After that, Toussaint didn’t stop coming over to my place, but he started heading over to the judge’s place too. Soon he was knocking on the judge’s door three times a week, the judge inviting him in to sit and watch soccer, the judge asking how his family was doing. When Toussaint asked for money, the judge said no.
He said, “Toussaint, you’ve got to take your own destiny in your hands. Nobody ever gave me anything in my life but that road. Your road isn’t a good road, but you got to get yourself down that road by yourself.”
And here’s what Toussaint Legrand is thinking about. He’s thinking about the mango trees on his uncle’s land in Carrefour Prince. He might not be able to spell, but he can sure as hell add, multiply, and divide. And what he’s thinking about is how fine he’d look if he could only sell the mangoes in Port-au-Prince. He’s thinking that if there was a road, that would change everything. He wouldn’t have to paint his hair with shoe polish. He could afford deodorant. He’d find a girl.
* * *
All Toussaint knew his whole life had been bad roads.
He was born in a little village about an hour’s walk from Jérémie. Out in Carrefour Prince, there was no electricity, no running water, no nothing but sugarcane, goats, beans, and fruit trees: mangoes, bananas, plantains, and breadfruit.
And no road.
Toussaint’s bad luck began before birth. His daddy was a master of the dark mystical arts, a boko named Destiné Eric. When Toussaint was five months in his mamma’s belly, Destiné Eric quarreled with an unsatisfied client who swore that he would take his vengeance—which he did, most unmagically, cutting Destiné Eric’s throat open with a machete. Toussaint was the thirdborn of a brood that would eventually swell to five brothers by five different fathers, all dead before their children were born.
Madame Legrand sold flour, sugar, rice, corn, and a myriad of Chinese-made plastic housewares at a stall in the market. When Toussaint was twelve, his little brother Junior got into a fistfight after school. Madame Legrand confronted the bully’s mother. Words got heated. This other lady cursed her: “Marie, you’re too rich. You won’t have money again!” After that her products ceased to sell. Weevils invaded the flour. She got too tired to get up and go sell. She ran out of money. She pulled Toussaint out of school, no longer able to pay his school fees.
Out of school, Toussaint got to vagabonding all day long around Jérémie. At the bus station he fell into conversation with a fat lady from the seaside village of Corail. Toussaint looked at the lady’s huge thighs and broad behind, her arms as thick as his chest, and he could almost smell the rice and meat in the folds of her clothes. Where there’s fat, there’s food, he thought. So he smiled at Suzette, melting that fat lady’s heart, and Toussaint had a new family, three hours’ walk down a bad road from his old family.
But things in Corail weren’t as Toussaint had hoped. There was a house to clean and dishes to wash and pots to scrub and buckets of water to haul; and although he wanted to be one of Suzette’s eight happy kids, he wasn’t. All the kids slept in comfy beds, but Toussaint slept on the floor in the kitchen with the rats and the bugs; and when Suzette made big fat-lady meals of rice and beans and meat, first she fed her kids, then herself, only then giving Toussaint the skinny leftovers.
Toussaint had been living twenty-one dog years chez Suzette when there was an incident—a nasty one.
Suzette’s husband was a tired, mean man who loved goats; he kept them and raised them and bred them and ate them and sold them. He had a ram that he kept for stud, a hearty, rancorous, endlessly horny beast just like himself, named Cerberus, and one of Toussaint’s jobs was keeping an eye on Cerberus when he was at pasture. A goat like Cerberus was the envy of many another goat breeder in the district.
Now, just what happened to Cerberus is a matter of dispute, Toussaint claiming that he asked one of Suzette’s kids to watch Cerberus while he himself helpfully hauled buckets of water, said child of Suzette thereupon irresponsibly falling into a deep and typical slumber. The other story was that Toussaint himself had fallen asleep, allowing Cerberus to gnaw his way through his rope. Either way, Cerberus was gone, most likely now rutting his way through some other man’s she-goats. Truth in the affair may be indeterminate, but blame was assigned nevertheless to Toussaint, who was beaten with a thick leather strap Suzette’s husband maintained for such exigencies, until thick welts like mushrooms sprang up on his slender face and arms and he was huddled in a ball in the kitchen. That’s when Toussaint took stock of his life and conditions—he was as skinny as the day he showed up and no closer to glory or a girl—and decided to take the bad road home.
