Even before the flyer had found its way to her, Anne had closely followed the story of Emmanuel Constant, through Haitian newspapers, Creole radio and cable access programs. Constant had created his death squad after a military coup had sent Haiti’s president into exile. Constant’s thousands of disciples had sought to silence the president’s followers by circling entire neighborhoods with gasoline, setting houses on fire, and shooting fleeing residents. Anne had read about their campaigns of facial scalping, where skin was removed from dead victims’ faces to render them unidentifiable. After the president returned from exile, Constant fled to New York on Christmas Eve. He was tried in absentia in a Haitian court and sentenced to life in prison, a sentence he would probably never serve.
Still, every morning and evening as her eyes wandered to the flyer on the lamppost in front of her beauty salon and her husband’s barbershop, Anne had to fight a strong desire to pull it down, not out of sympathy for Constant but out of a fear that even though her husband’s prison “work” and Constant’s offenses were separated by thirty-plus years, she might arrive at her store one morning to find her husband’s likeness on the lamppost rather than Constant’s.
“Do you think it’s really him?” she whispered to her husband.
He shrugged as someone behind them leaned over and hissed “Shush” into her ear.
The man her daughter believed to be Constant was looking straight ahead. He appeared to be paying close attention as the church choir started a Christmas medley.
What child is this, who, laid to rest
On Mary’s lap, is sleeping?
Her daughter was fuming, shifting in her seat and mumbling under her breath, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on the man’s profile.
Anne was proud of her daughter, proud of her righteous displeasure. But what if she ever found out about her own father? About the things he had done?
After the sermon, the congregation got up in rows to walk to the front of the church to take Holy Communion.
“How lucky we are,” said the priest, “that Jesus was born to give of his flesh for us to take into ourselves.”
How lucky
we
are, Anne thought, that we’re here at all, that we still have flesh.
When her turn came, Anne got up with a handful of people from her pew, including the young couple sitting next to her, and proceeded to the altar. Uninterested and unconfessed, her husband and daughter remained behind.
Standing before the priest, mouthing the Act of Contrition, she parted her lips to receive the wafer. Then she crossed herself and followed a line of people walking back in the other direction, to their seats.
As she neared the pew where her daughter believed Constant was sitting, she stopped to have a good look at the man on the aisle.
What if it were Constant? What would she do? Would she spit in his face or embrace him, acknowledging a kinship of shame and guilt that she’d inherited by marrying her husband? How would she even know whether Constant felt any guilt or shame? What if he’d come to this Mass to flaunt his freedom? To taunt those who’d been affected by his crimes? What if he didn’t even see it that way? What if he considered himself innocent? Innocent enough to go anywhere he pleased? What right did she have to judge him? As a devout Catholic and the wife of a man like her husband, she didn’t have the same freedom to condemn as her daughter did.
To get a closer look at the man, she simply lowered her body and moved her face closer to his. She did not even pretend to drop something on the ground, as she’d planned.
Up close, it was instantly obvious that though the man bore a faint resemblance to Constant, it wasn’t him. In his most recent pictures, the ones in the newspapers, not the one on the WANTED flyer, Constant appeared much older, fatter, almost twice the size of this man. Constant also had a wider forehead, bushier eyebrows, larger, more bulging eyes, and fuller lips.
Anne straightened her body but still lingered in the aisle, glaring down at the man until he looked up at her and smiled. He seemed to think she was a person he knew too, a face he couldn’t immediately place. He looked up expectantly as though waiting for her to say something that would remind him of their connection, but she said nothing. Someone tapped Anne’s shoulder from behind and she continued walking, her knees shaking until she got back to her seat.
“Not him,” she whispered to her husband.
He turned to his daughter and repeated, “Not him.”
While slipping into her seat, Anne whispered these words again to herself. “Not him.” It was not him. She felt strangely comforted, as though she, her husband, and her daughter had just been spared bodily harm. Her daughter, however, was still staring at the man doubtfully.
