The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  As soon as I said it, all of my own childhood anxieties came flooding back: the fear that my father didn’t find me worthy of attention, as compelling as Haiti. I tried again in terms that my four-year-old son would understand.

  —You know how you get so excited about stars and planets and solar systems? I asked. He nodded. —When I listen to people’s stories, I find it exciting in the same way.

  He cocked his head and smiled at me. —No, you’re teasing, he insisted.

  —It’s true! I laughed. —We’re different that way: Daddy, me, you, your brother. We each find different things beautiful and interesting, and that’s okay. We still love each other.

  —Tell me about when I was a baby, he said abruptly, his voice sleepy. And so I did. I told him how I used to carry him around the house in a sling when he was tiny, how I once took him to a three-hour Shakespeare play when he was ten months old (not realizing it would go on so long), and how, afterward, two British ladies complimented me on how wonderful he was.

  His eyelids drooped and I ran my fingers across his eyebrows, trying to convince him—to convince myself—that I would never be gone too long, that I would always come home to him, even if only to build block towers and kick a ball around the yard.

  I would always carry within me the competing desires to engage with the world and to retreat from it, and I hoped, just as my father once hoped for me, that my children would one day do their small part to make the world more beautiful and more just. But at that moment, my little boy needed to know that he mattered more to me than the stories of strangers. Because he does. We belong to each other. I am his mother; he is my son. Just as I am, in spite of everything, my father’s daughter.

  * * *

  Some months later, at the end of four long days at the kitchen table of a Franciscan convent along the Columbia River Gorge—having left my children yet again, this time to write about deforestation and drought in Haiti—I noticed a gap in the rain and pulled on my boots for a walk. There were birds hidden in the Douglas fir trees, and a waterfall thundered endlessly. Within minutes, I felt restored to stillness.

  Until, that is, I noticed a green rope of ivy starting to work its way around the trunk of a fir tree, and my father’s fierce dislike of invasive species took hold. Ivy has already strangled thousands of acres of Oregon woods. Once it reaches a height of two to three feet, it circles tree trunks and puts out dark berries to tempt the birds, the seeds shat out on other sections of the forest, spreading the blight.

  I reached down to uproot a tuft of ivy. A long white feathery root clung to the soil. Dead matted leaves and pine needles fell aside as I yanked harder, pulling up its latticework of roots. It was satisfying work, until I started to think about how each overlooked root fragment would shove out new growth—and these were not my woods; I would not be there to ensure that whatever I’d inadvertently left behind would be uprooted later.

  I paused, dirt under my fingernails, palms already aching, and realized that I could spend all morning pulling ivy and never finish the job. What was the point of trying if, in the end, it was a losing battle?

  I thought of my father and of the deforestation in Haiti—the numbing downward spiral. I didn’t want to admit defeat and walk away, but it felt like a hopeless task. I reached for a tuft of glossy leaves, then realized that they were connected to a massive root as big around as my thumb. I braced myself against a tree trunk and pulled harder, my back straining. Finally, the root ripped loose, and I realized that it had been cut, long before, with pruning shears. Someone had already been here. My mind leaped ahead with immense relief: Others would follow. It was not up to me to complete the work.

  As humans, we are capable of leaving enormous desolation in our wake. No old-growth trees remained after the loggers broke camp in the Columbia River Gorge and even now a handful of fireworks, carelessly tossed, can torch 30,000 acres of wilderness in a matter of days.

  In Ayiti, after five centuries of plunder, little remains of the rainforest that Columbus once described as immeasurably lush and green. And yet, even if the meager biodiversity that survives represents only a shadow of the earth’s former glory, it is still worth protecting. We are more aware than we used to be of our fragility. We, too, are learning the hard way about drought, fires, floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes. If we do not rein in our appetite for consumption, we will lose landscapes and creatures that we can never replace. As a recovering missionary’s daughter, it feels like something of a consolation to recognize that the part I have to play in protecting this beloved earth is laughably small (it is not mine alone to save), but it matters that we care. Love might only be a broken song. But I can still add my voice to that faltering music.

