Then he felt a pressure on his thigh. It was Nadia’s hand. Her face gave nothing away: it stared into the distance, pretty and impassive. He could see Johel’s face, fat and shiny with sweat, laughing at some joke, exulting in his triumph. Someone slapped Johel on the back. Terry sipped his drink, melted ice and lemon juice and sweet, thick rum.
8
I took Kay to the airport the next morning, the first flight out of Jérémie in a week.
“I don’t want to see him,” Kay said when she learned that Terry and Johel were coming back from Port-au-Prince that evening.
“Then you should go home,” I said.
“And do what?”
We sat under the sign that read BIENVENUE À JÉRÉMIE. LA CITÉ DES POÈTES, and watched the marchandes sell spiky-headed pineapples, immense grapefruit, finger bananas, and oversweet mandarins. You would never have known driving through Jérémie that morning that there had been any disorder at all, except for the Uruguayan APCs parked at aggressive angles to the street in front of Mission headquarters.
“I guess I lost,” Kay said with a brave, unhappy chuckle.
“Don’t think about it that way.”
“How should I think about it? I came to Haiti with a husband and a dream, and I’m going home—”
“That’s how you should think about it. You’re going home.”
Kay offered me a banana. Then she peeled one of her own.
“Are you going to miss me?” she said.
“Of course.”
“Well, I’m going to miss you.”
We might have gone back and forth like this had my phone not rung. Kay saw me glancing at it and said, “Go on.”
I let it ring—it seemed the least I could do—but as soon as it was done ringing, it rang again.
This time I did answer it. It was Marie Legrand, Toussaint’s mother. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. It was as if she were falling from a very high place. Finally I understood what she was telling me.
* * *
Nadia, Johel, and Terry drove back that day from Port-au-Prince. They left the city after breakfast, the three of them hungover. Between them, they’d slept no more than a dozen hours.
It took a couple of hours to get out of town, crawling through downtown and past the Martissant slum, then through Carrefour, the traffic tight. This stretch of road leading out of Port-au-Prince was as nasty a corner of the planet as any Terry had ever seen: tin-roofed shacks festering in sun-scorched chaos all the way to the sea. Nadia dozed in the backseat while the judge and Terry nudged their way through town, no one talking.
But when they got on the open road, the judge slapped his thigh and said, “Holy shit.” Terry and Nadia understood: they were warriors coming home from battle, and they’d won. Soon Andrés Richard called, congratulating Johel. Then Père Samedi. In the light of day, the judge’s victory was an even more amazing accomplishment than it had seemed the night before. Terry knew that even Nadia had been caught up in the dream. When they stopped to buy gas in Les Cayes, a small crowd gathered around the pump, all of them wanting to see the judge or shake his hand.
Terry could see Nadia’s eyes in the rearview mirror. It made him happy to be so close to her. He felt as if the two of them could speak with no words, his sighs sufficient to tell her that he loved her, her glances in the mirror enough to let Terry know that she was proud.
The night before, Kay had called him. She told him that she was headed home.
“I think that’s for the best,” Terry said.
“There’s still time for you to come too,” Kay said.
That Kay would even suggest such a thing—that’s how little faith in him she had. The trip to Port-au-Prince had been his plan; his force of will had animated their adventure. It was strange to Terry that Nadia understood so much more clearly the dimensions of his soul than his own wife.
They had been driving all morning, Terry and Johel switching places behind the wheel, when Johel’s phone rang.
* * *
Rumors, like fire, drift in subterranean currents until exploding promiscuously: some had known for days that there was a dead boy lying behind the market, and others knew that he had died in the riots, hit in the chest by a tear gas grenade, and still others whispered that the PNH had taken his body and thrown it behind the market, where the pigs gathered. Then everyone knew about the dead boy who was lying in the field, until eventually the juge de paix heard the story, came to the market, and ordered the cadaver transported to the morgue, where the attendants rifled through his pockets, found his phone, and called his mother, wanting to know if she knew what everyone knew, that Toussaint was dead.
