The Dew Breaker (13 page)

WEEK 11

My mother used to say that we’ll all have three deaths: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are put back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all. I sometimes hear a dog bark and I’m startled that it sounds a little like the dogs that roamed around me that day as I sat on the beach, watching my father’s fishing boat being hauled ashore without him in it.

My father used to love cockfights. He enjoyed the way the men would gather in a circle and pass a bottle of rum from hand to hand as they watched. This showed that animals were much smarter than men, he used to say, the way so many of us would congregate to watch two small birds.

He went to dogfights too, but he never enjoyed them as much. He could never get the howl of a dying dog out of his head. At least cocks were small, he said; we eat them, after all.

WEEK 12

When I was a girl, I had a small notebook made of a few folded sheets held together by my mother’s embroidering thread. There I sketched some figures, which were drawn so close together that they looked like they were fighting one another on the page.

My mother was the one who first thought they were fighting. She also thought they were frightening, so she made me a rag doll because she believed I was seeing these little shadows at night and was afraid of them.

Night after night, I clung to this rag doll, whose crooked eyes my mother had drawn over the white cloth with a piece of charcoal. After my father was gone, I twisted the doll’s neck night after night. During the day, I crowded the pages in my notebook with more tiny faces, to keep me company in case my mother also disappeared.

WEEK 13

Even though I’ve sung at a lot of funerals, I’m not necessarily a religious person. But I agree to Rézia’s idea to light candles so we can pass the real test.

Mariselle says we should pray to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. We add in there a prayer too, for our country.

“It’s not a lost cause yet,” Mariselle says, “because it made us.”

To that we toast, forsaking our rum for Mariselle’s Pinot Noir.

It feels like I’m drinking blood, not the symbolic blood of the sacraments, but real blood, velvet blood, our own blood.

I give them as keepsakes a few swatches of my mother’s embroidery. Threads of red clouds, omens for good luck.

Then Rézia asks me, “Why didn’t you go when you were asked to sing at the national palace?”

“Ordered,” I correct her. “I was ordered to go sing there.”

“Why didn’t you go?” Rézia persists. “If you had gone, maybe you’d still be home.”

I made a choice that I’d rather stop singing altogether than sing for the type of people who’d killed my father.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Rézia says. “Jackie Kennedy can go to Haiti anytime she wants, but we can’t.”

WEEK 14

We won’t know for some time if we passed. Yet Rézia’s still shaking with post-test anxiety when we sit down, each of us with a bowl of leftover stew from the day’s menu.

Mariselle is wearing a set of gold bangles that, when she moves her arms, sound like the type of miniature gourd rattles you might put on a child’s grave.

“I finally unpacked my suitcases,” she says, “to celebrate.”

She’s gotten a job at a gallery not far from Rézia’s restaurant and will be selling paintings, some of them her husband’s.

We celebrate with her by holding hands and twisting our way through the narrow spaces between the tables.

“And you, Freda, what are you going to do now?” an out-of-breath Mariselle asks when we stop.

“I’m going back,” I say, sinking into a chair. “I’m going to join a militia and return to fight.”

Both Mariselle and Rézia laugh so loud that it’s all I can hear for some time. Not the fan twirling overhead or the trickle of rum and wine from bottle to glass.

“Look, it’s the seventies,” I protest. “Look at Fidel Castro. He had women with him.”

They’re still laughing, but also drinking. Laughing and drinking.

“It’s not that.” Mariselle is doubled over, clinging to her belly, chortling. “It’s just that if you join a militia, we’ll soon be reading about
you
.”

“If you join a militia, you’ll die.” Rézia stops to wipe her damp forehead with her vetiver-scented hankie that now looks like a surrender flag. “Then who will sing at your funeral?”

The room is quiet now, except for the fan spinning overhead and a car horn blaring outside. Mariselle throws her head back, empties her entire glass in her mouth, then flings it across the room. We watch it fly, then land on the wall, breaking into a torrent of little pieces.

“Hey!” Rézia shuffles over with a broom and dustpan to pick up the shards. “Don’t wreck my place. If I didn’t have this place, I’d be as crazy as the two of you.”

“We’re not crazy.” Mariselle tries to get up, but her knees buckle under her and she falls back in her chair.

