The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  The temptation, of course, was to greedily push the grafted tree beyond what its tender limbs could carry. For with wood from a mature tree bound to such young rootstock, the sap throbbed and pulsed through the old veins like a miracle of gestation; like grizzled Sarah giving birth to laughing Isaac. Years before the sapling would have been capable of it—had it been left unmolested—the branch would swell with a sweet round globe of fruit and there was a risk that the weight could splinter the young branches.

  * * *

  On the day my father planned to meet Dieulila in her mango grove by the river, to teach her grafting while the rest of us stayed home to pack, he was exasperated when another missionary threw a kink into his plans by asking to tour one of his ramp vivan projects. My father agreed, careful to hide his reluctance, and led the missionary agronomist, plus a visiting volunteer, up a steep footpath to a mountain ridge high above Camp Coq.

  The living terraces, several months old, were already springing up green behind the mounds of dirt, leaves flared open to catch the sun’s heat and transform it into energy, the tangle of roots a promise of things to come. But as mesmerizing as the project was to my father, the sun was hot, and it made the volunteer’s head ache. To the untrained eye, the entire project could appear to be little more than rough trenches stretched across a bare hillside, from which a few scattered leaves sprouted on withered stalks.

  My father noted with exasperation that the volunteer appeared on the verge of heatstroke and promptly turned her back down the mountain.

  Back at the compound, he dropped off the expats and made dutiful small talk. He spoke briefly with a Haitian friend who had hiked down from another village to tell him about a feud brewing between neighbors.

  Jealousy is such a problem here, he noted irritably in his journal. He took a shower. And then, his heart warring with mingled desire and dread, he drove back to Garde Cognac to meet Dieulila.

  She had been expecting him since that morning and had set aside a cold malted drink, wrapped in leaves. —They told me to give this to you, she said, her fingers grazing his as she pressed it into his hands.

  My father paused for a moment and wondered fleetingly if he was about to come under the influence of a batri, a love potion heavy with the dark magic of Erzulie, the goddess of desire.

  Despite Dieulila’s attempts to keep it cool, the bottle had been sitting unrefrigerated in a plastic container since morning. It was warm. He drank.

  They left her children at the edge of the river and hiked alone into the mango grove. The sun was low in the sky, and the light filtered green and gold through the leaves.

  He asked how she had been given her name, and she told him that her given name was Woslyn, but she had nearly died at birth. Her father, cradling her tiny body in his arms, watched her fight to breathe and announced: There is a God! Dye li la.

  All around them, in the music of the hidden birds, in the sap flowing soundlessly through the trees, was the pregnant possibility of new life about to begin.

  They found a young mango tree, and my father pulled out the donor wood from his bag. Dieulila placed her hand around the trunk and gripped the blade, severing the branch neatly. My father placed his hand on her shoulder, aware of her warmth.

  While he watched, she inserted the scion wood into the gash and deftly wound the tattered strips of plastic around the wound like a cast; like a wedding knot. Her hands were confident. She smiled up at him. She had been paying attention.

  She led him to the house where she had lived with her husband before the dechoukaj. It was dark inside, after the warm green light of the mango orchard.

  Dieulila reached on tiptoe into the rafters, her fingers searching for a lost ring or a bracelet that she had left behind when she fled. Her fingertips brushed against cobwebs and loose splinters of wood, but her treasure was gone—knocked down by rats or pocketed by a stranger who had entered in her absence. A furrow of disappointment lined her face, but she pushed the loss aside and turned toward my father, pressing against him in the shadows.

  He put his arms around her, circling her waist. He bent toward her and kissed her open mouth. Her lips were unmoving. He leaned back to study her, ran his fingers across her strong back and shoulders, touched her breasts.

  The room was threaded with light, where the sun slanted in through broken chinks in the mud walls. The floor was uneven. Animal droppings had been kicked among the ashes of a cooking fire.

  These details he noted only in passing, but what he sensed even more viscerally was that they were not alone in the room.