  I left the ripped-up ivy dangling from a snowberry bush, for I had other work to return to: a book to write, children to love, students to encourage. I repeated a benediction under my breath: Let it be enough.

  To Arrive Where We Started and Know the Place for the First Time

  Haiti, 2012

  FOR SEVERAL YEARS after the earthquake, I returned to Haiti every spring. As a child, I believed that we missionaries had been sent because we had something to give, but Haiti has survived the unspeakable again and again and stood its ground.

  Ayiti has learned, through grief, how to endure. And it was in this extraordinary country, which we so naively tried to save, that I first glimpsed what it meant to be fully alive.

  If you have come to help me, writes Indigenous Australian artist and activist Lilla Watson, then you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up in mine then let us work together.

  My family had moved to Haiti to try to help, but instead, we learned our limitations. Failure can be a wise friend. We felt crushed at times; found it difficult to breathe; and yet the experience carved into each of us an understanding of loss, the weight of compassion. We learned how small we were when measured against the world’s great sorrow.

  Every time I tracked down another missionary from the compound, I realized that we had all been shaped by those same grinding forces. Ironically, one of the most significant lessons I learned from the missionaries was that it can be a gift to be the outsider, to get it wrong most of the time; to practice humility when I thought that I had the world all figured out. And I have come to believe that if we move toward the things we are afraid of, then we will find them changed—and ourselves changed in the process.

  One year I picked up a rental car in Miami and zigzagged across the state of Florida, driving eight hundred miles in three days to interview former missionary kids I had grown up with, now scattered into separate lives. Most admitted that they never talked about Haiti with friends in the States. A few of the adopted children had been taunted as “Fa-tians” (fake Haitians) by Haitian coworkers when it was clear that they couldn’t speak Kreyòl. A heaviness that felt like guilt hung over most of us: that we could have so much when others had so little. Only a handful had returned to visit Haiti.

  Missionary kids one generation older than me told stories that I had never heard spoken aloud: about Uncle S——, the charismatic pastor whose wife allegedly had been raped by soldiers and could not bear to be touched; the man who laughed and lingered over coffee with the missionary wives; the man who had lured who knows how many girls into his home and violated them, manipulating their innocence into a violent, self-loathing shame from which it took many almost a lifetime to break free.

  The indignation that I had felt for years toward the missionary women for their prim, terrified aversion to anything that touched on adolescent sexuality suddenly shifted into grief. They were trying, however imperfectly, to protect us from what they themselves had suffered. Not for the first time, I wished that we had learned, earlier, to speak our fears and sorrows aloud rather than bury them until they festered. Only when shame is spoken aloud can it be stripped of its power.

  * * *

  Ken Heneise, decades after the last greenhouse at the Ag Center
had been scrapped for parts, sat with me under an oak tree in northern Florida, at a military school where he taught organic farming to court-assigned juvenile delinquents.

  —One of the things I’ve had to work out is the whole mystique of missionary service, he admitted. —The more you sacrificed, the more you destroyed your family, meant that you were even more respected for what you had done for God. His voice sounded weary. —It proved you were unafraid; you didn’t count the cost.

  Our eyes followed the honeybees as they dipped and hovered, then disappeared into the dark mouth of the hive. Ken’s hair had gone gray in the intervening years, but otherwise he was as I remembered him: lanky, fastidious, affable. After leaving the mission field, he had drifted in and out of various jobs. He hadn’t attended church in years, fed up with organized religion and tormented as to why God would seem to answer his prayers but ignore the prayers of a Haitian father for his sick child.

  For a few years, burned out and exhausted, he had tried to sever all ties to Haiti. He’d worked as a school bus driver and had built green-certified houses in Florida. He had all but given up on agriculture until he learned of the horticulture job at the military school, where his precisely ordered flower beds and trim greenhouses earned him frequent commendations from the deputy director.

