The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  The following day, September 15, 1995, Dr. William Herman Hodges worked a full day in the clinic, drove to his home at Chateau Neuf, and collapsed of a heart attack. His son Paul wanted to summon a U.S. Army helicopter to airlift his father to a military base—he’d made the necessary phone calls and was assured that a helicopter could be there in twenty minutes—but the Doctor refused.

  —We’ll sweat it out right here, he announced. He had always insisted that when it was time for him to go, he didn’t want to drag out the inevitable.

  As his strength ebbed, his wife, his daughters, his sons, and their wives gathered around him. He was lucid to the end, administering orders to Steve James and to the nurses who attended him. His final words were: Tell everyone that I forgive them.

  * * *

  At the funeral service the following day, the pastor of the Limbé Baptist church gave an emotional eulogy, chastising the congregation for ever having complained when the hospital was too full to admit any but the sickest patients.

  —He planted trees when he saw our mountains were bare. He’s American, but he’s being buried here. And what is he being buried in? He’s being buried in the very trees that he planted on our hillsides to give us life.

  Joanna was moved when two thousand mourners burst into wailing.

  —Dr. Hodges died because he burned his heart out for you and me. Now he’s gone, and you won’t have to complain anymore! the pastor berated the packed room. —But I have talked to the Hodges family! he said, holding up his hand. —The clinic will still open on Monday morning.

  The room erupted into a chorus of fervent Amèns!

  Joanna thought the oration was marvelous and wished the mission board had been there to hear it.

  The graveside ceremony, later that afternoon, was a simple affair. As he had wished, Dr. Hodges was buried in an unadorned pine box behind his home at Chateau Neuf, within sight of the two-headed mountain that Columbus had beheld on his first voyage to the New World. Barbara painted Henri Christophe’s rising phoenix and a verse from the Book of Ruth on a hand-drawn plaque: Where you go I will go and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.

  Above his coffin Joanna placed a simple wooden cross that the termites later destroyed.

  * * *

  Dr. Hodges was eulogized as a Haitian patriot in the French-language daily newspaper Le Nouvelliste for his refusal to abandon Haiti during the U.S. embargo and invasion: Le Dr. Hodges a eu la position d’un patriote Haitien.

  My father heard about his death from a friend in Port-au-Prince, who had heard it announced on the radio, and he made the impetuous decision to attend the Doctor’s memorial service the following weekend. I called home, worried about his safety. It had been four years since we left, but I had visceral memories of roadblocks and burning tires.

  My father scoffed at my concern. The news reports had exaggerated the dangers of the American invasion, he assured me—we’d lived through worse.

  When my father hung up, I was surprised to realize that at some level, I was still afraid of losing him to Haiti; afraid that he might never come back. I was also irritated. To my eyes, Dr. Hodges was a stubborn old man who had brought his own doom down upon his shoulders. Unlike my father, I felt no allegiance to the compound. If anything, I felt grateful to have escaped when we did.

  Haiti was a riddle that I could not solve, and it was simpler to not think about it. I didn’t yet know about my father’s near-betrayal, or understand why my mother seemed so resentful of his continued interest in Haiti. Unless my father brought it up, we seldom spoke of the years we had spent as missionaries. Haiti had shifted from a place that I had loved to a country that I was relieved to have left behind. I had all but lost touch with Olynda.

  I had not yet figured out who I was or where I belonged, but the world was vast, and I was determined to find my place in it. On a scholarship semester abroad in Edinburgh and London, I wrapped a blue cape around my shoulders and memorized T. S. Eliot (no surprise: I had trouble relating to people my own age), then took a year off to teach Shakespeare to six-year-olds at a home for at-risk youth in Tennessee, reenacting sword fights in the kitchen with butter knives, and practicing backflips from boulders into the Little Pigeon River.

  The closest I came to reawakening trauma was when, in a sexual abuse training session at the children’s home in Tennessee, I realized that I myself had been molested at fourteen by the nineteen-year-old on the scuba diving trip. I sobbed when I told the story for the first time. The shame was no longer mine to carry. Still, it hurt to dwell on the past.

