inside playing cards as a boy’s head was shaved of hair and lice. The preacher waved to the barber and the men, who waved back. Could they be his executioners? The ones he’d been told would be waiting out on the street for him?

  A woman selling grilled corn in front of the barbershop called out to the preacher, “How are we tonight, Pastor?”

  Just as he always did whenever she greeted him that way, he nodded that he was fine, but this time took the extra step of bowing in her direction.

  The preacher then spotted a young couple he’d married. They had notebooks pressed against their chests as they walked toward him. The wife was taking a secretarial course, while the husband was studying to be an accountant. Their parents had rushed to have the preacher marry them when the girl became pregnant, but she’d suffered a miscarriage soon after the wedding.

  “How are you, Pastor?” she asked when they stopped to greet him.

  “How are the courses coming?” the preacher asked.

  “They’re very difficult, Pastor,” the young husband answered. “We have a lot of studying to do. This is why you haven’t seen us at the weekday services.”

  The three deacons were still following closely behind the preacher. They were a bit more comfortable now, feeling protected by the geniality of each of the preacher’s encounters. They too participated in the greetings, nodding and waving hello.

  A widow whom the preacher occasionally hired to wash and iron his clothes stopped him to ask when she should come by for the next batch.

  “Pastor, you’re not kind,” she said. “You wear the same clothes all the time so you won’t give me the work.”

  The preacher laughed before moving on to the house of a shoeshine man, who, when he wasn’t shining shoes, always sat in a low chair in his doorway watching the street. The shoeshine man was one of many who’d conspired to empty slop jars from their roofs over the heads of some Volunteers who’d come to arrest a group of philosophy students who’d performed Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot at the nearby student center.

  “We are all born mad.” The preacher now recalled that particular line from the play. “Some remain so.”

  The Volunteers had shot at all the surrounding houses the night after the play was performed, but thankfully no one had been hurt.

  “Pastor, your shoes look a little dusty tonight.” The shoeshine man reached under his chair and pulled out his shine toolbox.

  “Léon, there’s no need to have polished shoes at night,” the preacher said.

  “Pastor, a man like you should always have clean shoes,” Léon argued.

  “They won’t stay clean for long,” the preacher said.

  “Pastor, before you can say Amen, I will be done.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, Léon,” said the preacher.

  The “tomorrow” made the shoeshine man smile. The deacons smiled also, finding further reason to hope.

  The men were almost at the church when they reached the one street lamp on their stretch of Rue Tirremasse. A group of boys was gathered there in the direct path of the light beam. Some of the boys were singsonging their school lessons to one another, while others studied alone, pacing back and forth with their heads bowed. The preacher made out one of the boys who faithfully attended Sunday school with his mother, a ten-year-old who despite the mother’s scoldings was not above begging from the vendors and passersby. The boy had a cigarette butt in his hand. When he spotted the preacher, he threw the butt on the ground and darted down a dark alley away from the street.

  On another occasion the preacher might have remarked to the deacons for their own information, “Do you see that? Do you see what Satan’s doing to our youth, our jeunesse étudiante?” However, as he approached the gates of his church and looked up to greet the image of the Christ with the pale arms extended toward him, his mind was less on the flock than the wolves who though he hadn’t noticed them were certainly looming.

  Inside, the preacher flipped a light switch. The dangling bulbs flickered from high in the middle of the room. As the preacher strolled casually to the altar, the deacons brought out the kerosene lamps they always had on reserve in case there was a blackout, the collection baskets they passed at every service for offerings, and a gallon of water that they parceled out in a glass to the preacher to refresh his voice during the service.

  The service went on as usual that night, but many of the members who usually came didn’t attend. A few new faces were spotted in the congregation, however—people who had wandered in off the street to rest a few minutes on their way somewhere else, others like Léon who weren’t religious but had heard about the militia men milling about and thought they might be of help to the preacher should an ambush be attempted against him.

  Throughout the service, which ran longer than the usual hour, the preacher sang with all his might; he swayed his body back and forth, pounded his fists on the pulpit, stamped his feet, jumped up in the air and back, and dashed up to each pew to encourage the congregants to join them.

  His sermon that night was more like a testimony. It was a remembrance of the day of his wife’s death.

  He would always remember her eyes, he said. There was something about them that wasn’t quite right that afternoon. Maybe it was the way the tear ducts kept filling up and drying up again, with the tears never spilling down her face. Or maybe it was the way her pupils were so enlarged that they became one with her irises. Or maybe it was the way she kept fighting to keep the upper and lower lids apart, as though it was the greatest battle of her life. In any case, it was obvious as soon as she staggered home and slipped into bed that she was going to die.