Once everyone who wanted to had received communion, the choir began singing “Silent Night.” The tranquility of the melody and the solace of the words were now lost on Anne, for she was thinking that she would never attend this Mass, or any other, with her husband again. What if someone had been sitting there, staring at him, the same way her daughter had been staring at that man? And what if they recognized him, came up to him, and looked into his face?
When the choir finished the song, the priest motioned for them to start again so the congregation could join in.
Anne was surprised to see her husband’s lips move as though he were trying to follow along. He missed a few of the verses, lowering his head when he did, but he mostly managed to keep up. She was moved by this gesture, knowing he was singing only because he knew it was her favorite. He was trying to please her, take her mind off the agitation the man’s presence had caused her.
During the final blessing, her daughter kept her eyes on the man, craning her neck for a better view of his face.
As soon as the Mass ended, the priest headed down the aisle to greet the congregants on their way out. The people in the front pews followed him. She and her husband and daughter would have to wait until all the rows ahead of them had been emptied before they could exit.
When his turn came, the man they’d believed was Constant strolled past them, chatting with a woman at his side. As he passed her, their daughter raised her hand as if to grab his arm, but her father reached over, lowered it, and held it to her side until the man was beyond her reach.
“I wasn’t going to hit him,” the daughter said. “I was just going to ask his name.”
The daughter turned to her mother, as if to plead for her understanding and said, “Would it be so wrong, Manman, to ask his name?”
When it was their turn to greet the priest, her daughter and husband quickly slipped by him, leaving Anne to face him alone.
“It’s nice to see you, Anne,” the priest said. “I thought you were going to bring your family.”
“I did, Father,” she said.
From the church entrance, she looked out into the street, where most of the congregation had spilled onto the sidewalk. She pushed her head through the doorway until she spotted her husband and daughter crossing the street and moving toward a house with a plastic reindeer on the front lawn.
“There they are, Father,” she said, pointing as they reached the white metal fence bordering the house.
The priest turned to look, but couldn’t distinguish them from the others spread out now on both sidewalks.
Anne tried to imagine what her husband and daughter could be talking about out there, standing next to that light-drenched fence, their heads nearly touching, as if to shield each other from the cold. Were they discussing the Mass, the man, that house?
“Merry Christmas, Anne,” the priest said, trying to move her along. His gaze was already on the person behind her.
“Merry Christmas, Father,” Anne said. “It was a lovely Mass.”
Stepping outside, Anne joined the crowd on the sidewalk in front of the church, the faces still glowing from the enchantment of the Mass. She didn’t rush to cross the street to her husband and daughter, winding her way instead through clusters of families making plans for Christmas dinner, offering and accepting rides, and bundling up their children against the cold.
As she walked the length of the sidewalk, stopping to wish “Merry Christmas” to everyone in her path, she purposely chose families with little boys, stroking their hat-covered heads as she attempted to make small talk with the parents.
“Wasn’t it a lovely Mass?”
“Didn’t the choir sing well?”
“Papa’s ready to go.” Her daughter was suddenly at her side, looping her arm through hers. It was a lovely gesture on her daughter’s part, her fragile little girl, who’d grown so gruff and distant over the years.
Her husband was still standing across the street. His back was turned to the Christmas house; his hands were buried in his coat pockets, his shoulders hunched against the cold.
“Wasn’t it a lovely Mass?” Anne asked her daughter to see whether she was still thinking about the man. If she was, she’d probably say something like, “Yeah, okay, Manman, it was a fine Mass, until that killer came.”
Instead, while waving to her father across the street to show that she’d found Anne, the daughter said, “Listen, Manman. About that guy. I’m sorry I overreacted. Papa thought I was going to hit him or trip him or something. But I wouldn’t do anything like that. I don’t really know what happened. I wasn’t there.”
But I was, Anne wanted to say, or almost.
It was always like this, her life a pendulum between forgiveness and regret, but when the anger dissipated she considered it a small miracle, the same way she thought of her emergence from her occasional epileptic seizures as a kind of resurrection.
Her daughter’s breath, mixed in with the cold, was forming an icy vapor in the air in front of them. Then, moving her lips close, her daughter pressed them against Anne’s cheek until Anne’s face felt warm, almost hot.
