Low, crumbling walls of coral blocked the waves, and when we ventured out into the quiet pools, bright fish blurred the rippled sand. Meadow, lost in thought, felt an awareness of a larger shift within her: standing at the edge of the land and the sea, she understood, deeper than argument or observation, that the earth’s resources were limited; our collective consumption, left unchecked, would outstrip our ability to care for this planet. The realization awoke in her a worried kinship with the earth and its creatures.
* * *
Even Rose, at ten years old, had been changed by our brief stay in Haiti. Her dimpled smile was more guarded, braced for arguments with friends or a stinging insult. She, too, had been slapped, though by one of the other missionary girls. I seethed and promised retribution, but my mother talked me out of it.
Too young to join Meadow and me for youth group on Wednesday nights, Rose wandered around the compound alone until her Sunday school teacher, a volunteer nurse named Sonya, invited her over for tea—every week, a standing invitation. To be seen as unique on the compound, with singular sorrows and idiosyncrasies, was a rare gift. Sonya was beloved not only by my sister, and by the other missionary girls in her Sunday school class, but also in the hospital pediatric ward, where her laughter rang down the corridors when she played with orphans and teased her Haitian coworkers.
On an ordinary Friday afternoon, having carefully addressed her letters to fly out on the missionary plane, Sonya was in a car full of friends from the hospital, on the way to Port-au-Prince for the weekend, when a kamyon slammed into the vehicle and snapped her neck, killing her instantly. She was the only fatality.
When the news reached the compound, all the little girls who loved Sonya best were at a birthday party for Laura Rose at the seminary, so a driver was sent over to bring them home. Nothing was explained about why the birthday party had ended so abruptly. When the girls tumbled out of the car, they guessed only that something terrible had happened. The missionaries on the compound were blank with loss.
Parental arms pulled them in for hugs, but it was assumed that they had already been told. Rose learned the truth hours later, by eavesdropping. Having observed that no one else was crying, she, too, was silent. Another grief, buried.
Sonya’s last words, already stamped and sealed, flew out on the missionary plane, though she herself was beyond the reach of language.
* * *
Sonya was remembered and eulogized by the missionaries and their children, as well as by her Haitian coworkers, but there was no one to mourn the death of Cleanne, the young woman dying of AIDS.
Neighbors had heard Cleanne moaning, begging God to deliver her from the pain. By the time my father heard the news, the nine-year-old daughter who had slept with her beside the river had disappeared.
Grieved, my father sat down on the front steps of our house with his head in his hands and did not try to hide the tears that streamed down his face.
He was found in this pose by another missionary agronomist, who had learned to disguise his broken heart behind cynicism. —Do you really think your wandering the hills has done any good? the man asked. —It’s just another Haitian tragedy, they’re everywhere.
My father was too numb to reply.
The End in Sight
Limbé, 1991
I SPENT ALL morning trying in vain to steady myself the Saturday that Peter was due home from college. I would have given anything to be able to convey disinterest, or at least self-contained poise, but my emotions were about as subtle as a neon sign: Scared! Excited! Embarrassed! Wildly happy!
When Rose rode her bike over to tell me that they’d arrived, I bolted up from my desk and raced toward the front steps of the Hodges house before I could stop myself. I at least had the presence of mind to stop and breathe before I burst out from behind the bamboo. His back was turned.
I stumbled twice trying to climb three stairs, then put one hand on his arm and waited for what felt a tortured eternity until he looked down at me, smiled, and put a long, stiff arm around my shoulders—a safe “brothers and sisters in Christ” kind of hug; no more body contact than was absolutely necessary. My heart plunged. He really had decided that it was over.
Why did I do that? I berated myself afterward in my journal. Maybe it would have been different if I could have stood there just a little longer and said two words to him.
* * *
Peter did not come with us when we puttered one last time in the hospital motorboat out to Île-la-Rat, though I thought of him when I put on a snorkel and drifted over the coral alone. My sisters collected brittle stars and dove off the boat into warm, perfectly clear water.
Oh help, I wrote when I sat down in the sand with my journal. I just want to forget, at least for today. It’s too lovely to spoil with could-have-beens.
* * *
Had I been given the option to stay in Haiti, I was no longer sure what I would say. I hated the thought of leaving Olynda (and never seeing Peter again) and was worried about starting over at a new school in the fall—a nondescript American high school.
My father wanted to move back to the cabin in Idyllwild, but we’d heard that the prep school had closed abruptly due to bankruptcy. My mother planned to look for work in Nebraska when we stopped to visit the Divine grandparents during our cross-country train trip, but to my ears, small-town America sounded almost as claustrophobic as the missionary compound. My mother no longer cared where we landed so long as it wasn’t Haiti. For her, the end was in sight. Under a month and Limbé would be a distant memory.
Meadow was having recurring nightmares, and Rose’s jaw was swollen with an abscess that ached whenever she tried to speak. Dr. Hodges had been unable to determine a cause.