  * * *

  Dr. Hodges’s memorial service in Limbé was scheduled to take place one week after his death, and when my father’s connection through Dallas was delayed, he had to scramble to catch an earlier flight out of Portland. He had sliced open the side of his wrist on a cardboard box (a delivery for a Haitian friend of a friend in the capital), and was in too much of a rush to wait for the shuttle bus from the long-term parking lot, but he had a devil of a time flagging down a ride to the terminal with a thick welt of dried blood congealing down his arm.

  In Port-au-Prince, he caught a kamyon to Limbé. Was it this trip or another when the bus was oversold and he had to climb on top with the burlap sacks full of charcoal and mangoes? The other passengers scooted over, and my father settled down with his worn blue backpack between his knees. Goats and chickens, their legs tied in stiff knots, dangled from the brightly painted roof.

  The conversation turned, inevitably, to politics. A well-dressed Haitian man who had immigrated to the U.S. and was therefore regarded with both envy and contempt as a member of the Dyaspora announced with disdain that Titid (Aristide’s diminutive new nickname) was no friend of Haiti. His reputation as the people’s savior had been tarnished now that he was so chummy with the U.S.

  The road was gouged with potholes from years of neglect, and the kamyon tilted dangerously as it crept along the shoulder. Pushing to make up for lost time, the driver floored the gas when he hit the flat open fields of the Artibonite. Sacks of mangoes and charcoal battered the legs of the passengers on the roof. The young Dyaspora with the expensive shoes began to look queasy and leaned over the edge of the roof. When he vomited, the wind flung it upward, directly into my father’s face.

  A thin, wiry man seated next to them leaped to his feet and yelled: Dyaspora kaka sou blan! Dyaspora kaka sou blan!, the roof shifting and bumping beneath him as he shook his fist into the wind. He shouted as if his anonymity had been avenged; a lifetime of powerlessness vindicated by this one reversal: The Dyaspora smeared shit on the blan!

  No one offered my father anything to clean his face, but he laughed it off as best he could. He had nothing in his backpack but a camera, his wallet, and his passport. It was an hour before the kamyon made its next stop and he could climb down and scrub his face in a muddy rivulet by the side of the road. He left his backpack on the roof while he washed, calculating that his humiliation had earned him a measure of respect. When he returned, his passport, camera, and wallet were untouched.

  On the second leg of the journey, my father found a seat inside the kamyon, beside a woman who said that she remembered Dr. Hodges with great respect and was sorry to hear that he had died. She and her son would have died in labor were it not for the doctors at Hôpital le Bon Samaritain.

  When my father finally arrived at Steve and Nancy James’s house late that evening, he was welcomed as if he were a long-lost member of the family. He was given a towel and was able to shower. One of the nurses bandaged his bloody hand and warmed leftovers for dinner. He listened and chimed in as the missionaries retold favorite stories about Dr. Hodges: his trombone playing, the trademark red suspenders, his gentleness with his patients, the parrot that echoed his dinner whistle, his gift for languages and archaeology, his relentless historical curiosity. He had died as he’d wanted: with his boots on.

  * * *
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  The following afternoon, an elaborate memorial service was held at the Guahaba Museum. The grass had been carefully cut and the reflecting pool was full of water lilies. Mournful oboe music from The Mission drifted over the heads of the mourners, Haitian and foreigner alike, who had come to pay their respects to the Doctor.

  When the rain began to fall, no one moved.

  BOOK THREE

  Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

  Do justly, now.

  Love mercy, now.

  Walk humbly, now.

  You are not obligated to complete the work,

  But neither are you free to abandon it.

  TALMUD

  MISHNAH, AVOT 2:21

  At least there is hope for a tree: If it is cut down,

  it will sprout again, and its new shoots will not fail.

  Its roots may grow old in the ground and its stump die in the soil,

  yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth shoots like a plant.