“I’m sorry to have to say this too, Manman,” the daughter added, moving away, smiling. “We come every year, but it’s always the same thing. Same choir. Same songs. Same Mass. It was only a Mass. Nothing more. It’s never as fabulous as one of your miracles.”
NIGHT TALKERS
He thought that the mountain would kill him, that he would never see the other side. He had been walking for two hours when suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his side. He tried some breathing exercises he remembered from medical shows on television, but it was hard to concentrate. All he could think of, besides the pain, was his roommate, Michel, who’d had an emergency appendectomy a few weeks before in New York. What if he was suddenly stricken with appendicitis, here on top of a mountain, deep in the Haitian countryside, where the closest village seemed like a grain of sand in the valley below?
Hugging his midsection, he left the narrow trail and took cover from the scorching midday sun under a tall, arched, wind-deformed tree. Avoiding a row of anthills, he slid down onto his back over a patch of grainy pebbled soil and closed his eyes, shutting out, along with the sapphire sky, the craggy hills that made up the rest of his journey.
He was on his way to visit his aunt Estina, his father’s older sister, whom he’d not seen since he moved to New York ten years before. He had lost his parents to the dictatorship twenty-five years before that, when he was a boy, and his aunt Estina had raised him in the capital. After he moved to New York, she returned to her home in the mountains where she’d always taken him during school holidays. This was the first time he was going to her village, as he’d come to think of it, without her. If she had been with him, she would have made him start his journey earlier in the day. They would have boarded a camion at the bus depot in Port-au-Prince before dawn and started climbing the mountain at sunrise to avoid sunstroke at high noon. If she had known he was coming, she would have hired him a mule and sent a child to meet him halfway, a child who would know all the shortcuts to her village. She also would have advised him to wear a sun hat and bring more than the two bottles of water he’d consumed hours ago.
But no, he’d wanted to surprise her; however, the only person he was surprising was himself, by getting lost and nearly passing out and possibly lying there long enough to draw a few mountain vultures to come pick his skeleton clean.
When he finally opened his eyes, the sun was beating down on his face in pretty, symmetrical designs. Filtered through the long, upturned branches of what he now recognized as a giant saguaro cactus, the sun rays had patterned themselves into hearts, starfishes, and circles looped around one another.
He reached over and touched the cactus’s thick trunk, which felt like a needle-filled pincushion or a field of dry grass. The roots were close to the soil, a design that his aunt Estina had once told him would allow the plant to collect as much rainwater as possible. Further up along the spine, on the stem, was a tiny cobalt flower. He wanted to pluck it and carry it with him the rest of the way, but his aunt would scold him. Most cactus flowers bloomed only for a few short days, then withered and died. He should let the cactus enjoy its flower for this brief time, his aunt would say.
The pain in his midsection had subsided, so he decided to get up and continue walking. There were many paths to his aunt’s house, and seeing the lone saguaro had convinced him that he was on one of them.
He soon found himself entering a village, where a girl was pounding a pestle in a mortar, forming a small crater in the ground beneath the mortar as a group of younger children watched.
The girl stopped her pounding as soon as she saw him, causing the other children to turn their almost identical brown faces toward him.
“Bonjou, cousins,” he said, remembering the childhood greeting his aunt had taught him. When he was a boy, in spite of the loss of his parents, he had thought himself part of a massive family, every child his cousin and every adult his aunt or uncle.
“Bonjou,” the children replied.
“Ki jan w ye?” the oldest girl added, distinguishing herself. How are you?
“Could I have some water, please?” he said to her, determining that she was indeed the one in charge.
The girl turned her pestle over to the next-oldest child and ran into the limestone house as he dropped his backpack on the ground and collapsed on the front gallery. The ground felt chilly against his bare legs, as though he’d stumbled into a cold stream with his shorts and T-shirt on.
As one of the younger boys ran off behind the house, the other children settled down on the ground next to him, some of them reaching over and stroking his backpack.
The oldest girl came back with a glass in one hand and an earthen jar in the other. He watched as she poured the water, wondering if it, like her, was a mirage fabricated by his intense thirst. When she handed him the water, he drank it faster than it took her to pour him another glass, then another and another, until the earthen jar was clearly empty.