  He felt the arrival of unbidden guests crowding in from every side, invisibly. He could not be sure if the spirits were lwa who had come to goad him with lust and hunger, or if they were the tormented ghosts of men like himself, mercenaries and missionaries who had broken trust, who had pressed their bodies in furious desire against women to whom they had made no promises; men who, even in death, were weighed down by violation.

  The hairs pricked at the back of his neck as the unseen spirits curled around them in the dark. Disembodied words from the book of Proverbs, words he had read aloud from his Bible, began to sound in his head—

  May you rejoice in the wife of your youth

  May her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love

  Dieulila, wrapped in my father’s arms, breathless in the hope that she had found a man to shelter her, murmured something about the children they would make together. Her words reached him through the din. He stepped back from her and shook his head.

  —It won’t work, I’ve had an operation, he explained, his voice stiff. His desire for her was undiminished, but he could not silence the voices in his head: Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well.

  He pulled Dieulila toward him, felt her heart hammer against his own like a caught wild bird.

  He let go of her and stumbled out into the sunlight. The voices disappeared.

  * * *

  That night, on the missionary compound, after my sisters and I were in bed, he led my mother by the hand over to the swing set under the zanmann tree. There, while they rocked over the scraped and battered dirt, my father told her what he had done—and what he had almost done—with Dieulila in the abandoned house by the river.

  My mother cried into her hands.

  Thursday, June 27, 1991

  It is 3:30 a.m. There is too much anguish to feign sleep. Three days ago Jon took my hand and led me with him to the swing set to be by ourselves. It was the first time he had been romantic toward me in so long I’d forgotten how fun it was. That very day he had found himself hugging and fondling a Haitian woman out near her garden. There was another love in his life. It was the crowning slap on what was already the worst year of my life. No emotional support after the evacuation, all the times he would literally ignore me and walk out the door preoccupied and on his way to visit others on the compound. I had been so faithful to him. No wonder I feel so shriveled inside.

  * * *

  My mother did not give me her journals to read until years after I’d finally worked up the courage to ask my father for the rest of the story. It was past midnight. I had driven down to my parents’ farmhouse, surrounded by open fields, for the night. My mother had already gone to bed, not wanting to relive the memory yet again.

  As my father told me the story in all its excruciating detail, I, too, was surprised at the image of him holding my mother by the hand and leading her over to the swings. The tenderness felt out of character. He had given us so little during those years.

  —Had you ever sat with Mom on the swings before that night? I asked.

  —No, my father said, looking down at his dirt-stained hands, —I hadn’t. He paused, then continued. —But I knew I had to tell her. She was my best friend. I didn’t know what else to do.

  I kept my eyes down, following the lines of ink as my pen scratched across the page taking notes. —I think this is one of the most awkward conversat
ions I’ve ever had, I finally admitted with a strained laugh.

  My father exhaled loudly. —Yeah, me, too.

  When the silence became unbearable, we watched two mice scurry across the kitchen floor to pillage the cupboards for stray crumbs. In a hundred-year-old farmhouse, keeping them out was all but impossible, no matter how hard my mother tried. I paused, then broached the question I was afraid to have answered. —Dad, we used to joke, although to be honest, it never felt like much of a joke, that you loved Haiti more than you loved us.

  I let my voice trail off.

  —It was a hard time for me, he admitted. —For years after we left, I thought of Dieulila every time I blew out my birthday candles. I always made a wish that I’d be able to see her again.

  His nonanswer did nothing to alleviate the hurt. I wondered, not for the first time, why my mother had stayed.

  He said that he had tried to take a photograph of Dieulila but couldn’t get the camera to work. She was gone by the next time he returned to Haiti. She had moved to Port-au-Prince to find work and to escape her husband’s enemies, and while she was there, she either became very sick with tuberculosis or was pushed into a vat of boiling chocolate and died from the burns. The stories her relatives tell are inconsistent.