  Her limbs were all moving slowly but separately, as though they were no longer controlled by the rest of her body. She had already lost her power to speak, her ability to answer when he called her name, begging her to tell him what was wrong. Her lips moved, but no sounds came out of them. Still, he did his best to follow their laggard course to get some idea, some clue as to what she wanted him to do.

  He screamed for a neighbor to run and get his friend, the elder deacon, the one with the car. They would take her to the General Hospital on the chance that the doctors could do something to save her.

  In all the confusion, he had forgotten to pray. Maybe his prayers could have brought her back. Even though her body was growing colder, she was not yet dead.

  By the time the neighbor returned with the elder
deacon, his wife was no longer breathing. She had let out one final sigh right before they’d walked through the front door. He would always remember that sigh, dislodged almost out of frustration, as if to say, Why don’t you hear me? Why don’t you understand me? Why can’t you save me? He had wondered then if his wife’s death had had anything to do with the women’s auxiliary meeting that she’d just attended, a meeting called by a fellow pastor’s daughter, a girl who’d shown no interest in religion before but who was all of a sudden saying that she wanted to know God.

  The autopsy showed that his wife had been poisoned, something fast and deadly that the General Hospital coroner couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify. He’d felt some sense of vindication when the girl who might have poisoned his wife had disappeared, reportedly arrested and confined to the torturous dungeons of Fort Dimanche prison for some other crime. But he could never shake from his thoughts the notion that his wife’s death had been his fault, that she’d been killed to punish him for the things he said on his radio program or from the pulpit of his church.

  So he was now publicly begging his dead wife’s forgiveness. He was hoping she would hear him from Heaven and absolve him.

  A few of the faithful in the congregation, those who thought they knew the preacher well, including the Noël deacons, shifted in their seats, looking sad and puzzled but mostly fearful for the preacher and for themselves. They were glad that the preacher was finally showing some sign of grief and hinting that he might change his ways, back down from his verbal attacks on the government, but they worried that this was the wrong way to do it, on a night when anything that came out of his mouth might further enrage his enemies.

  A group of women got up and quickly walked out. Those passersby who’d simply stopped in to rest filed out behind them, not quite understanding what was going on but sensing somehow that it could lead to trouble, that they might be fingered as anti-patriots merely for listening to what was being said.

  Léon, the shoeshine man, wiped a tear from his eye, remembering his own son who was one of those men who roamed the night in denim uniforms and carried people away to their deaths. His son might have been one of those he’d emptied the slop jars on and who had shot in his direction in return, for a good Volunteer, it was said, should be able to kill his mother and father for the regime.

  Even though Léon hated what his son did, he still had to let his boy come home now and then for the boy’s mother’s sake and still had to acknowledge that maybe it was because of his boy that he’d not yet been arrested.

  The preacher continued talking about his wife, remembering how her lips were so memorable, bright pink against her very dark face, how the space between her mouth and nose was cupped, shaped like a seashell, how the tip of her nostrils seemed to dip into the shell whenever she smiled, and how he’d done his best that day to try and make her smile, just to see that one last time.

  He had loved his wife as soon as he saw her—his voice was growing hoarse and tired—he’d had no family in the city when he came to her father’s church at fourteen. He said as much to her when he met her at the first service he attended in this church, and she insisted that her parents take him in.

  He converted from Catholicism so he could sit in this church with her, becoming a minister so her parents—he was so glad that she was now with them in Heaven—he became a minister so her parents would let him marry her.

  He was still speaking out his reverie when his stepsister Anne walked in and out of the congregation within seconds. Anne was returning from her first cosmetology class. He’d signed her up that morning, her third in the city. He could tell from the cool, distant look on her face that she knew nothing of the immediate threat, the killers lurking about, his possible arrest. His sister—for his father and her mother had ordered them to always call each other frè, sè, “brother,” “sister”—had remained in their home village until a few days ago. In the seventy-two hours she’d been with him, however, he’d told and retold her of the day of his wife’s death and now it was too much. She was angry, angry at him for spending so much of his time and energy on the people in government, tired of his delusions to one day unseat them and set the masses free when he’d simply walked away from his own family, his old life, the place where the brother, with whom she shared a mother and he a father, had drowned. She would now go to his house and wait for him, to tell him all this once he returned. Besides, she was hungry and wanted to get something to eat.