She asked if he wanted more.
“Non,” he replied. “Mèsi.” Thank you.
The girl went back into the house to put the earthen jar and glass away. The children were staring up at him, too coy to question him and too curious not to stare. When the girl returned, she went back to her spot behind the mortar and pestle and just stood there as though she no longer knew what to do.
An old man carrying a machete and a sisal knapsack walked up to the bamboo gate that separated the road from the house. The young boy who had run off earlier was at his side.
“How are you, konpè?” the old man asked.
“Uncle,” he said, “I was dying of thirst until your granddaughter here gave me some water to drink.”
“My granddaughter?” The old man laughed. “She’s my daughter. Do you think I look that old?”
Toothless, he did look old, with a grizzly white beard and a face full of folds and creases that seemed to map out every road he had traveled in his life.
The old man reached over and grabbed one of three wooden poles that held up the front of the house. He stood there for a while, saying nothing, catching his breath. After the children had brought him a calabash filled with water—the glass and earthen jar were obviously reserved for strangers—and two chairs for him and the stranger, he lit his pipe, exhaled a fragrant cloud of fresh tobacco, and asked, “Where are you going, my son?”
“I’m going to see my aunt, Estina Estème,” he replied. “She lives in Beau Jour.”
The old man removed the pipe from his mouth and reached up to scratch his beard.
“Estina Estème? The same Estina Estème from Beau Jour?”
“The same,” he said, growing hopeful that he was not too far from his aunt’s house.
“You say she is your aunt?”
“She is,” he replied. “You know her?”
“Know her?” the old man retorted. “There are no strangers in these mountains. My grandfather Nozial and her grandfather Dorméus were cousins. Who was your father?”
“My father was Maxo Jean Dorméus,” he said.
“The one killed with his wife in that fire?” the old man asked. “They only had the one boy. Estina nearly died in that fire too. Only the boy came out whole.”
“I am the boy,” he said, an egg-sized lump growing in his throat. He hadn’t expected to be talking about these things so soon. He had prepared himself for only one conversation about his parents’ death, the one he would inevitably have with his aunt.
The children moved a few inches closer to him, their eyes beaming as though they were being treated to a frightening folktale in the middle of the day.
“Even after all these years,” the old man said, “I’m still so sad for you. So you are that young man who used to come here with Estina, the one who went to New York some years back?”
The old man looked him up and down, as if searching for burn marks on his body, then ordered the children to retreat.
“Shoo,” he commanded. “This is no talk for young ears.”
The children quickly vanished, the oldest girl resuming her work with the mortar and pestle.
Rising from his chair, the old man said, “Come, I’ll take you to Estina Estème.”
Estina Estème lived in a valley between two lime-green mountains and a giant waterfall, which sprayed a fine mist over the banana grove that surrounded her one-room house and the teal ten-place mausoleum that harbored the bones of many of her forebears. Her nephew recognized the house as soon as he saw it. It had not changed much, the sloped tin roof and the wooden frame intact. His aunt’s banana grove seemed to have flourished; it was greener and denser than he remembered. Her garden was packed with orange and avocado trees—a miracle, given the barren mountain range he’d just traveled through.
When he entered his aunt’s yard, he was greeted by a flock of hens and roosters that scattered quickly, seeking shelter on top of the family mausoleum.
He rushed to the front porch, where an old faded skirt and blouse were drying on the wooden railing. The door was open, so he ran into the house, leaving behind the old man and a group of neighbors whom the old man had enticed into following them by announcing as he passed their houses that he had with him Estina Estème’s only nephew.
In the small room was his aunt’s cot, covered with a pale blue sheet. Nearby was a calabash filled with water, within easy reach so she could drink from it at night without leaving her bed. Under the cot was her porcelain chamber pot and baskets filled with a few Sunday dresses, hats, and shoes.
The old man peeked in to ask, “She’s not here?”
“No,” he replied, “she’s not.”
He was growing annoyed with the old man, even though he would never have found his aunt’s house so quickly without his help.
