The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  All of the guests at the Medieval Feast, my mother explained to her class of nine- and ten-year-olds, needed to come prepared with a song, a story, or a joke to amuse the King or Queen—an honorary title that would be bestowed upon whomsoever bit in to the winning hors d’oeuvre that contained a single uncooked bean.

  Rose and her classmates immediately started daydreaming about whom they would choose if they should pick the lucky cheese and cracker; the older kids professed disinterest. My mother just revved up her starry-eyed sales pitch.

  No New World foods would be allowed at the feast: no tomatoes, no corn, no militon, no mangoes (never mind that the compound was about thirty miles from the ruins of the first official outpost of the so-called New World). We would eat with our hands from bread trenchers, and toast their royal majesties with goblets of powdered pink lemonade. There would even be a gingerbread castle.

  But the castle, as it turned out, was only the first disappointment. In the tropics, bread does not grow stale; it molds. Gingerbread—even elaborately sketched out and executed gingerbread castles with stained-glass windows made of melted lollipops that, when lit from behind, emit a hazy, romantic glow—has a tendency to go limp in the humidity.

  To make matters worse, my mother realized mid-project that she didn’t have quite enough candy for the stained-glass windows, so she and my two sisters hopped on their bikes to ride to the Limbé market. On the way home, clutching sticky red, gold, blue, and green lollipops like banners flying, they rode headlong into a gang of teenage boys who suddenly closed in around them, bringing their bicycles skidding to a halt.

  Meadow and Rose were frightened, but my mother was still trying to figure out what the surly boys wanted. She spoke just enough Kreyòl to understand that they were flinging curse words. She heard “your mother is a stinging wasp”—gèp manman ou—but misunderstood the meaning; gèt manman ou—“your mother’s clitoris”—was a phrase she was unfamiliar with.

  Unsure how best to protect her daughters, my mother was relieved when a Haitian man that she recognized from Kreyòl Sunday school came to their rescue. He shouted and ran toward them, whipping his belt out of his pant loops. My sisters cowered as he swung the leather whip through the air. A buckle landed on bare flesh, and the boys scattered, cursing.

  This knight at arms my mother rewarded with flustered thanks before retreating into the missionary fortress.

  Safe at home, she dismissed the trauma—a skill essential to survival—and focused her attention on assembling the gingerbread castle. But sugar-crusted icing could not hold the weight of the listing structure, so we had to resort to cans of tuna fish and peaches to prop up the teetering walls.

  By the night of the Feast, only the little girls seemed to register enthusiasm. They clustered around the sagging gingerbread castle and squabbled over whose turn it was to try on the tarnished sequin crown.

  I felt deflated. My mother was trying to yank us out of our lethargy, but even her stubborn strength was no match for the heaviness that hung over the compound.

  The evacuation had torn a hole in the narrative. The missionary confidence that we were hope-bearers, shining with Christ’s love had been replaced with a fundamental uncertainty: Were we even wanted? There was a palpable sense of failure in the room.

  Most of the missionaries dragged in at least twenty minutes after the Feast was supposed to begin, sinking reluctantly into folding chairs in the chapel. Steve James was on call at the hospital, just one floor beneath us, but he didn’t even bother to make an appearance for the introductory remarks, although his four daughters kept glancing over their shoulders for his arrival. He was still missing when my mother passed out the hors d’oeuvres. At her joyful command, a gaggle of girls bit gingerly into their cheese and crackers, eager for the prize.

  Steve’s golden-haired daughter Carrie squealed with excitement—she had found the hidden bean! The other third-grade girls pouted with envy.

  —All hail the Queen! my mother sang as she placed the sequined crown on the nervous but excited royal brow. Her Highness must now choose a King!

  At that moment, Steve pushed open the screen door. Carrie saw him first. Her father, whom she loved best in all the world, had arrived just when she wanted him most.

  —I choose Papa! she announced, her face radiant.

  Steve looked startled as all eyes in the room turned to him. My mother danced toward the doorway holding the King’s crown.