  As I gathered up my notes after our late-night conversation, my father set out a live trap to try to catch the scavenging mice in the kitchen.

  The next morning, he carried the trapped creatures down the long hill to the creek, where he dumped the tiny, frightened mice into an empty five-gallon bucket, then flung them across the water, as far as he could hurl them.

  The mice swam, their tails like rudders, their paws like paddles, until they reached the opposite bank and scurried under fallen logs. Exposed, vulnerable, no longer sheltered by the bounty of my mother’s kitchen. At the mercy of owls and snakes.

  Oregon, Ho!

  1991

  OUR LAST WEEK in Haiti—for me, at least, if not for my miserable parents—was a contented blur of goodbye parties and farewell trips to the beach. The day after my father led my mother by the hand to the swing set to confess his betrayal, my sisters and I, little imagining the conversations that must have been going on at home, spent the night with missionary friends in a house that overlooked the blue, glittering Baie de L’Acul.

  Kirsti was to perform a piano recital at the seminary that afternoon, so my sisters and I hiked over the ridge to hear her play, the Limbé Valley stretched out cool and green beneath us. The trail took us past the yellow concrete house where my father had hoped we would make Haitian friends. You miss a lot shut up on the compound, I noted with regret. I sat up to watch the moonlight glimmer on the water. I had arrived with my fists clenched, determined to let nothing touch me, but I left with my arms full of glory. A cloak pulled around me to heal the hurt.

  My father, who had arrived with so much hope that he had extra to give away—advice, hope, courage, all tucked away like seeds into his makouti—was now the one with clenched fists. His shoulders were bent under the weight of his disappointment: in Haiti, in us, in himself. His failure felt mountainous.

  * * *

  At Zo’s going-away party for my father, we were the only blan in attendance, sitting politely on wooden benches under the trees while a live band made a tremendous racket on improvised electric guitars, powered by our car battery: bare wires dropped into battery acid, translated into music.

  Drawn by the commotion, more people had gathered in the dirt clearing than my father had anticipated. Zo introduced him, and thanked him for the long hours he had spent in the gardens around Camp Coq, and my father reminded the hundred or so neighbors and local farmers how important it was for them to carry on the work of grafting, and to take care of their trees. Voices shouted: Amèn! But when my father held up a box of rare red coconut seedlings to give away, the decorum shifted to chaos.

  I had not yet witnessed how Haitian community groups distributed resources—profoundly aware that an unequal distribution of resources could have dire consequences in a community struggling for survival. These events were politic and methodical, so that no one would be left out. Our haphazard benevolence upset the balance.

  Elbows dug into ribs, fingernails pinched, voices shouted. Hands grabbed for the trees, ripping delicate leaves. There wasn’t enough to go around.

  My discomfort only felt amplified when Zo called us inside his mud and wattle house after the party had broken up. He had butchered three rabbits, and his wife had spent all afternoon preparing a feast: tender rice, slow-cooked meat, and an entire regime of plantains soaked in salt and fried in hot oil for a heaped platter of banann peze. There were only five chairs at the table.

  Not even Zo would sit down to eat with us, although he and his family stood around the table and watched with approval as we raised our forks and lifted the bounty self-consciously to our lips. It was painful to receive a gift that left us so aware of our inadequacy: We, the privileged, had been reminded of our poverty. We possessed more than we could ever consume and yet we could not match this generosity. We left humbled, yet again, by a rabbit banquet.

  * * *

  Our last night on the missionary compound, I finally worked up the courage to write Peter one more heart-on-my-sleeve letter, having decided that I would rather know the truth—no matter how bitter—than wonder forever if I had misjudged his feelings. I left the note on his pillow and slipped down the hallway with my heart racing, terrified that someone might see me ducking out of his empty room.

  He joined me on the swing set half an hour later. In the shadowed lamplight, I could tell that he was smiling.

