The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  Seventh grade: Idyllwild Elementary. The year that I burned my first journal and my father told me I looked like a slut for wearing pink stretch pants under a sparkly silver butterfly belt.

  Eighth grade: The Eliot-Pope Preparatory School, Idyllwild, where seniors lounged in acid-washed jeans in the smoking lounge, casually comparing trips to Bali and Mount Everest as Bon Jovi yowled in the background. Eighth-grade boarding students were invited to drop acid their first weekend away from home. I wasn’t sure which was worse: the prospect of moving back to Haiti in the midst of political uprisings, or the misery of being the only prude at the prep school. Meanwhile, my mother accused me of being The Devil’s Handmaiden when I “provoked my father” by writing in my journal instead of participating in family devotions. He threw a Bible through the window. I picked up the broken glass.

  The story that I did not confide to anyone, not even to my journal—and certainly not to my parents—was that during the loosely chaperoned scuba-diving trip in Baja, a cocky nineteen-year-old had unrolled his sleeping bag next to mine while we camped out under the stars. Unable to stop him from touching me, I assumed, mistakenly, that my father must be right: I really was a slut. My shame was a smell I couldn’t wash from my skin.

  Time to Try Out Our Dreams

  Haut-Limbé, 1990

  AT THE LAX airport, having just celebrated my fourteenth birthday, I waved goodbye to the grandparents and walked alone onto the plane. To steel myself, I pretended that I was a world-famous author heading off for an international book tour.

  I made a few attempts to flip casually through the in-flight magazine (careful not to let on that I hadn’t been on a plane since I was nine), but as soon as we lifted off, I scrapped my dignity and pressed my face to the glass. The plunging weight was like the sudden drop of a roller coaster. Mountains flattened to wide, arid deserts. The world at my feet. If I could just keep going, preferably to somewhere I’d never been before, I could subsist, if necessary, for at least a month on peanuts and ginger ale.

  Reality sank in as the tiny missionary plane banked low over the sugarcane fields and hillsides empty of trees, the Citadel a defiant fist against the sky. At the Cap-Haïtien airport, ceiling fans caked in a layer of dust rotated uselessly while customs officials rummaged through my luggage. The breeze from the sea smelled of rotting fish and garbage.

  My sisters, whom I had not seen in weeks, threw their arms around me, their thin cotton dresses blowing in the wind. My father had a Haitian straw hat shoved over his ears and a faded blue backpack slung over one shoulder. He looked sunburned and relaxed. For once, he seemed genuinely glad to see me. I noted with disappointment that my carefully teased bangs, shellacked into place with Aqua Net, were already starting to wilt in the tropical humidity.

  My mother kept turning around in the front seat of the new-to-us blue station wagon as we inched through the soot and noise of Cap-Haïtien, telling stories about the disaster of a birthday cake that they’d tried to bake for her in the solar oven in the front yard: one side of the cake had been lumpy and undercooked, the other was blackened to charcoal.

  Children tapped at the windows of the car and called: Blan! Blan! as bare-chested men strained against wooden carts piled high with discarded tires and sugarcane.

  I could almost convince myself in the States that we were the ones who were barely scraping by, with our pit toilet and hand-me-down clothes raided from a dumpster, but all it took was an hour in Haiti to yank things back into perspective. We were unmistakably privileged. The inequity felt glaring and uncomfortable.

  As my sisters led me up the steps to our new home in Haut-Limbé, a squat yellow concrete building surrounded by a few spindly croton bushes, neighbor children peered through gaps in the cactus fence. Inside was a stiff wooden couch; a leaky sink not quite lined up against the bathroom wall; and two metal bed frames in the room that my sisters shared.

  —We’ll have to take turns sharing a bed, Meadow explained, trying not to giggle. I looked around, horrified, until Rose laughed and pushed open the door to a former broom closet. There was just enough space inside for a single bed, a shelf, and ten inches of floor.

