The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  We knocked at the open doorway and called out: Onè. We could hear a mortar and pestle being set down in the kitchen. As soon as Madame Zo saw my mother, the two gray-haired women laughed and reached for each other’s hands. Madame Zo leaned in close to kiss us on each cheek. She smelled of pepper and cinnamon.

  Zo could not come to meet us, she apologized, because he had been having heart trouble, but she led us down the long hallway to his room, the doorways billowing with lace curtains. He was curled up under a thin sheet in the dark, his body cramped with illness. His voice was weak, but he lifted up his head and smiled as we entered.

  —Frè Zo. My brother, my father greeted him, his voice suddenly constricted.

  —Oh! Frè Jon!

  My father held out his hand, and Zo grasped it. He propped his head on his elbow so that he could receive his visitors with more dignity, but my father said: Please, you can put your head down. Ou mèt kouche, monchè.

  After we left Haiti in 1991, Zo had harvested and sold truckloads of grasses and hundreds of pounds of seeds to soil conservation projects across the country. A son and daughter who had emigrated sent funds to build their parents an elegant concrete-block house. Even with the unfinished second story and the latrine in the yard, it bore little resemblance to the humble mud-and-wattle house where Zo had hosted our going-away party. By working-class standards, he had become a wealthy man.

  —I came to find the house of Zo, and instead, I find a hotel, my father teased.

  —That’s a compliment. Zo grinned. —Ou fè m viv. You give me life.

  —It is God who gives us life, my father countered, but Zo’s extravagant compliments seemed to be his own private joke.

  Zo leaned his head back against his pillow. —God needs me to plant trees, he said. —After that I can die. They’re like children to me. It is because of trees that I am here: avèk bwa m viv.

  —I know that about you. My father laughed gruffly. They call you Bwa Zo, did you know that? The tree man.

  —I planted many, many trees, Zo murmured with a tired smile. —Cocoa, grapefruit, avocado.

  —And pineapple? my father asked.

  —I have lots, Zo assured him.

  Zo smiled again, a wide exhausted grin. —I’m glad to see you, he told my father. I’ve been wanting to see you.

  They exchanged news of old friends. Edner, the agwonòm whose salary had been paid with blueberry u-pick money from Oregon, had lost his oldest son in the earthquake, and his wife had folded in on herself with grief. The two men shared a long moment of silence. But their voices grew strong again when they talked about trees.

  —When you see the ravines, you will enter into my dream, Zo promised. He’d planted trees even on rented land, and had built stone terraces to catch the soil that washed down from the mountains. He had paid the masons out of his own pocket.

  My father shook his head, worried that the trees on the rented land would be cut down by the landowners after the lease expired, as had been the case with four hundred full-grown cinnamon trees later harvested for charcoal.

  —It’s not so important to me who owns the land, Zo explained. It needed to be reforested. Now I can go and walk under the trees where the birds sing. It’s like paradise for me. Now I don’t fear the rain.

  * * *

  When we left Zo’s house, promising to return the next day to visit his gardens, my father, out of his friend’s hearing, expressed exasperation at Zo’s strategy. —It’s not repeatable, my father complained.

  Although they shared a similar vision, my father worried that Zo was too generous, too foolhardy. What he hadn’t told Zo was that, behind his back, people sometimes called him a moun fou. I pointed out that Zo’s grandiose gesture felt extraordinary in an economy where the margins were so thin. The only people with the luxury to think about an entire ecosystem were NGOs and missionaries—who, historically at least, had done such a consistent job of bungling the effort that little evidence could be found now of their labor. Zo’s vision was more stubborn and all the more astonishing because he had invested so much of his own profit to create it.

  Still irritated, my father pointed out that Zo once sold a piece of land to pay off his sister’s debt, and the man who bought the land had cut down the trees for a profit equal to what he’d paid for the land itself. —At least, my father muttered, the trees had been a species that coppiced readily.