  We wanted him to make us laugh; we wanted him to push the pain aside for a night, to help us forget the torn world outside the chapel.

  Steve froze, then turned abruptly on his heels and vanished.

  The screen door banged shut behind him, the spring buzzing like a startled cicada.

  The nine-year-old Queen didn’t crumple under the shock. Her eyes welled briefly, but she blinked the tears away. My mother flailed around like a singed butterfly as the Queen chose a runner-up and we raised our glasses to toast Their Majesties’ good health.

  As the party limped on, I studied the Queen under her lopsided tiara. Her tawny eyes flickered as she readjusted her slipping crown. Something in her had snapped shut. She was more self-possessed than I had been at nine years old. Her smile was fixed and impenetrable. But I remembered my own jealousy when my father brought Ti Marcel home from the hospital. Nothing I could do could win back his attention. I had lost him to her—to Haiti. We couldn’t compete with such single-minded devotion.

  * * *

  Twenty years after that ill-fated night, when I asked Steve James what he remembered about the Medieval Feast, he confessed that walking out on his daughter was one of his deepest regrets as a father.

  He and his wife, Nancy, still lived in the Limbé Valley, although they had left the missionary compound. His eyes were lined with wrinkles. After years of meditation, he had the quiet poise of a monk. He flattened his gray hair against his skull as he spoke.

  Steve explained to me how conflicted he had felt on the night of the Feast between his daughters and the promise he had made to God. He had vowed that, as a medical doctor to the poorest of the poor, he would do everything in his power to heal those who came to him in need.

  * * *

  On duty one floor below the chapel on the night of the Feast, the emergencies just kept coming. A limp and dehydrated child. A probable malaria case. A near-comatose woman carried in with a decomposing fetus in her womb.

  This last case was critical, for if Steve did not work quickly, infection would set in. While his own children prepared for the celebration upstairs, Steve dropped to his knees before the birthing table. He knew that if he did not remove every fragment of the dead fetus, the mother would die. Conditions were miserable in the hot, airless room. There were no fans to stir the wet air, and the woman was clearly suffering as the doctor labored with her, up to his elbow in her clenched uterus.

  He didn’t have much time. His gloved hand tugged tissue loose, putrid with decay. As he gently extracted the tiny body, he felt his head swim with nausea, but he centered himself, determined to wrest life from death.

  Finally, after two excruciating hours, it was finished. The mother would live. The child’s body was taken away to be buried.

  Steve washed his hands and tried to pray a blessing on the woman, on the dead child, on the missionary hospital, on the anguish that sat on his shoulders like death itself, a burden he could find no words for. The smell would linger in his nostrils for days.

  He wanted to go home and shower, to sit in silence and let the pain slowly ebb from his shoulders. Lay to rest the memory of the child’s torn body, the woman’s moans. He craved the stillness of his study, his Bible open on his desk. Instead, he bowed to familial obligation and climbed the stairs to the chapel.

  On the landing, he paused to prepare himself for the weary disillusionment of the parents; the eager, oblivious energy of the children. His daughters had been talking about this Feast all week.

  He opened the door, hoping to find a quiet
seat in the back, but instead, he felt all eyes turn hungrily toward him. He froze, taking it all in—his daughter with the crown on her golden head; the sagging gingerbread castle; our strained, hopeful smiles.

  We wanted him to set it all aside. To laugh with us. To forget.

  He was so tired. He couldn’t shoulder the weight of our expectations.

  * * *

  Steve’s daughter Carrie, now a nurse in the U.S., had long ago forgiven her father.

  —She is so loving every time we talk about it, Steve admitted, then paused, his voice breaking. His voice trembled, then trailed off. —That guy who walked out on his daughter . . .

  —And yet, he added with a wry smile, —I am still learning to love myself. He sighed, then laughed.

  —We can’t change the past, he admitted finally, as if extending the only benediction he had to offer. —But we can work on the present.