“Freda, why don’t you do it now?” Mariselle says. “Why don’t you sing your own funeral song?”

“We’ll help you,” Rézia chimes in from where she’s sweeping up glass across the room.

I clear my throat to show them that I can do it, am willing to do it, sing my own funeral song. Why not?

And that’s how I begin my final performance as a funeral singer, or any kind of singer at all.

I sing “Brother Timonie.”
Brother Timonie, Brother Timonie, we
row on without you. But I’ll know we’ll meet again.

Rézia and Mariselle catch on quickly and join in. We sing until our voices grow hoarse, sometimes making Brother Timonie a sister.

When we’ve exhausted poor Timonie, we move on to a few more songs, happier songs. And for the rest of the night we raise our glasses, broken and unbroken alike, to the terrible days behind us and the uncertain ones ahead.

1

He came to kill the preacher. So he arrived early, extra early, a whole two hours before the evening service would begin.

The sun had not yet set when he plowed his black DKW within a few inches of a row of vendors who had lined themselves along where he’d imagined the curb might be, to sell all kinds of things, from grilled peanuts to packs of cigarettes. He wanted a perfect view of the church entrance in case the opportunity came to do the job from inside his car without his having to get out and soil his shoes.

Catching the street merchants stealing glimpses at his elephantine frame, he shifted now and again to better fit between the car seat and the steering wheel, his wide belly spilling over his belt to touch the tip of the gearshift.

Later one of the women, who didn’t want her name used, would tell the Human Rights people, “He looked like a pig in a calabash sitting there. Yes, I watched him. I watched him for a long time. I tried to frighten him with my old eyes. I belong to that church and I did not want to see my pastor die.”

Rumors had been spreading for a while that the preacher had enemies in high places. His Baptist church was the largest in Bel-Air, one of the oldest and poorest communities in Haiti’s capital, a neighborhood that one American journalist had described a few months earlier in a
Life
magazine article as “a hilly slum with an enviable view of the cobalt sea of Port-au-Prince harbor.”

The church was called L’Eglise Baptiste des Anges, the Baptist Church of the Angels, which was printed in chalky letters on a clapboard sign over the front doors. Above the sign was a likeness of Jesus, scrawny, with a hollowed ivory face and two emaciated hands extended toward passersby.

The preacher had a radio show, which aired at seven every Sunday morning on Radio Lumière, so that those who could not visit his church could listen to his sermons before they went about their holy day. Rumors of the preacher’s imminent encounter with the forces in power started as soon as he’d begun broadcasting his sermons on the radio the year before. Those at the presidential palace who monitored such things were at first annoyed, then enraged that the preacher was not sticking to the “The more you suffer on earth, the more glorious your heavenly reward” script. In his radio sermons, later elaborated on during midmorning services, the preacher called on the ghosts of brave men and women in the Bible who’d fought tyrants and nearly died. (He’d started adding women when his wife passed away six months before.) He exalted Queen Esther, who had intervened to halt a massacre of her people; Daniel, who had tamed lions intended to devour him; David, who had pebbled Goliath’s defeat; and Jonah, who had risen out of the belly of a sea beast.

“And what will we do with
our
beast?” the preacher encouraged his followers to chant from beside their radios at home, as well as from the plain wooden pews of his sanctuary.

He liked to imagine the whole country screaming, “What will we do with our beast?” but instead it seemed as if everyone was walking around whispering the sanctioned national prayer, written by the president himself: “Our father who art in the national palace, hallowed be thy name. Thy will be done, in the capital, as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive us our anti-patriotic thoughts, but do not forgive those anti-patriots who spit on our country and trespass against it. Let them succumb to the weight of their own venom. And deliver them not from evil.”

The church members who were the most loyal of the radio listeners, when they were visited at home in the middle of the night and dragged away for questioning in the torture cells at the nearby Casernes Dessalines military barracks, would all bravely answer the same way when asked what they thought the preacher meant when he demanded, “What will we do with our beast?”

“We are Christians,” they would say. “When we talk about a beast, we mean Satan, the devil.”

