The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  —C’mon, he chided. —You’re not even trying.

  —Dad, I am!

  How and when to argue without tipping him into violence was a skill I was still perfecting. He had recently pushed over the dining room table when I refused to take a bite of fish at dinner.

  As he drove back up the mountain toward Idyllwild, his callused hands palmed the wind. Far beneath us, green polo fields and golf courses marched down the dusty Coachella Valley toward my grandparents’ date ranch. Quail skittered through the chaparral, their voices a furtive pit-pit-pit in the dusk.

  I chose the moment when it looked like my father’s guard was down to make my case: I could stay behind and board at the prep school while the rest of the family went back to Haiti without me. I was old enough to be on my own.

  He laughed and kept driving. No chance.

  Apart from my father, no one in the family wanted to sign up for another year and a half of missionary service (the longest span of time my mother would agree to—she was adamant that I should be able to finish my last two years of high school in the U.S.—and a year and a half was the shortest time frame that my father seemed willing to accept).

  My mother certainly seemed happy enough in Idyllwild, aside from our too-small cabin and the absence of an indoor toilet. She had cut her long hair short, and served corn dogs to my sisters at the elementary school cafeteria, and led music at the Idyllwild Bible Church. Her best friend loved to hike and pray. She drove down the mountain once a week to take a drafting class at a community college, drawing endless blueprints for the real house she had not yet given up on, though my father had threatened not to build it unless we first went back with him to Haiti.

  He had dropped out of Fuller School of World Mission after only two years; he hated being stuck in a classroom. My mother, who would have given anything to be a student again, could audit only one class a term because she’d never finished her bachelor’s degree. Instead, she got a job as a checkout clerk at Ralph’s grocery store and typed up my father’s papers, snapping at him when he leaned over her shoulder to point out a word she’d gotten wrong.

  Without a master’s degree, my father wasn’t eligible for full-time missionary work with the American Baptists, and all of the other organizations that he’d applied to had turned us down. The Mennonites asked whether he’d defend his family if there was a threat of violence; when he said yes, they told him they found his peace stance lacking. A mission agency in Irian Jaya had changed their mind after they found out my mother spoke in tongues. (I wasn’t exactly sure why that should disqualify her, but I wasn’t overly disappointed: missionary friends in Irian Jaya boasted of roasting sago grubs instead of hot dogs, the soft, squishy bodies exploding in their mouths like lard.)

  The only reliable work that my father had been able to find in Idyllwild was cleaning toilets at Forest Service day use areas and crawling under vacation homes to install plumbing. He had also spent a few backbreaking weeks replanting native seedlings on a logged hillside, which was the closest he’d come to happiness since we left Haiti.

  What he craved, my mother explained, was work that mattered. He had hoped to return to the mountains as a full-time forest ranger, but with budget cuts and affirmative action quotas, he hadn’t been hired back. Reforestation in Haiti, despite its challenges, at least felt consistent with his vocation: to care for the earth.

  The only trouble was, my sisters and I were no longer quite so gung-ho about being uprooted. During tense conversations around the dinner table, Meadow, Rose, and I agreed that we would be willing to go on a summer trip to Haiti, to see old friends and relive old memories, but that was the extent of our curiosity.

  Rose had been four when we left and barely remembered Haiti. Now a dimpled second-grader, blond as a beauty queen, she wasn’t ready to leave the mountains where she had been born. Meadow, whose curly red perm bobbed against her shoulders when she giggled, had a gaggle of girlfriends who performed gymnastic tricks together on the playground at recess, and she was reluctant to say goodbye to that sweet camaraderie.

  The very last thing I wanted, as a thirteen-year-old, was to move back to a conservative missionary compound in middle-of-nowhere Haiti, where, instead of Halloween, we’d celebrate Bible Dress-Up Day; school dances, it went without saying, would be out of the question—positively immoral.