  —Your dad and I clashed terribly, Ken admitted. —When you’re young, you’re so much more certain about things. He kicked at an acorn, nudging it into the subsoil.

  I’d visited the Ag Center on a recent trip to Haiti and had found it almost unrecognizable. Ken’s carefully grafted orchard of tropical-hardy grapefruits, lemons, and limes had been cleared to make room for a helicopter landing pad for the UN.

  —We want to be remembered, but maybe we’re not supposed to build institutions that last, he said with a wry smile.

  As I stood to go, he told me with a surprised laugh: We’re going to celebrate Earth Day at the military base this year for the first time. How about that?

  Even with the bitter taste of failure in his mouth, he hadn’t lost the missionary impulse.

  * * *

  Like almost everyone from the compound, I’d lost touch with David and Emily Hodges after we left Haiti. I’d heard stories of how David had thundered and roared when the Hodges family had gone to battle with the American Baptist Board of International Ministries, insisting that his father rewrite the constitution of the missionary hospital to turn Hôpital le Bon Samaritain into a private family-run institution, and yet those who knew him well insisted that he was a changed man. David and his family had eventually left the compound to live for a year in a remote rural community in Pennsylvania that was dedicated to peace, before settling in Indiana.

  Tiny Emily, whose long dark hair was now streaked with gray, set a plate for me at the table when I drove from Chicago to visit them. —It’s good to see you again, she said. Her soft, rough voice was matter-of-fact as she served up a heaping plate of beans and rice with poul Kreyòl. She had a farm girl’s impatience with wasted words.

  David’s wild Einstein shock of hair was as unkempt as I remembered. He shook my hand firmly, then sat abruptly at the kitchen table, one long leg folded over the other. He lifted his chin slightly and peered at me as if to gauge my significance. —My training is as a physicist, he intoned. —It’s not the long term you have to look at. You have to look at the good you do now, not the good you do over the long term. Nothing is going to survive in the end. In the end, everything is going to become nothing.

  He raised an eyebrow and dared me to argue.

  He told me that in his father’s good years, he had known that the hospital wasn’t going to survive indefinitely. —We made my father believe that the mission board was his enemy. I’m not proud of those days, he continued, clearly determined to shoulder the blame. —And I won’t even give extenuating circumstances; we should have known better.

  David’s eyes met mine as he handed down his fierce, unapologetic verdict. —Both sides behaved badly. It was about power, and greed.

  After the Doctor died, David had helped to run the hospital along with Joanna and his siblings. David’s sons fell asleep to the chant of submachine gunfire and the beat of U.S. occupation helicopters overhead. They made escape plans and slept in their clothes in case they needed to flee from an attack in the middle of the night.

  David’s epiphany had taken place in a Limbé jail cell, after he openly challenged a soldier—a childhood friend—who had broken in to hospital property to look for weapons (none were found). The other missionaries were frantic. Barbara tried to bring David dinner, but he was too proud to accept it. Instead, the prisoners shared their meals with him. He spent only one night in prison, but it was enough. He had seen what he needed to see.

  After David was released, he took steps to undo the family veto power, eventually restructuring the board of the missionary hospital to include pastors from the Convention Baptiste d’Haiti.

  —It was not ours, no matter what we said. We did not have the right to do what we did.

  He cleared his throat, sounding very much like his father. —The Haitians need to rule themselves. Toss all the foreigners out. Definitely the UN.

  —Even though you would be in Haiti right now to help if you could, I pointed out. Having moved to Haiti as a seven-year-old, he still dreamed in Kreyòl. It wasn’t until he was in his late forties that he had moved to the U.S. as a full-time resident. He still felt out of place among his fellow Americans.

  David pressed his fingers against his forehead and closed his eyes. —I’m in exile. I remember it every day.

