So all that was what was going on in Kay’s mind when Terry first packed up and headed down to Haiti. When Terry got the job in Haiti, she thought, We can pay the mortgage. Then she thought, Thank God I won’t have to see him anymore.
* * *
Only the strange thing was—Haiti was sort of just like this thing that they had needed.
As soon as Terry got down to Haiti, she started to like him more, just the tone in his voice, the pictures he sent of him and his African colleagues. Kay wasn’t too vain, certainly not compared with her sisters, but sometimes she would see an outfit in a fashion magazine—a pretty skirt or blouse, something that under ordinary circumstances she’d never wear in a thousand years—and more than anything she’d want to try it on, see herself wearing that printed skirt in the mirror. See how it transformed her, turned her into another woman. Kay had two fears in life: the first was that she was going to lose everything she loved—her job, her husband, her house—but the other was that it was all just going to stay the same until she died. She knew that didn’t make much sense, but where was it written that Kay White had to make a whole lot of sense? Sometimes the thought tormented her, especially in the early evenings, that nothing in her life was ever going to change—and Haiti was change, pure and distilled. She saw Terry’s pictures of the beaches and the white dirt roads, the tin-roofed huts and the little kids in nothing but ankle-length old gray T-shirts, and she saw change: she wanted to see herself in that picture too.
Looking at Terry in those photos was like seeing him for the first time, as if she were looking at someone else’s foxy husband on Facebook. The little fleck of gray in his hair was new. Kay thought it was handsome. Terry with his arm over his colleague, Terry with his arm around the judge. That was the Good Terry. Terry telling her about that road. This was the Terry she had once loved before life had set them both back on their heels. The Terry who thought huge and made big plans and said yes to everything. The Terry who was going to take her up in the hot-air balloon of life until they were floating weightless in the clouds …
… the Terry who showed her one day—they were just kids, broke and hopeful—that big Georgian house with the columns and the rolling lawn and told her that was going to be the place where one day their grandkids would play on the lawn. House wasn’t even for sale. Terry said, “Come on,” rang the doorbell. Old couple answers. Cutest little old people you ever saw. So in love, so old. Terry says, “We’d like to buy your house and raise a family here.” This old couple, charmed as all heck, they invited us in, offered us lemonade. Before long, they’re showing us the nursery and the pantry, and Terry is telling them we’re going to have two boys, and those old people are saying, “We can tell you kids are going to have a wonderful life.”
Just a wonderful life.
That Terry was in those photos from Haiti—that same Terry grin and smirk. “Kay, we’re going to do some great things down here”—that’s what he told her. “Kay, we’re going to make a difference.”
Welcome back, buddy. I missed you.
So she came down to Haiti, and then she just kept coming. People back home asked her, “What d’you love about it down there?”
And what could she say about Haiti but that it made her happy?
3
Soon some of Kay’s other friends arrived at the restaurant. How had she met so many people? That was the miracle of Kay White. “This is my friend Baker, he’s from the embassy,” she said, and I shook hands with a dreadlocked political attaché whose accent was Texas, whose aspect was the other Caribbean of pretty beaches and steel drums, and whose manner was all pleasant professional charm. Then I met a man named Larry Bayles Jameson who told me to call him LBJ, just like everyone else.
“LBJ is my inspiration,” Kay said. “You know what LBJ does?”
I shook my head, and LBJ looked at the floor modestly, and Kay explained that LBJ ran a small Ford dealership outside Terre Haute. He gave his customers the following option when they bought a new vehicle: if they made a donation to one of his water projects in Haiti, the first service was on him. At the end of the year he matched all the donations out of his own pocket. Then he and his sons came to Haiti twice a year to dig wells and install pumps and build cisterns.
