My mother stayed late at the school the following afternoon, absorbed in third-grade math problems and misspelled essays, until the sound of rocks smashing against the wall snapped her back to the present. One of the kindergartners was trying his hand at dechoukaj. She sent him home, then realized that her own daughters must still be processing the coup. She found Rose and Meadow both in tears. Rose had been told by the other little girls on the compound that she was too bossy; Meadow was having trouble breathing.
That night even my mother agreed that the puppy should be allowed to sleep inside, for comfort. It seemed to help—that is, until Rose woke at midnight to something warm and wet seeping into the mattress and started crying all over again.
—Flip, I told you this was a bad idea! my father yelled as my mother and I got up to change the sheets. —That puppy is spoiled rotten!
My mother wasn’t there the next morning to witness my father’s rage (she’d slipped out of the house at six a.m. to finish lesson plans) but Rose came running over to the school in tears to tell her what had just happened.
How should we deal with his uncontrolled anger? my mother wrote in her journal. I feel like there’s nothing that can be done.
My father, furious that the puppy had interrupted his sleep, had hurled our schoolbooks off the table and torn up Rose and Meadow’s homework folders.
—Dad, stop it! Just stop! I had screamed as he aimed a kick under the mattress. Meadow held open the screen door, and the puppy darted out with a yelp.
Meadow hid in my arms, shaking, as our father kicked the bicycles into a clattering heap on his way out. The puppy slunk back eventually and I knelt and stroked her soft belly and oversize paws while she gobbled up her breakfast. —I’m sorry he scared you, I whispered.
My father spent the rest of that morning helping Ron plant seedlings in the hospital tree nursery. —Pa fè sa! Stop that! he roared when kids on the other side of the barbed-wire fence whizzed rocks at his head.
It was as if he understood that our privilege was at the root of their anger, but he understood it only in the form of shame. He had already uprooted us from our country and it occurs to me now that if it had been within his power, he might have gone even further and dechouked the American greed and comfort that tainted us: our preference for puppies and movies in the lounge, our disinterest in learning Kreyòl. We were the ball and chain that tied him to the compound. He couldn’t figure out how to escape.
My father, though he appeared to the kids who hurled rocks at his head to have everything, couldn’t achieve the one thing he wanted most: to belong to Haiti.
* * *
My first priority, as soon as school let out, was to find my puppy, but though I clapped and called, I couldn’t find her anywhere. She didn’t come running, not even when I filled her bowl with boiled bulgur and tiny silver ti yaya fish and walked all the way back to the highway behind the Jameses’ house and around the fishpond, calling her name into the shadows.
My father said she must have gotten too close to the hospital and been stolen, but I blamed him. The next day, as if in penance, he took my mother and sisters on a foray through the nearby streets to ask if anyone had seen a small gray puppy. I didn’t bother to join them. I knew that she was never coming back.
I climbed onto the roof of the school and shredded a dried leaf between my fingernails. There was no point in loving a creature like that anyway. I was going to have to say goodbye sooner or later; it wasn’t like my father would let us bring a dog back to the States from Haiti. Life was full of losses. I should have figured this out by now. And how did I have any right to complain when people were dying in hospital beds and houses were being set on fire?
* * *
By the end of the week, kamyons were once again blaring past on the highway, and the burned tires and garbage had been shoved into the gutters. Port-au-Prince and Limbé seemed to have reached a holding pattern, but my father assured us that Cap-Haïtien was still explosive. No one on the compound had driven that far, but the rumor was that the Esso gas station had been burned to the ground, along with the only store that sold propane.
My mother sat down with Rose on our small brick patio and lifted up her mug of tea. —A toast to the cookies! To the bananas! To the Nutella! she proposed. Rose smiled reluctantly. Meadow, her lip quivering, admitted that she was lonely.