  —So, Zo’s efforts were not completely in vain, I pointed out. Even if the trees had been cut down, the roots would push up new growth that could be harvested again and again. —So who can say who wins in the long run? I argued. —The trees, maybe. The man who stuffed his pockets with profit. Maybe Zo.

  My father scowled, unconvinced. —But Zo can’t do it all himself. If he doesn’t take the time to persuade younger farmers to follow his example, then all of this work will just disappear when he dies.

  I thought of Ken Heneise’s observation, following the collapse of the Ag Center—that what we create rarely outlives us. I thought of Joanna’s devotion to the hospital. The trees that my father had guarded so carefully on Morne Bois Pin had all been cut down, and the springs that had bubbled up on the peninsula were now dry. But the hidden aquifers remained, waiting beneath the surface for a time when they might be refilled with rainwater trickling down through new branches. Restoring the earth was not the work of one lifetime.

  T. S. Eliot’s lines from The Four Quartets came to mind: There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again.

  What did any of our lives amount to in the end? A tangled melody. A broken song.

  * * *

  The next morning, at Zo’s insistence, we met his son, Franz, for the promised tour, so my father could see what had been accomplished since his last visit. We found a place to park by the edge of the Limbé River just as it started to rain. My father predicted that the storm would blow over in a few minutes, so we waited in the car until it passed.

  Franz had worked in the past as a mechanic and a driver and he asked hopefully if my father knew of any NGOs or missionaries who were hiring. My father did not. He did, however, use the opportunity provided by the rainstorm to lecture Franz about continuing his father’s work. It appeared irrelevant that vehicles, not trees, were Franz’s passion. My father insisted that if no one took care of the trees that Zo had planted, then it would be like the Haitian proverb: Sa a se yon travi ki lavi men, siye a tè. It’s like washing your hands and then drying them in the dirt.

  Franz smiled awkwardly. —Shall we get out of the car? he suggested. —The rain has stopped.

  Poor Franz. It was no small task to bear the brunt of my father’s disappointment.

  We slipped off our shoes to wade across the Limbé River to Zo’s gardens and climbed out under a canopy of mahogany trees. A crooked path wound through orchards of avocado and sitron and thick plantations of banann. High above the valley floor, on land so steep that my mother and I had to hold hands to clamber over the ridged mounds of manioc and yams, we found wild, untrimmed hedges of Leucaena that my father had helped plant. The ramp vivan towered over terraces of vetivè and elephant grass.

  From the ridge, the deep bowl of the valley was edged with green. Everywhere we looked, we could see isolated swaths of forest. A hawk wheeled overhead.

  —Who replanted those hillsides? I asked, pointing to other mountains thick with trees.

  It was the same answer each time: Zo.

  As we hiked down, my father pointed out, pleased, that the bwa blan trees were everywhere now; the birds must have been planting the seeds.

  The rich smell of cedar drifted over the path as we approached the river, and my father veered us off course to see if a tree that he remembered Zo planting twenty years earlier was still alive. And there it was, so wide that neither Mom nor I could reach around it, and we had to link arms, staring up into the leafy branches. Our hands smelled sweet when we uncircled them.

  When we reached the ravines, th
e terraces were everything that Zo had promised and more. Falling water burbled over stacked stones. Thickets of green dazzled with wildflowers. Behind the carefully built rock ledges, low depressions had been engineered to catch what washed down from neighboring gardens—trapped topsoil that had been prevented from draining into the rivers and burying the coral reefs offshore. Birds warbled overhead.

  In wealthier nations, where landowners and wilderness clubs could afford the luxury of benevolence, such measures might be considered less extraordinary, but in Haiti, for one man to rent tracts of deforested land and rebuild them into wildlife habitat was a defiant act of beauty, an investment in a future he might not live to see. Zo had signed his name in green.

  In My End Is My Beginning

  Ayiti, 2016

  MY SONS WERE eight and ten when David and I took them to Haiti for the first time. —I didn’t know it would be so beautiful! they exclaimed as the plane made its descent into Cap-Haïtien.

  Their voices sounded almost too eager, as if anticipating what I’d hoped they would say.