  It was four-thirty in the morning before we said good night. A few hours later, I woke to tea and toast in the kitchen with Emily, who wanted to know what good books I had read lately. David was already gone, but Emily and I hugged our mugs of tea and filled the morning with words.

  * * *

  When I met with John Sundquist later that afternoon in Chicago, it had been fifteen years since the American Baptist Board of International Ministries went to battle with Dr. Hodges over who owned the missionary hospital. Sundquist received me graciously, his square face offset by a crown of white hair. Teaspoons and saucers rattled delicately as he fixed me a cup of tea.

  The problem, as he had observed it during his tenure as board chair of International Ministries, was that Haiti was too close to the U.S.; the poorest country in the western hemisphere within shouting distance of the richest. Churches in Haiti never matured because every one of them had a pipeline back to the U.S.; dependency was a big issue. He was aware that it was a temptation for missionaries not to point out the strengths of a country when perceived weakness drew heftier donations.

  It was not hard to imagine how Hodges and Sundquist, equally admired in their respective fields, had locked horns.

  —I had prayed for Bill Hodges since I was younger than you, Sundquist informed me. —We don’t want to confess it in public, but we have missionaries, and we have stars. He was a star: the ideal missionary.

  He conceded that it was unfortunate, but he’d been forced to act. —I didn’t want to remove the king and put resources at risk, but I had to do it. He was a lone ranger. We’re not meant to be lone rangers.

  Only once did his patrician demeanor crack. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and admitted: It is still painful. And it should be. I mean, we blew it. Every piece of this puzzle blew it.

  When I said goodbye and stepped outside, seagulls guttered and soared along the edge of Lake Michigan. I took in a long breath of cold air. It seemed that we had all failed. And yet hidden in the wreckage was a reminder that felt somehow reassuring—failure was not the end of the story.

  * * *

  When I asked my sisters if they wanted to return with me to Haiti, Meadow was so hesitant that I didn’t even try to talk her into it. Rose, rather sensibly, said no. The first post-earthquake presidential elections in Haiti had prompted a travel warning as, in a stroke of pure lunatic surrealism, both Baby Doc
Duvalier and Aristide had returned from exile to take up residence in Port-au-Prince. It was as if Elvis and Tupac had returned from beyond the grave to cohost a reality show on military coups.

  My sisters remembered Haiti as a place of uncertainty: rocks hurled at our roof, loud voices over the wall, gunshots, the evacuation. It was a line from Terry Tempest Williams that finally convinced Meadow to join me: The question that I’m constantly asking myself is, What are we afraid of? I think it’s important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of growth.

  We met at the Cap-Haïtien airport. Meadow had flown in from Washington, D.C., where she was finishing a science and policy fellowship at the EPA. Steve and Nancy James brought us over the mountains to Haut-Limbé. We walked arm in arm under the mango trees, past the yellow concrete seminary house where once we cried ourselves to sleep at night. Meadow couldn’t stop smiling.

  —I had forgotten all the things I loved about living here, she admitted, surprised.

  —Crazy, isn’t it, I said, that this place we were so afraid of could also be so full of joy?

  With six-foot-four Tony Casséus as our guide, we hurtled over potholed roads and drank Prestige beer with off-duty policemen and fishermen playing dominoes, then glided over coral reefs in a wooden fishing boat when the Jeep broke down. We sat facing the waves as the sun sank into the sea. Tony ordered another round of beers and a plate of fresh-caught ceviche.

  —Haiti is a beautiful country, it is very important that people understand the beauty of Haiti. For a moment, his slurred voice had the urgent cadence of a Baptist preacher. —People don’t understand this. They only see the negative side of Haiti.

  He was painfully aware that, as a third-generation missionary son, he had been expected, at least by some, to step into his father’s role at the Baptist University. A few still saw him as the black sheep of the family, but he assured us that he had made his peace with his parents.