  We did not hold hands as we crossed the dark playground to find a place where we could be alone. We sat down on the back steps of an empty volunteer cottage, and Peter asked if he could put his arms around me. I leaned back until I could feel the tremor of his heartbeat. He held my waist as if I were made of spun glass.

  —I don’t know how long I’ve wanted to hold you like this, he confessed as the bamboo rustled and swayed over our heads. —And I can’t think of a single good reason why I had to wait so long to find out.

  I snuggled up against him. I would not have been surprised if the cicadas had burst into hallelujahs and fireworks had shot out from my fingertips.

  He rested his chin against my neck and asked: Is this as good as picking avocados in the moonlight?

  I laughed.

  He did not kiss me, but it was enough to know that he’d always wanted to. When we hugged each other good night I slipped home through the trees determined that we would find a way to see each other again. Perhaps he could visit me on a break from college. Now that I knew that he loved me, nothing could stand in our way.

  As the bus pulled away from the compound the next morning I pressed my face to the glass. Olynda and I had both been crying. Tamara leaned on her crutch and waved. Peter held my gaze with a secret smile only for me. I thought this was going to be the longest, most horrible experience of my life, I wrote to my journal. And here it’s been the best thing that ever happened to me.

  I took blurry photographs out of the windows on the long drive to Port-au-Prince of women threshing rice, donkeys laden with bags of charcoal, schoolgirls in gingham uniforms with matching ribbons in their hair. I did not want to forget anything.

  On a trash heap outside of the capital, I thought that I glimpsed a dead body, but though I craned my neck back for a second look, I could not be sure. Perhaps I had been mistaken. I wanted to believe that it was only a trick of the light. A life lost, no matter what the circumstances, deserved to be put to rest with dignity.

  * * *

  When we reached the airport and learned that our return tickets had expired, my parents had to slap down most of the money they had squirreled away after selling the station wagon, which spiraled into a familiar parental argument. Our secondhand clothes and abitan luggage—ragged cardboard boxes stuffed with all of our earthly possessions—marked us as hicks, come to visi
t the Gran Peyi. We even spoke Kreyòl with a thick peasant accent. When I tried to take a sip of water from a drinking fountain at the Port-au-Prince airport, my mother yelled out: Apricot, no! My father held out a battered honey jar with a peeling label, full of well water from Limbé. I refused. Even in Haiti we stood out like yokels.

  As the plane lifted above the slums of Port-au-Prince, tin-roofed houses pressed against the hills as if clinging to the earth itself. I had fantasized for so long about escaping Haiti; now, I realized, I wasn’t ready to leave.

  Miami felt dispiriting even from the air: the orderly streets; the drab, predictable subdivisions. Everything is just so planned-out and all the same, I wrote as I sat outside the terminal, waiting for a shuttle bus to take us to the train station. The streets were empty, the only sounds the noise of the endless cars—brakes squeaking, engines grinding, the splash of rainwater as they hurtled through the puddles.

  I think I miss Haiti, I confided to my journal. That splendid, complicated, troubling, maddening, beautiful country that I would have been proud to call home.

  * * *

  It took us three weeks to ramble across North America by train, stopping to watch fireworks explode above the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and to shuck corn and watch Laurel and Hardy videos with the Nebraska relatives (I was relieved when my mother couldn’t find any jobs she was qualified for in the local newspaper).

  On the morning our train finally rolled across the Idaho/Oregon border, my mother was awake at five a.m., her eyes glued to the scenery.

  —I already saw six deer! she announced triumphantly as we stretched stiff necks and rubbed the sleep from our eyes. Steep, angled cliffs loomed above a broad, clear river. Through gaps in the trees, waterfalls plunged through ferns.

  From Portland, we drove to a converted schoolhouse owned by friends, which was surrounded by flower beds and apple trees heavy with fruit. We wandered through the garden as if in a dream and plucked handfuls of ripe blueberries and raspberries. When we lifted the sun-kissed sweetness into our mouths, the juice stained our fingers. Finally, we understood our mother’s love affair with Oregon.