The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  * * *

  My father brought Ti Marcel home from the pediatric ward every chance he could find, and took her out in the rain to feel the sharp sting of raindrops on her bare arms. Cradled against his chest, her ungainly head listed awkwardly on a thin neck. In the waning and humid dusk, my sisters and I raced in breathless circles around their two-headed silhouette under the zanmann tree, playing freeze tag in the dust.

  As the months whirled by, my father’s letters radiated pleasure. Ti Marcel learned to sit up. She grew hair. She developed a taste for my mother’s home-cooked dinners, mashed into gruel by my doting father. Baby Marcel is everyone’s example of a miracle, he boasted to Grandma Lois. Yesterday she held a bottle all by herself.

  Even I couldn’t deny the transformation. My father had always insisted that she was a smart kid—he could tell by the way her eyes followed us around the room—and within a few short months, she had blossomed into a determined, curious child. She could follow all the prompts in the Pat the Bunny book when she sat on his lap: Lift the handkerchief to play peekaboo, pat the man’s scratchy beard, put her finger through the gold wedding ring.

  She began to spend entire weekends at our house, which my father chronicled in his weekly letters to faraway California.

  Dec 8: We had Marcel over again last night. She really has a lot more hair . . . In just the last few days the older girls have decided she really is neat. They said last night that they’re starting to like her more.

  Dec 15: Good morning, the chickens are crowing, the crows cawing, the cat meowing, Marcel squeaking, and the sky is a pretty color . . . Marcel has spent the last two nights here. She always sleeps straight through and wakes up to be no trouble at all.

  My father adored Ti Marcel. I still considered her a menace. I hated how gently he spoon-fed her gulping hunger, as if he would do anything to rescue her. He never seemed exasperated when she soaked the bed with diarrhea, but if I sassed back instead of setting the table like Mom asked, he’d slam open the drawers in the kitchen and yank my arm while paddling mightily with a wooden spoon. Ti Marcel didn’t have the strength to defy him, and no matter how little attention he gave, she turned to him like a sunflower.

  Even now, I can remember the texture and shape of my jealousy, wadded up like a loose sock under the heel of my roller skates, grating against my anklebone every time I rounded a corner. Jealousy jarring and black-heat-abrasive, like the skid of sweaty knees and palms on jagged concrete when I hit gravel and my skates flew one way and my arms another—blood from broken palms and a skinned nose leaking into my sobbing mouth.

  At eight years old, I didn’t care what became of her. I wanted my father back.

  * * *

  By Christmas, Ti Marcel had her own bed at our house, to my mother’s growing exasperation. My father never gave any warning before he brought home a baby from the pediatric ward, which meant that the burden for the rest of us girls fell to my mother. Still, she helped me pick out an embroidered yellow dress from the marketplace as a Christmas present for Ti Marcel—reminding me firmly that God wanted us to be kind to everyone, but especially to those without families to love them.

  I listened resentfully to my mother’s Sunday school lesson, then lost myself in making an elaborate card, mesmerized by the confident arc of my crayon as it swept across the page.

  On Christmas Eve, the missionary kids lit tissue-thin Haitian fanals and carried the swaying candlelit cardboard churches through the hospital to sing carols to the patients. We plonked out a pretty decent rendition of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” in Kreyòl, but had to revert to jolly old English for “Good King Wenceslas.” Dr. Hodges’s deep baritone rumbled under my mother’s soprano—as the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even. The families of the patients, not having understood a word, leaned against the doorways and shouted Amèn!

  The annual Christmas pageant at the seminary, by contrast, was performed only in Kreyòl. For once, we weren’t the stars of the show and didn’t have to sit in the front row, which felt like a relief. Mary, played by a young Haitian seminary student, rode in on a live donkey, and five-month-old baby Andrew, recently adopted by Steve and Nancy James, was awarded the place of honor in the manger. The shepherds did their best to gaze meaningfully at the Christ child while wrangling a herd of squirming goats, but the bleating animals startled poor Andrew, whose parents passed forward his bottle as an entire flock of angels danced down the aisle singing hallelujahs. I agreed with my parents: No Christmas pageant in the States could hold a candle to that chaotic joy.

  As soon as we got home from the pageant, my father brought Ti Marcel over from the pediatric ward for Christmas dinner. She smelled of Vaseline and sulfur powder, but he didn’t seem to mind—scabies being, as he put it, a small price to pay for life itself. The electricity had been flickering on and off all evening, and the kerosene lantern wouldn’t stay lit. When our dinner guests arrived—fellow tree-hugger expats who worked for an NGO in Cap-Haïtien—my mother tried to make small talk while slicing a fresh pineapple and checking on the rolls in the propane oven as my sisters and I, hopped up on all the excitement, raced around her ankles shouting at each other. My father was too busy to help; Ti Marcel needed a bath.

  Joanna knocked on the door in the midst of this commotion to inform my father that some well-heeled Haitian visitors wanted to purchase poinsettias so he needed to open up the greenhouse for an after-hours sale. He promptly handed my mother the dripping baby, still crying and cold from her bath. My mother never did find the elusive bottle of formula—which my father, in his hurry, had dropped into an empty chicken-feed container just outside the front door—so my mother spent twenty minutes trying to placate a wailing baby while Christmas dinner grew cold in the dark.

