The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  As soon as we arrived, the fluid movement eddied to a halt. Bustling, officious women swiped the chairs from the ladies at the sewing machines and lifted them over the heads of the others so that we could sit down.

  My mother tried to refuse, but the leaders waved away her protestations. We were their guests. My mother submitted, uncomfortably queenlike, and perched on a woven grass chair. Meadow and I were lifted and plunked down beside her. The leaders nodded approval. The old pattern of colonialism, however distasteful, was a well-worn rut.

  Worse yet, our arrival signaled the beginning of a Bible study. A woman with a commanding voice broke into a dramatic opening prayer as lace handkerchiefs were adjusted atop tight braids. I waited until my mother wasn’t looking, then slid down to scrape at a trapped stone with my fingernails. Meadow followed suit, and before the prayer was finished, we were squabbling over who had commandeered whose territory. Rosie went after the chickens. They squawked noisily as she gave chase, fluttering irresistibly toward a steaming chodyè of rice and beans on a bed of hot coals. Motionless Haitian children watched our antics from a small square of fabric, presumably having been warned not to move.

  As soon as the Bible study ended, my mother whisked us away, stammering apologies. On the slow, sweaty walk home, she felt surprised at her sharp envy of the women in the dirt courtyard. She tried to explain it to the grandparents on a cassette tape: The Dames Dorcas had one another. And they had found ways to care for their community using the little resources they had.

  Despite my mother’s misgivings, she didn’t give up trying to help. She donated money and bought fabric at the open-air market, and brought along her autoharp when the Dames Dorcas prayed and sang for the sick. The women seemed delighted that she, a blan, wanted to join their group. But it was clear to my mother that they didn’t need her.

  What am I doing here in Haiti? she asked the family journal. Has God brought me to Haiti to enjoy the luxurious lifestyle? I don’t think so. Aren’t we servants of Christ? I’m not serving anybody. They’re all serving me. I need to have a long talk with God and get my assignment straight.

  * * *

  We had left the honeymoon stage. The frustrations had begun to accumulate. I developed heat rash, Meadow vomited in her bed, my mother discovered cockroaches in the silverware drawer, and Rosie learned—by mimicry—to yank open the silverware drawers and scream.

  When my mother plugged in the iron in the kitchen, it turned on the light in the bedroom. —Who’s the electrician around here? she complained loudly to no one in particular.

  Feel like I’ll never speak Kreyòl or take control of this place, my father confided in the journal after a dispiriting morning of cleaning the cobwebs off the chicken coops while the Haitian ag workers pelted him with questions he couldn’t begin to understand.

  Just before the real missionaries left on furlough, there had been a tense conversation about leadership, after which my mother jotted down, surprised: They thought it was fortunate we didn’t speak Kreyòl well so we wouldn’t create friendships that would undermine our effectiveness at being boss.

  Perhaps she had misunderstood—by then there were already a host of miscommunications between the two families—but my mother didn’t feel free to ignore the unsettling advice: We were, after all, novices.

  Never before had we lived in a world so adept at throwing us off balance.

  * * *

  The solitary Centre Agricole loomed above a plain of half-harvested sugarcane like a billboard for idealism. Farmers in the adjoining fields worked long hours in the heat, pulling rough wooden plows behind bony oxen, as if struggling to escape the cycle of poverty. My father tried unsuccessfully to recruit them to his agriculture extension seminars on vegetable cultivation, but the only people who seemed to sign up were young men in tailored slacks and button-up shirts who took copious notes but had no intention, as my father saw it, of muddying their hands with fieldwork.

  What my parents did not yet understand was that these educated sons of church elders, whose parents had scrimped and sacrificed to give their children the possibility of a better life, aspired to a world with more opportunities. Agronomy classes were a door behind which lay knowledge and, quite possibly, if they were lucky, business connections. For the young men had observed an economic corollary that the missionaries had failed to anticipate—which was that no Haitian farmer, no matter how innovative, could hope to equal the salary of a foreign agronomist who was paid in U.S. dollars and provided, free of charge, with housing and a vehicle. The American God appeared to be very affluent indeed, and the young aspirants seemed to have fallen sway to a logical, if unreliable, conclusion: If they threw in their lot with the missionaries, opportunities should follow.

