The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  I had wasted most of a year in self-absorbed drama, but there was still time. When I got home, I updated my journal: I never did think I’d admit to loving Haiti, but I am glad I’m here.

  After the Dance, the Drum Is Heavy

  Aprè dans, tanbou lou

  Limbé, 1991

  MY FATHER CELEBRATED New Year’s Day hiking across the worn hillsides to wish his farmer friends Bòn ane (unlike my sisters and I, who spent the afternoon watching movies on the compound). At every house, he was offered a thick, steaming bowl of traditional soup jomou, pumpkin soup redolent with shallots and garlic and, if the harvest had not been too lean, goat meat. In return, he handed out New Year’s zetrèn: batteries, toothpaste, nail clippers, scissors, toy cars, and seeds. More than one farmer clasped his hand and said: —Sa se yon jou mwen pa t panse mwen ta wè. This is a day I never thought I would live to see.

  A widow in her fifties pulled aside a thin curtain to show my father the single room she shared with her seven grandchildren, as wide as a double bed. He prayed with her and read the Psalms from his well-thumbed Kreyòl Bible, then gave her a gift of twenty-five dollars—enough to pay a year’s rent—plus a forty-dollar microloan so that she could buy material to resell at the market. She had worked as a machann in the Limbé market before she lost her children to AIDS; worry over her remaining grandchildren had cost her livelihood.

  My mother, back at the compound, had opened our door to find a woman whom my father had met some months earlier in a small village near Zo’s house. Cleanne’s feet were dusty and her dress was torn. She looked to be only in her late twenties but already seemed broken by life. My father had given her money so that she could visit the hospital, but it hadn’t been enough to pay for the consultation. My mother supplied the remaining nine dollars. Cleanne’s daughter, in torn sandals, waited beside her like a shadow.

  The next visitor who knocked was a more frequent caller. She made the rounds every few months, complaining that none of the Haitian Christians would give her even one gourde to buy charcoal; no one showed compassion, only the blan. If no gifts were forthcoming, she would declaim loudly: Lord have mercy on us all! My mother sent her home with a bunch of bananas.

  My father made it back to the compound just in time to catch the last few minutes of the Rose Bowl, televised live from Pasadena. What a trip to see sunny Southern California, he wrote in a postcard to Grandma Lois. Forgot there was such a thing as the Rose Parade.

  * * *

  Although it went against my father’s better judgment, my mother insisted, and my sisters and I were elated when, for my fifteenth birthday, I got to bring home a floppy-eared gray puppy to replace the ones that we had already lost. I buried my nose in her impossibly soft fur and named her Squash.

  My father, keenly aware that most animals in Haiti were lucky to scavenge whatever they could find—he knew families where even the children weren’t guaranteed more than one meal every few days—decreed that the dog would under no circumstances be allowed to sleep inside, but she whimpered and scratched at the door on her first night away from her litter mates. At two-thirty a.m., he rolled over and grumbled to my mother that this hadn’t been his idea.

  I’d already carried the mewling pup inside when my mother pushed open the door to the room I shared with my sisters. Her tiny body burrowed against my chest as I pulled the sheet over us.

  —Don’t wake up Dad, my mother whispered.

  * * *

  Three days before Christmas vacation was supposed to end, my mother announced that she would be driving to Port-au-Prince with whoever wanted to join her for a weekend stay at a missionary guest house with a pool. My father was predictably exasperated. Milos and Christa, who didn’t own a car, had talked her into it.

  Christa and Milos both worked at the hospital, but it was Milos who was the joyfully unrepentant troublemaker. A Czechoslovakian nurse with a wild, dark beard, he kept reproductions of Orthodox icons in his wallet, in case he had to call on the saints for help. When he went jogging along the highway, he was famous for reaching up to bump the carefully stacked baskets on the heads of market women, just to hear them swear at him. On several different occasions, my father had overheard Haitian onlookers debate in serious tones whether or not Milos was in fact crazy—a moun fou.