  They were dismayed, however, by the piles of discarded plastic bottles that lined the harbor (an environmental crisis accelerated by the cholera epidemic—yet another unanticipated legacy of those who thought they had come to help; in this case, UN peacekeepers). Immediately, both boys wanted to get to work inventing a solar-powered trash-collection vehicle. The missionary impulse, already at play.

  It was hot and muggy when we waded across the Limbé River to visit Zo, now fully recovered and back to work in his gardens. The boys could follow very little of the long conversation in Kreyòl about trees, but they tried to nod politely and express the requisite admiration for each new species that Zo pointed out. Still, I confessed to Zo’s son, Franz—out of Zo’s hearing—that I remembered how hard I had found it as a kid to listen to my father talk on and on about trees.

  —You and your father have changed places, Franz said with a wry smile. I laughed. It was too obvious.

  Zo was gracious, as always, with our unplanned interruption to his work. When we found him, he had a brace of sugarcane stalks over one shoulder and he paused and broke open the soil with his machete to kneel and cover the roots before leading us through his riverfront garden—land that had been so badly eroded by storms when he purchased it that it was considered unfit to grow food. He’d planted water-loving trees to stabilize the bank, then filled in the soil with twenty different species of vegetables, vines, and tubers; each reliant on the other to flourish.

  But he wanted most to show me the red coconut palms, descended from ones that my father had given to him at our going-away party twenty-five years earlier.

  It was a story that my father had cited for years as a failure: the virus-resistant, imported palm trees had ended up with torn roots and leaves during the disorganized giveaway. And yet, I realized, Zo had planted and replanted the descendants of those same red coconuts all over Camp Coq. They were still bearing fruit decades later.

  It isn’t always ours to know what impact we will have. What good—or what harm—we leave in our wake isn’t always immediately apparent.

  * * *

  I’d wanted the boys to see the places and people I remembered from childhood, and was relieved when Mueller Jean-Jacques graciously agreed to drive us around the north of Haiti in Steve and Nancy’s borrowed pickup. As a six-year-old at the Ag Center, I had always been delighted when I ran into Mueller, then a skinny twenty-year-old mechanic with a big grin. He was just as teasing and welcoming with my boys as he had been with me. My eight-year-old, loving the attention, leaned his arms across the front seat to practice a few words in this new language.

  Mueller was patient with our fumbling Kreyòl, and with the endless potholes, stopping to wave market women safely across the highway, and offering rides to strangers.

  He took us to see what was left of the Ag Center, and to the compound in Limbé. The sidewalk in front of Jericho School was even more cracked than in years past. The boys were impressed by how high the roof of the school was. I was amazed that so small a scrap of beauty—a few tree trunks, a patch of sky—could have given me so much room to breathe.

  The Guahaba Museum, across the highway, had received several thousand visitors over the previous year, although it was painful to see the Doctor’s carefully lettered signs pocked with termite holes. The boys were proud to sign their names in the guest book and had no hesitation whatsoever when it came to writing where they were from: Oregon. (Even though one of them had been born in London.) I envied their confidence.

  * * *

  My sons’ favorite memories from their week in Haiti are the same ones that I would have picked at eight and ten: doing flips into the Mont Joli pool; their first taste of Coca-Cola; the bright red ixora flowers, which they strung into necklaces and fed to Nancy James’s Hispaniolan parakeets; playing soccer with a new friend, no common language required. We hiked to the Citadel, where they perched astride cannons and pretended to take out the French army, and we spent one glorious day at the beach. They had never imagined that water could be so warm.

  A Haitian university student named Elio Dortilus, just back from a scholarship semester abroad in the U.S., led us to the top of a mountain that overlooked the Limbé Valley where kids flew kites at dusk. Elio held a coin up to his eye, blocking the view, to show us how if we focus only on the problems in front of us, we lose our perspective.

  —There is so much more to Haiti than problems, he told the boys. They didn’t need convincing.