  My father grumbled that they just wanted desk jobs, preferably with a fan. He would have much rather saved his insights for the subsistence farmers who had no choice but to throw in their lot with the land, but none came to his seminars. Perhaps because the farmers with holes in their shirts and broken sandals couldn’t afford to leave their fields (or were skeptical of a sales pitch from foreign do-gooders, who seldom stayed long enough to find out if their ideas made any difference).

  * * *

  We had come, or so we told ourselves, to improve Haiti: noblesse oblige. But there were unanticipated consequences to this new role. If, for example, the son of a missionary commanded the son of one of the Haitian agricultural technicians to get off the tricycle, my sisters and I noted with surprise that he obeyed.

  Three-year-old Meadow decided to give this new technique a try.

  —Desann! she commanded in a high, squeaky voice. —Get off!

  A Haitian boy named FanFan, several years older than my sister, studied her pale outstretched arm and the timid look on her face. He paused, then obeyed.

  My mother, watching through the screen windows, ran outside, horrified.

  —Meadow! You can’t do that! she explained in a strangled voice. —He’s a person! He’s a kid, too.

  Meadow’s face crumpled into guilt. My mother insisted that FanFan climb back on. His alert face appeared to be calculating this new shift in power.

  My mother combed Meadow’s hair out of her eyes, feeling confused and overwhelmed. The children of the Ag Center technicians didn’t have bikes of their own, and the tricycle in question didn’t technically belong to us. As my mother understood it, FanFan had been taught by his Haitian parents to respect the blan. If she let him play with her girls as an equal, she would upset the delicate balance.

  She had imagined, before we left the U.S., that in no time at all we’d make Haitian friends and learn to speak Kreyòl, but navigating the minefield of power and privilege required skills she didn’t possess. Perhaps, she concluded, it would be easier not to let her daughters play with the local children. It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but a wealthy Dominican family had already insisted on weekly play dates to help their children learn English—a far easier compromise than figuring out how to create harmony in an unjust world.

  She shooed us inside to play with Barbies and listen to a children’s Bible hour in English while she helped Adeline finish dinner. The screen door banged shut behind us. FanFan was left alone on the tricycle, his emotions no doubt as conflicted as our own.

  It was one split-second decision; our first betrayal of the missionary ideal: Love your neighbor as yourself.

  * * *

  In our inaugural newsletter home from the mission field, two months after we arrived, my mother included a paragraph titled “Vacation Land!?,” in which she confessed her embarrassment over living the life of a rich woman. She explained why we had come—to oversee the weekly sale of 280 dozen eggs, to promote chickens and rabbits as affordable sources of protein, and to offer reforestation seminars to farmers whose lands were stripped of trees—then added: Our only reassurance is this, if God brought us here, He must know what He is doing!

  * * *

  Our first family portrait in Haiti, desp
ite our mounting doubts, was the very picture of earnest idealism (how easy it was to slip into the expected role). Sun-bonneted and smiling, I clasped my hands primly and posed in front of the Centre Agricole sign. Rosie sat on our father’s shoulders and played with his hair as he squinted, sunburned and blond, into the camera. Meadow stared down at her sandals, her cheeks still round with baby fat. My mother’s face was shadowed under her new straw hat, but she, too, was smiling. We were only a few months into the missionary venture: a farmer, his wife, and their three daughters, all lined up for the benefit of faraway church members who didn’t understand any more than we did what it meant to try to save the world.

  We didn’t realize that the cloud chariots had already begun to dissipate; we had only just begun to be humbled by disappointed ideals.