  His sister’s quick appearance and departure did not break the preacher’s flow of reminiscences, however. A half hour later, as the preacher was still recounting the sad tale of his wife’s death, a fat man, whose very large head was crowned with a deep widow’s peak, burst through the church’s front door. Behind the fat man was a group of Volunteers, all dressed in denim uniforms and wearing dark glasses whose front surfaces were like mirrors, distorting the room into curvatures and the churchgoers into miniatures. The men waved their handguns and rifles at the congregation and told them to keep their heads down, their foreheads pressed against the pews in front of them. The fat man wobbled down the aisle toward the preacher, held a .38 in one hand and with the other grabbed the preacher’s neck, wrapping his long, plump fingers around the preacher’s Adam’s apple, putting extra pressure on the preacher’s voice box to keep him from speaking. The extra force was not necessary, for the preacher had spent months preparing himself for a moment such as this, imagining what he would or would not do in this exact situation, and now that the moment had come, he was glad that his body was cooperating, no unexpected pulmonary attacks, no sudden bowel movements.

  A few of the Volunteers joined the fat man and the preacher at the altar. Two of them grabbed the preacher’s arms and swung them around behind his back and held them there. The preacher winced in pain only once as the fat man and the others shoved him toward the front door.

  The street outside the church was suddenly empty, all the merchants and children gone, all doors padlocked, with no light streaming out.

  The preacher imagined his neighbors trembling in their hiding places, wondering if they would be visited next. But tonight, it seemed, was his night, and his alone.

  The preacher was thrown in the back of a truck. A group of Miliciens piled on top of him. He raised his feet close to his chest as they shoved him from side to side, pounding rifle butts on random parts of his body. His face was now pressed against the metal undulations of the truck bed, boot soles and heels raining down on him, cigarette butts being put out in his hair, which sizzled and popped like tiny grains of rock salt in an open fire. He was hit with jolts of shock from what felt like portable electric devices pressed against the heels of his now bare feet.

  He welcomed the sudden jerk of the truck taking off to race down the empty streets, because it provided a brief interruption of the assaults. He felt a flurry of hands sweep over his face. Some raised his head, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of the unfamiliar faces surrounding him, many now with the dark glasses off.

  A dusty black rag was wrapped around his eyes, then tied in rigid knots around the back of his head. Now that his eyes were covered, he craved to see.

  The truck suddenly stopped. The men nearest to him exchanged a few words with the people in a car up front. It seemed to him that the conversation was about where to take him, the nearby military barracks or the prison, Casernes or Fort Dimanche. It was said that if one went to the former there was a small chance of coming out alive, but the latter was literally a sepulcher from which no one was ever expected to resurface.

  He thought he heard Casernes, the barracks. The truck was off again, and the blows resumed for the rest of his journey. He lost track of his own movements, his body cringing at every strike.

  The truck stopped once more, and he felt the truck bed slowly rise as the Miliciens jumped off.

  He heard a woman scream, “Jean! Jean! Is that you?” And if his name had been Jean, he would have thought himself already dead, being called fo
rward by his wife from the other side.

  He tried for the first time to loosen his hand and foot restraints so that he could perhaps move closer to the empty space where the woman’s voice was coming from.

  A shot was fired somewhere. In the air? At him? At the woman calling Jean? He didn’t feel the expected hot burst of flames anywhere on his skin. Someone dragged him by the legs, pulled him forward, removing his jacket, and then he felt himself falling from the back of the truck onto the concrete. He fell on his face, crushing his forehead. His blood quickly soaked the blindfold, a warm veil of red covering the darkness over his eyes. He was being dragged by the legs over the rise of a curb. With each yank forward, a little bit of him was bruised, peeled away. He felt as though he was shedding skin, shedding voice, shedding sight, shedding everything he’d tried so hard to make himself into, a well-dressed man, a well-spoken man, a well-read man. He was leaving all that behind now with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards, and cracks in the concrete.

  He tried to make himself as limp as possible as he was pushed down some uneven steps that at different moments in his descent wedged themselves between his ribs.

  He was probably in a cell now, for he heard the rattling of bars and a lock being turned. He heard some breathing, some of it labored, and loud, moaning men. The smell of rotting flesh made him want to sneeze. There were some shadows circling him, sniffing like rats following the scent of blood. His head was spinning like a child’s top. The shadows were spinning too and then faded all together.

  He was disappointed to find himself awakened again sometime in the night. A warm liquid was trickling down on his face and when he opened his mouth to quench his thirst with it, he realized it was urine.

  Ave urina! The ridiculous thought entered his mind from some source he couldn’t quite recall. Morituri te salutant, I who am about die salute you.