  Some of the missionaries were horrified by Milos’s antics, but when he was scolded, he frowned and looked down at his clasped hands, then announced with an impish grin that there was not enough joy in the world.

  The kids on the compound adored him. Chaos followed in his wake. He gave away chocolate on his saint’s day but would tell no one his actual birth date. In the fairy tales he wrote and distributed to friends, strange figures wandered in and out of the surreal-like characters from a dream. He seemed haunted by secrets.

  My father, although fond of Milos, was not at all pleased with the plan: Flip, are you crazy? There’s a gas shortage!

  —We’ll just use some of the gas we have stored; better to use it than have it stolen!

  My father stormed off to the garden. She kept packing.

  I had been briefly tempted to stay when I mistakenly assumed that both of my parents would be away for the weekend. I could invite Olynda over and we could stay up late and bake brownies; the puppy could sleep inside and no one would even know. I changed plans in a hurry when I realized that I would be stuck at home with my father.

  My mother honked and waved as we drove out of the compound the next morning. My father planned to ride his bike up a steep dirt trail to a village called Suffering, then take a tap tap to Gonaïves to visit Cherylene. We agreed to pick him up on our way back. He promised to feed the puppy.

  Even with nine people crammed into a five-passenger station wagon (Meadow and I curled up on pillows in the back, Rose on a lap), the four-hour drive was—without my father’s dispiriting presence—everything I could have wished for in a road trip. We stopped along the highway outside of Gonaïves and took goofball pictures in front of bizarrely formed cacti, and ate lunch at a serene beachside restaurant in Montrouis—indulgences we never would have dreamed of if my father had been driving.

  I love Haiti! It’s a tourist’s dream! I rhapsodized after eating peanut-molasses candy and raspberries in Fermanthe. Milos talked my mother into brunch at the Olaffson, the fanciest hotel I had ever seen, then whisked us off to visit the Haitian art museum in Port-au-Prince. Mom laughed more than I’d heard her laugh all year. We even stopped at an air-conditioned supermarket (air-conditioned!) in swanky Pétionville and bought real Granny Smith apple juice—each cardboard box with its plastic sippy straw a tantalizing reminder of a life we’d nearly forgotten.

  My mother, unused to driving in the city, hunched her shoulders and gripped the wheel nervously when she had to pull into Port-au-Prince traffic: a honking jumble of motorcycles, kids in school uniforms, overloaded kamyon buses, and snow cone vendors clanging the sides of their carts. She was even jumpier when we walked out one afternoon to buy fried sweet potatoes from a hissing pan of oil.

  —Rose, you’re standing too close to the street, get behind me!

  —Mom, I’m fine! Rose snapped back. She was ten years old. Of course she knew how to walk down a street.

  My mother kept grabbing for Rose’s arm, and Rose kept yanking it away.

  —Here, Rose, I’ll protect you! I cried, leaping in front of her the next time we had to cross a road. I held up my hands like a badly trained ninja. A schoolgirl on the back of a motorcycle smiled.

  My mother exhaled loudly, but at least I had gotten Rose to laugh. Meadow slipped her arm through Mom’s and patted it consolingly.

  —Was I really that bad? she asked, but we were laughing too hard to answer.

  My mother later recorded in her journal the only truly unsettling incident that we witnessed during our vacation, which came and went in an instant. On the drive to Port-au-Prince, somewhere in the Artibonite, we had driven past a body in flames. We did not speak of it afterward, that I reme
mber, although my father also mentions it in his journal, so someone must have told him what we saw through the windows of the station wagon.

  It had been a momentary glimpse in a crowded open-air market. A tire shoved over the victim’s head, arms pinned by the melting rubber. Thick smoke billowed. Spectators had gathered.

  We didn’t pull over to find out what had happened, so we were left only with speculations. A man or a woman? A thief? A murderer? A scapegoat? Had anyone protested, or were they too afraid that they might be next?

  There was a tense silence in the car after we drove past. We turned our attention to the road ahead. Breathed inaudible prayers, or tried to distract ourselves with any other image but that.

