The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

Flip is not happy with me was all that he would admit to his journal. She says I am only a companion. When she has expectations, she gets disappointed.

  And yet sometimes, in spite of their stubbornness, my parents found a way to reach across the chasm that Haiti had opened between them. I can picture them standing in the doorway of the kitchen in Haut-Limbé, his arms around her waist, laughing about something I did not then understand. His hands were always stained with dirt, no matter how long he scrubbed them, and his tangled hair hid sunburned ears; her eyes sparkled like a girl’s.

  * * *

  It was my mother who finally convinced him to let my sisters and me bring home two fuzzy, round-bellied Labradors when Laurie and Casso’s dog had puppies. I cuddled the puppies on my lap on the porch during a lightning storm, as torrents of rain poured off the tin roof. Inspired, I penned an ecstatic letter that Grandma Lois promptly typed up and mailed on to the relatives (gathering courage from this, I secretly submitted it to Youthwalk magazine without telling anyone):

  A brilliant flash of lightning would split the sky, leaving every single blade of grass and drop of rain outlined for an instant; burned in your memory, the silhouette on your eyelids. And with a mighty crash, a roll of thunder would pound out a celestial rhythm in the skies, seemingly loud enough to tear the earth in its sheer power. It is an incredible feeling to be lightly brushed with the same winds that took place in that unearthly display while feeling the comforting warmth of a slumbering puppy. And yet the most soothing—and the most frightening—fact is that it is the same God. The God of the storm is the same as that of the snuggly, furry puppy—he’s big enough to protect us, but gentle enough to care for us individually. How lucky we are!

  Both puppies stopped eating a few weeks later. Missionary friends suspected that they might have contracted worms. After the first puppy died, my mother—against my father’s protests—drove us all the way to Cap-Haïtien with a towel stretched across the backseat of the station wagon to try to find help, but the only veterinarian in town was on vacation in the States and wouldn’t be back for weeks.

  We dug a double grave under a dead orange tree in the yard. The knowledge that we had wasted time and money trying to save a puppy when so many around us faced far greater losses only added shame to the grief. I played a lament on my mother’s recorder. My sisters held on to each other.

  * * *

  By Father’s Day, my father and I could barely tolerate each other. He refused to even consider my suggestion of an elegant family luncheon in Cap-Haïtien, as the thought of sitting down to an expensive meal while farmers starved on the nearby hills made him irritable. Instead, he decided that we should visit Cherylene in Gonaïves.

  It had been five years since we last saw Ti Marcel, and the whole premise felt ridiculous to me—a two-hour drive over dusty, miserable roads to find a child who might or might not be living in the house where we had last seen her, years earlier. I didn’t want to admit how much it hurt that my father would rather spend the day with a Haitian girl he wasn’t even related to than have lunch with his daughters.

  We couldn’t call ahead; there were no phones. Meadow and Rose groaned at the long, hot car ride ahead of us. My mother told us to at least try to have a good attitude—it was Father’s Day.

  Cherylene’s aunts were sitting on the front steps when we arrived. They remembered my parents and pulled out their best furniture, sturdy iron chairs with plastic seat covers, and a child was sent running to buy us Cokes. My sisters and I sat stiffly upright, the backs of our legs stuck to the sweaty plastic, while someone else fetched Cherylene. Neighbor kids crowded into the open doorway to stare at us.

  My father, ever impervious to awkward social dynamics, made small talk. He asked after Cherylene’s father only to learn that Marcel had taken a new wife in the country; he seldom visited. Cherylene had been badly burned when a can of kerosene tipped over and her clothes caught fire. She had beaten out the flames but spent months in the local hospital recuperating.

  She stepped through the front door nearly an hour later, her hair freshly plaited in tight braids tied with white ribbons. She was wearing a bright blue skirt festooned with sailboats. She didn’t remember us, but she had heard stories.

  She walked toward us, smiling, her hand held out. —What did you bring for me?

  My mother looked embarrassed, but dutifully pulled out a bag of Rose’s hand-me down dresses.