  I was also more concerned than my father seemed to be about the letters he read aloud to us from the missionaries who still lived in Limbé. Baby Doc had fled the country soon after we moved away—newspaper images showed him in exile in France, plump, in a white suit, his $900 million Swiss bank accounts padded with stolen aid money. After decades trapped under a repressive dictatorship, the country had exploded into anarchy. Closed schools. Uprooted gardens. Charred businesses. Pastor Tomas at the Limbé Baptist church grabbed the pulpit and urged his congregation to stand together and act as responsible citizens; political freedom did not mean the freedom to avenge grudges. Susan Hodges, Joanna’s eldest daughter, supplemented her mother’s more optimistic newsletters with fatalistic updates: Medical people have all left the country and other clinics and hospitals are unreliable (closed half the time because of politics). Good ole L’Hôpital le Bon Samaritain is open every day come hell or high water!! Port-au-Prince is a WAR ZONE.

  To dechouke once meant to pull out a stump by its roots in order to clear the land, but as Dr. Hodges explained to his supporters, the old word had taken on a more sinister meaning. In the face of such violence, the powerless learned to keep their heads low until the newly powerful had executed their vengeance and the dechoukaj was over.

  * * *

  My father assured us, before he and my mother flew to Haiti for a one-week fact-finding trip over spring break, that things were already starting to settle down in Haiti, but while they were in Limbé, yet another attempted coup shut down all the airports and they were three days late getting home. The following day, the very same missionary plane they’d just taken out of Cap-Haïtien was hijacked.

  And this, I wondered skeptically, was a safer place to raise three girls than Godless America?

  When we finally agreed to take a family vote, my father reminded us of all the things we’d loved about Haiti as kids—the beach trips, the green-throated lizards on the dining room wall, our friends at Jericho School.

  I folded my arms, unconvinced. My mother wavered. When it came time to vote, she confided her reservations in lopsided, uneven pencil: Meadow, our tender and cautious child, doesn’t want to leave her friends and familiar surroundings. She says she doesn’t care whether we go or not but I suspect going back will be hardest for her.

  After the votes had been counted, I added an unsolicited note beneath my mother’s words: Apricot, our noisy and obnoxious child, says she doesn’t care whether we go or not. I wish we could afford to send her off to boarding school. To myself I added, as if in consolation: I am pretty sure I will survive no matter what we do.

  The final tally was four to one against moving back to Haiti, yet somehow my father still overruled us.

  Trees: A Sign of the Kingdom

  Idyllwild, 1989

  BY DECEMBER 31, 1989, our bags were all but packed, our goodbye parties planned. I woke to the howl of coyotes as they circled a rabbit den in the meadow. My sisters and I dressed for church in skirts and delicate sling-back shoes that threatened to slip as we gingerly made our way over the icy deck to the car. My father was still working on his sermon notes. At the top of each typed page, he’d scrawled a reminder in blue ink: Don’t sniffle!

  After our commissioning service at the Idyllwild Bible Church—hands laid authoritatively on our bent heads, earnest requests for God’s protection, followed by syrupy piano music under the pastoral prayer—we stood in the foyer to shake hands and hand out prayer cards.

  Our typed support letter explained that Haitian Christians needed missionaries to help them be salt and light in their communities: They want to see how they can restore their land so it
can adequately feed their families and be preserved for future generations. Mothers want to raise up godly children in the midst of a culture that doesn’t understand marital fidelity. (The assertion that we had anything to teach Haitian Christians about morality was not yet painfully ironic.)

  Restoring the land was, at least, a subject on which my father was reasonably knowledgeable. At Fuller Seminary, most of his papers had focused on deforestation. Long after the rest of us had gone to bed, he’d sat up at the battered Formica table with his tongue clenched between his teeth to scour the concordance for Bible verses about trees. He found four hundred separate entries. Of the fifty different instances of the word “forest” in the Bible, he noted that only one was found in the New Testament. Ditto for “streams,” which showed up seventy-six times in the Old Testament but only four times in the New—evidence of deforestation in the Promised Land.