The Human Rights people, when they gathered in hotel bars at the end of long days of secretly counting corpses and typing single-spaced reports, would write of the flock’s devotion to the preacher, noting, “
Impossible to deepen that
night.
These people don’t have far to go to find their devils. Their devils aren’t imagined; they’re real.”

Not all the church members agreed with the preacher’s political line, however. Some would even tell you, “If the pastor continues like this, I leave the church. He should think about his life. He should think about our lives.”

The light of day vanished as he waited, the street vendors exchanging places around him, day brokers going home to be replaced by evening merchants who sold fried meats, plantains, and more cigarettes, late into the night. Among the dusk travelers were his colleagues in their denim uniforms. He didn’t know them intimately, but recognized a few. Those he did know loved to wear their uniforms, even though he didn’t think they should on jobs like this. Not that there was anything subtle about this job. He was sure that even before the “uniforms” had arrived some of the neighborhood people, upon observing him, had already gone off to warn the preacher. He was equally certain that neither he nor his uniformed acquaintances would deter the preacher. From what he knew of the preacher’s reputation, he was certain that the preacher would come and the evening service would go on. For if he stayed home, it would mean the devil had won, the devil of his own fear.

The preacher didn’t live far away. Four agents were even now in front of his modest two-room house, waiting to snatch him in case he tried to escape. Somehow he found it hard to imagine the preacher even being afraid. Perhaps he too was falling for the religious propaganda. The preacher would not be like the others, he told himself, who in the final hours before their arrests would plot impossible departures, run to trusted friends or relatives to parcel out their goods and their children.

In his work there were many approaches. Some of his colleagues tried to go as far from the neighborhoods where they grew up as possible when doing a task like this. Others relished returning to the people in their home areas, people who’d refused cough syrup for a mother or sister as she sat up the whole night coughing up blood. Some would rather “disappear” the schoolteachers who’d told them that they had heads like mules and would never learn to read or write. Others wanted to take revenge on the girls who were too self-important, who never smiled when their names were called out or when they were hissed at or whistled at in the street. Others still wanted to beat the girls’ parents for asking their last names and judging their lineage not illustrious enough. But he liked to work on people he didn’t know, people around whom he could create all sorts of evil tales.

For example, he could easily convince himself before killing the preacher that being Catholic, he wasn’t supposed to like the Protestants anyway. They didn’t dance. They made their women dress in white and cover their heads with matching handkerchiefs, scarves, or rags. They were always talking or singing about the devil, using biblical symbols that could easily be misinterpreted. So killing someone like the preacher wouldn’t make him feel guilty for long, no matter where he had to do it.

In slaying the preacher, he could tell himself, he would actually be freeing an entire section of Bel-Air, men, women, and children who had been brainwashed with rites of incessant prayers and milky clothes. He’d be liberating them, he reasoned, from a Bible that had maligned them, pegged them as slaves, and told them to obey their masters, holy writings that he had completely vacated from his mind soon after the raucous party his parents had thrown to celebrate his first communion. With their preacher gone, the masses of Bel-Air would be more likely to turn back to their ancestral beliefs, he told himself, creeds carried over the ocean by forebears who had squirmed, wailed, and nearly suffocated in the hulls of Middle Passage kanntès, nègriers, slave ships.

The night before, the president of the republic had tried to send a painful message both to people like him and to people like the preacher. The president, often referred to as the Sovereign One, had been heard on the radio announcing the execution of nineteen young officers, members of the palace guard, who the president thought had betrayed him. The president, also known as the Renovator of the Fatherland, had listed the officers’ names, roll-call style, on the radio, had answered “absent” for each of them, then had calmly announced, “They have been shot.”

So now every order from the national palace was a loyalty test, a warning that worse things could come.

The preacher had already received his own warning. Six months before, the daughter of a rival pastor had been paid to slip a piece of poisoned candy to the preacher’s wife during a women’s auxiliary meeting. After his wife’s death, the preacher had simply taken his wife’s body to her village in the mountains to be buried in her family plot.

Considering the preacher’s stubbornness made him tap his index finger on the .38 tucked away against his spine. It was a nervous habit, something he did whenever he caught himself thinking too much, too hard, for too long.