* * *
I went with Madame Legrand to retrieve Toussaint’s body from the morgue. She owed morgue fees for the three days they’d held him.
They hadn’t done much for him in the morgue. You sure wouldn’t want your mother to see you like that. It was just a concrete box with three dead people on the floor, and one of them was Toussaint. He was lying on the stained concrete floor, facedown, butt in the air, no shirt, blue jeans down around his hips, no underwear. His chest had been bruised by the force of the projectile, but the thing that got your eye wasn’t the wounds, it was Toussaint’s ass, hanging out in the air. What the dead don’t have is any dignity.
Madame Legrand looked at her son. I thought for a moment that she was going to vomit or faint, but she just stood there trembling, as if she were very cold. We watched Toussaint for a long time, both of us waiting for him to move, but he didn’t, not so much as a twitch. The room smelled of decomposing flesh and Lightning. Then we walked into the morgue attendant’s little office.
“He’s mine,” Madame Legrand said. “He’s my child.”
The morgue attendant was fiddling with a pencil, trying to figure out the secrets of the lottery. It was all in the numbers, and he was adding and subtracting long columns. He looked up from his work and said, “You got to give him a good funeral now.”
“I didn’t know that,” Madame Legrand said.
The morgue attendant scratched at the paper, wrote some more.
“You can’t leave him here,” he said.
“It’s the first child I lost,” she explained.
“You’ll lose them all.”
“All of them?”
“Even if you have ten, they’ll all come here.”
“All ten?”
“A good funeral’s what you need.”
“Did you lose your children?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Who killed my child?”
Madame Legrand took a step toward the morgue attendant. I guess the numbers were getting somewhere, because it took him a couple of minutes before he answered.
“I didn’t see, I didn’t hear.”
Madame Legrand said, “It’s not my child who’s dead. Don’t you tell me my child is dead.”
He looked up, looked down again at his papers. “Madame, you go see. It’s you who tells me your child is lying there.”
“It’s not Toussaint. It’s not Toussaint who’s lying there.”
She was angry now. But the morgue attendant only said, “Go see. I got work to do.”
Madame Legrand went back into the morgue. I was still standing there when we heard her cry out. The morgue attendant just kept adding up rows and rows of numbers, crossing some out, subtracting others.
* * *
There was to have been a celebration for the judge on the Place Dumas when he came back into town, but with Toussaint dead, that had been canceled. In any case, Toussaint would have organized it and hired the paid supporters, who would have cheered and danced until the judge rolled up his shirtsleeves and gave a speech.
The judge, Terry, and Nadia rolled into town late that evening, all three exhausted. The road had been brutal. A bus had broken an axle near the Rivière Glace, where the route was narrow, and they’d had to sit by the side of the car until a mechanic from Les Cayes could weld the
axle in place, four hours of waiting in the hot sun. Then, an hour later, their own car had a flat. Terry had fixed it, cursing under his breath, while Nadia and Johel sat side by side on a rock, staring at him.
Back in the car, not even the judge wanted to talk. Terry could hear him muttering under his breath.
“What are you saying?” Terry finally asked.
The judge looked at Terry, startled. “Who?”
“You. You’ve been talking to yourself for an hour.”
The judge smiled. “He told me he wanted to be a poet.”
After a minute Terry said, “What he told me was that he was going to be a neurosurgeon.”
It didn’t seem right to the judge to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself.
The sound of the men’s laughter irritated Nadia. She wanted to tell them to be quiet, but her own voice wouldn’t come. She had met Toussaint only once. He had come by the house to drop off the judge’s motorcycle at the conclusion of one of his scouting missions, and they had ended up talking for an afternoon. When he learned that she sang with Galaxy and had sung with a famous band like Erzulie L’Amour, he admitted his own ambition, to one day be a musician himself. He knew the region, if not the village, that she came from, and they were able to exchange stories about a dozen or more local personages. Toussaint reminded Nadia of her own older brother, another skinny layabout big talker with a charming smile. She had wanted that afternoon to warn Toussaint. She had wanted to tell him to stay away from the judge.