  Hackles raised, he launched in like Smokey the Bear going after a casual litterer who had just tossed a match down on the forest floor:

  This paper is written from the premise that trees, the earth and people were all created by God for good and that he remains concerned over the condition of all of them; that he loves all peoples and all lands. Christianity has been blind to the necessity of concern for the environment. We have been guilty of abusing the provisions of God’s good creation.

  He even, presciently, found a way to weave the threat of climate change into his twenty-seven-page paper, “Trees: A Sign of the Kingdom,” complete with bibliography (the only problem was, it was 1985, and evangelical America was still decades away from giving a damn).

  He wasn’t much of an evangelist aside from the gospel of trees, but he reminded his readers that it was bad theology to separate the spiritual from the physical and cited Ezekiel 24:19 to end, bang, with a flourish:

  Must my flock feed on what you have trampled

  and drink what you have muddied with your feet?

  Pleased, he got up from the dining room table, stretched, and stepped outside, having heard on the radio that there was supposed to be a lunar eclipse that night. But the glare of the city was so skittery and frantic for attention—car lot searchlights probing the foothills, Los Angeles a neon time bomb on the horizon—that even at midnight the moon was 100 percent invisible.

  When Halley’s Comet did a fly-by a few months later, he drove us all the way to the date ranch, several hours away, not about to miss it just because city folk didn’t have the good sense to turn out their lights at night. He and Mom tucked the three of us girls onto a mattress in the back of the pickup, then shook us awake at two a.m. to watch the faint flare of white along the horizon. In open spaces, he felt as if he could breathe again.

  * * *

  When my parents first floated the idea of going back to Haiti—before they asked my sisters and I what we thought—they agreed that they didn’t want to just live among missionaries, isolated from our Haitian neighbors.

  On their fact-finding trip over spring break, they were pleased to discover that Jules Casséus, the president of the Baptist seminary, was supportive of my father’s vision and even invited us to live rent-free in a house just across the road from the seminary campus in Haut-Limbé. This time, instead of cushioning ourselves within the confines of a missionary compound, we would be surrounded by Haitian neighbors. At Casso’s suggestion, my father would organize reforestation and erosion-control gardening projects in a small community about an hour’s hike into the mountains. In this way, my father hoped to bypass the foreign-run tree nurseries and convince rural farmers to plant their own seeds on their own land—just as Zo had done years earlier.

  A few of the missionaries were skeptical of this low-budget scheme, but the one thing my parents had acquired from Fuller Seminary, even without a degree, was a determination to at least make new mistakes; Projè Pyebwa, for which my father had supplied hundreds of thousands of trees when he ran the hospital tree nursery, had planted twenty-five million trees in Haiti in the 1980s, although during the same period, as many as seven trees were cut down for each new one planted. It was time for a new paradigm.

  * * *

  My parents’ one concession for having yanked me out of prep school was to allow me to stay behind for a two-week scuba-diving course, so while I packed my bags for Baja, the rest of the family stepped gingerly around sewer-clogged gutters in Port-au-Prince. My sisters, unwitting test cases in this missionary experiment, walked for hours across the city to buy bus tickets. They ate sugarcane peeled and split by machetes, and bought fresh-cut oranges and fried sweet potatoes from women who hunched over charcoal rechos.

  The next evening, their bus ground to a stop at the end of a dirt road in Haut-Limbé. My father shouted up at the men on the roof for the suitcases, and strangers swung the dusty luggage onto their heads and strolled alongside, goading him with questions. Roosters and gaunt, timid dogs skittered across dirt courtyards. Goats bleated behind cactus fences.

  There was no food in the house when they arrived, and no stores nearby to purchase bread or milk. By bedtime, Meadow was trembling from hunger, unable to hide her tears. My mother held her and stroked her hair, insisting that my father at least knock on Laurie and Casso’s door, at the Baptist Seminary across the road, to borrow a cup of powdered milk and some rice.

  My sisters’ discomfort was no more than that of other nearby Haitian children who had ended the day without a meal. That night, on the other side of the cactus hedge, a wake was held for a neighbor who had died. The relatives sang hymns late into the night. My sisters fell asleep to the sound of wailing. Haiti was troubling in this regard—no matter how broken we felt, another, greater sorrow loomed just over our shoulders.