My mother, struggling with depression and overwhelmed by the needs of her daughters and students, confided to her journal: I was never convinced God “sent” us this time. The other times, yes, but surely this trip was to appease Jon. How can I choose to keep loving unconditionally when I have feelings of not being loved by my husband?
He would spend long hours in conversation with our cook, Anna Rose, or others on the compound, but he barely acknowledged my mother if they were in the same room. Most mornings he was out the door by six a.m. School kids along the road from Limbé to Garde Cognac recognized the blue station wagon when they saw him coming, and had learned to flag him down for a ride, but by the time he kicked off his shoes after a long day of preaching reforestation and planting living terraces, he had nothing left to say to his wife.
My mother’s empathy was depleted. Haiti was little more than a competing lover who had stolen her husband.
She did manage to secure one last-minute, errand-packed night alone with him before we left the country—a quick overnight trip to Port-au-Prince so that they could pick up exit visas for the U.S.
My sisters stayed with friends. I, for once, had the house to myself. The sovereignty was glorious. I ate dinner with Olynda at the long table at the Hodges house, and we raised our eyebrows and gave each other sidelong glances when the Doctor cleared his throat and pontificated. Afterward, we sat cross-legged on the hood of one of the compound vehicles and talked about everything and nothing.
At midnight, I baked brownies, then sneaked over to Olynda and Tamara’s room with a warm, gooey plate of chocolaty goodness, scraping on the screen window to get their attention.
—Psst! Blan yo! Psst! I whispered.
The response from inside was everything I had hoped for. Olynda leaped off her bed, fumbled to stop the music, then stood frozen until she recognized my laugh.
We played Skip-Bo until two-thirty a.m., when she yawned and announced: Go home and get your stuff. And hurry up already.
The next day, having the volunteer cottage to ourselves, we baked pizza and watched a storm lash the breadfruit trees while we did the dishes.
First the sky got all dark and gray and the wind started blowing, very rough and strong, and in a few moments, everything was being mercilessly p
elted by a thousand drops of water. And the thunder! (I so love thunder) was beautiful—so loud and deep. I wished we could have gone out and stood in it, but (sigh) you know these domestic duties.
We were just sitting down to lunch when my parents returned, windblown but relieved to have successfully completed all of their errands. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen my mother so relaxed.
Dieulila
Limbé, 1991
WHEN I WAS in my late twenties and read through my father’s journals for the first time, I was startled when I came across his final entry, after which the journal abruptly ended. The cramped note, scrawled in pencil, was the size of a postage stamp:
Monday, June 24, 1991
Did mango grafts at Dieulila’s. Heard more of her life history. Hugged her in a way I shouldn’t have. Told Flip.
While the rest of the family had spent the day packing, I’d noted irritably in my journal that my father was nowhere to be found.
We left Haiti exactly one week later. Dieulila was never mentioned again.
* * *
More than a decade after we’d left Haiti, at a family Christmas gathering, my father told my sisters and me the rest of the story, adding: Here’s something else for your book, Apricot.
My sisters were devastated. I wasn’t sure what to feel.
There is, in colonial literature, a recurring image: a foreign man, emboldened by his authority and by the lack of accountability, takes on a native mistress as a token of both his unquestioned power and his affection (if such a word may be used) for his adopted country.
It was like this and not at all like this with my own father.
* * *
During our final few months in Haiti, Dieulila, her husband, and their three small children lived across the river from Zo’s village, in a mud-walled house surrounded by a grove of young mango trees. Their land was too flat to benefit from living terraces, but my father nevertheless felt free to offer unsolicited advice. Noticing a mound covered in dirt and banana leaves, left to slowly smolder into charcoal, he told the family that they needed to replant the trees that they had cut down.
Dieulila’s husband seemed disinterested, but she asked questions. Her curiosity took on a more urgent nature when her husband died unexpectedly a few months later.
It was a season of anarchy and his death came without warning. He had been swept up in a revenge plot, leaving Dieulila at home with the children as he grabbed his machete. Only when he reached the home of his enemy, miles upriver, did he realize, too late, that he was the intended target. He was high in a coconut tree, hacking off the dry fronds so that they could set fire to the house, when the group turned on him.
When Dieulila heard the news, she packed up her three small children and her cooking pots, and abandoned the solitary house by the river. She moved into the village of Camp Coq, where even if she was surrounded by her husband’s murderers there were at least others nearby to hear her screams.
She still tended her gardens along the river, as she had no other income. And it was in those fields, alone with her work, that my father’s notice of Dieulila began to take on a different hue.
She was not afraid of hard work, and for this he admired her. Her body was slim, but she hefted and sank her hoe into the uneven soil with a furious determination. She did not ask for pity. When he chided her for her hand-rolled cigarette, saying that it would destroy her lungs, she replied shortly: I smoke so that I do not feel hungry.
Once, she asked him for advice. A friend in Jamaica had promised her easy work that paid good money if she left her children behind. My father could only imagine what Dieulila was hinting at—there were few options available to a beautiful woman, far from her children, among men who did not speak her language.