It was a moonless night. The headlights of the car lit up only the short stretch of bad road ahead, and looking out the window, Nadia could see nothing of the hills through which they traveled. She had never lost her girlhood fear of the dark. Soon she was aware that she was hardly breathing. She had heard stories as a child of the loup-garou: the neighbor who shed his humanity at sunset to steal a feast of children. The loup-garou might be your neighbor, your friend. The loup-garou had come for Toussaint.
She could hear the judge’s voice and then Terry’s. It occurred to her that she and the baby she carried were at their mercy. She imagined them looking back at her, their eyes bright red, fangs elongated; she wondered how she would defend herself if they came for her. She felt the child inside her, still not strong enough to kick, but rolling weight. Nadia felt her body pitch forward and sway backward. They were descending the final hills before the bridge over the Grand’Anse. Now they were in Jérémie.
PART SEVEN
1
On his first morning back from Port-au-Prince, the judge called his staff one by one, asking them to meet him at his campaign headquarters. There had been some doubt the night before whether he would even continue the campaign in Toussaint’s absence. Johel himself had considered dropping out of the race.
But that morning, still sore from the road, he had awoken early and sat on his back porch as the first sun lit up the town. He heard a chorus of children singing at the Baptist church, their song faint at first, and then louder as the music caught on the wind and echoed through the town’s bowls and canyons. He had never heard singing at this early hour, and he sat up straighter in his chair. Soon the choir sang the Haitian national anthem. It was vigorous music, expressing all the martial energy of a great warrior people. “Marchons unis, marchons unis,” the choir sang. For a moment Johel imagined his enslaved forebears rising up to fight the blan, dying, and with each death encouraging a dozen like-minded patriot souls. The swelling of young voices in the apricot light of dawn stiffened his resolve.
Later that morning, when his campaign staff was assembled, Johel told the crew of students, professionals, and lawyers of his emotions as he listened to the stirring verse. His obvious sincerity inspired in his staff similar feelings. Even Terry, who did not understand the lyrics of the song, was moved, and he rose with everyone else when the judge suggested that they sing the anthem in Toussaint’s honor. Toussaint’s friends and colleagues placed their hands over their hearts and promised to form ranks for the country and the flag. The anthem had a special meaning to each of them that day. There was no thought of retreat. They sang, “Mourir est beau, mourir est beau / Pour le Drapeau, pour la Patrie.” When they were finished, the room was silent, as if they had all taken a solemn oath.
Then Nadia spoke. She had surprised her husband, who had supposed that she would be intimidated by this crowd of fast-talking, educated young people, by insisting on attending the strategy session. Then she surprised him still more.
“We have to bury him right,” she said. “We won’t get another moment like this one.”
Nadia understood that the way to win a heart was to tell a story, and that the funeral was like a stage that would attract an audience of ten thousand or more, all of them eager to see the patriot’s body. She told the men that Toussaint’s flag-draped coffin could say more than the judge’s words and that in each of Madame Legrand’s tears there would be a thousand votes.
The suggestion shocked the judge.
“Should I take his shirt and pants too?” the judge said. “The boy is dead. Let’s bury him in peace.”
“You don’t understand how a dead man thinks,” Nadia said.
“And you do?”
“I know he fought for you when he was alive, and you won’t fight for him when he’s dead.”
“What does his mother want?” asked the judge.
“She wants to bury him right.”
That afternoon Nadia went to sit beside Marie Legrand in the bereft woman’s hut. Nadia rocked her body in sympathetic rhythm to Madame Legrand, the women crying together. Nadia told Madame Legrand that the judge wanted to put Toussaint in the ground with all due respect.