  JOB 14:7–9

  Peregrinati

  Oregon, 2001

  WHEN I WAS in my twenties, Haiti was a country I confessed to only when cornered: You’re not American, are you? Where are you from? The questions arrived at odd moments: over a drink; in grocery store checkout aisles. My ridiculous chameleon voice gave me away.

  Geography slipped out in unguarded syllables: the raised lilt at the end of the sentence (London); the sun-bleached tic when I talked too fast: You know, like? (adolescent vestige of California girl); the reflexive: Yes, sir; yes, ma’am, when pulled over by the cops (Tennessee); my slow, careful overenunciation. I was like the caddis fly larvae that my sisters and I used to poke at in the creek in Idyllwild, their shells stitched together from shards of mica and Styrofoam, sand and bone, buffeted by the moving water. My wanderlust was my robe, my petty splendor.

  The simplest answer—which left out nearly everything—was that I was born and had graduated from high school in Oregon. The real story took too long to tell, and I had learned to brace myself for the moment when their eyes glazed over. I had done the math once, out of curiosity: seventeen different addresses and ten schools, and that was before I left home at seventeen. Sometimes I quoted Steinbeck: I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now—only that place where the books are kept.

  The rest of the family had put down roots in Oregon, but after a year and a half of college in Santa Barbara, and a semester abroad in the UK, I’d moved to Tennessee, where at nineteen I had fallen briefly, tempestuously in love with a fellow missionary kid from Nicaragua—the grandson, as it so happened, of sweet, meddlesome Ivah, who had convinced both the Hodges family and my parents to change their plans and move to Haiti. Even in retirement in Florida, Ivah had not lost her busybody flair. She later confessed in a letter to my mother that even when I was a child, she had been impressed by how responsible I was, keeping my little sisters in line, so she sent her grandson to visit me in a snowstorm, all of his earthly belongings crammed into a pickup truck with engine problems. She thought I might be just the one to come to the rescue.

  Having seldom been asked on dates, I was flattered by the attention. Even though he’d grown up in Nicaragua and my family had lived in Haiti, we shared a vague sense of displacement. We felt out of step with Americans our own age. Three months later, we were engaged. My mother worried that I was too quiet and constrained in my fiancé’s presence. I felt that the brokenness of her own marriage hardly gave her room to criticize. It took me almost two years to realize that proving my mother wrong was a terrible basis for a marriage. I swallowed my pride and gave back the ring; we only knew how to hurt each other.

  At twenty-one, I waited tables in Knoxville, squirreling away my tips to pay for my English lit degree, then moved back to Oregon for a year, where I poured coffee to pay the rent and wrote poetry in a tiny apartment above a garage that I shared with my sister Meadow. At twenty-three, I landed a job teaching Shakespeare and the Ramayana at an international school in the highlands of Java. Muslim neighbors invited me in to sip tea, and I learned to ride a motorcycle (badly) and to talk my way onto crowded trains, staying up half the night to hear the stories of strangers. My students were from Taiwan, the UK, Japan, Australia, Korea, the U.S., and Indonesia, and spoke a minimum of two languages. Their identities were hybrid, suspended between worlds. They asked beautiful questions.

  For the most part, I had made peace with the God of my childhood, though we still got into shouting matches from time to time (I did most of the shouting). Sometimes I offered very practical advice on how to run the universe more justly, though I seldom saw my suggestions put into action. I hadn’t told my father, but I had come to the radical conclusion that God was not nearly so prudish as the churches that claimed to speak on Her behalf. I clung to Irenaeus’s centuries-old observation: The glory of God is a human being fully alive and to George MacDonald’s quip: It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in his presence.

  But my father’s voice was still loud in my ears. When I finished my two-year teaching contract, I realized that I was tired of flitting from one adventure to the next in the hope of trying to evade the one story that I didn’t know how to tell: my own missionary childhood.

  I thought of Suzette, who had first assured me that I was a writer. Perhaps it was finally time to face what I did not understand.