My father was tormented. For all her confidence, there was a fragility about her that he longed to rescue. She had no one to fight for her or offer comfort. Once, he found her limping back from her fields because a fungus had cracked and split the skin between her toes. He drove her home, then begged a prescription from one of the missionary nurses. Dieulila thanked him with a thick baton of roughly processed chocolate from her trees, which my father brought home as a gift for my mother.
* * *
For my father’s fortieth birthday (that famed and fabled celebration of the midlife crisis), we tried to persuade him to let us plan a birthday bash—all the missionaries dressed in mock mourning, perhaps a skit—but he wasn’t interested. He didn’t have time for parties. Instead, he spent his birthday among Haitian farmers, one of whom chided: What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be working, you should be with your family!
My father knew that most farmers in Haiti didn’t celebrate or even know the date of their own birthdays. He smiled, enjoying the attention, then announced: When I was nine years old, I drove the tractor all day on my birthday. I was angry and didn’t think that I should have to work, but I’m thankful now that I had a father who expected a lot from me.
If my sisters and I had been there, we would have rolled our eyes. (Grandpa Lee himself later admitted that it was a memory he regretted.)
Although my father didn’t confess it until years later, he had hoped to spend his fortieth birthday with Dieulila. He was disappointed when we insisted that he at least join us for dinner so we could sing him happy birthday. We promised there would be no streamers.
Even if my father did not spend his birthday with Dieulila, as he had hoped, he let himself imagine how the evening would have gone—the joke he would have told when he showed up at her door, the meal she would have prepared for him.
For he had begun to notice that whenever he stopped by her garden to check on her, she seemed as glad to see him as he was to see her. He wondered what it would feel like to put his arms around her waist. There was not much time left.
He had second thoughts, plenty of them. Invited to speak at a church along the River of Suffering, he was too distracted with thoughts of Dieulila to prepare a proper sermon. He looked for a shade tree to collapse against, ignoring the repeated warnings not to sit under the mango tree, which could—and did—drop a ripe mango heavy enough to dent a man’s skull. But instead of hitting my father, and possibly knocking some sense into him, the mango merely tumbled onto his Bible, which was sitting beside him in the open makouti.
A near miss. He had come so close.
If it was a warning, he didn’t listen.
* * *
Exactly one week before we were to leave Haiti, my father made an official note in his day planner to visit Dieulila’s gardens. Because her fields weren’t steep enough for terracing, he had decided to introduce her to the potent miracle of grafting.
He had already given a rudimentary lesson on grafting in Garde Cognac, which Dieulila had watched. Grafting, he knew, could improve the yield of fruit trees regardless of rainfall, so whenever he visited a cluster of houses, he’d ask around to find out who had the best-tasting mangoes. Beckoning to his audience to gather round, he’d flip open his handmade grafting knife (an invention he was proud of: a single rotating scalpel blade attached with a screw and wing nut to a piece of Haitian oak). Instead of using expensive imported grafting tape, he cut strips of discarded plastic bags, which he’d picked up along the highway, into lengths, hoping that his innovations could be easily replicated once he was gone. Then, under the watchful gaze of his audience, he’d cut—with the owner’s permission—a fertile length of scion wood from the favorite tree, no wider than a pencil. This scrappy green branch he’d wrap in a wet washcloth and carry to a nearby sapling—an unspectacular garden-variety mango, with stringy pulp and unremarkable flavor.
It wasn’t a complicated process, but he hoped that the value of the graft, once executed, would be self-evident. For although they dangled like cheap green baubles when in season—falling to the ground with such force that the rinds, like a parable, split open to reveal the gold within—not all mangoes were created equal.
The stringy, ob
long fil blan mango, ubiquitous in the Limbé Valley, came into season all at once, with such glut and abundance that the rank and rotting excess was kicked aside for pig food. My father knew men who had eaten as many as forty mangoes in a single day, their cramping guts so taut with hunger that even the illusion of satiety was worth the agony that followed.
But the fil blan mangoes, plain-flavored, with strands that stuck in the teeth, were not those for which one’s mouth watered. That honor went to the mangoes of Passe-Reine and the Central Plateau: Mango Batis, Fransik, Wozali, Mango Dous Dous. These luxuries, brought over the mountains on the back of straining kamyon trucks, the burlap sacks full to bursting, were stacked like prize jewels at the open-air markets by women who leaned back haughtily, pipes in hand, to wait for the best offer; these were the mangoes for which one hoarded and haggled. Whenever possible, my father brought in scion wood from these coveted varieties, but he knew that even better-than-average mangoes could fetch a decent price at the local markets, especially if they bore out of season.
Having thus secured his audience’s attention, he showed them how it was done: First, remove the extra leaves from the scion and cut a gently sloping angle, roughly three inches in length. Cut an identical angle into the severed tip of the rootstock. Match the two cambium layers together so that the flowing sap would make, of the two, one new tree, then tightly bind the wound with strips of a plastic bag.
Voilà, he revealed: a new and improved mango, capable of bearing coveted fruit years ahead of its peers.
The Gospel of Trees Page 26