  But it all turned out quite alright, she concluded with a sigh in her weekly letter home to the Divine grandparents.

  * * *

  With only six months to go before our two-year contract at the compound was up, it was unclear what our future might hold. Joanna had already informed us that her daughter Susan would be moving back to Limbé with her family; Susan’s husband, Ron Smith, would resume management of the tree nursery. A visiting American Baptist Foreign Mission Society representative, impressed by my father’s work ethic, had encouraged him to apply to seminary, since the Baptists required all full-time missionaries to obtain a master’s degree or higher, but the Fuller School of World Mission in California had yet to reply with an acceptance offer. Nor were my parents sure how they’d pay for a seminary degree if my father did get in. The crop of spaghetti squash that my father had tilled into the soil in California had eaten up a good portion of what they’d saved while working at the Ag Center, and our income at the missionary hospital, subsidized by supporters in the States, capped out at a few hundred dollars a month—which was more than enough to live on in Haiti but wouldn’t stretch very far in California. He might be able to pick up a seasonal Forest Service job, but it would be too late to plant vegetables. And besides the cabin in Idyllwild, whose pipes wouldn’t last through a winter, we didn’t have anywhere to live (the trailer in the desert, to my mother’s great relief, had been sold at a steep discount and hauled away by a friend even poorer than we were).

  But no matter how daunting our own challenges might seem, tiny Ti Marcel was a living reminder that we could always find someone who had it much harder than us—and if she could stare down those odds, then surely we could do no less.

  * * *

  By the time the end of January rolled around and a letter from California arrived with the news that one of my father’s sisters was willing to adopt Ti Marcel so we wouldn’t have to leave her in Haiti, the argument that had been silently brewing for months spilled out into the open. My father, swept along by the hope that this borrowed Haitian daughter would soon become a part of the family—even if only as a niece or cousin—wanted to move her out of the pediatric ward permanently. My mother reminded him that Ti Marcel already had a father
, even if he hadn’t yet returned for her.

  This, at least, was sufficient to force my father to stop and consider his actions. He drove the next day to the Teleco office in Cap-Haïtien and placed a collect call to his sister. Shouting over a badly connected line in a sweltering phone booth, my father explained that as fond as he was of Ti Marcel, it didn’t seem right to uproot her from her family. We would just have to trust that God would continue to protect her.

  He was, however, moved by his family’s generosity. We still can’t get over what a wonderful family you are to be willing to adopt a kid mostly for our sakes, he mused reverently on a cassette tape for the Andersons.

  My mother, on the other hand, found the public drama humiliating—particularly as it reflected poorly on both my parents’ meager finances and their hazy plans for the future. Apparently they thought Jon couldn’t live without that little baby so they were going to adopt her for us, she explained to the Divine grandparents. However, it isn’t something one enters lightly.

  Even after the conversation with his sister, my father continued to pamper Ti Marcel without any hope of permanence, bringing her home every night for dinner, until Meadow and I complained. Even Rosie was tired of playing with her. Couldn’t we do something else for a change?

  For once, my father relented; that night we played checkers. Meadow, who didn’t appreciate getting skunked by my two kings, tipped over the board.

  The next night, Ti Marcel was back. She had just gotten her first tooth—which, my father pointed out proudly, hadn’t even made her grumpy—and we celebrated her first birthday with a chocolate cupcake and a candle that we helped extinguish.

  * * *

  Exactly one week later, like a character in a mystery novel, Marcel, the rightful father, reappeared. It was an otherwise unremarkable Monday afternoon. Herons squawked in the trees, and missionary kids raced on roller skates around the bumpy circular sidewalk as Marcel, still dusty from his three-hour kamyon ride, made his way in silence to the pediatric ward. He had arrived without fanfare, but he had returned to claim his own.

  The prison cell in Miami had apparently been a fabrication. As it turned out, he was a farmer with a small plot of land outside of Gonaïves, and he had left his cows and fields for the day to reclaim his daughter. No explanation was given for why, if he owned milk cows, his daughter had been left at the hospital in such dire condition. The Haitian nurses, bristling with condescension, showed him his transformed little girl, who could now stand against the rail of her crib and bounce with chubby arms. They explained that she had become a favorite of a missionary named Agwonòm Jon, who wanted to adopt her.

  Marcel’s response was adamant, as the nurses later reported to my father: I don’t want the blan to take my baby!

  This assertion should have been enough to settle the matter, but by so blatantly demonstrating our affection for Ti Marcel, we had wandered into uncertain territory. Given the historic imbalance of power, it was widely understood that if a blan decided to take custody of a Haitian child, his will could not be thwarted, even by the rightful father. Indeed, before Marcel was allowed to take his daughter home, he was sent first to speak with Dr. Hodges, who cleared his throat and decreed that the child—for her own protection—was not yet healthy enough to leave the confines of the hospital.

  Marcel reiterated to the nurses in the pediatric ward that his daughter would not be raised by a white man, then melted back into the obscurity from whence he came.

