The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  In fact, the Doctor was even now in the process of opening an archaeological museum—we should plan a visit. We craned our necks as the Musée de Guahaba disappeared behind us, just visible through the trees.

  A few miles up the valley, Ken pointed out the dirt road that led to the Baptist seminary in Haut-Limbé—Upper Limbé—where he and his siblings had grown up. In the gathering dark, shadowy figures lined the streets, backlit by flickering kerosene lamps. Ken’s sister, Laurie, had married a Haitian pastor named Jules Casséus, and the couple had just moved into Ivah and Harold’s old house because Casso (as everyone called him) had been promoted to president of the Baptist seminary. We’d meet them soon, Ken promised—Laurie taught piano and her son, Tony, was the same age as Meadow.

  It was so much to take in all at once. As we drove the final stretch, over the mountains and through ramshackle Cap-Haïtien to the quiet ag center, Ken pointed out the moonlit edge of the Baie de L’Acul, the very same stretch of water where Columbus himself put down anchor in 1492. My little sisters commemorated the journey by getting carsick on both of our parents’ laps.

  As soon as we opened the car doors, in Quartier-Morin, we were surrounded by black Labradors that licked at our hands, and the shrill noise of night insects. Sour with kid vomit, my parents listened distractedly as Ken gave a brief tour of our temporary accommodations. For the first month, until he and his family left on furlough, we would be sleeping in a dormitory built to house Haitian students during agricultural seminars, though no students were currently in residence. The walls smelled of damp concrete, and my sisters and I, sponged clean, curled up on thin mattresses and fell immediately to sleep. Mosquitoes thrashed against a bare lightbulb as my parents sat up to record their first impressions.

  Hello HAITI—The temperature is absolutely delightful with a feel of humidity, my mother inscribed in a gilt-edged journal, a Christmas gift. A flock of ruffed grouse graced the cover, above the delicately scripted title: The Happy Family.

  In the family journal, my mother’s penmanship is looped and even, aside from my father’s jagged corrections. Where she recorded that the plane had landed in Port-au-Prince exactly on schedule, at 1:51 p.m., he had crossed this out and written: 2:41 p.m.

  They still can’t tell a story without interrupting each other.

  * * *

  At six a.m., when we rubbed our eyes and squinted at the ceiling, the world that we had stumbled into was already wide awake and throbbing. Roosters crowed, donkeys brayed, and voices called out in a language so emphatic and musical that I couldn’t tell where one word ended and the next began.

  We followed the straight and narrow sidewalk to breakfast that first morning at the missionary residence—oatmeal and sardines, an unhappy surprise. Ken’s wife, Debbie, had apple-blossom cheeks and soft brown hair pulled back in a headband. She wore long sleeves and hats to protect her flawless skin from the harsh tropical sun. Our wild commotion at breakfast seemed to unsettle her, though I was in awe when I learned that she and her horse had thundered across racetracks and leaped over hurdles before she became a missionary wife.

  Rosie cried and Meadow picked at her oatmeal, but I scarfed mine in record time so I could get the lay of the land from the Heneises’ son, Ryan, the five-year-old commander of the tree house in the mango tree. Adeline, a soft-voiced Haitian woman, cleared our empty plates to the kitchen as Ken inducted my father into a pastime that would become an irresistible obsession: speculation on Haitian politics. The radio that morning had announced that a failed assassination attempt had been made on Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the price of diesel had jumped twenty-five cents a gallon. The menfolk mused that a major coup was perhaps in the making. At any moment, everything could change. Ken pushed back from the table. It was time for a crash course in Ag Center management.

  Ken demonstrated with no small amount of pride how a missionary property should be maintained. In the shed, every tool was hung neatly on its hook and outlined so that if anything were out of place it would be immediately obvious. In the three long greenhouses, the pungent smell of cucumbers and tomatoes hit us like a wall of perfumed green. Rabbits nudged their water bottles in long, orderly wire cages. Laying hens clucked. My mother took particular note of the hundreds of fluffy, shrill five-week-old chicks, bred for the tropics, and grabbed my father’s arm. Raising chickens in the back yard is a far cry from having 1,200 in cages and figuring out what diseases they have!, she admitted in a postcard dashed off to the grandparents.