  Rabbit Banquet

  Quartier-Morin, 1982

  WHEN MY FATHER bent over the Ag Center account books in the evenings with a calculator and a half-bitten pencil, the rabbit project and the caged chickens were his biggest headaches. My mother rubbed his shoulders, pointing out new gray hairs over his ears that she’d never noticed before. The rabbit project, it seemed, lost more money than it brought in. My father had already canceled the food pellets flown in on the missionary plane—the rabbits adjusted just fine to a diet of wild green kudzu—and he was determined to replace the prohibitively expensive tin-roofed cages with thatch. It irritated him that the rabbits had better roofs than the local farmers.

  The chicken project was even more vexing. The imported hens in wire cages produced significantly more eggs than the half-wild Haitian breed that ran loose through dirt courtyards, but there was little demand in the rural north for such volume (plus, like true foodies, the locals preferred the quality of the free-range egg).

  To make the numbers work, my father had to load the egg cartons into the back of the Ag Center pickup each week and drive the length of the country across the harrowing roads to sell to the hotels in Port-au-Prince. No Haitian, he had been warned, could be entrusted with the task.

  Late one night, when my father was supposed to be on his way home from the capital, my mother shook me awake. I didn’t know that she was still waiting for the sound of the truck on the gravel driveway. Without a phone, there was no way for him to tell us that he was safe in the capital, staying with missionary friends. She was left to imagine the worst: a military checkpoint gone sour, the truck tipped over; stranded with three small girls in a country where she barely spoke the language. Her voice was tense when she nudged me awake.

  —Apricot! she whispered.

  I groaned and rubbed my eyes.

  —Come and see!

  I stumbled down the hallway, through the kitchen, into a dark corridor where the charcoal stove was kept. While she’d been awake worrying about Dad, the female Labrador had gone into labor. The exhausted mother panted and whined on a pile of torn sheets as one slick wet sac, then another, slid from between her legs. I stared, mesmerized by the sound of her snapping teeth as she gnawed at the glistening purplish cords.

  When the dog had tongued the last of her babies clean and a squirming litter of blind puppies mewled against her teats, I crawled back into bed and fell into a dreamless sleep. Mom stayed up to make sure that the new mother, in her nervous anxiety, didn’t kill any of her offspring by mistake.

  Slept very bad all night with puppies and no Jon, she wrote in the Happy Family journal. Woke up in morning sick as could be—just like I was pregnant, sick to my stomach and tired.

  * * *

  Although my mother remained ambivalent about Haiti, by six months into that first year as missionaries, it was obvious to nearly everyone that my father was hooked. He collected new vocabulary like seeds, storing away the words for “crops,” “weather,” and “dirt.” Coworkers encouraged his fumbling Kreyòl and laughed at his corny jokes. And while he was certainly guilty of complaining at a moment’s notice about how the Ag Center was managed, he didn’t seem to mind the jaw-rattling roads or the strangers who dropped by without warning. The improvisational nature of agricultural development work—everything dependent on the weather and politics—suited him just fine. As a farmer, he understood that life was unpredictable.

  The heavy clay soil of the Ag Center was cracked and arid in the dry season and impassably muddy in the rainy season, and the American-bought tractor was forever in need of unavailable replacement parts. My father slammed doors and yelled when he discovered that the rabbit and chicken manure was being burned as waste—but this, at least, was something he knew how to fix. He taught the technicians how to mix the weeds that they pulled from the vegetable plots with chicken manure, so that it decomposed into rich, dark humus to spread on the gardens. Within weeks, the broccoli florets were as wide as his outstretched hand.

  And if the vehicles were left untended and the manicured grounds fell into disarray, well, so be it. The only progress that mattered, as far as he was concerned, was work that satisfied, food for the hungry, the slow but relentless transformation of shit into gold.