So after three years on his own, Toussaint walked back to his mamma in Jérémie, where he did nothing and had nothing to do, and nothing was the problem that he faced all day every day: nothing to eat, nothing to wear. Toussaint had been back in Jérémie just a few months, and he woke up one morning to hear his little brothers crying on account of their being so hungry and his mamma not being capable of feeding them nothing. So he went out on the road looking for a vision of what to do, and a vision came to him of his mamma’s uncle out near the airport. It was a long walk, and when he made it out there, his uncle was boiling up potatoes and manioc, which made it hard for said uncle to deny the existence in his garden of potatoes and manioc. When Toussaint explained that Junior and Israel were crying hungry back home, his mamma’s uncle dug him up some potatoes and manioc, which Toussaint tied up in a black plastic bag and balanced on his head, and went walking home, feeling somewhat resentful that he was doing what his mamma should have been doing, begging for food for the little men.
But it’s like they say, God comes on a donkey, slow and steady, because on his way back into town, Toussaint Legrand saw me, and he felt certain that the good Lord had put me on that road, the road that led him right to the judge.
* * *
The Legrand family had countless cousins and distant relations spread out over almost all of the Grand’Anse; and it was Toussaint’s habit to mooch off all of them, drifting around the region in a rhythm of his own devising, his exceedingly sensitive inner compass guiding him to whichever cousin had just come into a little cash or a ripe harvest, or had won some money in the borlette, or was simply feeling generous. His cousin Selavi (pronounced “C’est la vie”) Legrand, for example, had a husband in Miami who every few months would Western Union her down a small contribution for the upkeep of his children—and within a day or two of the receipt of these funds, Toussaint would arrive on Selavi’s doorstep, looking woebegone.
Selavi lived in a village accessible only by foot, perhaps a three-hour hike from the road, which itself necessitated a hike of almost half a day from Jérémie. Toussaint’s scrawny body concealed strength and endurance, and he thought nothing of long distances on foot—what else did he have to do, after all? When he arrived in Morne Rouge, his patience did not go unrewarded: the Haitian peasant rebels at parsimony and is generous, and so it was that Selavi offered Toussaint a bowl of chicken stew and a couple hundred gourdes to buy the little men in town a new pair of shoes or to buy Marie Legrand some credit for her phone.
Back in Jérémie, Toussaint told Terry and the judge the following story:
He had been sitting after dinner, as the older men swapped bawdy jokes and the children dozed, when Selavi’s father indignantly recalled the last election. He had shown up at the polling center, he said, intending to cast his ballot for the Sénateur, only to find that the box next to the Sénateur’s name had already been checked on his ballot. Selavi’s father was a citoyen and a proud son of the revolution, and it rankled him that what should have been his choice and privilege was now an obligation. When he protested, the head of the voting center informed him that no other ballots were available. Soon other men joined their protests to his, and the situation threatened to become unruly, when a local curé, a man named Abraham Samedi, appeared.
The crowd at the voting center fell silent as Père Samedi desce
nded from his mule. He was in his late sixties, and his hooded black eyes, set deep in his bony face, made the locals think of the illustrations in their Bibles of Old Testament prophets. Selavi’s father, well-muscled as he was, stood not much taller than five feet, and Père Samedi towered over him. He wrapped his long arm around the younger man’s shoulder. Then the men walked side by side for several minutes. No one in the crowd could hear their conversation, but they could see Selavi’s father nodding, and by the time they returned from their brief promenade, it was clear that Selavi’s father had seen the wisdom of the old priest’s counsel: that a vote for the Eagle (this was the name of the Sénateur’s political party, of which he was the only candidate) was a vote for the Eagle, no matter who scrawled an X in the box opposite the Sénateur’s photograph on the ballot. In the end, the precinct in which Selavi’s father voted turned out nearly unanimously for the Sénateur, as they always did, giving the Sénateur 312 votes and his opponent just 6.