  Under Debbie’s watchful eye, my mother jotted down the time and location of the weekly English-speaking women’s Bible study (sample lesson: “The Virtuous Woman”) as well as a list of Kreyòl phrases and instructions on how to manage the household help. A cassette tape sent to the grandparents recorded the exact tone of my mother’s voice as she repeated: Adeline, koupe sa. Adeline, cut this. And what precise and oblivious condescension was contained in that earnest mimicry.

  * * *

  That first evening at the Ag Center, after the Heneises had retreated behind closed doors to pack for furlough (that strained, strange, once-every-four-years holiday from the mission field that never quite became one, jammed instead with fund-raising slide shows in church basements and missionary conferences, all of which were designed to keep the mission afloat), my mother grabbed a whiffle ball and whipped up an improvised game on an open patch of grass. Meadow and I took turns whacking wildly at the ball, then racing around an invisible baseline. Before long, a crowd of Haitian children had gathered to watch, until someone kicked a soccer ball onto the infield, and then it was our turn to stare, amazed, as lean, strong legs darted in to score a goal.

  The flashing feet moved almost as quickly as the language itself. After a few breathless minutes on the sidelines, I threw caution aside and dove in, my hair slipping loose from my braids, my feet fumbling with the unfamiliar steps, happy to be lost in the dance.

  Vacation Land

  Quartier-Morin, 1982

  THE INITIAL EUPHORIA swept us along like bath toys bumped and spinning in a rain-clogged ditch for a good few weeks before we realized that we were stranded. We knew nothing of the four stages of cultural adaptation and had no clue how brief the honeymoon stage would be—that golden age of astonishment during which each new discovery would be greeted with effervescent eagerness—nor that this would be followed by frustration, an awkward period of adjustment, and (if we were lucky) acceptance.

  Kreyòl language lessons, which we badly needed, started on day two and consisted of a few words repeated onto a battery-powered tape recorder, which we were sent out on the road to parrot.

  —Bonjou, mwen memn se Agwonòm Jon. M’ap aprann pale Kreyòl. Se sa sèlman mwen kapab di. Hello, my name is Farmer Jon. I’m learning to speak Kreyòl. That’s all I can say.

  If people paused to talk with us, we smiled miserably. The most important phrase, the one we repeated most often, was: Pale dousman, souple. Speak slowly, please. Usually, people just talked louder.

  We learned quickly that when the sun fell into the sea, darkness abruptly followed. Without flashlights or streetlamps, we stumbled on loose rocks and slowly picked our way home. Bicycles raced without headlights over the hard-packed dirt, a jangling noise the only warning of their approach. My mother grabbed our arms and pulled us into her skirt, terrified that she’d lose one of us under the spinning spokes. Her sharp inhalation sent a shiver down my spine.

  On cassette tapes mailed home to the grandparents, we recorded our amazement: giant hummingbirds whirred along the hibiscus hedges and glow bugs sparkled in the grass. When it rained, wide green banana leaves were held overhead instead of umbrellas.

  Exactly two weeks after we arrived, just after we’d taken our places around the dining room table, a high-pitched scream broke through the buzzing roar of the cicadas.

  My father pushed back his chair to have a look.

  —Jon! my mother called after him as the screen door slammed shut, vibrating convulsively on a r
usty spring: thrumming, thrumming, then a rattle like a fading drum roll.

  —Come outside and see! he called from under the mango tree. Meadow and I ran out after him. Rosie put up her arms to be held.

  —What is it? we asked, staring up into the dense, dark canopy.

  There above us, half hidden in the leaves, was a frog clenched in the jaws of a small green snake. Our mouths slacked open with awe as it unhitched its jawbone and begun to suck that slippery, green, very alive tree frog slithering and screeching into its gullet.

  We did not move until the last writhing finger pads had disappeared and the high-pitched, nails-on-a-chalkboard death spasm had ended. Behind the gleaming yellow eyes of the now rather satisfied snake was an untidy bulge, no longer writhing.

