The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  From time to time, the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society advocated for a gradual transition to Haitian Baptist leadership, but its board members seemed to have accepted that such things took time.

  The history of the hospital was known. The future remained unclear.

  Life in Paradise

  Limbé, 1983

  MY SISTERS AND I, after six boring months in the U.S., were already bouncing in our seats as the plane began its descent into Port-au-Prince. Haiti, as far as I was concerned, contained every good thing in the world, cousins and grandparents excepted (though lizards and snorkeling went a long way to make up for that loss). And this time, to make a happy story even better, Joanna’s daughter Barbara had left a station wagon for us at the airport, so instead of continuing over the mountains to the lonely Ag Center, my father turned right just before we crossed the Limbé River down a short, dusty road toward our new home on the missionary compound.

  He lifted one hand off the wheel to greet the neighbor women who gathered laundry from cactus hedges and the men who tipped wooden chairs against pink and green porches. At the chipped gray fountain by the hospital gate, kids beat on overturned buckets while they waited in line, the clean water splashing onto the wet concrete at their feet.

  Inside the hospital entrance, women crouched in front of charcoal fires, preparing meals for sick family members, their shadows thrown long against the wall.

  —Bonswa, a chorus of voices called out to us.

  —Bonswa, good evening, we answered as we rolled slowly past the facilities depot, past the bamboo grove with its whispering leaves, the glaring fluorescent lights of the pharmacy and the green sludge of the fishpond, into a tidy circle of whitewashed homes under a towering zanmann tree. Herons squawked as they rose in a graceful arc above the breadfruit trees. We had landed in paradise.

  * * *

  The hallelujah chorus that I woke to every morning was a symphony sung by roosters and herons, backed by the beat of the clicking cicadas and the low whirring tick of the fan. Kicking aside thin sheets, I scratched fresh welts on my ankles and watched as a lizard flicked his tongue, then crept on padded toes toward a blood-drowsy mosquito. From the kitchen, the smell of pancakes with imitation maple syrup, carefully rationed to compensate for the sharp tang of Haitian honey. And after breakfast? An unending parade of distractions.

  Feet wedged into lace-up roller skates, I tore down the long concrete sidewalk that snaked all the way from the front porch of the Hodges house to the back gate by the highway. I darted past the Rose Cottage and the wispy acerola cherry tree, from which hung tiny fruit, small as a doll’s heart; past the swing set under the zanmann tree, past the parrot that had learned in short order how to screech my name—Raperkrop! Raperkrop!—in imitation of my mother’s exasperated hollering. By the rabbit cages, I hurtled through a small dark forest of knobbly-armed kakao trees with white fairy blossoms perfectly proportioned for Barbie wedding bouquets, zipped back to the iguana cage and came to a screeching halt, then—arms wide like a levitating flamingo—I precariously turned around on tiptoe to race off in the opposite direction.

  I could circumnavigate my universe in fifteen minutes and stop for snacks at any missionary house along the way.

  After the dusty solitude of our desert trailer and the slow pace of the Ag Center, the missionary compound was nonstop action. My mother was an instant hit because she baked gooey cinnamon rolls and sang camp songs good and loud. She popped popcorn and hosted game nights; long after we girls had been sent to bed, we could hear the nurse volunteers slap playing cards onto the dining room table and grab riotously for the spoons.

  We do take walks in the community to remind us where we are, my father pointed out in our first newsletter from the compound. I added in a postscript: I’s fun to be back in HATi, I’m glad Meadow still remembers Creole. Love, Apricot.

  Every morning after breakfast, my father walked past the zanmann tree and the swing set into the cluttered tree nursery with its crumbling piles of soil. The voices of the Haitian nursery workers drifted over the playground as they watered and fertilized and packed into cardboard boxes the thousands upon thousands of seedlings in plastic Rootrainers, ready to be transplanted onto the eroded hills.