  We did not mourn, at least not openly; did not light a candle for the life snuffed out. I did not write about the horrific scene in my journal, or in letters to the grandparents, as if my silence could blot out the smoldering, blackened silhouette. I did not know what to say, did not want to accept that life could be reduced by such agony to ashes and bone. This death was sinister and ugly. Uncleansed by grief. Our silence was our complicity.

  Perhaps this was why, on our last morning in Port-au-Prince, Milos insisted that we visit the Missionaries of Charity Home for the Dying. He wanted to give massages, as did one of the other nurse volunteers. To be touched is to understand that we are connected, he explained. We followed him into the dim room. Haitian nuns in white and blue moved between creaking metal bed frames. My mother let go of Rose’s shoulders and slipped her hand into the outstretched palm of an elderly man. His leg bones stretched gaunt under a white sheet.

  —Bondye beni ou. God bless you, he murmured.

  —Bondye beni ou, my mother echoed.

  Milos took a dying man’s feet in his hands, gently massaging the callused skin. A woman with high cheekbones and a concave chest stared at the opposite wall. I moved toward her, aware of my discomfort.

  So much of my time on the compound had been spent avoiding the hospital, but perhaps this was what I had come to Haiti to learn: that my well-being was inextricably linked to the lives of every other person in this room. We belonged to the same earth. Our lives were of equal significance.

  —Bonjou, I whispered. I placed one hand in hers. Her skin was cool against the frayed sheets: the taut muscles, the fragile bone structure.

  * * *

  My sisters and I didn’t try to hide our disappointment when we said goodbye to Milos. He and his more adventurous entourage had decided to take a kamyon back to Limbé so they could have one more full day in the capital, whereas we’d already promised to meet Dad in Gonaïves. If we’d been able to call and change our plans, I’d have jumped at the chance.

  The long, hot drive to visit Cherylene was demoralizing. My mother seemed to grow increasingly irritable as the day wore on. She insisted that I change out of my jeans—which not a single person in Port-au-Prince had found objectionable—and put on a more culturally appropriate skirt before we met my father.

  —But why? I argued.

  She sucked in her breath and stopped the car abruptly, dust swirling over the cactus. —I’m going to take a walk while you get changed! she announced, her voice high with forced cheerfulness.

  Rose stuck her feet out the car window. —Apricot, come on, you’re just making it take longer!

  —It’s hot, Meadow mumbled.

  —You know she’s only doing this because of Dad, I pointed out. My attempts to inspire mutiny were futile.

  —Well, that’s better! Mom said briskly when she sat down again behind the wheel.

  I ignored her. I had slammed down the gates of the fortress, untouchable.

  Cherylene’s relatives, as usual, hadn’t known to expect us, so our hosts spent the better part of two hours getting dressed so that we could take their photographs. Why are we here again? I muttered under my breath.

  It had only been a few months since our last visit, so when Cherylene stepped into the room, my father leaned forward, I thought, far too eagerly. His laugh seemed unnecessarily loud. The whole act rang false to me. He hadn’t seemed particularly glad to see us after three days away—if anything, he seemed even more disappointed in us than usual—but he was stumbling all over himself to demonstrate his devotion to Cherylene. Whom exactly was he trying to convince?

  As soon as we got back in the car, conversation quickly ground to a halt. He wasn’t interested in our stories from Port-au-Prince, and we were equally bored with his updates about the ant infestations in the vegetable gardens. I did ask about my puppy, and he said it was doing fine. He’d had to get up one night to throw a cup of water on it because it wouldn’t stop whining, but it had toughened up since then. He glanced in the rearview mirror, hoping for a reaction, but I refused to give him the satisfaction.

  When one of our tires blew out just over the pass of Pilboro, he knelt by the side of the road and strained against the lug nuts, which had rusted in the humidity. The muscles in his back twitched and he grunted with frustration. A crowd gathered to watch. One woman held a baby with rheumy eyes and a wet slick of mucus running down her nose.

  —Take her, the woman insisted, attempting to push the sick child into my mother’s arms.

  My mother stepped back, flustered. —No, madame, thank you. I don’t want your child.