  We stared at each other, eyes dilated. My father grinned and asked, —Wow, how’s that for a natural history lesson?

  * * *

  I was starting to realize that anything could happen in this brightly colored country. Naked boys raced tin-can toy cars down the middle of the streets, and no one stopped them or made them put on clothes. Kamyon drivers blared carnival-music horns and barreled down on unsuspecting bicyclists like an orchestra gone insane. Even the mud houses were the color of bubblegum ice cream. Haiti, it seemed to me, was a cacophony of joy.

  Flagging down a crowded tap tap to visit the open-air market in Cap-Haïtien was an adventure in itself. My mother was careful not to let her hair touch the scuzzy painted-on curtains of the improvised bus: two benches wedged into the back of a sagging pickup, baskets jammed against knees, a chicken or a goat dangling upside down from the roof. Market women heaved Meadow and me onto their knees with powerful arms, and I’d burrow against the damp body heat, jostled by the rhythm of the worn-out shocks and the thumping stereo. When we tapped the side of the tap tap to clamber out, we lifted our sandals to avoid the gray-green refuse that floated down the gutters to the sea.

  Sweet potatoes, grapefruit, and pineapple were stacked like jewels on squares of plastic. Barefoot children reached for Rosie’s blond curls. (Meadow and I got more wary attention; red hair, we’d been told, meant kwashiorkor—protein deficiency—an emblem of shame in Haiti.)

  The market women insisted that my mother distribute her purchases equally: ten oranges from one machann; ten from the next vendor. Marmites of rice were sold just like the gospel parables—a good measure pressed down, shaken together, and running over the sides of a clean-scoured coffee can. If I tried to haggle over a mango or a scrap of lace, the market women laughed and egged me on, their hips spread uncomfortably over low chairs, the smoke from their pipes drifting into a loose halo as they translated my butchered Kreyòl into music.

  Everything in me wanted to holler a resounding yes to this new world and dive headfirst into the quicksilver flourishes of the language, but when I watched the grown-ups out of the corner of my eye—the ones who looked like me; the other missionaries—I saw that something in them seemed to hesitate and hold back.

  On my mother’s twenty-ninth birthday, we drove into Cap-Haïtien so we could call the grandparents collect from a hotel pay phone, but the operator spent an hour trying to establish a crackling, erratic connection, and a stray dog kept jumping up on Rosie. Afterward, my mother was disillusioned when she tried to walk along the Cap-Haïtien seawall. The reek of the clogged gutters was impossible to ignore, and faded plastic bobbed in the surf.

  Longing for serenity, she led me down the dirt road in front of the Ag Center on the bony back of the Centre Agricole donkey. Old women squatted in front of charcoal fires, and boys called out across a cactus fence. They told us we should give them the donkey, plus the pants that my mother was wearing. I was confused and annoyed. My mother didn’t know how to respond. The staggering inequity between their lives and ours demanded an explanation.

  And yet poverty was more or less what we had expected to find. Conversations around the missionary dinner table made it seem obvious that Haiti was a country in need of our help. This was, after all, why we had come.

  What caught us off guard was the sharp divide between those who had so little and those whose luxuries far outstripped our own.

  It didn’t take my mother long to give up on homeschooling. A small English-speaking school run by missionaries catered to expats as well as to local business owners, and within weeks, we had been inducted into a community of well-traveled Dominicans and Haitians who could lean back casually by their private pools to discuss politics and art in either French or English, then switch to Kreyòl to give orders to the servants.

  At a birthday party perched on the palatial slopes of Bel Air, high above Cap-Haïtien, one elegant Dominicana confided to my mother that when she had moved to the U.S. for grad school, she was surprised to discover that she was expected to wash her own dishes. My mother laughed, at a loss for what to say. We felt like backwoods yokels.

  Beyond the lights and music of the birthday party, my parents could just make out over the slums and the sugarcane fields the Baptist Ag Center, whose lights twinkled religiously until the generator shut off promptly at nine p.m. A man with dark sunglasses explained dryly that electricity had not yet been granted to the common folk; it was not one of the priorities of the dictatorship.