  There were more trees on the compound than in the rest of Limbé combined, but this was only because the Hodges family defended them so fiercely. Joanna, we learned, had planted the towering zanmann tree as a wispy seedling, even though the rest of her family laughed and said it would never survive. Over the years, she’d fended off the goats and children who tore at its leaves until, two and a half decades later, the tropical almond extended a quiet canopy over the missionary houses and dropped gilded red leaves twice a year for the kids to scoop up and toss into the air, pretending that it was fall.

  * * *

  David Hodges, Bill and Joanna’s elder son, who had moved to Limbé when he was seven, still lived on the compound. He was tall and thin, with a shaggy, untamed beard, and he raced off on a red motor scooter to fire up the generator every time the national power grid failed. He was in charge of the buildings and grounds and had been known to climb power poles during hurricanes to keep the lights twinkling in the missionary houses and the vaccines at a stable temperature. He loomed over the compound like a vaguely benevolent but unpredictable giant, straight out of the Brothers Grimm; I would not have been surprised to discover that he also caught and hurled lightning bolts with his bare fists.

  His wife, Emily, a full foot shorter, was an Indiana farm girl who invited the missionary kids over for book clubs in her living room. All of us had heard the rumors about how David had proposed to her—it involved the fishpond, which we were expressly forbidden to play in because sick patients had been known to tip their bedpans into its slimy depths. And yet rumor had it that when David proposed—and Emily said yes—he threw her in.

  I knew vaguely of the existence of Susan and Paul, the oldest and youngest Hodges children. They no longer lived on the compound but visited every so often. Paul had a job in Mauritania; Susan lived with her family in Port-au-Prince.

  Barbara Hodges had never married, though she was about the same age as my mother. She lived in a bedroom at the back of her parents’ house and ran the pharmacy. My parents never did succeed in setting her up with any eligible young bachelors, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. (The rumor was that she had fallen in love with a Haitian artist, but her parents hadn’t approved.) Her fingers flew over the piano keys when she accompanied the choir at the Limbé Baptist church, and she wore her long black hair twisted into a bun. She wasn’t the official mother of Bill and Joanna’s three adopted children, but she was the one who went with us on field trips to Columbus sites and to see metalworkers pour shimmering molten aluminum into molds and tip out cooking pots as if by magic.

  In all, there were ten missionary kids at Jericho School in 1984, though the numbers fluctuated; our family hopscotched around to three different houses in two years because of rotating furlough schedules.

  Joni Hodges, the youngest adopted son of Bill and Joanna, had been dropped off at the hospital as a baby with swollen hernias. After his operation, the Haitian nurses taught the little boy to say: Bonjou, Papa every time Dr. Hodges passed by on his rounds. Joni’s mother had died two months after he was born, and his birth father already had five children to feed and care for. Joni was officially adopted when he was two; his birth father still came to visit.

  Anacaona Hodges, adopted a few years earlier, had been named after a Taíno princess, and though she was only ten, she had a regal profile and carried herself with such fierce and self-sufficient dignity that I worshipped her instinctively.

  Peter Hodges was eleven and quieter than his adoptive siblings. He had arrived at the hospital as a toddler with an abscessed knee, and the bones in his leg had never fully healed. I learned later that kids in Limbé mocked him for his limp, but he never teased me, even when I stormed into a fury because no one wanted to play a game
of Sardines by my rules. Also, significantly, he never once called me Little Boss—a nickname perfectly calculated to tip me into outrage. I tried not to make it too obvious that I was smitten, but I couldn’t have been more elated when we both came down with chicken pox and were quarantined across from each other at Bernice Rogers’s dining room table for an entire blessed week.

  Picole, whom all the little girls on the compound wanted as an older sister, lived across the highway with her younger brother, Loren (a saucy charmer whom most of the girls were secretly in love with). Their father was a Haitian pastor named Paul Romeus who had started a trade school in Limbé with scholarships for students who couldn’t afford books or uniforms. His wife, Belle, was a no-nonsense midwesterner with a dry wit and a quick smile who had worked as a nurse at the hospital for twenty years.