  I tossed my bags onto my bed and collapsed. After a strained click, the cassette tape whirred to life, and the Little Mermaid echoed down the hallway. Wouldn’t you think I’m the girl, the girl who has everything?

  * * *

  As soon as we finished lunch, my mother drove the four miles into Limbé so I could meet the other missionary kids at Jericho School. I stared out the window at hazy blue mountains and green-fingered mango trees. It felt familiar and surreal.

  The compound was more or less as I remembered it—the zanmann tree a little taller, the playground slide a little more dented. The other teenagers in the one-room high school scraped their chairs back from their desks to stare at me. I felt suddenly aware of how very American I looked with my noisy earrings, ratted bangs, and teal mascara. Clearly an outsider.

  —Hello, we all mumbled self-consciously.

  Olynda had been adopted after we left, but I knew the rest of the teenagers. Ana, at eighteen, was as regal and unreadable as ever. Peter, about to graduate, had the same wry, quiet smile. (Did he remember, I wondered sheepishly, my schoolgirl crush?) Reuben, Susan’s oldest son, had the classic Hodges intensity—ready, at a moment’s notice, to battle out an argument or repair a broken engine. Kirsti and I were the only ones not related to the Hodges family. We’d written a few sporadic letters over the years, mostly complaining about our conservative parents, but it felt awkward to see each other in person again; we weren’t nine years old anymore.

  Bernice Rogers, now the high school superintendent, broke the silence by holding out her arms for a hug. Her round midwestern face was stretched into a smile: Look at how much you’ve grown! she crowed. Her reading glasses dug in to my neck.

  When my mother suggested that maybe I’d like to help shelve books in the Jericho library until school let out, I nodded and slipped outside after her. Across the grass, Haitian nurses crossed the raised walkways of the hospital. Gardeners leaned against the fishpond, its tepid surface thick with algae.

  —I think you’ll be really happy here, my mother said, squeezing my shoulders. I stiffened.

  She peeked inside the other classrooms so I could say a quick hello to Meadow’s and Rose’s teachers: dimpled, guitar-strumming Mary Hays in the four-student middle school; white-haired, widowed Ms. Whitt. In all, twenty-eight students were tucked inside the freshly whitewashed walls of Jericho School, sixteen of whom were the adopted children or grandchildren of Bill and Joanna Hodges.

  In the dimly lit three-foot-by-three-foot school library, stacked floor to ceiling with musty paperbacks, I sat down on the floor with one of the Jim Kjelgaard adventure series that I had read and reread in grade school—each new heart-stopping climax centered around heroic dogs who raced to rescue their hapless humans, complete with an obligatory happy ending. The pages were more fragile than I remembered. The story threatened to disintegrate in my hands.

  * * *

  Today Apricot arrived safe and sound, my mother wrote to a friend in Idyllwild. I can’t believe how much more relaxed I am, all my little chicks are back in the nest. Sometimes I can’t believe this is really happening so smoothly. God is certainly going before us. We are so thankful for the time we have to try out our dreams.

  The Rock in the Water

  Haut-Limbé, 1990

  IN THE MORNINGS—HOT, humid, smelling of hibiscus and smoldering charcoal—my father headed off into the hills with a backpack full of seeds, a jug of water, and a Kreyòl Bible from which he read aloud Bible verses about trees. When strangers asked him what he carried in his makouti he answered: I’m carrying hope.

  The week I arrived in Haiti, my father insisted that the whole family join him for a two-hour Kreyòl church service at a tiny outstation church in the mountains, an hour’s walk from our house. Afterward, during his interminable visits to check on the garden
s of wrinkled old women with toothless smiles who pulled out their best chairs while they squatted beside us on the dirt, my sisters and I sat down gingerly, irritable in the heat, on wooden chairs that wobbled beneath us, the palm-frond seats softly disintegrating, testimony to the ceaseless, invisible ministrations of the termites. Obeying our father’s mute orders, we sat still, listened without comprehending, without interest, to the blurred cadence of language, the ritual formality. First the greetings, then the polite inquiries about the health of distant relations; a discussion of crops, trees, the weather; a smattering of politics.