  He let silence fill the space between us as parrots and cicadas took up the chorus outside.

  Desire, betrayal, forgiveness. The only story we have to tell.

  * * *

  The ill-fated Medieval Feast in the chapel was not, in the end, a complete debacle—thanks in no small part to my mother’s relentless cheerleading. There were still juggling acts, poetry readings, the requisite number of knock-knock jokes.

  The walls of the gingerbread castle, despite our efforts, collapsed before we had time to light the candles, but the ruins tasted of buttery molasses and sugar frosting and left our hands sticky with crushed lollipops.

  On Beauty and Sorrow

  Limbé, 1991

  BY APRIL 1991, with only four months to go before our agreed-upon year and a half of missionary service was complete, my father’s letters to his parents were increasingly exasperated. Someone in Limbé had been sneaking a goat through the barbed-wire fence behind the Jameses’ house to graze. Even after repeated warnings to the goat’s owners to cease and desist, it had chewed a grotesque ring of bark off a fruit-bearing citrus, almost killing the tree. When my father found the marauding beast in the process of munching its way through the seedlings in the nursery, he took his pocketknife and slit its throat, then threw the still-bleeding animal into the street.

  I’ve been threatening to do it for some time, he explained to the grandparents, with more than a little bravado. We did have a lot of little rocks thrown at our house yesterday afternoon and evening. Such is life in paradise.

  And yet, despite this unrepentant foray into dechoukaj—the very opposite of what he’d preached with a knife held to his throat—my father realized that to leave, as planned, and give up on Haiti was the most bitter prospect of all. His second-to-last newsletter was notable chiefly for its thinly veiled undercurrent of hopelessness: Sometimes I wonder how I will fit back into the States after our exposure here. I expect I will squirm under the theme of hope and joy, remembering people here.

  I, too, was increasingly nervous about our return to the U.S.

  Haiti had opened my eyes to both beauty and suffering, but it was the beauty that blinded me, that made me reach for my pen to write it all down—the storms that lashed the mango trees; the awkward dance of the fiddler crabs at the beach; the moonlit mountains, each receding ridge a deeper shade of gray, like a sketch outlined in charcoal.

  Ever since Peter had left for his second term of college, I had been dashing off eight-page epistles, chock-full of passionate meditations. On Saturdays, when the mail arrived, I made excuses to linger by the kitchen table in the Hodges house, waiting for a reply. He wrote to his cousins. He wrote to his papa, the Doctor. But he did not write to me.

  Finally, after aching weeks of silence, he wrote to say: I’m going to put this as blunt as possible. Good friends never break up, but lovers sometimes do. We won’t have much time together, so to start something would be crazy. Besides, we’d like to be able to see each other in the future without having any uncomfortable feelings about the past.

  I stumbled through the week in a daze.

  Craving solitude, I slipped out of the hospital gates and found myself on the road in Limbé. Children held up their palms: Blan, ban mwen yon ti bagay; ban m mont lan. I shook my head and smiled, trying to evade the demands: Blan, give me a little something; give me your watch. After all these years, I still didn’t know how to escape that hated role.

  Outside of Limbé, the dirt road stretched out against the hills. Women dipped their clothes in the muddy river and conversed in loud voices. I wanted to sit down next to them but was afraid that I would interrupt the banter. Instead, I sat on a rock at the edge of the sand and wrote: If only this place wasn’t so beautiful! You want to love it, to make it your own, but it won’t take you. It only looks at you strange, then laughs behind your back. Rather humbling, you know? But it’s good for us tèt cho Americans to know we can’t have everything.

  * * *

  My father, sensing weakness, angled for an ally. Another long talk with A, he noted in his journal. Might be willing to stay in Haiti.

  He spent his last few months preaching the good news about ramp vivan terraces, by which he hoped—his final, last-ditch effort—to save the world through trees. Living terraces had already been employed elsewhere in Haiti, often with grass to hold the soil in place, but as soon as the heavy rains came, the barricades broke apart; when the organic matter decomposed, the work was lost. Trees, on the other hand, were an investment in the future.

