The Gospel of Trees

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by Apricot Irving


  I saw Grandpa Lee only in passing, when he tramped out the door in his irrigating boots, a plastic mug of iced Pepsi in his hand. Sometimes I tagged along out of boredom or curiosity. If he caught a gopher, he’d let me help feed it to the cats.

  * * *

  At four years old, I already knew how to walk carefully through the tall grasses, laying the blades flat with my feet so that I never stepped on a rattlesnake unaware. My father explained this trick when he swung me onto his shoulders in the evenings to get me out of my mother’s hair. He crouched beside me to point out the tracks of roadrunners in the dust and told me to quit talking so we could hear the bullfrogs sing. He told stories of my great-grandfather, who had cleared the desert with a mule, and of men who scaled ladders fifty-six feet high to harvest the clustered dates.

  My father, as I understood it, wasn’t afraid of anything—not even scorpions and rattlesnakes, as long as he saw them first. When he was four years old, there hadn’t been room on the single foldout bed in his parents’ trailer for four children, so he, as the eldest son, and his younger brother had slept in a separate outbuilding. He’d learned early how to fend for himself; he wasn’t a sissy city kid.

  I memorized the warning.

  My mother, on the other hand, didn’t bother to hide her terror of the desert. Rattlesnakes, tongues flickering, wound through the dust under our trailer, across the strip of yellow carpet where I had set up my dollhouse, and into the verdant allure of my mother’s kitchen garden, in search of rabbits and small fat mice. Their narrow heads slipped easily through the fence, but when they realized, too late, that their swollen bellies—taut from an earlier feast—were unable to slip through, they thrashed wildly, their scales caught on the flimsy chicken wire.

  So proud, those rattlesnakes, they never suspected that their desires could lead them astray. Or perhaps they simply couldn’t smell the danger. We must have seemed such simple fools, so easily taken advantage of: a disarray of children, one harried mother trying to keep up with the laundry and meals in the desert heat.

  If Grandpa Lee was in shouting distance, death came quickly. His hand, holding the shovel, seemed to me as firm and unforgiving as that of the angel who forbade entrance to the Garden of Eden in the illustrated children’s Bible that Grandma Lois had given us for Christmas. Grandpa’s jaw tightened—I could never tell if it was in concentration or pleasure—as the blade descended and the bones of the snake’s twisting neck cracked and split.

  If my father came to the rescue, he’d ignore my mother’s frantic pleas to Kill it, please, Jon! As far as he was concerned, the rattlesnakes were free pest control; they kept the field mice out of the vegetable seeds.

  He trapped them in empty garbage cans, then released the snakes into the canyon where they could hunt in peace. But if the deed was done, well, my father was not a man to pass up an opportunity.

  I watched, spellbound, my sweaty toes curled around the legs of the orange vinyl chair in the kitchen as he gutted and lowered the pale headless rope into the Crock-Pot. Unzipped of its scales, bereft of its venom, the muscles still craved movement, even after the brain had been severed. Tiny synapses leapt and shivered in the sinewed flesh as it thrashed and uncurled. Drops of water flicked onto my bare arms and I jumped, unnerved, as the dead snake danced.

  We ate rattlesnake tacos for dinner that night.

  * * *

  My mother could never understand my father’s fealty to such a hostile landscape. A withered extrovert, confined to a trailer the size of her sister’s garage in the suburbs, she resented that her husband disappeared just after dawn. He’d return intermittently throughout the day, but it wasn’t until evening, caked with sweat and dust, that he’d kick off his boots and rejoin the family. Lush, neighborly Oregon with its potlucks and house concerts had faded to a mirage.

  My father couldn’t explain his allegiance. He simply put his shoulder to the plow and didn’t look back. He expected his wife to do her part, just as his mother had. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would be unhappy.

  The night he found a pile of dead Christmas trees dumped by the side of the road and burst in the front door, euphoric, to phone his parents, my mother had just sat down in the rocking chair to nurse baby Meadow. He reached over her shoulder without even looking at her.

