The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  A few days later, my father was offered a job as the manager of a native plant nursery; the owner, a plant pathology professor he’d worked for in ag school, had not forgotten his legendary work ethic. My mother couldn’t believe our good fortune.

  Our rental house was ten miles outside of town, across the highway from a wildlife refuge. The asphalt paths were overgrown with wild blackberry vines. Thistles glistened in the rain. When the school bus set me free, I’d drop my backpack and walk for miles, hearing only the high scree of hawks. The silence was as vast and gray-toned as the sky. I spoke to no one on these walks except sometimes the beauty itself. I returned with flushed cheeks and windblown hair, more grateful than I could put into words for that bracing solitude.

  I missed friends in Haiti, but I didn’t know what to say if my father happened to casually bring up in conversation that we had just moved back from a year and a half of volunteer missionary service. After this, the conversations usually foundered, then fell flat. No one seemed to know what follow-up questions to ask. I began to realize how very absurd it was for us—a white family with something of a savior complex—to claim a connection to Haiti, however tenuous. Nor could I figure out how to describe the missionary compound in a way that would sound believable.

  My parents, caught up in their own crises, gave me no more curfews. The hovering claustrophobia of the compound was gone. There were no more family game nights.

  No longer required to play the part of the missionary’s daughter, I could disclose only what I wished. In Oregon, my pale skin rendered me invisible. No one asked for my earrings, for the watch on my wrist, or for food because they had not eaten in three days. The anguish that such inequities existed had not disappeared—the sorrow surfaced most often as guilt—but I was no longer the blan, staring across a fixed boundary.

  I tried out for the school play and landed the part of Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—never once guessing that a renowned poet from the Caribbean, Aimé Césaire, had adapted a version of the play, set in Haiti, with Ariel as the accommodating mulatto and Caliban as the revolutionary slave. I memorized my part while walking alone through the wildlife refuge across from our house, a Penguin paperback tucked under my arm, shouting lines to the sky: All hail, great master, grave sir, hail! I come to answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, the ride on the curled clouds . . .

  Only in dreams did I return to Haiti. I slid down a steep bank, my shins bloody, as Olynda, Ana, and Peter disappeared down the road ahead of me; I couldn’t keep up. Drowning in a waterfall, I reached for an overhanging branch, and the slivers in my hand turned into tiny silver ti yaya fish, their eyes like bright moons. I watched, helpless, as they burrowed into my hand, swimming into the bloodstream.

  * * *

  I wrote to Olynda so she’d have letters to open when the mail arrived on Saturdays, but gently sodden Oregon felt increasingly disconnected from the tightly wound drama of the compound. I didn’t know how to describe the life we had stumbled into, and I was ashamed by how easy it had been to disown Haiti.

  For the first few months, I wrote long-winded letters to Peter, though his replies came less and less often. My final missive—a particularly impulsive one, plagued with self-doubt—fluttered out of the car window on the drive to school. I ran back to search for it in the weeds along the highway (mortified that someone else might read it), but I never found it or found the courage to write another. Our brief long-distance romance was over.

  My father, pining for Haiti’s eroded hillsides, corresponded far more diligently with friends in Limbé, expat as well as Haitian. The political violence had returned, and letters once again described factories, businesses, and elegant walled-off homes that were being attacked, purportedly by Aristide supporters. My father had nightmares about Belle and Paul’s house going up in flames.

  U.S. newspapers, by contrast, pointed out with admiration that in just seven months in office, Aristide had succeeded, for the first time in almost two hundred years of independence, in passing legislation that recognized Kreyòl as a national language equal to French. Aristide also continued to insist that the future of Haiti rested on the shoulders of the poor—the ones too often left out of the political process.

  My father interpreted this to mean that Aristide was tacitly encouraging his supporters to seize what was rightfully theirs, hiding artfully behind metaphor when he urged them to uproot the rotten trees from the land. For it proved far easier to dechouke than to replant.