—You know, I’m lonely, too, my mother agreed, and marched both of my sisters upstairs after dinner to watch The Sound of Music. She couldn’t resist singing along when indomitable, flibbertigibbet Maria clasped the hands of her frightened children and led them to safety across the mountaintops, fields of wildflowers fluttering in the breeze.
I stayed behind to clang around the kitchen, skimming the fat off a jug of fresh milk to make whipped cream while my father camped out at the dining room table with a stack of letters to answer. He seemed to have forgotten entirely that tomorrow was Mom’s birthday.
Today marks our one-year anniversary in Limbé, he wrote in a long, frustrated missive to Grandma Lois. We arrived so hopeful. At this point I’m ready to write the place off. It feels as though these people are intent on self-destruction and that there is no purpose in knocking on their hard heads. I hope I don’t get swallowed by a whale.
Drowning in his Jonah the prophet role, he did not notice the telltale warning signs: his reduction of an entire country to “those people,” as if each individual mother, daughter, grandfather, farmer, schoolgirl, kamyon driver, or nurse could be lumped into one dismissive category, their stories erased.
* * *
On my mother’s thirty-eighth birthday, Nancy James brought over a vase of roses clipped from her garden, and even my father sat outside under the trees to savor forkfuls of gingerbread cake, whipped cream, and one carefully hoarded can of peaches.
It was Saturday, and when the mail arrived, I pulled a thin envelope from the pile, addressed to me. It was from Youthwalk magazine. Remembering that I had sent in a submission six months earlier, I hid the envelope at the bottom of the stack and ducked into my closet. I opened every other letter first, a vain attempt to slow time down while my heart tap-danced double time.
I was braced for the inevitable rejection, but there it was—completely implausible but printed in stark black ink for anyone to see—they wanted to publish what I had written! Or at least they would consider including my essay in their next devotional if I could add a few more lines and send in a photo.
I burst into the dining room and handed the letter to my mother. She shrieked and hugged me, then blurted out the news before I had a chance to shush her.
—I’m not published yet, I insisted, suddenly feeling shy.
Two days later, when I disappeared out of the back gate of the compound with my mother’s Nikon camera thumping against my chest, I still couldn’t believe my good fortune.
My mother, completely out of character, had agreed to let me go on a walk—alone—as long as I promised to be gone no longer than forty-five minutes. It helped that she was relaxed from birthday celebrations and that the Youthwalk editor had asked for a photo. Also, my father hadn’t been there to veto the idea.
It had felt strange to read my essay again, so many months later. I felt ambivalent about leaving the puppies in the story, since they hadn’t survived: The God of the storm is the same as that of the snuggly, furry puppy . . . How lucky we are!
We had lost all three in just six months, though it seemed petty to complain; others had lost much more.
Theologically, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the problem of pain. Joanna’s newsletters about the hospital always seemed suspiciously cheerful, but it didn’t feel right to just ignore the heartache. Or was that the point: that life was full of pain, but God was fierce and wild and unpredictable—and able to hold on to us even in the midst of loss.
I paused, heart pounding, on a dirt path at the top of a ridgeline and studied the Limbé valley through the viewfinder. So much history had played out in this
one valley alone: Taínos, conquistadores, slaveholders, missionaries, revolutionaries. What were we to do with all of that grief?
I had used up almost a whole roll of film (my mother was going to kill me) and had promised to head straight back, but I wasn’t ready, just yet, to return to the compound. I needed a little more time to think—about my Youthwalk submission, about Peter. I sat down and pulled on a tuft of grass.
Peter would be heading back to college soon, and while he hadn’t said anything definitive, when I sat next to him in Kreyòl church, I could feel his skin brush against mine every time he adjusted his posture. Olynda raised her eyebrows disapprovingly every time she caught me looking at him, as if to say My brother, really?, but I couldn’t help imagining how easy it would be to just lean over and rest my cheek against his shoulder. Was I, as Olynda warned, a hopeless flirt?