  —We hit the jackpot! he crowed into the phone.

  Baby Meadow startled and let go, spurting milk onto Mom’s dress. My mother’s body crackled with anger. He missed the warning.

  —We can run the dead trees through the chipper and they’ll make great mulch for the date trees!

  —Oh, Jonny, that’s wonderful! Grandma Lois’s voice trilled from the other end of the line.

  I sat very quiet at the kitchen table, pretending that I was invisible.

  My mother sucked in her breath, her cheeks as red as rooster combs. My father, still grinning, hung up the phone and ambled down the hallway to take a shower.

  —I hate you! I hate you! she screamed after him. Meadow stopped nursing and wailed. My mother slung the baby over her shoulder and patted with hard, rhythmic thumps. My father sighed and ran callused fingers through his dusty hair.

  —What did I do this time? he asked, befuddled by the incoherent emotions of females.

  * * *

  She plotted her escape when she was alone at the clothesline, stabbing wooden pegs onto my father’s ragged T-shirts, onto the cloth diapers and stained dresses, onto the heavy canvas pants worn as protection against rattlesnakes and date thorns.

  For months there had been no running water in their tiny bathroom, so they had to hike up the sand dune to his parents’ trailer to take showers. Every time she turned the door handle, she worried that she’d find her father-in-law squatting on the john.

  Why had she stayed with this man, she asked herself at the clothesline. The only prospects in sight were more children and another season to endure. The joke was on her for having ever wanted to be a farmer’s wife. She was a rattlesnake snagged on chicken wire: cut off before she could even enter the garden.

  She wondered what it would feel like to begin again, alone. She told herself that she’d just gotten off to a bad start: an emotionless husband, his insular family, the cramped trailer—but there was nothing to prevent her from walking away.

  Baby Meadow fussed from inside the trailer, and my mother grabbed for the wash basket. Easing into the rocking chair as she unbuttoned her blouse, she reached for a cookbook only to realize—after the baby had latched on hungrily to feed—that she’d instead picked up the prim paperback devotional that her mother-in-law had given her for Christmas.

  My mother was suspicious but bored. She skimmed the first few pages. The intro to God Calling explained that two ordinary women who preferred to remain anonymous had waited in front of a blank piece of paper until they heard the voice of God.

  Mildly curious but braced for exasperation, my mother read the first few entries.

  Never think things overwhelming. How can you be overwhelmed when I am with you?

  The tone surprised her. It had been so long since anyone had spoken to her that gently. She turned the page.

  You must be as one who runs a race, stumbles and falls, rises and presses on to the goal Be calm, no matter what may befall you. Rest in me.

  Closing her eyes and leaning in to the words, she climbed up into that offered stillness. It was as if Christ Himself had jumped down from the cross and knelt before my mother’s rocking chair: the rebuke mixed with sorrow, the authority of pain, the hidden gentleness. Here was a God who understood loneliness. A God who promised that He would not leave her. She lifted the baby and leaned her face against Meadow’s damp hair. Her limbic reflexes—the thrashing reptilian brain, clamoring for flight or fight—quieted.

  She knew that she faced a crossroads. If she submitted to that still, small voice, nothing in her circumstances would change. She would be stuck growing vegetables in the dust with a husband who no longer seemed to notice her. But s
he would no longer feel alone.

  * * *

  And so it was that, on the very first Sunday after my mother’s encounter with God in the rocking chair, she dressed me in my frilliest skirt and blouse, put shoes on my feet, and off we went to the first church she could find while my father, left at home with the baby, raised his eyebrows and let her go. Which was how my mother came to be a member of the Coachella Valley Christian Church on Jackson Street; if she was going to devote her life to this Jesus, then she might as well learn what He had to say.

  My father came with us a few weeks later, curious to understand the change in her. He bounced Meadow on his hip while he made small talk with retirees. I knocked back a Dixie cup of Kool-Aid and buzzed around on a sugar high.