  * * *

  We are pleased with the house, my father wrote to me a few days later. The stationery featured a cartoon pig that snorted: Forget you? FAT chance!

  Opening the letter in Idyllwild, I took a deep breath and prepared myself for the worst.

  My mother and sisters had just returned from taking the tap tap to the Limbé market to buy household supplies, and I was to add to my suitcase a serrated knife, vegetable peeler, a whetstone, and a hammer. My mother’s take on our housing situation in Haut-Limbé was, predictably, rather more ambivalent than my father’s: The furnishings are mahogany wood and uncomfortable to sit on very long. So far, I haven’t seen any cockroaches, but we’ve cleaned out lots of their droppings. As you can imagine, there’s not much privacy.

  My father concluded: You’ll make kid number 6 in the high school. People are amazed at how grown-up you are and how beautiful too from your picture.

  The compliment, a rarity, I dismissed as a bribe, but I wondered nervously which picture he had shown them—most likely the one from our prayer card (now stuck to every church member’s refrigerator): all five of us squinting into the sun in front of Suicide Rock. I had worn my favorite teal shirt and brocade vest. I had been too heartbroken to smile.

  Cynical City

  Idyllwild, 1989

  WELCOME TO CYNICAL CITY, I wrote on the title page of my eighth-grade journal. The mixed-up feelings of a very mixed-up girl in a mixed-up world (from a person who is only human and who likes certain things to remain confidential).

  A short list by Apricot Michelle Anderson of things that I have survived thus far: (not very impressive, I know, compared to what other people have survived, but hey—it’s my list):

  • Pinworms, most likely picked up while running around barefoot at the Limbé compound, though no one figured it out until we were back in California. My father didn’t want to waste money on medical care, so he turned me facedown on the bed and picked the itchy, wriggling worms out of my anus while my mother busied herself in another room. He told me to quit crying and hold still. I was nine. In that moment, I hated him. Hated her. Hated Haiti for infecting me.

  • Home alone on robbery night. Well, sort of. We lived across the cul-de-sac from a crack house while Dad was in seminary in the Los Angeles foothi
lls (he had turned down the apartment complex with the rest of the missionary families because he said he needed a garden). Mom called in what looked like a robbery, then left me to babysit my little sisters while she and Dad drove across town for a Focus on the Family event with James Dobson (ironic). When the police pounded on the door, I didn’t know what to do. I knew better than to open the door to strangers but wasn’t sure if this also applied to police. Meadow and Rosie huddled behind me in their nightgowns, wet hair dripping onto the floor. I was ten. I didn’t open the door. Apparently, the police complimented my mother afterward on my excellent manners.

  • Four new schools in as many years. You’d think I’d have it all figured out by now.

  Fifth grade: Franklin Fox Elementary (Altadena). My sisters and I were some of the only white kids in the school, but everyone spoke English so it felt way easier than Haiti. Lots to catch up on. I figured out how to leap between the whapping double-dutch ropes but couldn’t keep up with the flash-footed girls on the playground who knew all the words and dance moves to “Thriller” (my only exposure to Michael Jackson being the Weird Al Yankovic version of “I’m Fat,” which we had listened to in music class in Limbé, all of the missionary kids cross-legged on a woven grass mat on the floor). It sucked being the odd one out.

  Sixth grade: Woodrow Wilson (Pasadena). On the first day of middle school, all the kids from my neighborhood were bused across town to be integrated with the white school but I didn’t know which bus to take home and was too ashamed to ask. I guessed wrong. More than a mile from home with my uncle’s oversized trumpet case banging against my shin bone, a sketchy-looking man with a paper bag told me I wasn’t allowed to walk through the neighborhood and made me go past a chain-link fence and knock on a stranger’s door to get permission. The woman who yanked the door open didn’t think it was funny, but at least she yelled at the man with the paper bag, not me. Her thick arms bent at her hips as she roared: Don’t you be messin with her! My mother called her my guardian angel.