  We watched, horrified, when one of the aunts summoned Cherylene to her side and lifted up her shirt to show us the scars from the cooking accident. Her skin from waist to neck was puckered with taut pink splotches. I realized, ashamed, that I didn’t know how to say “I’m sorry” in Kreyòl—for her pain; for our foolish insistence on barging in on her life, reducing her once again to a recipient of our generosity; for the gulf between our lives and hers.

  Before we left, my father tried to persuade my sisters and me to sing a song in Kreyòl, but we gave him thin-lipped smiles. Instead, Cherylene turned up the radio and danced alone in the middle of the room to klank-a-dank konpa music. When she asked to keep my sunglasses, my parents smiled and raised their eyebrows at me suggestively; I said no.

  In the photo that my mother snapped of the two of us, saucy six-year-old Cherylene hams it up in my thick-framed dark glasses while I watch from the chair, a strained smile on my face.

  From my father’s perspective, the day was a smashing success, even if he found the Pentecostal prayer meeting at the end a bit unnerving. Cherylene’s relatives handed out hymnbooks and head coverings, and everyone started praying and singing at once, the din of our overlapping voices like a holy ghost cabal; my mother rather liked it.

  As soon as we got home, my father dashed off a letter to Grandma Lois: It’s a wonder she is alive Her burn was worse than I can describe but she was in good health. I’m sure we’ll see her again.

  When my sunglasses broke soon thereafter, he said that it should be a lesson to me for hoarding.

  * * *

  I despised my father’s faded, rumpled clothes, his dirt-stained fingernails, and his unpredictable temper. I avoided sitting next to him at dinner so that I wouldn’t have to hold his hand during the prayer. But even I could tell that his enthusiasm had begun to falter. By late summer, the rainy season still had not arrived. Farmers called it the worst drought in seventeen years. Creeks that had never run dry slowed to a trickle, then evaporated. In the village of Rey, there was barely enough water for people to drink, let alone irrigate their vegetable gardens.

  After fifty-three days without rain, most of the seedling trees that my father had given to the farmers had withered and died. He spent weeks trying to capture a spring from a nearby gully and paid a local mason to construct a cistern in a last-ditch attempt to save the vegetable gardens. But the cement was faulty, and in the middle of the night, the walls collapsed. Terrorized farmers were jolted awake in the dark by a shuddering explosion of water across parched soil.

  Two thousand dollars of donated funds evaporated into the dust.

  My father’s record keeping was a litany of failure:

  Joseph’s garden hit by chickens.

  Reynolds’ family of 8 had 6 bell peppers for dinner. Nothing else to eat.

  Yesterday a vehicle struck school kids above Limbé, quite a commotion. Driver ran for his life. Car stoned, burned. Kid from mob came in to hospital, ear nearly severed by flying rock.

  Dr. Hodges sees only a grim future here.

  My father couldn’t bring himself to visit when a family returned from a consultation at Hôpital le Bon Samaritain with the news that their six-month-old baby was dying of AIDS. Instead, he slipped off his backpack in the thin shade of a guava bush and tried to pray. Across the flood-scarred valley, he could just make out the faint blue edge of the sea. Dèyè mòn, gèn mòn. Behind the mountains, more mountains; behind one problem, another loomed. He hid his face in his hands.

  When I read this entry in my father’s black day planner for the firs
t time, decades later, I was surprised by the grief that welled up in me. There was so much to mourn: the drought. The AIDS epidemic. The farmer in Rey who left behind forty-three descendants, yet his land was sold to pay for a lavish funeral. But it was the news from Adeline, our first cook at the Ag Center, that pushed my father over the edge.

  Adeline used to bring her son, Nosben, over to sit next to her as she stirred the rice and beans, while my sisters and I played nearby. Nosben was a year older than Meadow, and Adeline had hoped to send him to live with his father in the U.S., but a visa had never materialized. Instead, at thirteen, Nosben had died of sickle cell anemia—a disease that could have been managed had he been born into different circumstances, or had he made it safely out of Haiti. Adeline was inconsolable.