What interested Terry and the judge particularly in this story was that neither man had realized the role of Père Samedi in local politics, nor his ardent support for the Sénateur.
And so it was that Terry and the judge offered Toussaint the first job of his young life: he was now the scout.
Back in the days when they were slaves, the judge told Toussaint, there was always a scout, somebody who went below the slave man’s radar. A kid, maybe, someone who can slip in and out of anywhere, someone who can talk to anyone. Someone who makes friends easily, can find out what the real lay of the land is. Who’s the gros neg, the big man? What does he really want or need? Someone who can find out the true story of what happened last time around. What do they really think about the Sénateur? Not a job any of those lycée kids could do—maybe they know how to read and work out chemistry problems, but they show up in Morne Rouge, deep in the mountains, they’d stand out. They don’t have Toussaint’s natural ability to talk, to listen, to make friends.
The judge had an old, beat-up motorcycle sitting in a shed, and he let Toussaint take it out on the road: one day Corail, one day Pestel, three-day trip from Dame Marie to Les Irois or deep into the mountains. Everywhere he goes, he has a cousin or knows someone who knows someone; they treat him as a friend.
And everywhere he goes, he’s coming back telling the judge the same story: not a chance in the world the judge is going to beat the Sénateur. People like the Sénateur, yes, but that’s not the issue. Problem is, the Sénateur has Bonbon, or Beaumont, or Pestel wired up tight. In Bonbon, they say, last time around, you hardly even needed to bother to vote: there was an X already in the Sénateur’s box on your ballet. You ask for another ballot, a clean ballot, they’d tell you, “So sorry, brother, all the ballots we have. You like those fingers?” In Beaumont they’d say, “Didn’t want to vote for the Sénateur myself, but I couldn’t turn down the money. Not with the price of coffee the way it is.” In Pestel they’d say, “We didn’t like the Sénateur around here, so we just stayed home. Lot of bad things happen on voting day. Funny thing is—when they published the results, seems we all voted anyway.”
The judge said, “Sounds like an uphill battle on our hands.”
Toussaint said, “I’m with you to the end, Judge.”
“Tell me something, Toussaint. You think if they voted fairly and people just voted their hearts, do you think I’d have a chance?”
Toussaint thinks it over. First time in his life anyone ever asked him a thing like that, wanted his opinion. He says, “I do, Judge.”
“Why’s that?”
“When I tell people about that road—they can’t believe it. One thing everyone wants around here is a road. I think you tell people about that road, you just might have a chance.”
2
A few years before I came to Haiti, the Mission decided to bring the vast Port-au-Prince bidonville of Cité Soleil under its authority. The neighborhood was said to be dominated by warlords and gang leaders, and the military operation began with a show of force: soldiers from the Mission would parade through the narrow streets in APCs, one after another, like Hannibal’s elephants. Somewhere in the middle of the procession a Uruguayan APC came under small-arms fire from gang members on roofs. Then the Uruguayan APC broke down and the Uruguayans abandoned their vehicle in panic, leaving the gang members in possession of an APC, a machine gun, and numerous small arms. The no-nonsense, hyperviolent Brazilian army had to rescue the equipment, leaving who knows how many dead Haitian civilians in their wake. It was not a pretty scene, and shortly thereafter the Uruguayans were sent to Jérémie—in peacekeeping terms, a decided demotion.
Nowadays the Uruguayans would take their APCs out on the back roads of the Grand’Anse from time to time just to see if they ran right. Once, they knocked over the wall of their own base trying to park. That was about the extent of their martial activities. Most mornings you could see a couple dozen of them out on the beach, drinking maté and playing soccer and flopping around in inner tubes.
I found Terry swimming in the deep water out past where the Uruguayans were splashing. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks. Kay had been back in Florida, and without her around to animate the barbecues and cocktail hours and trips to the beach, the only time I saw Terry was on the road from Mission HQ around dusk, when he’d wave at me from the window of his SUV.