  Recruited to direct the children’s choir, my mother took to belting out musical numbers while she cooked dinner. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. The mother whom I’d been afraid might walk out on us had revved to life again.

  As the months went by, the habit coalesced into identity: We became a churchgoing family. My mother had sworn allegiance to the Christ who had captured her, and my father and the rest of us were along for the ride.

  Which is not, by any means, to suggest that we had stumbled onto a primrose path. She was still married to a man who would rather work all day than talk to his wife, and they were not above the odd shouting match in the kitchen. (She perfected a snappy, sardonic quip to get a laugh at church potlucks: Opposites attract—is that some kind of a cosmic joke?)

  But there were also the afternoons when we played whiffle ball with a whole herd of uncles, great-grandparents, and second cousins, and nights that we camped out under the stars. Plus, my parents were able to borrow from the extended family just enough for a cash down payment on a one-room cabin in the Idyllwild mountains—a haven that we could escape to when the heat became unbearable.

  Even after a third daughter arrived (unplanned, as usual), the fragile balance held. I took a deep breath. We had been saved.

  The Bear Went Over the Mountain

  Idyllwild, 1981

  THE CALL TO the mission field arrived on an otherwise ordinary afternoon, the mustard yellow phone jangling from the wall of the Idyllwild cabin. Grandma Lois was on the other end of the line, her voice trembling with excitement—she’d just learned that a forty-acre Baptist agricultural center in the north of Haiti needed a caretaker for a year. My parents held the phone between them. My father shrugged, curious.

  —Where’s Haiti? my mother wanted to know.

  Friends at church had already told my parents that they would make good missionaries, as they had the requisite pioneer spirit, but as far as my mother could tell, being a missionary just meant framed family photos in the church lobby and monthly updates in the bulletin. Too much pressure. No, thanks. Not to mention being unable to speak the language. Or make friends. It sounded lonely.

  My father liked the idea of using his expertise to help others, and had briefly contemplated joining the Peace Corps in college—until the recruiting officer found out that my mother was already pregnant and explained that developing countries were considered too high-risk for children. My parents agreed to at least pray about it, a newly acquired habit, but it seemed unlikely that anything would come of it.

  It was Grandma Lois who had always dreamed of being a missionary, before six children and a family date business cut her adrift from that destiny. My mother was far from convinced that the best way to serve God was to move to another country.

  —Why not just find ways to help others here? she asked my father, loath to lose momentum on her latest plan: to get rid of the trailer in the desert and construct a real house up the canyon, a respectable distance from the family date ranch.

  As far as I was concerned, my parents had only just hammered out a seasonal compromise that suited all five of us: summers in Idyllwild; winters in the desert. The Idyllwild cabin wasn’t much bigger than our trailer in the desert—one twelve-by-sixteen-foot room with a woodstove and a pit toilet out back—but it was just down the ridgeline from the San Jacinto Wilderness. We woke to the tinkling music of a stream overhung by mint and azaleas. My parents slept in the loft, Meadow and I on a fold-down bunk bed that doubled as a couch, and baby Rose Ember (born while my father was fighting forest fires) got a foam pad on the floor. There was no insulation, and there were cracks in the walls through which we could watch the sunlight flicker on the manzanita, so when the temperatures dropped, we packed up and moved back down to the desert. Winter was the time to plant seeds, anyway; summers in the desert were brutal on vegetables (and wives).

  I, for one, wished that summers in Idyllwild could last forever. My mother lugged grocery bags of books home from the library, and Meadow and I spent hours on the hand-me-down couch that my father had dragged onto the porch. Twice a week we gathered a fistful of change to take showers at the state park campground. My ranger father hauled us up on his shoulders when we met him on the trail, and my mother strummed her autoharp and sang Little Rabbit Foo Foo songs around the campfire. We ate dinner at the picnic table, where a tame scrub jay swooped down from the live oak to steal peanuts from our outstretched hands.