  After the funeral, my father picked up a wooden statue of a peasant woman struggling under an impossibly heavy load and hurled it across our living room. The statue shattered when it hit the wall, the basket splitting open along the wood grain, the woman’s broken arm flying from her body. My sisters hid behind my mother. I watched my father crumple into a chair. At fourteen, I knew only that his rage, even if it stemmed from grief, was a poison that was seeping into all of us. If we did not find a way to survive sorrow, we, too, would self-destruct.

  On Belonging

  Limbé, 1990

  HOW QUICKLY WE turn away from the pain of others when a distraction is offered. My sisters and I felt like escapees from a monastery when Steve and Nancy James offered to let us house-sit their airy four-bedroom in Limbé while they took a three-week summer vacation in the States. We hurled ourselves into the frenzy of compound life: movie nights in the upstairs lounge, pizza parties, Slip ’N Slide races across the lumpy grass lawn. No one stared when we flopped down in our sagging swimsuits and shot along the slippery plastic, wet hair in our mouths. We could even wear shorts as long as we didn’t leave the compound—which we hardly ever did anyway, as the political upheaval had triggered a fuel shortage.

  Our universe had shrunk to the size of a polo field, circled by barbed wire. The Doctor’s and Joanna’s mad genius son, David, boasted that he had stockpiled a forty-one-day supply of diesel in a hidden depot; it would keep the missionary generators running even if the rest of the country exploded into anarchy.

  Free at last from my father’s high-minded expectations, I watched back-to-back movies with the other teenagers, or hung out at the picnic table under the labapen tree with Olynda. After five years on the compound, Olly’s English was as confident as her Kreyòl. Even when we were annoyed with each other, she had a teasing, playful way of turning conflict sideways, and she could almost always make me laugh. We were forever scandalizing Susan Smith by flirting with boys.

  We were about the same age, but Olynda seemed somehow older. During slumber-party confessionals, I learned that her story was even more complicated than I had imagined. Her father—an American man whom she could barely remember—had died when she was four. She thought his name was Richard. She’d never actually seen a photograph of him.

  Her birth mother, Bernadette, small-boned and petite, had been one of his employees at a sequin factory in Port-au-Prince. Only after his death did Bernadette learn that he already had a wife and children in the U.S.; one son came to Haiti for the funeral. Bernadette lost her job at the factory soon after. Olynda remembered neighbor kids calling her a devil’s child and pinching her to see if she felt pain because her skin was lighter and her hair was different.

  She was six when her mother explained that she would be spending the summer with relatives in Limbé. After her mother left, Olynda’s aunt informed her that Bernadette would not be coming back.

  Shaken awake before dawn to fetch the water for her cousins’ breakfast, Olynda carried the rest of the family’s laundry down to the river to wash. She cooked rice and beans and swept the dirt courtyard. She fell asleep on a mattress stuffed with rags. She could still remember the sting of the long cowhide whip.

  Paul Romeus, the Haitian pastor who ran the school in Limbé that Olynda’s cousins attended, pressured the family to let her attend as well. Paul offered a scholarship to cover Olynda’s school fees and uniform; his daughter Picole brought her over to the missionary compound to play. The first time Olynda visited the compound, she was startled by the slide and swing set. She’d never seen a playground before, and was amazed by the missionary houses full of Barbie dolls and tiny Barbie shoes. She had never even imagined that such things existed.

  She learned only later the reason that her mother had left her. Shunned by her family, Bernadette had sunk into a deep depression, but when she returned and discovered the welts on her daughter’s back, she took Olynda back with her to Gonaïves. There, the taunts from the neighborhood kids were unrelenting. Olynda couldn’t stop talking about the missionary compound in Limbé: a dreamworld where everyone was happy and there were always friends to play with.

  Bernadette eventually convinced Bill and Joanna Hodges to adopt her daughter.

  —We talked about it and agreed that it would be better for me, Olynda explained. —More opportunities. Piano lessons, trips to the States.

  Joanna’s newsletter announcement of the adoption had included a photograph of Olynda with her chin tucked shyly, her long hair curled against her shoulders.

  —It was like getting my childhood back.

  I nodded as if I understood.

  —But when my mom got pregnant again later, when I was fourteen, and kept the child, I was so angry. Why couldn’t she have kept me? Why couldn’t I be with her, too?