Madame Legrand’s tears subsided.
“The boy loved his mother,” she said.
“He was a fine child,” Nadia said.
“The boy always worried how his family would eat.”
“We need to send him home right.”
“Will Juge Blan take care of us now?” asked Madame Legrand. “That’s the way Toussaint would want it.”
The two women, both veterans of the marché, understood each other. A Haitian funeral is expensive, and nothing brings more honor to a woman than burying her son right.
Toussaint’s death and burial would never have been a significant political or social occasion had the judge himself not acquired such notoriety over the course of the last weeks. He had gone to Port-au-Prince, confronted the blan, and come home a hero.
The next day, the judge, as he did most every morning, went on foot to buy fresh cabiche. He enjoyed eating the hot rolls spread thickly with homemade peanut butter. Soon the boulangerie was overwhelmed with a quickly growing crowd, all pushing and shoving to get closer to him. Women wanted to touch his face. The shouting of the crowd was too loud to allow the judge to speak, and eventually he had to call Terry to come and get him.
Then, that afternoon, there was a scary moment. The judge was in his office when one of his students received a call from an acquaintance in Camp-Perrin. A black SUV had stopped there on its way to Jérémie, the caller said, with four men inside, heavily armed. The story soon spread that the men were on their way to Jérémie to assassinate the judge, and Terry attempted to convince him that he should take refuge for the day on the grounds of the Uruguayan military base, where he would be surrounded by machine-gun nests, watchtowers, and barbed wire.
“Not going to happen,” Johel said.
“Just for a day, buddy,” Terry said. “Until we figure out what’s going on.”
“No man walks who can stop us.”
“That’s fine, but these folks are in a car.”
Johel looked at Terry, and Terry knew there was no use arguing the point further.
That evening, a brigade vigilance met the black SUV at the bridge over the Grand’Anse. The four men inside the vehicle, flustered by the large crowd that surrounded them, explained that they had flown in from New York the day before. The car was a rental. They were tourists, m
embers of the Haitian diaspora, on their way to visit family in Dame Marie. Two of the four men barely spoke Creole. All were unarmed, and none of them had ever heard the name Johel Célestin.
* * *
The bishop of the Grand’Anse made his political affiliations clear by agreeing to conduct Toussaint’s obsequies in the cathedral. On the morning of the funeral, the Place Dumas was overwhelmed by mourners. They came from every corner of the Grand’Anse, many on foot, still others by the fleet of buses the judge had chartered, those tough old yellow school buses, long retired from hauling American children, that found a second life on the battered Haitian roads.
There was, however, a problem that the judge had not been able to overcome. He had hired on Madame Legrand’s behalf a private morgue to hold the body and prepare it for burial. But the PNH refused to release the body, claiming that the criminal investigation into Toussaint’s death required an autopsy. There were, however, neither forensic pathologists in the Grand’Anse nor facilities to autopsy a corpse, and it was widely assumed that the chief of police was acting on behalf of the Sénateur, who wished to forestall the political rally that the funeral would entail.
Johel had been negotiating now for three days to obtain the body, but on the morning of the funeral, the crowds already massing, the body still lay under lock and key at the Bon Repos. The family had not been admitted to wash the body and dress it and pray over it. The judge had presumed that the urgency of the funeral would cause the PNH to relent, but instead, battle lines had hardened as the chief of the PNH, declaring that the law came before tears, threatened with impeccable logic to burn the body in the courtyard of the commissariat rather than release it under blackmail.
There was an additional complication: the Sénateur himself was back in town. An old political hand, he announced that he was going to kick off his own campaign with a massive rally on the day of the funeral. At the very hour that the judge was going to bury Toussaint, he was going to be roasting pigs and serving them with mountains of rice and beans. He suggested slyly on Radio Vision 2000 that in grief and sorrow, nothing was more important than a good meal.
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