  My father, who heard about the encounter only after Marcel had left, readied himself for the impending loss. It seems very right that she should have a real father, he penned in a letter to his mother later that afternoon. But there was already a catch in his throat—so much so that he added later, as an afterthought scribbled in the margins: I’m glad she didn’t go today. I will miss her when she does go.

  * * *

  As far as I was concerned, the crisis was over. Now that Ti Marcel had a home waiting for her, I could cuddle her without envy. I wove her hair into soft braids and read her fairy tales on the cicada-humming porch while she sat on my lap and reached for the pages.

  Life was looking up again. There were newborn baby bunnies to smuggle from their cages, a kite-day competition at Jericho School, and my new Easter dress, which spun like a gilded teacup when I whirled around the living room. Grandma Lois had even heard rumors that my father had been accepted at Fuller Seminary, though the news wasn’t official yet. What did it matter that our passports were missing? We were seasoned adventurers by now. The world was full of surprises.

  On our last Easter morning in Haiti for the foreseeable future, my father shook us awake in the dark. We clustered around Mom’s autoharp and stared down from a ridgeline as the sun spilled over the mountains into the Limbé Valley. Flocks of cattle egrets lifted from the mangroves as far beneath us, like a glittering promise, curved the blue, quiet Baie de L’Acul—into which jutted the triumphantly reforested Morne Bois Pin peninsula. My father and the nursery workers had just planted an additional 960 trees on that restored Eden. My mother clasped her autoharp to her breast and sang like an angel.

  The Limbé Baptist church celebrated Easter with a long, slow rhythmic march to the river where the baptismal candidates, robed in white, waded into the water singing. The missionaries celebrated with an all-compound potluck. Ti Marcel sat on my lap while my parents grabbed each other’s waists and barreled across the grass with their legs tied together, taking a noisy first place in the three-legged race. I came in second in the sack races. Meadow, who had just learned to jump rope, whisked around our volunteer cottage, humming to herself. Rosie licked the icing off a pan of cinnamon rolls. Ti Marcel, rechristened Marcelle in my father’s letters, trilled her sweet-voiced gurgle of Da-da-da-dah. She had just broken in three new teeth, as sharp as diamonds. She was almost crawling.

  * * *

  As my father had already pointed out to Grandma Lois, Marcelle’s dramatic recovery was a useful counterweight to other disappointments. For though the Morne Bois Pin peninsula appeared, from a distance, to give off an inspirational glow, my father understood that all was not well in the missionary forest. He had long suspected that the local employees, who received no direct oversight during the week, were not only falsifying their time sheets but even cutting down trees and pocketing the profits.

  Determined to set things straight, he set out a few days after Easter to catch the suspects in the act. He did not, as he usually did, cross the bay in the small wooden motorboat that belonged to the hospital, which he knew could be heard from across the water; instead he drove to a black sand beach directly across from Morne Bois Pin and paid a fisherman with a tattered sail to drop him off on the opposite shore without anyone knowing that he had arrived.

  As it turned out, his suspicions were justified. The workers were not at their posts, nor even on the peninsula, although they came running as soon as they saw his stoop-shouldered silhouette through the neglected trees. On further investigation, he found hastily scattered branches over tree trunks that he had not authorized the men to cut.

  He fired them on the spot, then hiked along an unpaved road to catch a tap tap back to where he’d left the vehicle, pulling into the compound just before dark. Only too late did he learn what he had lost.

  * * *

  My mother was up to her elbows in greasy soap bubbles, the bread pans clinking in the sink, when she heard the knock at the door. She had been trying to get the house in order after a frantic morning during which she had baked cinnamon rolls while babysitting three additional missionary kids, cooked lunch for a friend, then welcomed surprise visitors who were more than happy to bite into the sweet candied bread melting with homemade butter. After her guests finally left, she was about to settle Rosie down for a much-needed nap when a gang of missionary kids banged on the door to ask for my help catching a garter snake. Meadow and I raced off after them, and the commotion yanked four-year-old Rosie out of her drowsiness. My mother had to go ba
ck in and rub her shoulders until she finally got quiet.

  My mother felt vaguely irritated as she left the dishes in the sink to respond to yet another interruption. Opening the screen door, she was startled to find Ti Marcel in the arms of a stranger. Marcel, whom we’d never met, explained that he had brought his daughter, Cherylene, to say goodbye.

  Marcel and his sister had already made a careful, diplomatic tour of the hospital, though it had taken him almost an hour to convince the skeptical Dr. Hodges that his recently malnourished daughter would not relapse under inattentive supervision. Marcel was polite but firm. He would make sure that his daughter received proper care. Before he left Limbé, Marcel stopped to thank each of the missionary doctors and nurses, the Haitian staff—and, of course, my family.

  My mother, thrown off guard by the sudden announcement, had just sufficient wherewithal to assemble her own scattered daughters (Rosie poked her head out of the bedroom as soon as she heard voices; Meadow and I were under the zanmann tree, the snake having gotten away). My mother explained to us that Ti Marcel had a new name and that we might not see her again, then helped us gather up the books and toys and clothes we’d amassed over the previous seven and a half months of pretending that she was our sister.