  Only when my father roared and smashed supposedly unbreakable plates on the deck, or when full bladders forced us to slip bare feet into worn tennis shoes and brave the pit toilet, did I regret our mountain solitude. Meadow and I hated to go alone, so we’d shake each other awake and carry a candle between us, glancing furtively over our shoulders in the dark. There were two holes—one labeled Bucks and the other Does—and we’d pee in tandem, squinting sleepily at yellowed Sears & Roebuck ads for woodstoves and rifles. The worst part was creaking the door back open. The stench helped, as did the queasy feeling in our guts when we turned for one last irresistible look at what we had accomplished. Still, it took forever to race back across the porch and slam the door behind us so we could dive back under the covers, safe from whatever had stalked us in the rustling darkness.

  * * *

  After the initial phone call from Grandma Lois about a possible job in Haiti, nothing more persuasive emerged to sway my parents, so my mother proceeded as planned with the dreamed-of house in the desert. She picked out double-paned windows and filed permits with the county. Relatives in Nebraska had even offered a loan—that is, until the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics because they’d invaded Afghanistan and, in retaliation, the Soviet Union stopped buying American grain, which caused the market to plummet. At which point, serendipitously, Grandma Lois received a second phone call, this time from a high-spirited missionary matriarch named Ivah Heneise, who had just flown in from Cap-Haïtien with drums, bamboo pipes, conch shells, and a traveling band called the King’s Messengers, all crammed into a fifteen-passenger van for their first U.S. tour.

  Ivah, as my parents were soon to learn, was not easy to refuse. She had thinning burgundy hair and bright eyes that blinked excitedly behind her glasses. She and her now legally blind husband, Harold, had moved to a thatched-roof house in Haiti in 1947, well before electricity or running water had reached the Limbé Valley, and after evicting the snakes from the rafters, she’d given birth to four children on Haitian soil, plus incubated a theological seminary, several Baptist churches, a Haiti Handicraft enterprise that sold brightly colored embroidered skirts and blouses, an ag center, and a missionary hospital.

  The Baptist Centre Agricole, Ivah explained cheerfully, was managed by her son, Ken, and was just fifteen minutes outside of Cap-Haïtien, where cruise ships pulled up to the wharf in the summer months; it was also only twenty miles from the Baptist hospital in Limbé, if we needed medical treatment. The Heneises, at the Baptist seminary, and the Hodges family, at the Good Samaritan Hospital, had both lived in Haiti for decades—and they had a dozen grandchildren between them, most still living in the north of Haiti. We would be in good hands.

  As for the language barrier, Ivah assured my mother that she need not to worry—you didn’t learn to speak a la
nguage; you learned to sing a language.

  My parents, dazzled into curiosity, consented to an interview with the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, who explained that if my father served for a year as a volunteer missionary, he would oversee the chicken and rabbit projects, teach horticulture seminars, and manage the Haitian staff and the greenhouses. The salary would be seventeen thousand dollars for the yearlong assignment. (By contrast, Palm Shadow Produce, their organic vegetable business, had brought in only fifteen thousand in its first year of operation—and that was before taxes, fuel, irrigation water, fertilizer, and labor.)

  My parents did a few quick mental calculations. After a year in Haiti, they’d come home with money in the bank; I could be homeschooled for kindergarten.

  The Divine grandparents (unlike Grandma Lois) were initially hesitant—having spent the war years, respectively, in the South Pacific and as a nurse in a military hospital, they’d been given ample opportunities to visualize worst-case scenarios—but even they eventually conceded that the adventure seemed like the perfect fit for my parents: concern for God’s creation, plus a fair dose of the impulsive. My father would be able to share his knowledge of plants, and my mother would be able to extend hospitality to strangers.

  He is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose, my mother doodled on a piece of notebook paper, twirling the pen nib between her fingers as she stared out at the trees.

  * * *

  The American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, to ensure that my parents were qualified for their roles as missionary volunteers, asked the pastor of our church, Mike Noizumi, to fill out a four-page evaluation, wherein he was asked whether or not my parents were:

 

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