  If we were particularly unlucky, my father would ask us to sing a song before we left. His cracked but earnest voice chased the melody while my mother soared above us on the descant: Eske ou vle ale lakay Papa mwen, lakay Papa mwen . . . Do you want to go to my Father’s house?

  The song, like most spirituals, described with foot-stomping, hand-clapping yearning the Sweet Hereafter that we all longed to escape to, but if you had asked me, at fourteen, what I thought of lakay Papa mwen, I would have told you that I wanted nothing more than to escape his tyranny.

  Rey, the village where my father focused his reforestation efforts, was, like many others in Haiti, a small cluster of houses along a dirt path, not particularly close to a streambed but within walking distance. The gardens were small and subsistence-based, and the farmers survived by impossibly slim margins. Most families tried to supplement their income by planting cash crops such as manioc and peanuts—well suited to the brutal tropical climate—or by cutting down trees for charcoal.

  My father quickly gained a reputation as a rare blan who wasn’t afraid of walking, whether in the rain or in the sun, and flush with possibility, he organized field trips to expose the farmers in Rey to innovative ideas that were already being used across the north of Haiti. Wedged into the battered blue station wagon, they drove an hour and a half to peruse the vegetable market in Saint-Raphaël. They hiked six miles to see a fish project in Vallières. More than once, he took farmers to Camp Coq to see his friend Zo—his oldest ally and fellow tree lover. Zo had not only survived the dechoukaj but had redoubled his reforestation efforts, proudly leading visitors through forests of cinnamon trees, and showing off cages of sleek, healthy rabbits.

  At least initially, the farmers seemed inspired. My mother hiked up to Rey twice a week and helped demonstrate how to mix animal manure with unused vegetable trimmings to create compost, though at first the women only laughed when my mother asked permission to collect the dried cow patties from their gardens: Mezanmi! Gade blan yo! Look at what the blan are doing now! My mother shrugged and explained that in the U.S., people paid good money for manure. The women only laughed all the harder; they’d heard some hard-to-believe stories about the Gran Peyi, but this was too much.

  Meanwhile, my father handed out new vegetable seeds for farmers to try in their gardens and drought-resistant kasya trees, which coppiced readily—even when harvested for charcoal, the stumps sent up new offshoots. Tiny seedlings began to unfurl tentative green-fringed leaves. Hope was in the air.

  * * *

  When my father came home at night to a hot meal and an indoor shower, heavy-laden with gifts of guavas, pineapples, mangoes, kasav, and bananas, he recited one of his new favorite Haitian proverbs: Wòch nan dlo pa kòn mizè wòch nan solèy. The rock in the water doesn’t know the misery of a rock in the sun.

  I don’t go to bed hungry with mosquitoes buzzing around on a grass mat, with some kids sick and no hope of income for weeks to come, he wrote to our supporters. I am getting to know people who have even more misery than I’ve suggested above. They are teaching me about courage.

  * * *

  When I came home from a long day of filling out mind-numbingly boring correspondence courses at the missionary school while my parents were off saving the world, I wished aloud, repeatedly, that I had been allowed to finish high school in Idyllwild.

  If my father insisted on a family Bible study after dinner, I shoved my chair into the corner of the living room and crossed my arms, a contemptuous look on my face, while, through the screen windows, as if in mockery of our failure, hymns drifted over the cactus hedge. One of our Haitian neighbors, a Boy Scout leader and stalwart member of the local Baptist church—clearly a hundred times holier than we were—could be heard praying aloud with his four daughters. I smirked: No pressure, Dad.

  A Wall of Mountains

  Haut-Limbé, 1990

  WHEN THE MISSIONARY mail plane floated in from Florida with letters and care packages full of things that couldn’t be purchased in the north of Haiti—melted-together M&M’s, Kool-Aid packets, chocolate chips, tampons—it was a delicious torture to imagine climbing into the cockpit and quitting Haiti for good.