  Zo, in Camp Coq, was a natural ally in this new undertaking. Using a rough, improvised level made of two poles and a wooden crossbar from which hung a string tied around a rock, they swiveled their way across the slope of the mountain, creating a low-tech contour map. It was crucial that the line be perfectly level, without any low spots to weaken the dam, and along this they buried seeds. As the seeds grew, the roots wove a thick mesh to hold the soil in place. Eventually, the pocked and ruined garden would be transformed into a miracle of stairstep terraces neatly stacked against the side of the mountain. In theory, it was brilliant. Implausibly, this time the theory worked.

  Planting individual trees was too time-consuming and promised only limited results. Ramp vivan, my father was convinced, might be the only hope to save what little soil was left on the mountains.

  He poured his energy into a fevered attempt to persuade as many farmers as he could to install living terraces. Leucaena branches, rich in nutrients, could be cut and carried for animal feed, and the larger trunks could be cut for charcoal without damaging the resilient mesh of roots.

  A few farmers listened. Most didn’t have time for the latest big idea of the blan.

  * * *

  If, like my father, you suffer from a savior complex, Haiti is a bleak assignment, but if you are able to enter it unguarded, shielded only by curiosity, you will find the sorrows entangled with a defiant joy.

  Olynda and I, invited to the wedding of her aunt’s cook, were supposed to attend only under the watchful eye of Barbara, but when she hadn’t made it home from the pharmacy by the time the wedding was supposed to start, we slipped out unchaperoned, giddy at our own daring.

  The wedding was supposed to start at six p.m., but the bride and groom were taking showers when we arrived at six-twenty, feeling a bit foolish for our overeagerness. An hour later, we all piled into borrowed cars and drove the long way through the streets of Limbé, honking and waving. We passed the church three times before we went inside.

  Only the bride and groom were allowed into the pastor’s living room, where the service was held. I wished that I had the guts to stand on tiptoe like the people from the market and stare through the open windows—there were no secrets in Haiti.

  Afterward, we made another noisy procession, this time all the way down to the Limbé River and back. I sat on Olynda’s lap because there were so many other people in the car, but the honking and shouting had worked its magic: a huge crowd was waiting in the street to cheer as the bride and groom walked through their front door.

  We followed them ins
ide, where streamers and bright plastic flowers hung from the ceiling. The table was piled high with rice, chicken, beets, and crabs in their shells. Melons and fat pineapples were studded with toothpicks and decorated with a green maraschino cherry or a cheese curl. The wedding cake was dense and gritty, as if it had been baked over charcoal. Popcorn neatly wrapped in paper napkins was passed through the open windows to the voyeurs outside.

  When the lights flicked on and off, signaling that it was time for the dance party, Olynda and I sashayed onto the living room floor. We twirled our skirts to Kreyòl pop music, and I swung a little girl in a pink dress around and around in a dizzy circle until we both fell down laughing. Well past curfew, Olynda’s cousins walked us home in the dark.

  Kerosene lanterns threw shadows across the dirt road and voices called bòn nwit. At the entrance, the watchmen turned back our escorts and we continued inside alone, the electric lights glaring over our scuffed shoes and tousled hair as the gate slammed shut behind us.

  * * *

  I felt a bittersweet sense of impending loss as our final months in Haiti skittered past. Meadow turned thirteen and taller than me. Her surprise party ended in tears. My father wanted to read her birthday letters out loud, and I argued that they were private; we all ended up shouting at each other.

  On Mother’s Day, having planned ahead this time, we strolled barefoot along the high-tide line at Plage Saint Michel. Jericho School’s jovial white-haired kindergarten teacher, Ms. Whitt, regaled us with stories. Left to fend for herself after her husband died, she had climbed down an empty swimming pool ladder to stalk a particularly aggressive woodchuck, then killed it with one shot. Makes you realize life is NOT over at 40! I scribed with admiration in my journal.