Over the course of the next quarter hour, the group swelled out to more than a dozen. On the flight down to Haiti just that morning, Kay had met an Indian telecom engineer who worked for Digicel—he was there too; then I shook the hand of a cartographer who worked for USAID, and I kissed the downy cheek of his French girlfriend, an epidemiologist who worked for the WHO. A few of Terry’s colleagues were there. “These are our good friends,” Kay said. Some of the guests had never even met Kay in the flesh. They were friends only on Twitter and Facebook.
We were soon seated at a long table in the garden, where on Kay’s instructions I was nestled between LBJ on my left and Baker on my right. Kay was directly in front of me, talking to the French lady from the WHO. The others in our group, who did not know one another, made polite conversational forays. The only thing that brought us all together was that we were acquaintances of Kay White.
I said, “Now, LBJ, tell me what brought you down to Haiti.”
“You want the long version or the short version?”
Seeing me hesitate, LBJ smiled. “Short version is I used to have quite a serious drinking problem. Came to Haiti and stopped drinking.”
LBJ picked up a roll from the basket, pulled it open, and smeared it with butter.
“And the long version?”
LBJ said, “Long version is I had more money than I needed and more time than I could handle and I was wasting my life away swimming laps in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. That’s a real long story right there. Long version is I got to the point where my wife was going to walk right out the door if I didn’t clean up my act. So I went to my pastor, and he told me to come with him down to a village in Haiti for a week.”
Up there in Fond Rouge, LBJ continued, the nearest water was from the Artibonite River, an hour away on foot. There was no water for bathing or for washing clothes or for irrigating crops or for drinking—no water except what people could carry on their heads. So the local people walked to the river, then walked back home, picking their way along the rocky paths, five-gallon buckets balanced on their heads. The kids were skipping school just to lug the gallons up the hill. Not only was the water inaccessible, it wasn’t even all that clean: it was river water, and there were villages crapping and pissing in the river long before the residents of Fond Rouge got it in their buckets.
Maybe three days into his trip, LBJ told me, he got to watching a local carpenter making a child’s coffin. He stopped in the sun and watched the carpenter working. He had never seen a child’s coffin before—that’s a beautiful fact right there about American life, that you can live an ordinary American life and never see a carpenter making a child-size coffin. An undertaker in the States has to special-order that cruelest box. But this carpenter in the Haitian hills that day was talking with some other fellow and laughing, painting the varnish on this coffin, making it pretty. Brother—how many of those things you make a month? Too many, too many.
On his last night in the mountains, LBJ told me, he got himself a bottle of the local rotgut. He’d been holding out all right until then, more for appearance’s sake than anything else, but that last night in Haiti one of the local guys offered him a tot and he was off to the races. This stuff was raw white rum, strong like the call of Satan and as mean as an alley cat. He was halfway through the bottle when he had the thought that would change his life—that he, Larry Bayles Jameson, was in possession of everything necessary to improve the lives of the inhabitants of Fond Rouge, Haiti. What they lacked, he had. He could give them water if he wanted to, and if they had clean drinking water, nobody would be making child-size coffins; and if they didn’t have water this time next month, next year, or however long it took—it was because he, Larry Bayles Jameson, chose not to give it to
them.
Now, twenty years, LBJ said—that’s a long time. Lots of twists and turns in that time, and he wasn’t going to pretend he never touched another drink or was always a fine husband or a perfect father. But come hell or high water, twice a year every year, three weeks in winter and three in summer, he was down here digging a well or capping a spring, making sure someone who didn’t have water had some.
“Now, that’s just sheer goodness,” Kay said. “Is there anybody who doesn’t want to be a good person deep down?”
LBJ smiled modestly and took a sip of his sparkling water.
From Terry’s side of the table there were raucous bursts of laughter. Terry said, “The whole thing?” and the man beside him, who I believe came from Brazil, spread his arms out wide. Terry said, “That’s not so big.” On my side of the table, Kay remained engrossed in conversation with her French friend; and Baker, to my right, was hunched over his phone, tapping out a long description for his Facebook page of the experience of sitting at this table. At one point I started to ask him a question, and he said gently, “I’m sorry—just a minute,” and were I to have said something else, I would have been considered an irritant or a scold.