  Sometimes Picole brought with her to the compound one of her father’s scholarship students, whose mother wasn’t able to take care of her. Olynda had jet-black ringlets that fell to her shoulders and long lashes. She watched shyly as we careened around the playground, shouting at each other.

  Last but not least, three American girls had just moved into a brand-new house at the back of the compound, with cathedral ceilings and iron window bars welded into the shape of flowers to keep out the robbers. Kirsti, Mimi, and Carrie’s father, Dr. Steve James, had come to help Dr. Hodges at the hospital. I liked Steve. He had a soft voice, and his smile turned up the corners of his mustache. I couldn’t imagine him shouting at anybody. When he wasn’t at the hospital, he spent hours alone with his Bible folded open on his desk.

  Steve and his wife, Nancy, had both grown up as missionary kids in Burma and were best friends when they were eight years old. Their daughters were the same stairstep ages as my sisters and me. Nancy lined us up against the dining room wall in leotards and tights and taught us to point our toes and plié, after which we crammed elbow-to-elbow to sip tea in that quiet house, which breathed serenity. The Burmese teacups were pale and translucent; grains of rice, pressed into the unbaked clay, had burned clean and left a thin sliver of glaze for the light to peek through. I had never seen anything so delicate.

  Tamara, though not yet officially adopted by the Hodges family, had already been featured in several of Joanna’s newsletters. Her unevenly shorn hair had been infested with lice and she was covered in running sores when she was dropped off at the missionary hospital. One eye was blind and the right side of her body was partially paralyzed. The staff at the hospital had been told that her name was Pa vle sa: I don’t want that.

  Tamara’s spirit, however, was undefeated, despite the odds stacked against her, and as the nurses dressed her wounds and massaged her atrophied limbs, feeding her protein-rich mash, she fought her way to health. When the hospital chaplain made his weekly rounds, she clapped along to the Kreyòl choruses. Joanna came in to applaud her first few faltering steps, as Tamara teetered precariously, dragging her right leg along the floor. The staff at the hospital wanted a new name for her, so Bill and Joanna decided on the palm tree.

  —Yo rele m Tamara! My name is Tamara! she’d shout to anyone who would listen, leaning on her crutch as she hitched her way down the sidewalk. When she was well enough to move out of the pediatric ward, Joanna enrolled her first in Belle and Paul’s school, across the highway, paying a woman in Limbé to provide a bed for her, until Suzette, our inimitable schoolmarm, convinced the Hodges family to let Tamara join the joyful ranks of Jericho School.

  * * *

  As a confident transplant from the American South and the sole black woman in leadership on the compound, Suzette was—like the rest of the missionaries—called a blan whenever she ventured into Limbé (occasionally, people teased her for trying to hide her Haitian roots and refused to believe that she couldn’t speak Kreyòl). A few of the missionaries, I later learned, were made uncomfortable by her formidable presence, but as a seven-year-old, I was blissfully ignorant of this ancillary drama. All I knew was that Suzette summoned pure outrageous joy to follow in her wake.

  When I was impatient and nipped at the heels of the other kids, Suzette just gave me more writing assignments. She laughed and steered me toward my desk when I stumbled back from the library with my nose in a book, feet feeling blindly for the legs of my chair, so swept away by the power of language that I couldn’t tear my eyes from the page. It was Suzette who assured me in ringing tones that I was a writer, the first time I had ever heard those magic words spoken aloud. She made me promise that I would dedicate my first book to her.

  Seized by inspiration, I sat bolt upright during a game of checkers and scribbled down a spontaneous poem. My father clapped me on the back when he saw it printed in Suzette’s graceful calligraphy for the Jericho Journal (circulation about ten):

  The bell rang! The bell rang!

  Hurry, hurry, hurry!

  No one’s got their homework done,

  We’re all in a flurry!

  The second stanza galloped on from there.