He had been constantly thinking about getting out of this life, moving to Florida, or even New York, making himself part of the new Haitian communities there, to keep an eye on the movements that were fueling the expatriate invasions at the borders. He could infiltrate the art galleries, makeshift coffee shops, where the exiled intellectuals were said to meet to drink coffee and rum and talk revolution. He was already saving up his money to begin a new life, carrying most of it with him in his back pocket but also keeping some in a cemented hole in his office at the barracks and the rest in a pouch in his mattress at home. But he couldn’t leave until he followed his orders, proved his loyalty, and killed the preacher. Pushing all this to the back of his mind, he poked his head out of the car window and asked one of the boys who were studying in a group under the street lamp to get him a pack of cigarettes.

A childhood zinc deficiency had long ago removed his ability to taste things sweet or sour, hot peppers, confections, even the five-star rum he loved. So he ate things now for their smells and sounds rather than their taste, and he smoked potent cigarettes—Splendides, red.

He was not yet thirty years old, yet his voice was already too hoarse, his windpipe sometimes itching from a place he couldn’t scratch. But he couldn’t do without the smoke and the temporary cloudiness his cigars and cigarettes allowed him. No more than he could do without his five-star Barbancourt, one glass at a time over a game of cards, zo, or checkers with the smartest of the prisoners in the barracks.

Sometimes during his one-on-one “interviews,” he would convince his captives that if they won the hazard games he commanded them to play, they could live, something that gave them a glint of hope unlike anything he’d ever seen in human eyes, except maybe during a fight when someone whose throat he had his hands around was suddenly on top of him squeezing, kicking, biting for life.

The night before, he’d dreamed he was leaving Haiti dressed as a nun after the government had fallen. Perhaps it was a sign from the gods, he told himself, warning him to retreat, and soon. He didn’t want to wait until he was too old to leave. But when the order came about the preacher, he simply could not refuse.

The boy came back with the cigarettes and a withered copy of a history book tucked in his armpit. He pulled out a wad of cash as large as his own hand and let the boy have three gourdes of his change in honor of a past he couldn’t deny.

His own parents were landowning peasants, who’d had him educated at a school run by Belgian priests, a school that was also attended by the children of the cane and vanilla plantation owners in the south, in Léogâne. His family had lost all their land soon after the Sovereign One had come to power in 1957, when a few local army officials decided they wanted to build summer homes there. Consequently his father had gone mad and his mother had simply disappeared. Rumor had it that she’d taken a boat to Jamaica with a neighbor who had been her first love but whom she had chosen not to marry because he’d had only one change of clothes, two pairs of secondhand shoes, no money, no house, no livestock, and no land. The man’s lot had apparently improved even as his father’s had deteriorated, and since the man had vanished at the same time as his mother, it seemed logical to believe that his mother had run off with him.

He had joined the Miliciens, the Volunteers for National Security, at nineteen, after his mother left. It began when the Volunteers came to his town bussing people to a presidential rally in the capital. They needed bodies to listen to one of the president’s Flag Day speeches. People had wanted to go home for their hats and sunbonnets, but there was no time for that. Straw hats with fringed edges had been prepared for them with the president’s name printed on them. There were many solemn faces on the camion that day, but his wasn’t one of them. He was going to the city, where by raising his head and craning his neck he could see the president of his country.

En route to the capital that morning, he smoked his first pipe and drank three cups of homemade moonshine. One of the silent objectors who had been trying to numb himself before the rally had passed the pipe and kleren to him. With that first smoke and the public drinking of what he now considered inferior liquor, he felt himself transformed into an adult.

When he got to the city, he followed the throng of people to the vast, meticulously trimmed lawn of the national palace. He was mesmerized by the procession of humanity, standing before the whitest and biggest building in the whole country. Decorating the palace terraces were men with rifles, men dressed in uniforms with golden ropes like those he’d studied in pictures of the fathers of the independence in his own boyhood history book. And finally the president, slipping out onto the balcony dressed like a guardian of the cemetery in a black suit and coattails, a black hat, a .38 visibly attached to his belt, and a rifle at his side.

When he saw the president’s ashen, spectacle-adorned face, he decided he would never go back home. He finally believed his father’s oft-repeated declaration that his son would never work the land, never carry a knapsack on his shoulders or a machete in his hand.