LBJ started talking to Kay about a band they both liked. Only in Haiti do you meet people who find it a diversion to build infrastructure. But in Haiti you meet people like that all the time. One hundred percent true story: Fellow makes a fortune down in Texas building big-box retailers. Buys a bulldozer, ships it down to Haiti. Starts building roads. Ends up medevaced out of the country after driving that bulldozer off a cliff. Who just shows up in a sovereign nation with his own private bulldozer and builds roads? How many people do you know who have built a charitable hospital? In Haiti, I met three. Orphanages, latrines, and wells? I lost track. And because in Haiti you meet people like that all the time, it comes to seem normal. That’s why so many outsize schemes and megalomaniac ambitions were hatched in Haiti, because it is a place where nobody ever says no.
I had been in poor countries before I came to Haiti, but never in a place—not India, not Africa—where nearly everyone was poor. Walking around Haiti, I sometimes felt like one of those Saudi sheiks who install gold-plated hot tubs in their retrofitted 747s, wealthy beyond imagination or hope. I too had visited villages that, like the village of Fond Rouge in LBJ’s story, were without clean drinking water; and like LBJ, I had seen carpenters cutting, sawing, sanding, and planing lumber into a child’s coffin. But then I had let the matter slide. Deep, deep inside me there was a voice that said, Let them walk for their water. There is no other way to put it: had the voice said anything else, and had it been loud enough, I would have acted. My ability to remain happy while intimately aware of the sufferings of others was a discovery about myself.
Now it was time to order. This proved complicated. Some people at the table had yet to open their menus, and others could not read French; some people were very hungry and wished to order full meals, while others were treating dinner as an opportunity to snack and drink. In the delay and hesitation and confusion you could feel the mood of the table souring. So Kay suggested ordering an assortment of appetizers to be shared. In this way, people could consider the menu at their leisure. Terry from his end of the table said, “You go, girl,” which made our end of the table laugh. Then Kay spoke with the waiter, who was glad to have a single interlocutor from this large and demanding group. She ordered efficiently and lavishly: plates of deep-fried okra and bruschetti topped with diced tomatoes and basil, and little bite-size portions of this and that.
I was still waiting for Baker to finish sending his message when Johel and Nadia arrived.
4
I had told Kay that I had never seen her, but I was wrong: I had seen this woman many times in Jérémie, but I had not known that she was Nadia, the judge’s wife. I had never made the connection between them. From Kay’s stories I had been on the lookout for a woman with a certain kind of beauty. But the woman I had seen at the market or at the boulangerie was plain. She was neither tall nor short, but slender, almost willowy, which in consumptive, malnourished Haiti is rarely considered attractive. Her skin was very dark, almost greenish—I had imagined Nadia as cocoa-colored, like the judge. Kay had mentioned her striking eyes, but I had not noticed them. Indeed, I might not have noticed her at all—fixed her as a face and person—if it had not been for one incident.
The meat market in Jérémie was also our abattoir. At dawn, the goats were led here from the hills and sold. Then the marchandes would slaughter them on the spot with a machete blow, splitting the heads open. The drainage canal was like a swamp of coagulated blood speckled with fat. Goat heads with glassy eyes were displayed on the concrete benches, side by side with goat paws, the fur still attached. Goats, yet to be butchered, bleated in terror and misery. Huge swarms of flies blackened the exposed meat.
I liked the place: there was a fascination in the organs, entrails, and musculature, the rusty smell of blood; and here I was introduced to that hardiest and most enduring of human beings, the Haitian marchande. When you and I and all our kind have long since moldered away—when the last writer and the last reader have grappled each other into a shallow grave—these women’s descendants will still be in tropical markets, whacking the heads of goats with blunt machetes, laughing at the horror, and surviving.