I brushed off my skirt and stood. One last look before I reentered the claustrophobia.
The hovering iridescent wingbeat of a dragonfly. A cricket clicking in the dry grass. A mango tree framed against a distant ridge. And then I saw them—two sparrow hawks, wingtips lifted as they circled the sky.
Beauty, it seemed, had been here all along: a wild summons, a name for God that did not stick in my throat. It felt suddenly absurd that as missionaries we had come to teach Haitians about God. God was already here. Maybe our only job was to bear witness to the beauty—and the sorrow. Without denying either one.
* * *
When I slipped back inside our volunteer cottage as quietly as I could, my mother and Milos were at the kitchen table with cups of tea and a devotional on suffering. I was only fifteen minutes late—I’d been gone barely an hour—but Milos, whose joyful disregard for protocol I had always assumed to be boundless, frowned into his beard and told us that he’d been jogging along the highway earlier that afternoon when a crowd blocked his path. They weren’t laughing. Some had grabbed rocks to throw at him. My mother gasped. —Oh, Milos! That’s awful!
—Well, I stayed off the highway, I said.
—Still, Apricot, you could have been hurt!
—It’s probably unwise, given the current political climate, Milos began.
—But I’m here! I came back. I’m fine, I said, closing the bedroom door firmly behind me.
My father was equally exasperated when he found out that my mother had let me go. Apparently, the American Baptist mission board representative from Cap-Haïtien had driven out earlier that afternoon to talk with the missionaries about emergency evacuation plans, should they prove necessary.
* * *
My parents sat up late at the kitchen table after my sisters and I had been sent to bed, to debate where we would go if—as it now seemed possible—we had to leave Haiti early. My mother was adamant that we would not be moving back into the one-room cabin in Idyllwild with the pit toilet. My father wasn’t so sure. What was wrong with living simply?
—But I thought that was the deal, my mother argued. —We’d go to Haiti, and then you’d get a real job with benefits! She pounded the table with her fist. —I thought that this poor living was finally supposed to be over!
He lowered his head like a man in the stocks. He didn’t want to sell his soul just to pay a mortgage. He wanted his life to count for something significant.
My mother groaned. —But Jon, we’ve done our time!
When my sisters and I got in on the conversation, my father did, at least, agree to a two-week train trip across the U.S., coach class, from Florida to California. My mother, realizing that it would be one of our last family trips before I left for college, and that we could stop through Oregon on the way, clasped her hands across her chest and sighed: Oh, Oregon!
She described the mint fields and picking wild blackberries straight off the vine. We teased her, but she closed her eyes and shook her head as if she couldn’t hear us, her mouth easing into a tired grin.
I was rather elated myself, as Peter had made the bold move of sitting down next to me at the picnic table—in broad daylight, not caring who might be watching—for no apparent reason except to be near me. I had been practicing Kreyòl with Annalise, one of the women who worked on the compound, while she kept an eye on her two- and three-year-old missionary kid charges. Peter did not laugh at my stumbling Kreyòl, and Annalise teased me only a little. By the time I raced over to help Olynda tally the pharmacy charts (late as usual), I was practically skipping.
Olynda refused to say a single word to me during the entire twenty minutes that it took us to flip each stained yellow chart to the correct page and tap the numbers into the ten-key calculator, but the angry whir as the receipt spat out its curled tongue seemed only to repeat the magic words: He cares! HE CARES!
* * *
It had been weeks since my father had hiked up to visit the gardens in Rey—he’d barely left the compound since the attempted coup—and he stalked between the clinic and the tree nursery like a caged beast.
He helped a visiting surgeon remove a farmer’s anthrax-ridden, gangrenous leg with a saw, the gory scene unlike anything that he had ever witnessed. The farmer was so terrified that the doctors feared he would die of shock mid-operation. He survived but would never be able to farm again.