When he walked out of the house, he found himself facing a dozen or so more people gathered in his aunt’s yard. He scanned the faces and recognized one or two, but couldn’t recall the names. Many in the group were nudging one another, whispering while pointing at him. Others called out, “Dany, don’t you know me anymore?”
He walked over and kissed the women, shook hands with the men, and patted the children’s heads.
“Please, where’s my aunt?” he asked of the entire crowd.
“She’ll soon be here,” a woman replied. “We sent for her.”
Once he knew his aunt was on her way, he did his best to appear interested in catching up. Many in the crowd complained that once he got to New York, he forgot about them, never sending the watch or necklace or radio he’d promised. Surprised that they’d taken his youthful pledges so seriously, he offered some feeble excuses. “It’s not so easy to earn money in New York. . . . I thought you’d moved to the capital. . . . I didn’t know your address.”
“Where would we have gone?” one of the men rebutted. “We were not so lucky as you.”
He was glad when he heard his aunt’s voice, calling his name. The crowd parted and she appeared, pudgy yet graceful in a drop-waist dress. Her face was round and full, her skin silken and very black, her few wrinkles, in his estimation, more like beauty marks than signs of old age. Two people were guiding her by the elbows. As they were leading her to him, she pulled herself away and raised her hands in front of her, searching for him in the breeze. He had almost forgotten that she was blind, had been since the day of the fire that had taken his parents’ lives.
The crowd moved back a few feet as he ran into her arms. She held him tightly, angling her head to kiss the side of his face.
“Dany, is it you?” She patted his back and shoulders to make sure.
“I brought him here for you,” the old man said.
“Old Zo, why is it that you’re always mixed up in everything?” she asked, joking.
“True to my name,” the old man replied, “I’m a bone that fits every stew.”
The crowd laughed.
“Let’s go in the house,” his aunt told him. “It’s hot out here.”
As they started for her front door, he took her hand and tried to guide her, but found himself an obstacle in her path and let go. Once they were inside, she felt her way to her cot and sat down on the edge.
“Sit with me, Da,” she said. “You have made your old aunt a young woman again.”
“How are you?” He sat down next to her. “Truly?”
“
Truly
fine,” she said. “Did Popo tell you different?”
For years now, he’d been paying a boyhood friend in Port-au-Prince, Popo, to come and check on her once a month. He would send Popo money to buy her whatever she needed and Popo would in turn call him in New York to brief him on how she was doing.
“No,” he said. “Popo didn’t tell me anything.”
“Then why did you come?” she asked. “I’m not unhappy to see you, but you just dropped out of the sky. There must be a reason.” She felt for his face, found it, and kissed it for what seemed like the hundredth time. “Were you sent back?” she asked. “We have a few boys here in the village who have been sent back. Many don’t even speak Creole anymore. They come here because this is the only place they have any family. There’s one boy not far from here. I’ll take you to visit him. You can speak to him, one American to another.”
“You still go on your visits?” he asked.
“When they came to fetch me, I was with a girl in labor,” she said.
“Still midwifing?”
“Helping the midwife,” she replied. “You know I know every corner of these mountains. If a new tree grows, I learn where it is. Same with children. A baby’s still born the same way it was when I had sight.”
“I meant to come sooner,” he said, watching her join and separate her fingers like tree branches brushing against each other. Both her hands had been burned during the fire that had followed the explosion at his parents’ house, but over the years the burn marks had smoothed into her skin and were now barely visible.
“I knew that once the time was right you’d come back,” she said. “But why didn’t you send word that you were on your way?”
“You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t just drop out of the sky. I came because I want to tell you something.”
“What is it, Da?” she asked, weaving and unweaving her fingers. “Are you finally getting married?”
“No,” he said. “That’s not it. I found him. I found him in New York, the man who killed Papa and Manman and took your sight.”
Why the old man chose that exact moment to come through the door he would never know. Perhaps it was chance, serendipity, or maybe simply because the old man was a nosy pain in the ass. But just then Old Zo came in, pushing the mortar-and-pestle girl ahead of him. She was carrying a covered plate of food.