  Sweat dripped down the back of my knees as unemployed Haitian teenagers lounged in the shade of the one-story terminal, their voices rising and falling like heat on the runway. When the pilot finally unlatched the cargo hold, the teenagers swarmed over the mail sacks like ants over sugarcane, vying to carry the heaviest boxes—whatever meager tip they might earn presumably being the difference between eating or not eating that day.

  When the missionary letters and boxes were safely stowed in the back of the station wagon and customs duties paid, my father slammed the hatchback shut and pulled down the dirt road toward Limbé. A few younger boys raced behind to leap onto the bumper. My father accelerated and they jumped off, shouting. Overhead, the plane circled once and disappeared over a wall of mountains.

  * * *

  My mother carefully rationed the care packages sent by our supporters. My father tried to convince the church to stop sending them. I don’t see why a missionary flight should be used for candy and goodies, he grumbled irritably in the margins of one of my mother’s letters.

  If a care package included a cassette tape, my sisters and I sat around the dining room table and leaned in close to hear the voices that tumbled out. Grandma Marian, in Nebraska, told us that she was sewing tea cozies for her ladies’ Bible study group on Thursdays; our cousins were going to Disney World for their summer vacation; Uncle George was buying a new car. Occasionally, Grandpa George recorded an inning of a ball game or a selection of big-band music, complete with shrill radio advertisements for life insurance.

  I traced the lines of the plastic tablecloth with my finger as they described the remodeling they were doing on their sun porch, Grandma’s soft voice nearly drowned out by a shovel scraping against a pile of gravel outside. Goats bleated as trucks ground past on their way to market. A radio blared konpa music in a language I had no wish to understand.

  My father’s newsletters from Haiti were, nevertheless, optimistic.

  Bonjour zami yo! The Anderson family has arrived safe and sound in Limbé. One of the girls’ first comments was, “There are lizards in our house!” And it is true. We have lots of lizards. They must think this house is their home as they creep along the walls and window screens in the Chameleon colors of bright green and brown. We consider them welcome guests because of all the bugs they eat.

  And I guess for similar reasons, we too are considered welcome guests by the Haitians. We are a curiosity to them and as they get to know us better, they realize we have come to help them as we can.

  In a handwritten postscript to one of his relatives, my father conceded that my sisters and I had readjustment blues, but added, We are still very glad to be here. It was early in the game. He was confident we’d come around.

  I wasn’t. At least during the week I can keep busy with school and see other Americans, even if they despise me, I confided to my journal, but weekends are miserable in this deserted hellhole. Everyone is at a soccer match now. Talk about a dead sport.

  My mother, torn between her homesick daughters and her husband’s determination to transform Haiti—one eroded hillside at a time—by some miracle talked my father into attending a weekend pool party in Cap-Haïtien with the rest of the missionaries. (Wasn’t restful. Enjoyabl
e although expensive was his peevish conclusion in the day planner that doubled as his journal.)

  For once, I could kick off my confining missionary-kid clothes and slip into the deep artificial blue of a hotel pool. Waiters in white uniforms served us cold Cokes on linen tablecloths. I ordered french fries and stretched out on a towel next to the other missionary girls to gossip in the sun. When they pestered me about which boy I liked, I tugged my bathing suit into place and dove into the pool, my hair billowing out behind me. When I came up for air, my father announced that it was time to go, pronto—then got sidetracked telling a volunteer about his tree projects.

  I pulled a T-shirt over my head and wrung out my wet hair. He didn’t notice when I slipped on a pair of shorts and begged Meadow to wait with me out by the car, where we could at least read novels while we waited for him to stop talking.

  Two bare-chested Haitian teenagers sauntered over to chat us up.

  —Hello bay-bee, what ees your name?

  I pretended to ignore them.

  —What time ees eet? one asked, then careened off into a dizzying patter of Kreyòl I couldn’t begin to follow.

  —I luf yoo. Fuk yoo.

  I laughed and flicked back my hair.

  Meadow, growing alarmed, fumbled with the car keys and disappeared into the station wagon, locking the doors behind her.