  Laurie and Casso were a month away from retirement when we had dinner with them around the old dining room table. It had been almost seventy years since Ivah and Harold had moved to Haut-Limbé to start the seminary; the years of the missionaries were ending. The incoming president of the Baptist university was a Haitian man who had studied in Belgium and would be bringing his family with him from New Jersey. He told us that his twelve-year-old son was reluctant about the move, even though he spoke Kreyòl fluently. But they were doing God’s work, he assured us; his son would adjust.

  Crowded around the small television in Laurie and Casso’s living room, we cheered on the America’s Cup soccer tournament with a dozen university students and professors (the U.S. lost badly) and made it back to our cottage during a break in the rain. The lightning was spectacular through the trees.

  —I think that’s more lightning than I’ve seen in my entire life! my eight-year-old told me, amazed, as David and I tucked him under the mosquito netting.

  —No more talking, I reminded him as he rolled over and threw his arm around his brother.

  —I was just telling him that he was the best brother I could have, he confided sleepily.

  Rain pounded on the tin roof, and lightning flashed through the screens. Thunder boomed overhead. The storm was as powerful and exhilarating as the ones I remembered from my own childhood.

  —I’m so HAPPY, I said to David, laughing, as I leaned back on my heels to listen. My sweaty, exhausted husband smiled. This beloved place that at times had been so hard to love and yet still, after all these years, felt like coming home.

  * * *

  Joanna’s final trip to Haiti, although no one realized it at the time, was in the spring of 2015. Representatives from the town of Limbé had wished to honor her husband’s legacy by renaming the street that ran in front of the hospital as Route Dr. William Hodges. She was ninety-two years old. By the following summer, her cancer had returned. She spent her final days at a hospice center in Florida. Even after she could no longer remember the names of her children and grandchildren when they came to see her, she still, in her best moments, could speak a little Kreyòl with the Haitian staff. Olynda gently massaged her mother’s shoulders and fed her tiny bites of brownie and sips of coffee when the nurses weren’t looking. Told that her face still looked as young and smooth as a demwazèl’s, Joanna replied: Oh se vre? Do you think it’s true?

  She asked to be cremated so that her ashes could be pl
aced next to her husband in Haiti.

  * * *

  In the beginning, Hôpital le Bon Samaritain, like the zanmann tree that Joanna planted from seed and fought to protect, was thin and spindly, tossed by rainstorms, threatened by goats. But as the tree put down roots and reached for the sunlight, it towered above the Limbé River.

  The branches spread a canopy over the dusty courtyard, important with visiting surgical teams and medical students from Europe and North America; Haitian nurses bustled through the corridors to set bones and IVs; technicians bent over slides in the lab.

  The tree provided shelter—children were born in its shade, orphans were settled into new homes, lives were saved—but over the years, vines twisted up its broad trunk. Pharmaceuticals, pilfered from the missionary hospital, provided the seed money for newer, smaller pharmacies that sprang up along the town’s crowded streets. Nurses and lab technicians, trained at the hospital, took their skills to scrappy upstart clinics that competed for clientele. The tree, some said, had contracted a virus.

  Eventually, as all living things must, it would collapse and decompose. Branches would fall and be carried to other projects.

  This was, in a sense, a fulfillment of the missionary vision: Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

  The tangle of latticework vines would hold the shape of that loss for a time. The outline of the tree, as if in photographic negative, would be visible against the sky; but as the nutrients seeped back into the earth, its final purpose would be revealed: to nourish the life of significant soil.

  A Note to Readers

  AMONG THE INNUMERABLE books and documents to which I owe thanks are: The Travels of Marco Polo; The Taínos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus by Irving Rouse; Robert Fuson’s translation of The Log of Christopher Columbus, which includes a generous nod to the archeological research of Dr. Hodges in Appendix E; A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas; Maya Deren’s seminal work on Vodou, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti; Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti; The Magic Orange Tree, a collection of Haitian folk tales transcribed by Diane Wolkstein; West Indian Folk-tales retold by Philip Sherlock, which includes a version of the Carib origin myth that ends with the planting of trees; A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for the line “I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”