  By late September 1991, a military junta had elbowed its way into the fray. Aristide’s democratically elected idealism came to an abrupt and untimely end.

  In Limbé, agitators once again hurled rocks at the hospital gate. Joanna wrote to say that the windshield of Barbara’s car had been smashed by a flying bottle while she was running errands in Cap-Haïtien. A crowd was said to have torched the Haitian Baptist headquarters, presumably because of the pastors’ vocal opposition to communism. This time, perhaps luckily, my father wasn’t there to confront the protestors who gathered in front of Belle and Paul’s home. Paul Romeus was alone in the house when his car, parked in the front yard, exploded into flames. He escaped through an opening in the back wall and hid in the home of a neighbor. Their dogs were killed. The carpentry shop burned to the ground.

  Even at the height of the terror, Hôpital le Bon Samaritain continued to function, although one afternoon, instead of seeing the usual four hundred patients, the doctors saw only twelve. Driven by desperation, a pregnant woman was carried inside the clinic in the process of giving birth, the hand of her baby thrust like a revolutionary fist from the birth canal. Dr. Hodges and the new missionary surgeon quickly rolled the woman into the surgery wing and delivered the baby successfully by C-section. As the doctors lifted the baby into its mother’s arms, the Haitian nurses burst into a hymn, their voices weaving a tent of song.

  * * *

  The U.S. Embassy, just as it had done during the Duvalier regime, urged all nonessential American citizens to flee the country. Dr. Hodges and Joanna, along with their four grown children, refused to leave, as did Herb Rogers and the new missionary surgeon, but this time, thirty-six women, children, and missionary spouses boarded emergency flights out of Cap-Haïtien.

  I called Olynda in Nebraska, where she and Tamara were staying with Bernice Rogers and keeping in touch with the compound via ham radio. Olynda told me that she had been so scared when they left. She didn’t know when, or if, she would see everyone again. The Jameses were in Pennsylvania. The Smiths were in Florida. My family had been lucky to leave when we did; everyone else had been able to take only twenty pounds each of carry-on luggage.

  Now that we were both enrolled in American high schools, Olynda and I swapped stories. Our six-person classroom at Jericho School felt laughably small.

  —Most people here are friendly, Olynda hedged circumspectly. —But it’s a little strange to be the only black student in the entire school.

  Already she’d had to negotiate questions I had never been asked: Where are you from? Why are you here? You don’t look Haitian.

  My anonymity in Oregon was a privilege I hadn’t recognized. I was accepted implicitly as a member of the dominant culture. I was not perceived as a threat, even if I felt out of place at odd moments. Olynda’s was a dilemma I would never have to face. Into that loneliness, I could not follow her.

  * * *

  My father, three thousand miles away from the trauma that was unfolding in Limbé, was tormented that he was too far away to help. He had arrived in Oregon as I had arrived in Haiti—with bitter fists. The thick blankets of winter fog plagued him. He refused to eat at restaurants or to shop anywhere but Goodwill, out of solidarity with Haitian friends trapped in poverty. Nor would he let my mother buy new furniture, arguing that it was a waste of money; we could find what we needed at yard sales.

  When eleven-year-old Rose asked him to buy me a single red rose for the closing night of The Tempest,
my father dropped the flower on the table with disgust and asked: Do you know how much this cost? Don’t ever ask me to spend that kind of money again.

  He yelled if we turned on the baseboard heaters at our rental house. In the mornings, our breath made white clouds above our lips. We stayed under the covers as long as possible, then huddled by the crackling woodstove.

  Eventually, my parents sold the cabin in Idyllwild to make a down payment on the native plant nursery. They now owned land in Oregon, just as my mother had always dreamed. But there wasn’t much to spare after the mortgage was paid. My father dug trees in the rain and my mother got a second and then a third part-time job, driving a school bus and potting transplants at another nursery. She was livid when she discovered that my father had written a check for eight hundred dollars, depleting half of their savings account, and had sent the money to friends in Haiti without even consulting her.