  * * *

  It didn’t hurt that Haiti was well equipped with adventure, a defining virtue in our family. On weekends, having crested the ridgeline behind Cap-Haïtien, white-sand beaches disappeared into lapping waves. Hearing rumors of pirate ruins, we stuffed snorkels and towels into a picnic basket and paid someone to watch the car for us when the road dead-ended at a fishing village. Fishermen with thick, knotted arms rowed us across pristine Labadie Bay for a pittance. Our snorkels wheezed as we lifted wet tennis shoes over the sharp spikes of sea urchins. Bright fish darted through the coral. We bought fresh-caught lobster to roast over a fire of twigs, cracked open the shells, drizzled the meat with lime, and took our first bite of the good life, a crumbling pirate fortress at our backs.

  The coral and fish and undersea gardens here are like what you see in National Geographic, my mother updated the grandparents. (Maybe I should be a travel agent instead of a missionary!)

  The relative ease with which we had adjusted to life in Haiti did not go unnoticed when my parents rubbed shoulders with the other missionaries at the Sunday-evening English church (my mother, naturally, had been asked to help with the music), and when we received a coveted lunch invitation to the home of Dr. Bill and Joanna Hodges, who ran the Baptist hospital, my parents were bona fide starstruck.

  In Limbé, cooks cleared away the lunch dishes from a fantastically long dining room table—built to feed the Hodges clan, plus a dozen or more medical volunteers at Hôpital le Bon Samaritain—after which the Doctor cleared his throat with ponderous dignity and led us into his study for a private exhibit of archaeological treasures. In his weathered palm he held a tarnished five-hundred-year-old coin, then demonstrated how he used electrolysis to remove the rust and dirt, revealing, as if from behind a veil, the fading image of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.

  Joanna’s curly gray hair tumbled over her shoulders when she got started on a good story.

  —Sometimes you go into a missionary’s home, and they’re all down on their knees praying! But when you go into Doc Hodges’s home and they’re all down on their knees, they’re looking at a map and they’re saying: Well, how do you get here?

  She had a movie-star smile and a laugh that sounded like a donkey braying. She handed out mimeographed stacks of the Doctor’s more famous newsletters, including several on Columbus.

  Proudly surveying her realm—which included half a dozen homes, a playground, a tree nursery, and an on-site missionary school—Joanna dropped the hint that if my parents wanted to return to Limbé after our term at the Ag Center was complete, my father could manage the hospital tree nursery.

  My father raised his eyebrows hopefully. My mother looked dismayed. As soon as my sisters and I were given permission, we raced off to play with Joanna’s half-a-dozen adopted children and grandchildren on the swing set under a towering green almond tree—the very epicenter of paradise, as far as I could tell.

  That ni
ght, back at the Ag Center, my parents tucked us girls into bed and sat up late to confer. When the generator switched off, the trappings of modernity—lights, fans, cassette player—shuddered to a stop. (At the hospital, Joanna had informed them, the generators ran all night long.) My mother lit a wobbling kerosene flame and slapped away a mosquito. Outside, cicadas chirped.

  My parents understood, better than they used to, what they had been offered. Hôpital le Bon Samaritain was one of the most coveted missionary appointments in the north of Haiti. If we were to move to Limbé, we would no longer be relegated to an isolated agricultural outpost. There would be other missionary kids to play with right outside our front door, and my father would finally be able to focus on reforestation, which he’d been hankering to do ever since he laid eyes on the stripped-bare mountains.

  But my mother, despite her allegiance to Jesus, hadn’t set her sights on missionary life. She was already counting down the days until we could break ground on our new house in the desert, and was looking forward to summer in Idyllwild. Another two-year stint in Haiti wasn’t at all what she had in mind.

  Until, that is, she snapped awake after a lucid dream in which a voice, which sounded very much like the voice of God, asked whether she wanted to be a bright light shining out across the water or a stagnant, going-nowhere stream, eddying and foamy.

  She confided to my father that the Lord had shown her a vision. Maybe they were supposed to stay in Haiti.

  * * *

  The rabbit banquet may have helped sway her vote.