The Darker Saints

by Brian Hodge

  “Would you like to wait for a while, before going further?” asked Christophe.

  Justin nodded. “I’d like that. Very much.”

  They sat beneath a ficus tree, where they could watch. And converse without losing their words to the water.

  For minutes he simply listened. Above the falls rose a tapestry of prayers, as pilgrims lifted heads and bruised souls to a sky they refused to believe was indifferent. Shouted voices, at times blending, at times distinct, all charged with an intensity of emotion that touched the heart. Benevolence, forgiveness — these were beseeched with a sincerity he could never miss, even if he couldn’t translate. And if on the road these same voices had rung with exuberance, here they unleashed a flood of anguish.

  “What do they pray for?” Justin asked.

  Christophe smiled. “Everything. For good crops. For better health. For higher wages. To again see missing relatives they fear the government has taken.” He pointed many yards away to a wailing young woman who, on her knees in a ragged orange dress, clutched the roots of a huge tree. Into its crevices of bark had been pressed votive candles burning with small soft flames. “That woman there? If I correctly hear her, she is praying for another baby to fill the place in her heart left by a child who died of fever.”

  Justin turned away, could no longer invade a moment of such vulnerability. Let it belong to her, and to her saint. Alone.

  “Before I came down,” he said, “I worried that I’d be resented here, I guess. That they’d look at me and feel I didn’t belong here. That I was an intruder.”

  “No, no. Never think that. No.” Christophe lay a hand on his shoulder. “It is suffering, more than anything, that defines the character of a Haitian. Not the color of skin. You would have the respect of anyone here, because they could understand much of what you feel. You lost the one you loved more than any other. This is something they can share.”

  “It doesn’t end, you know?” Justin’s voice slid higher, breaking as he bit his lip. “Because she’s still … still … there, like the worst failure of my life, that I can never make right. Because it’s not up to me. But I can’t … I can’t get past it.”

  Still coasting back in Tampa, more than seven months after the fact, a gauntlet of shit jobs to make ends meet. Janitor one month, video store clerk the next, bartender for the next two. Like that. It was a living. Barely. The checks helped, too, that which he wasn’t setting aside for April come the day the insurance company decided she had sponged off them long enough.

  “I took April her paints and everything, you know, back in December. They said she wouldn’t even look at them. Then about three weeks ago she started using them, did one painting. Wouldn’t talk to anyone about it, and nobody knew what it was. I couldn’t tell either. Just shapes, shadows. In blue. And gray.”

  Christophe smiled. “I would think that to be wonderful news.”

  “Maybe.” Justin lay back, using his folded shirt for a pillow.

  “I go there to see her, in that place, and I want to have faith when something like this happens. But then I try to talk to her, and … nothing. Even when she seems to know I’m there, she doesn’t make much sense. Two people, talking the same language … but they can’t agree on what the words mean.”

  “I understand,” said Christophe, then a long silence filled with water and the prayers of strangers. Finally: “My brother is in much the same condition, remember. His mind elsewhere. That rifle blow to his head, he has never been the same.”

  Justin rolled his head over, to look up at him from below. “I forgot. I forgot all about that.”

  “I felt I should wait awhile before reminding you.”

  “It was right you waited to do it here.” Staring up, the sky a vibrant Caribbean blue through the weave of green. “What do you think about a guy who lives like he really wants to kill himself, but he just can’t pick up the gun and do it? Like he’s hoping a traffic accident might do the job for him, or the wrong guy he picks on when he’s drunk and gets into a fight. What do you think he’s afraid of? The pain of the gun going off in his mouth? Is that what scares him about it? Or that he might find himself someplace where it’s really time to start paying for his sins. Because he’s kept the gun ready for a long time. But just can’t.” Hushed, then, to a cracking whisper that Christophe probably couldn’t even hear. “I wonder every day.”

  “Maybe,” Christophe said slowly, “he fears succeeding.”

  Justin laughed, half delight and half bile. “Then it wouldn’t be the first time he let that get in the way.”

  “Just as long as he understands that his death should mean something. That it should never be for nothing.” Christophe’s eyes drifted shut, and for a long moment he sat with head bowed, a new crease furrowed across his brow. “They pray to Napoleon now, some of them. They already believe him to be a loa.”

  “Who does?”

  “Those who left Twin Oaks. Both those in Miami and those who were forced to return here.”

  Miami’s Little Haiti had proven no promised land. Not all were able to stay, unable to prove to INS satisfaction that they’d been in the country since 1982. Of those who had, the primary weapon had been a photo one of the women had taken from Mullavey’s house that had been snapped shortly after their arrival. Andrew Jackson Mullavey and some of his latest acquisitions, against a backdrop of unmistakable Twin Oaks architecture. And on the back of Kodak paper, a simple stamp made by the processing lab: MAR 82.

  Some could stay. The rest, deported.

  While Napoleon, he supposed, was freer than any of them.

  “Sainthood becomes him,” said Justin. “I can see that.”

  “It wouldn’t become you, though.” This Christophe said with a harsh certainty. “Not yet. So you should perhaps not try quite so hard.”

  Justin said nothing, just sent thoughts to the sky and winds, let them be grabbed by whatever had a whim: Then give me a reason.

  There came no lightning, no thunder, neither a voice from the clouds nor trembling of the earth. But these he could live without, and in time he stood.

  “I’m going down to take the plunge,” he said. “Coming?”

  “Not yet. But soon. I have many prayers to think through first.”

  From his shirt pocket, Justin took the two candles he’d brought from home. White, pristine, and in their wax he had etched a name in each, his own and April’s. He didn’t know why.

  He left Christophe and his shirt behind, and walked to the huge tree where earlier the grieving mother had lain prostrate. A vast mapou tree, a sacred shrine, home of spirits with branches spreading like an emerald heaven unto itself. He knelt among its roots with other supplicants, and off a candle already burning he lit his own. Softened the round base of each with the flame of the other, and pressed both side by side into an empty fold of bark.

  With luck they would burn together, snuff out together, and in such simplistic symbols lived the most profound hopes of all. He walked to the edge of the hillside, beneath which beat the liquid heart of Saut d’Eau, and to the impassioned voices of peasants he added his own. He had hoped for eloquence, but it fled without ceremony, leaving behind a core of need so deep that without it he would have been nothing at all.

  “Please!” he screamed into the valley. “Please…”

  It was all he had to give, and if he’d failed to plead his case with the poignant eloquence of the peasants, then surely no god with kindness in his heart could have failed to at least notice from how truly deep it came.

  The bath of ritual followed prayer, and he made his way down the slope to join others near the edge of a rock outcropping. Already drenched with spray, and here clothes were shed, for the pilgrims who so chose. Most were women, some of whom jumped in fully clothed, others who wore cheap swimsuits, and still others who met the water bare-breasted and in panties. More than one twined upon wet rock, serpentine, mounts of Damballah-Wèdo.

  He had no shame, modesty a virtue he had long been
unable to afford. He left his jeans upon the rock.

  And leapt.

  Such cold water, a shock upon a midsummer day, and though he shared it with dozens, they all went in alone. It swallowed him whole, plunging, blind, deaf to all but a dull muffled roar, and he sank to the bottom until he touched mud. Would spirits touch him in return? He felt. And felt.

  And when he rose to burst through the surface with gasping breath, he let himself drift for a while, eyes closed while the falls roared on, and through them shot echoes of prayers. Perhaps he would know in a moment whether or not they would actually be answered. He could be sure of nothing anymore.

  Knowing only that they were here, trying their hardest, brothers and sisters all, linked by common threads of heartache.

  Never so many pleading voices…

  And never so few who cared to listen.