  We had no answer to this question. We lay on our stomachs and tried to imagine what it would have been like to be in her mother’s shoes.

  Bernadette visited every few months, perched stiffly on the edge of a sofa in the living room of the Hodges home, but the conversations always felt strained. Olynda wished she could just sit down on the floor and play with her baby brother, but she didn’t know how to put her mother at ease.

  The compound had seemed like such a paradise when we were little, but we were teenagers now. Overwhelmed by paradoxes we couldn’t resolve, Olynda threw a pillow at my head.

  —It’s ridiculous! I won’t even be allowed to wear makeup until I’m eighteen! she groaned.

  I laughed and threw the pillow back.

  * * *

  We never talked outright about the unspoken hierarchy on the compound, how the adopted children were given keys to the pantry in the kitchens and had to unlock them for the rest of the Haitian staff. When Barbara had to be in Port-au-Prince for the day, I found it both flattering and absurd (though I never challenged it) that I was considered responsible enough to be put in charge of Haitian employees twice my age.

  Even I had noticed that the missionary kids who had friends in Limbé seemed to invite them over only when no one else was around. Once, I pushed open the door to the TV lounge and found Ana surrounded by Haitian girls I didn’t recognize, combs and fingers tangled in her hair. She made no attempt to introduce me, just glared over her shoulder until I backed out of the room mumbling apologies. I wasn’t sure which of us was more embarrassed.

  Manno, our former Kreyòl language instructor, must have been aware of the compound’s implicit bias, but he ignored it, showing up unannounced one summer afternoon when the teenagers were camped out under the labapen tree, debating whether or not the pirated Janet Jackson album that I had picked up at the open-air market the week before, with crooked photocopied lyrics in Spanish, was appropriate for the younger kids to listen to.

  Manno looked as proud and poised as a rooster in a cockfighting ring when he drove up on his red motor scooter. The other missionary kids tried not to laugh when he asked if I wanted to go for a ride. I was mortified by what I interpreted as his unabashed interest in me (compound rules dictated that such things should never be disclosed openly). When he tried talking to me in Kreyòl, I answered in English, lest I humiliate myself even further.

  If I had written the script,
Peter would have put his arms around me and sent Manno packing like some hoodlum in a 1950s musical, all of us in hoopskirts and leather jackets. Instead, while I half-mocked his broken English, I noticed that Peter was starting to edge away from the picnic table. When it became obvious that no one else wanted to talk to Manno any more than I did—he was an outsider; he wasn’t one of us—he left abruptly, clearly as offended by the encounter as I was.

  As soon as he was gone, I tried to lighten the mood by making fun of him. My friends were oddly unresponsive.

  —He’s just trying to get to know you. You should have some Haitian friends, one adopted teenager told me.

  —But he doesn’t want me for a friend; he only wants to get to know me because I am a blan! I protested, trying, unsuccessfully, to make everyone laugh.

  —You have no idea what it’s like to be Haitian, my friend said coldly, then walked away. It struck me with a sudden wave of embarrassment that because we were all missionary kids, I had imagined that our experience of Haiti was essentially the same. I had assumed too much.

  Olynda followed Kristin. Peter was already gone.

  Lizzie and Tamara stayed to argue over whether Barbara had any right to turn off The Mickey Mouse Club in the middle of an episode just because it was immodest. I played with the peeling paint at the edge of the picnic table, trying to appear unconcerned. A screen door slammed and I could hear laughter. I could only assume that they were laughing at me.

  * * *

  As missionary kids, none of us had any wish to live on the compound for the rest of our lives, but we resented those who reminded us how very isolated we were in our petty kingdom suspended between worlds. We closed ranks to keep them at a distance: Manno, the visiting expatriate volunteers. The night before Ana and Peter left for college, all of the teenagers somehow ended up in the tree nursery, perched on bags of sawdust while the rain tinged against the metal roof. The warm half-dark smelled of earth and pinesap, and we cracked jokes about where we’d put a swimming pool on the compound, or who among us was most likely to end up married to a potbellied American with a Southern accent.