  My sisters and I paid little attention to this monotonous grown-up conversation, for we were wedged onto a leather couch between twin four-year-old girls with gold jewelry, our eyes glued to a television as big as our dining room table. We stared, slack-jawed, as the indomitable Mighty Mouse performed yet another feat of derring-do, rescuing his hapless victims with unruffled aplomb. The heroic narrative was hard to resist. (We had certainly succumbed.)

  I felt like a diplomat instead of a hick missionary! my mother confessed afterward to the grandparents, a bit stupefied at this sudden ascendancy to a life of privilege.

  As farm stock, we were unaccustomed to being treated like dignitaries. My parents knew how to plant their feet on the earth and work, hard. They valued self-reliance and stubbornness. They looked up to no one. Nor did they expect anyone to look up to them.

  And yet there was an undeniable deference shown to us as missionaries. The Haitian pastors who visited the Ag Center, from working-class families, came only as far as the gate, where they waited and did not enter without permission. Was there some unspoken rule we didn’t know about? Were they afraid of the dogs? I couldn’t imagine anyone being scared of the black Labradors that licked our ears and noses—so much friendlier than the farm dogs under Grandma Lois’s porch. But the Haitians tapped and waited until someone emerged from the missionary domain.

  At first it felt uncomfortable. Then it began to feel routine. We had become the blan—the wealthy foreigners—even if, in our own country, all that we owned was an eight-foot-wide trailer and a cabin with a pit toilet. For even that small hoard, meager though it might be, so far outstripped the earnings of subsistence farmers, fishermen, pastors, and market women that in truth we had been privileged all along, and we hadn’t even realized it.

  To make matters even more complicated, we had servants for the first time in our lives. At the insistence of the outgoing missionaries, my parents paid a cook, Adeline, as well as a woman named Ma Homer to wash the evening dishes—lest the two women lose their livelihoods while the Heneises were on furlough—and my father supervised a staff of ag technicians and gardeners, but it wasn’t the life that my parents had imagined servants of God to lead.

  Adeline, who spent hours stirring cornmeal mush in an aluminum pot over a charcoal stove while her three-year-old son, Nosben, played beside her, never complained. Adeline’s husband worked in the U.S. and sent back money, but he didn’t have a green card and couldn’t legally bring the rest of the family over to join him.

  It did not escape my mother’s attention that while someone else cooked our dinner, her daughters leaned over her arm and narrated whimsical stories to inscribe in graceful calligraphy; our job was to illustrate these and other fantasies. While Adeline hunched
over a plastic tub in the yard to scrub our clothes into a sudsy lather, my mother had time to teach us to sew on a treadle machine set up under the mango tree. We pumped furiously, our feet propped against the foot pedals, amazed as the round wheel spun and sang. With our mother’s fingers to guide it, the needle bobbed and pierced the clean-cut fabric, leaving ribbons of thread in its wake. When she stomped her foot down firmly to force the rocking pedal into submission, from under her fingers emerged a dress with a bright ruffled hem.

  One afternoon when it rained more than five inches in a single day, my sisters and I played in the yard in our bathing suits. I can still remember the throbbing, tingling pleasure of standing under the gutter with my eyes squinted shut, the water coursing over my bare head as I squeezed the sweet, dark mud between my toes.

  My parents later found out that houses had collapsed in Cap-Haïtien because there were not enough trees on the surrounding hillsides to slow the force of the pounding rain.

  How miserable for the Haitians with leaking roofs and mud everywhere, my mother wrote in the family journal. Where do they sleep at night? Where do they lay their mats? How can I ever complain about small houses?

  * * *

  Hearing about a local Baptist women’s group that sewed clothes for the poor, my mother herded the three of us girls along to see if we could help. The Dames Dorcas, as they called themselves, were already hard at work when we arrived. Thirty women hovered around two treadle sewing machines. Those with scissors knelt on the dirt courtyard to snip, without patterns, around the outline of finished dresses. The unpinned fabric was then handed to the women at the sewing machines, who turned over the finishing work to assistants on the periphery, needles flashing as they mended hand-me-down children’s clothes and frayed pants.