Even now, we almost didn’t speak. He was swimming much farther out than I had ever gone. I had arrived to find him swimming, had swum myself for at least an hour, and had been sitting, watching him, for still longer when he finally came out of the water, his broad chest and shoulders swollen from the sport. He was panting from the exertion. When he saw me, he came and sat beside me.
He was silent for a long time, watching the tide creep higher. Then he started talking to me, the way a man can sometimes talk more openly to an acquaintance than to a friend, about the burden of pain and love he was carrying.
“What you got to understand—what you got to understand, her pussy, it’s sweet. Almost like—cinnamon, you know?”
Terry pulled a cigarette from a pack he had left in his shoe. He took a drag so deep that half the cigarette was reduced to ash. The smirk fell off his face. His bluster faded, and I realized that his vulgarity was only a mask intended to conceal a tenderness I hadn’t thought him capable of. You only had to look at his eyes to see it: the lower eyelid distended by sleeplessness, streaks of red emerging from the mud-colored pupils.
“Listen, brother. We got something—it’s serious, brother. That’s all I’m saying. She won’t talk to me, and you gotta go see her for me. I’m dying here. I don’t know who else I can get to go. She likes you, she’ll listen to you.”
“She doesn’t like me,” I said, surprised that she even knew my name. We had only exchanged words once, at Kay’s birthday party.
“No, she does, bro. Trust me, she does.”
“Why won’t she talk to you?”
“You were there, man. You saw her. She’s not like you can talk to her, she gets in the mood, you know.”
“It’s the election?”
“That and other things.”
“Other things?” I said.
A roar came up from the Uruguayans: someone had scored a goal. The winning Uruguayans lifted their hero on their shoulders and paraded down the beach with him. The defeated goalie sagged to his knees. He looked about ready to bash his own brains out with the nearest rock.
“She wants me to get her out of here,” Terry said.
“Where are you supposed to take her?”
He stubbed out his cigarette in the sand, flipped the pack over onto its back, slipped out another one, and lit it. He was on four-day stubble.
“That’s what I say. I say, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ But she won’t listen. I say, ‘Even if I marry you, even if you weren’t already married, even if I weren’t married, I can’t get you a visa.’”
“And you told her that?”
He said, “You can’t talk to her.
She just says, ‘You don’t love me.’ I say—”
Terry didn’t finish.
“Does Kay know?”
“She doesn’t need to know. I love that woman. But this thing isn’t like that. What you have to understand is that I don’t have a choice.”
* * *
Back after that first thing, Kay had dragged Terry into counseling. No, no, I won’t go—and then there he was, slouched in a chair like he was at the principal’s office. Principal was a middle-aged lady with horn-rimmed glasses, chewing nicotine gum, one piece after another. Louise Whatshername. Christ, what was her name? Three times a week, ninety minutes a session, for about six months, this Louise Something sat there listening, crossing her legs when Kay crossed hers, then talking to Terry, the look in her eyes telling him that she understood, she really did. “I bet that was very difficult to resist,” she said. Sometimes Kay would jump on Terry’s ass, and Louise would say, “Kay, this is Terry’s time to talk. Let Terry tell his story. Your time is coming up next.”
And Terry knew just what she was doing: this was his game. She was taking a bad situation and making it into a story, something both of them could live with. “Love is a story,” this Louise Lady said. “A marriage is a story. But you can’t have two stories in a marriage. That’s my golden rule. If a stranger comes up to you and asks what happened, you both tell the same story. Bad story, good story, but maximum one story per marriage.” She was taking two stories and making them one again.
“I can’t forgive him,” Kay said.
“You don’t need to,” said Louise. “You two just need to have the same story. And you don’t even know it, but you two have been living different stories for a long time. When you two have the same story, you don’t need to forgive him, because you were the one who was unfaithful, just like he was unfaithful, and he’s the one who suffered, just like you’re suffering now.”
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