  So I moved to Seattle—close enough to family but not too close—joined an Irish band, and found a job waiting tables at a French restaurant.

  I would have loved to give the impression that I was world-weary and sophisticated, with a dozen stamps in my passport and a stack of cardboard boxes filled with books in several languages, elephant statues made of melted-down alarm-clock bells, and an icon from Jerusalem, but I was still unmistakably a missionary’s daughter. The guilt was stamped like Cain’s on my forehead when I counted up all that I possessed: a roof over my head, a warm bed, food and wine, what passed for freedom. Opportunities denied far too many young women my age, born into different circumstances.

  In my swallow’s-nest apartment above the thunderous roar of the highway, I sat down at my rickety garage-sale table and began to write:

  Here’s to a place that I’ve never met but long for. Here’s to home. Here’s to my beginning.

  Petrichor

  Oregon, 2002

  MY FATHER WAS suspicious and critical when, shortly after I moved to Seattle, I fell in love with a high school friend who had first fallen in love with me a decade earlier, when we, the hapless ex-missionary family, stumbled into a home and a job in Oregon.

  David was an irreverent, peaceable man who had taken a boat from Denmark to meet me in London when we were both in college, though we just missed each other (the world before cell phones). Once, on a misty drive together to the Oregon coast when we were in our twenties, I had told him that we were going different directions in life: ergo, this could never work. Still, he had written to me when I moved to Tennessee, and he had told me, while I was engaged, that he would always regret me.

  I had a tendency to fall for drifters and idealists—the ones my father liked. David had a degree in accounting, and his family had lived in Oregon for six generations. He had spent his entire childhood in the same house on a quiet cul-de-sac. (He was the one about whom my mother sometimes asked: What about David? He’s such a nice boy. To which I invariably replied: Mom, please.)

  It took me a decade to understand that kindness was exactly what I was looking for in a companion. He made me laugh. He asked good questions. If I ran away this time, I would always regret it.

  My mother couldn’t stop smiling when I admitted that finally, after ten years, I had fallen in love with my good friend David. My father stomped off, disgusted, to fix the clogged water pump at the native plant nursery.

  —People have to work around here! It’s time to quit this nonsense and get to bed! he shouted, storming into the living room w
hen we were on the couch laughing at midnight.

  My mother’s lips tightened. —Jon, we’ll go to bed when we’re ready.

  He picked up the fireplace tongs and hurled them against the woodstove, the metal clattering and ringing against the stone.

  —Jon Anderson! she shouted.

  The bedroom door slammed shut. The conversation was over.

  * * *

  —He doesn’t share our family’s love for a flexible lifestyle, my father explained to me a few months later, on the night when—unbeknownst to me—David had called to ask for my parents’ blessing. (My mother was out of town, so my father laughed and said: Well, we’ll have to talk it over. I’ll get back to you.)

  It was just before Christmas, and my father and I were alone on the farm in Oregon. I sat down by the woodstove, wary of his sudden interest in my affairs. He chose his words carefully, trying not to set me off.

  —David seems weighed down by material possessions, he warned, eyes averted as he warmed his callused, dirt-stained fingers by the fire.

  —You don’t have to live in poverty to love the Kingdom of God, I shot back.

  * * *

  The following summer, Olynda flew up from Florida, and a few former students from Indonesia came to help us celebrate. At our rehearsal dinner, David played the song “Hard-Headed Woman,” and meant it favorably.

  I walked alone down the aisle on our wedding day. I did not lean on my father’s arm. He had raised me to be self-sufficient, and I had learned his bitter lesson. I was not going to repeat any of his mistakes.

  * * *

  So precarious was my parents’ marriage, in the years after we left Haiti, that I had braced myself for divorce when my sister Rose left for college. But once they were alone with each other, my mother’s emails described canoe trips along the creek behind their house, or seed-collecting expeditions to the coast and the mountains. Just as they had done in their college years, they pulled off the highway after a day in the wilderness and slept under the stars.