Everywhere my father looked, he found reasons to despair. Grandma Lois mailed a newspaper clipping about four hundred houses that had been burned to the ground outside of Gonaïves. Cherylene, who lived near the bus station, should have been fine, but it was impossible to know for sure. When my father drove a group of hospital volunteers to the airport, the uprooted gardens along the highway made him sick to his stomach. He grumbled that if my mother hadn’t been teaching at Jericho School, we might have just packed our bags and left.
He was even more dismayed when he found out that Cleanne, the frail single mother whom he’d befriended, had walked six miles from Garde Cognac with her nine-year-old daughter, worried that she would be late for her follow-up consultation in the missionary clinic the next morning. They had slept beside the river, two thin bodies curled up against the night, because she hadn’t been able to afford the twenty-cent tap tap fare. He would have given them a ride if he had known.
Even worse, when Cleanne showed my father her hospital chart after the consultation, he realized what she did not. She had tested positive for HIV. Her immune system had already been destroyed, and there was nothing more the hospital could do for her. My father explained what this meant. She would die soon.
He urged her to find a home for her daughter before it was too late, so the girl would have a future. But Cleanne had already placed a daughter as a live-in servant in someone else’s house and could not bear the thought of losing the only child she had left. She could not bear to face death alone.
My father asked if he could pray with her, and Cleanne nodded. She explained that she didn’t attend church because she didn’t have the right clothes to wear, but she did trust in God.
—God doesn’t care about what kind of clothes we wear, my father insisted.
He gave her what she needed to pay her hospital bill, plus extra for tap tap fare and food, but was haunted by the realization that she did not have the support of an extended family. Had she been given a bed at the hospital, she could have at least spent her final days in the care of nurses who could offer some relief from the pain. But the beds were reserved only for those who had some hope of recovery. And every bed was full.
Love in a Time of Dechoukaj, Kontinye
Limbé, 1991
AFTER MY SISTERS fell asleep, I creaked open the screen door and sat on the steps, unwilling to leave such beauty unwitnessed. I pulled out my journal.
This is another world, sitting here beneath the moon. It seems so distant from time and everyday worries. It’s so bright! Almost as if it were full day, but softer, kinder, and more mysterious. And she sees my dearest tonight.
The night before Peter left for college, in the companionable half-darkness of the swing set, he had confessed that we had a very spe
cial relationship. He didn’t try to hold my hand, but he did say that he would miss me. It was enough to set my heart soaring.
I kept thinking of him, settling back into his dorm room, as the missionaries gathered around a bonfire at the Jameses’ house. Hot dogs sizzled and marshmallows puffed into toasty, sticky perfection over bright red coals—all that remained of our spindly Christmas trees from Morne Bois Pin. The moon was almost full through the silhouetted trees. I turned back to my journal:
I wonder if he’s thinking about me? Not half as much as I’m thinking of him, surely. Five months is too long. Half a day is too long! I want to see him, and talk with him, and tell him I’ll die if he leaves me again (which I won’t, of course, but it sounds much more tragic than something like, “If you leave me again I’ll have a sullen fit and mope around the house for a few days”).
The next morning we woke once again to burning tires and angry voices in the streets. Although the Haitian military denied it, rumors of a failed plot to free Lafontant from prison had touched off new protests. The house of an alleged Lafontant supporter in Limbé was firebombed. David Hodges roared off on his red motor scooter only to watch the home of the local Bazin representative burst into flames. Gunshots ricocheted across the marketplace. Dr. Hodges spent the evening removing a bullet from the leg of a young girl who had been caught in the cross fire.
That week, five houses in Limbé were dechouked. The tribunal office was ransacked and its archives burned. The ex–police captain’s truck was set on fire and his Uzi and revolver stolen. When a group of young men attacked houses directly across from the hospital during the night, no one stopped them. Even the police seemed increasingly reluctant to intervene.
My father was dumbfounded. Enough is enough. Ase se kont, he said to anyone who would listen.
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