  —Everyone else is more important to you than we are! she sobbed, hiding her face in her arms while my sisters crept over to bury their faces in her neck. By the time she turned forty, every last one of her jaunty curls had faded to gray.

  My father slammed the door and stalked off to cut more firewood.

  * * *

  My father hacked at the encroaching blackberry vines around our rental house as if trying to escape, then handed my sisters and me sawed-off milk jugs with the handle left intact so we could hook them through our belts—an innovation he took some pride in—and sent us out to pick a gallon of blackberries per person, per day. It pained him to see God-given fruit go to waste.

  Eventually, he discovered an apple tree under the two-story tangle and spent every spare evening thereafter locked in a battle with the blackberries that left his arms scratched and bleeding. The apple tree was starved for sunlight, but he patiently mounded compost around its roots, and by the following year, there were translucent yellow apples to pick along with the obligatory gallon of blackberries.

  In the evenings, when it grew too dark to work outside, he sat at the kitchen table to slice watery half-moons for the food dryer, so that when we woke, the house smelled of warm apples—unless, that is, the evening news had featured some grim update on Haiti that portrayed Aristide as a deposed hero, in which case he sat up late at the dining room table to write indignant letters to the editor.

  * * *

  My parents’ marriage felt tenuous in those years. Haiti was the unnamed presence that stood between them: the deforestation, the embargo, the skeletal children, the widows waiting to be saved.

  My father couldn’t seem to forgive us for having trapped him in Oregon. Growing trees for commercial properties was no consolation when topsoil was washing away in Haiti. It was as if his obligations to our family had steered him away from some dramatic destiny he had been meant to fulfill.

  When friends at church asked, innocently enough, how my parents had met and if there was a romantic proposal story, my father informed them that, actually, my mother had proposed to him. My mother pressed her lips together and declined to comment.

  —I wasn’t ready to be tied down, he told me once as he gazed wistfully over our back pasture, just before I graduated from high school.

  I was seventeen when I left for college. I had learned that it was best to avoid my father when I was at home. If he saw me with a book in hand, he assigned me another chore. We rarely talked. But once I moved away, I found a new letter waiting for me every week in my campus mailbox.

  He updated me about the garden, the weather, the pheasant they found in the chicken coop. The old white rooster had died. Mom had canned thirty-eight quarts of grape juice. He had planted thirty-nine maple trees to eventually cut for firewood. Would be time to start up the woodstove soon.

  When he took a short-term job shoveling pumpkin seeds at a local factory to bring in extra income, he wrote to me from the night shift. The wisps of translucent pumpkin-seed husk that floated up in the fans, eerily lit by the drying lights, reminded him of moths on a summer night.

  He admitted that he had been much happier as a ranger, as a farmer, or when we lived in Haiti; when he had been able to devote himself to work that satisfied, and didn’t care whether he got paid or not.

  Over time, his confessions began to feel no longer like a weight but like kindness; a shared stumbling forward into the dark. It was easier for both of us to find our way toward each other through words on a page rather than to be in each other’s presence, but it was at least a beginning. I finally understood what must have been so obvious to others—it was his way of saying that he loved me.

  He Who Dies, That’s His Affair

  Limbé, 1991–1995

  MY FATHER, WHO supported the hospital whenever possible with proceeds from the native plant nursery, received regular updates from Joanna in embattled Limbé. The American Baptist Board of International Ministries had continued to pressure the Hodges family to join the other evacuated missionaries but Dr. Hodges had refused, arguing that more than 100 Haitians would die within the first few weeks, including 20 handicapped children, 30 abandoned babies, and 90 diabetic youths who relied upon the clinic’s free insulin. If he and his family were to leave Limbé, he argued, the hospital would be looted and destroyed.

  John Sundquist, the head of the board of International Ministries, did not agree with Dr. Hodges’s assessment, and as the conflict became more heated, Joanna photocopied both his and the Doctor’s letters and sent them on to loyal supporters.