  —What a kid, what a school! my father boomed. I beamed.

  Suzette was a ringleader of inexhaustible enthusiasm who donned a construction-paper top hat, red pajama pants, and the Doctor’s black rubber boots for the first and only Jericho School circus.

  Dr. Hodges surprised us by not only showing up but showing up in costume. He won honorable mention for his End of the World–themed hat (Joanna confided that his nickname in high school had been Gloomy Gus). One of the nurse volunteers, however, one-upped him with her prizewinning entry: Baby Getting an IV.

  The missionary moms spent weeks sewing sequins onto homemade clown outfits. Peter was a juggler. Ana was a lion. Rosie and the James girls were clowns. Meadow played a snake charmer and popped out of a tall woven laundry basket with a garter snake wound around her wrist (my father had found the snake at the tree nursery and had dropped it in the laundry basket while he took a shower—the tiny creature, no longer than my sister’s arm, wasn’t nearly as impressive as the pair of eight-foot-long boa constrictors that he had rescued from one of the hospital wards, but my mother still screamed when she grabbed a fistful of dirty clothes and found a snake coiled around a T-shirt, tongue flickering). My mother recovered (as did the snake), and she trilled belly-dance music on the recorder as adorable, squeaky-voiced Meadow grinned shyly at the riotous applause.

  Tamara wore green tights and led a trained kitty—a gangly, acrobatic medical student—around the yard by a leash tied to his ankle. At her command, he flipped into a handstand, tennis shoes dangling upside down over his head.

  I balanced on the back of my father’s bicycle in a sparkly clown suit, one toe pointed skyward—Amazing Apricot and Her Dynamite Dad!

  * * *

  During lunchtime, our games of freeze tag waited in suspended animation while we gulped down fresh-squeezed sitronad and sòs pwa mayi. Then we raced off again, mothers appeased, screen doors slamming behind us.

  And if we tired of freeze tag or if the roller skates gave us blisters, there were bikes to race through the raje or trees to climb; shaggy black Labrador mutts to pester or swing sets to shimmy up, our legs dangling like circus performers. We caught lizards in lard cans, played Matchbox cars above the smoking trash pit, and summited the Citadel on the back of bony horses to take grinning photographs, our toes lipped over a hundred-foot drop-off—a world without safety rails.

  If there is a more perfect habitat for a seven-year-old, I ask only for its address.

  Musée de Guahaba

  Limbé, 1984

  AS A WIRY second-grader with skinned knees and ponytail braids, I didn’t know much about Dr. Hodges except that he almost always wore red suspenders (to peg him in a game of charades, pretty much all I had to do was snap invisible suspenders and clear my throat importantly).

  The Hodges house was the biggest on the compound, with a parrot that whistled from a cage on the porch in perfect imitation of the Doctor’s piercing summons to the dining hall. Morning, noon, and night, a rotating cast of H
aitian doctors on residency from Port-au-Prince, nurse volunteers, and international medical students crowded around the long dining room table for rice and beans and Kreyòl chicken, as well as sage pronouncements on colonial history and tropical medicine.

  If we found smashed-up bits of crockery on the beach, we took it to Dr. Hodges for identification, just to watch him push up his glasses and announce that what we were in fact holding was two-hundred-year-old French pottery—most likely predating the Haitian revolution. We held the shards so carefully in our palms, it was as if they were made of diamonds.

  When his long-awaited Musée de Guahaba opened just across the highway—“Guahaba” being the Taíno name for Limbé—my father took us over to see the marvel for ourselves.

  Meadow and I raced past the long reflecting pool and up the red tile steps, where our father dropped a few gourdes into the donation box—the price of a large mango. Hand-painted block letters above the gleaming whitewashed rotunda spelled out DIEU CRÉA L’HOMME À SON IMAGE. French, not Kreyòl, was still the official language in Haiti, although only the well educated spoke it fluently—which excluded us. Dr. Hodges modestly translated: We are created in the image of God.