  —She’s sick. You take care of her. Take her.

  The crowd studied us. I couldn’t tell what to make of their laughter.

  The interaction felt theatrical, staged to draw attention to the gaping inequity between us; a farce. I couldn’t figure out what they wanted from us.

  Milos, I felt sure, would have known what to do and risen to the crowd’s energy. Perhaps he’d have pretended to steal the baby and called the mother’s bluff.

  Then I thought of Olynda. Her mother had given her away. What would I have done in her place? How angry would I feel if I could not protect my own child from harm yet had to watch others sail past, blithely shielded by resources I could never dream of possessing? No wonder the resentment ran so deep; no wonder Aristide’s campaign promises had resonated so powerfully, why uprooting the old order might have seemed like the only option.

  My father wiped his hands on a rag and slammed the flat tire into the hatchback, then yelled at Rose for accidentally spilling water on the seeds in his backpack. My mother rubbed her temples. Was he always this angry? His hands gripped the wheel as he steered us down the darkening mountain. We sank deeper into the strained silence.

  Love in a Time of Dechoukaj

  Limbé, 1991

  WHEN WE AWOKE the next morning, thick black smoke curled over the barbed wire into the compound. I could hear angry voices, the sound of running feet. My father had already been over to the Doctor’s study to hear the news for himself. While we slept, Roger Lafontant—the man who had commanded the Tonton Macoutes terror squad during the Duvalier years—had taken over the National Palace. To prevent the newly elected Aristide from taking office, the provisional president, Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, had been forced at gunpoint to read a televised resignation speech. Lafontant had declared himself the new head of the republic. Aristide urged his followers to protest.

  Milos and the other volunteers had escaped Port-au-Prince just before businesses seen as Duvalierist sympathizers roared into flames. Looters ducked in to salvage what could be pulled from the wreckage. Torched car frames and tree branches barricaded the national highway. In the north, houses of both Lafontant supporters and his rival, Marc Bazin, were dechouked.

  Jericho School continued as normal, though Meadow’s middle school teacher, Mary Hays, arrived windblown on the back of Manno’s motorcycle; they’d had to talk their way through the barricades. I realized belatedly that what I had mistaken for bravado in Manno was, in fact, courage.

  My father, rather than risk the streets on his bicycle, and risk repercussions to friends in the countryside, spent the morning with Dr. Hodges in the clinic, helping to translate for a group of visiting medical students, un
til protestors gathered to hurl rocks at a house across the street while neighbors shouted at them from behind closed doors. Rumor had it that both the house and a nearby school belonged to a Lafontant supporter, who was said to have been in Port-au-Prince at the time of the coup.

  Rocks still in hand, the protestors turned toward the missionary hospital. For a moment, it looked as if they were about to storm the clinic, until some in the group joined hands and formed a human barrier. My father watched, his body tense with adrenaline, as the young men changed course and continued down the road, a sign shattering behind them in a rain of glass.

  By nightfall, the military coup was over. Roger Lafontant, though he’d claimed to have the support of the army, had been arrested, along with his co-conspirators. News reports announced that seventy-five people had been killed in clashes across the country.

  My father informed us over dinner that some of the places we had just visited in Port-au-Prince had been burned to the ground.

  —It sure sounds like Aristide is inciting his followers to continue the dechoukaj and then denying it all in the same breath, he told us.

  —I’m so glad we’re not still driving back and forth from Haut-Limbé, my mother said, rubbing Meadow’s knotted shoulders.

  Meadow had been able to eat only a few bites of dinner. Her breathing was shallow and uneven. Steve James had listened with his stethoscope but hadn’t been able to detect anything amiss. He’d suggested gently that it could be anxiety.

  —Who knows what’s next, my father said as he pushed back his chair to join the other men in Dr. Hodges’s study. —The Doctor used to say that things are getting worse all over. Now he just says it’s all disgusting.

  That night, my mother curled up next to Meadow on her narrow twin bed, the frame creaking beneath them every time my sister tried to take a deep breath, but it was eleven-thirty before she was able to fall asleep.