  We will not let thirty years of work be devastated, Dr. Hodges wrote from Limbé. Our presence signifies a commitment to Haiti, no matter what the political situation.

  Sundquist pointed out that the Hodges family had isolated themselves in an unhealthy situation. Exasperated with their stiff-necked insubordination—after all, the board of International Ministries would be responsible should anything happen to one of their missionaries—Sundquist was of the opinion that the Hodges family exaggerated their own importance; no one was irreplaceable. From Sundquist’s perspective, Dr. Hodges simply didn’t want to let go of the dynasty that he had created.

  Dr. Hodges put his chin down and marched through his rounds, his head throbbing with arguments. His sixty-seven-year-old body was amped up and edgy from holding it all together in a prolonged state of mental and physical alertness. He pronounced a diagnosis on his exhausted body: vertigo. When he moved his head, the world turned sideways.

  The American Baptist Board of International Ministries had every right to shut the hospital down if they saw fit, yet Dr. Hodges refused to acknowledge their authority. It was intolerable. It was flagrant insubordination. It was, in a way, so very Haitian.

  * * *

  Ayiti Cheri, land of the untamed spirit, home of the free and the proud. So deceptively acquiescent to foreign aid, so resistant to foreign rule. Beloved Haiti: reformer’s paradise; colonist’s bane.

  For it was not the Hodges family alone who flaunted their noncompliance. The military generals who had deposed Aristide felt the same self-evident right to rule. Asserting that they alone understood what was best for their people, they had disregarded protocol to accomplish their purpose.

  But if the board of International Ministries took offense at the Hodges family, that was nothing compared to what the U.S. and the United Nations felt about the military junta in Haiti. And there is no enemy quite so formidable or self-righteous as the U.S. government when it believes that the reputation of Democracy is at stake.

  The Organization of American States, under pressure from the U.S., leveled an economic embargo against Haiti. Dr. Hodges wrote outraged newsletters arguing that economic sanctions against the poorest country in the western hemisphere were ludicrous. Those with money and power could find ways of getting around the restrictions—there was a centuries-old tradition of smuggling on the island, after all—but the embargo would only devastate the rural farmers, who relied on public transportation to sell their harvest. “Embargo,” in Kreyòl, became a twisted, mocking play on w
ords: anba gwo, squashed beneath the powerful. “Democracy” was ridiculed as demokrache (to spit) or demokraze (to destroy).

  The only diesel available, on the black market, sold for twenty-eight dollars a gallon, and the price of kerosene rose to twelve dollars a gallon in Limbé. There was no electricity or running water in Cap-Haïtien. Dr. Hodges warned that the country was doomed to return to the age of pirates. Without kerosene, farmers and day laborers reverted to Paleolithic technology: a smoky wick dipped in cooking oil. These plucky embargo lamps the Doctor championed in his newsletters as symbols of human ingenuity and obstinacy: U.S. meddling hadn’t crushed Haiti yet.

  Joanna mailed out support letters titled “EMERGENCY ENERGY CRISIS FUND FOR LIMBÉ” and recruited funds for solar power so the hospital could continue to supply twenty-four-hour-a-day electricity for the lab, the surgical wing, and the five public water fountains. In subsequent updates she added, You can also send us care packages: candies, chocolate, chocolate chips, soups, sprinkles for Christmas cookies for the kids in the hospital, tea bags and cereal. I like Frosted Flakes and the kids like Honey Roasted Cheerios.

  * * *

  For those without access to missionary support planes, life was considerably more difficult. Overcrowded fishing boats crammed with refugees fled the country in droves. Île-la-Rat, our picnic spot at the edge of Baie de L’Acul—the tranquil bay into which Columbus had sailed with such ardent anticipation—was one of the staging grounds. There, on the pristine white-sand beaches where we had flopped down after a day of snorkeling, refugees were loaded like ballast and sent out to sea.