Nadia—I did not know her name then—was at the market one morning. This was at the most humid time of the year, thundery days building toward but never reaching climactic rainfall. She was bargaining with a marchande and I was bargaining with another when her arm reached out for the table, her knees wobbled, and she sank slowly to the floor. It was such a graceful gesture that I watched her fall with unconcern. (Haitian women, by the way, for reasons I do not know, were very often fainting.) The marchandes surrounded her, someone found a chair, and someone else fanned her with the side of a cardboard box. She had landed in a puddle, and her face and hair were caked with goat’s blood. Her spooky, flaccid stare, her lips twitching soundlessly—she was not where we were.
That was how I thought of her thereafter—not as Nadia, but as the lady who passed out in the market—until I saw her again that evening at the Boucan Grégoire, trailing two steps behind her husband as they threaded their way through the crowded terrace.
And now she seemed to me a beautiful woman. Perhaps it was a matter of her hair: tonight she wore her hair in long cornrows, which she pulled back into a loose ponytail; what had been to me before a bony face with a high forehead and sharp, jutting cheekbones now seemed feline and dramatic. I had not noticed how lovely her mouth was, her fine lips sculpted. When I had seen her before, she had been dressed in jeans and a tank top that only emphasized how thin she was—her jutting collarbones, her arms as thick at the bicep as at the wrist. Tonight she wore a red dress that I knew without knowing why was both stylish and expensive. She looked as if she had spent her afternoon being groomed. She balanced easily on a pair of high-heeled sandals. Now her skinniness was like the weightlessness of a fine-boned bird. Her fragility, which before had suggested sickliness, was made delicate and desirable by the expensive room she was in.
As Johel led his wife in the direction of our table, he stopped at other tables. Nadia arrested every eye in the room. The judge shook men’s hands and gripped shoulders; women stood up, and he gave them kisses. People were pleased to see him. He was dressed, like the other men in the restaurant, in a well-pressed white shirt and blazer, and in this room his fatness, which in Jérémie seemed like superfluous bulk, now seemed masculine and important. As I watched him maneuver his way through the room, his notion that he could be a politician seemed less absurd to me. He had acquired grace and poise. The people he greeted were people with whom he was intimate and familiar. He had left Haiti as a child, but the portion of his family that remained was of old and established Port-au-Prince stock. Now I saw that his return to Haiti had been like a tributary branch of a river returning to broader waters.
Soon t
hey were at our table, and here the judge was also at his ease. He knew some of the people, and others he didn’t. To Kay he said, “You look marvelous. I can’t believe you’re turning twenty-five. Happy birthday.” Then to Terry, who had stood up and walked around the table to shake his friend’s hand, he added, “Well done, brother. Well done.” I wasn’t sure what this meant, but Terry seemed pleased by the compliment, which seemed to evaluate positively every facet of Terry’s life. Johel shook LBJ’s hand and said, “So you’re the famous LBJ.” He kissed the French epidemiologist on the cheek. When he came to me, he said, “Brother, what a beautiful surprise.”
As he moved around the table, he introduced his wife, keeping his hand low on her back. She didn’t smile, and her voice was so quiet as to be almost inaudible. When I was introduced to her, she showed no sign of recognizing me. Her eyes drifted down to the tablecloth. Her handshake was fragile, and when I stepped forward to kiss her on the cheek, she stood absolutely still, as if I might be provoked and bite her.
Now there was a problem. The table was too small to accommodate easily the newcomers. We had already been seated elbow-to-elbow. It would have required rearranging the entire group to place two plates side by side. So chairs were moved, and the waiters somewhat clumsily inserted a pair of plates in the remote corners of the table, one plate between Kay and Baker and the other on the far side of the table, near Terry.
“Nadia, you want to sit with your husband, don’t you?” Kay asked. “Or do you mind sitting next to me?”
Peacekeeping Page 7