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CHAPTER SEVEN

Never saw so much black. Negroes everywhere.

            The truck bounced along a dirt road outside Port-au-Prince, rocking and rolling us three boys in back. Our luggage slid from one side of the truck to the other, crashing against Lukey, until he had the sense to move up against the cab of the truck with me and Mark.

            Dad and Mr. Stubblefield, the missionary, rode up front. Mr. Stubblefield was a pear-shaped man with thick lips and a crooked nose. He wore a red baseball cap and glasses. We boys didn’t know him. Dad knew him from his two previous trips to Haiti.

            The shacks along the road were shaded by palm trees and looked like some of the worst forts I’d ever built when I was Lukey’s age. The roofs were made of dry palm fronds. Some of the nicer ones had plaster walls that were painted green, pink, gray or a combination of colors. It was as if they couldn’t make up their minds. Most of the shacks had no glass in the windows and no doors. Little black kids, skinny to the bone, their bellies sticking out like pregnant midgets, stood in the doorways and watched us drive by. Dogs everywhere. Skinny, patch-haired dogs. Chickens and roosters losing their feathers.  Old people sat in the dirt in the shade. And the heat. Like breathing steam. My t-shirt stuck to me. The dust churned up by the truck suffocated me. Everywhere it smelled like rotten vegetables, burnt bananas and diesel. This was not what the brochure promised.

            Mark and Lukey, sweating and whining about the heat, wanted to go home already.

            “This’s what you guys wanted,” I said.

            “Is not,” Lukey said.

            “Is so,” I whined back at him, just to be mean, because that’s how I felt.

            “Not,” he said back.

            “Shut up,” Mark cut in, “or I’m telling.”

            I mimicked Mark. “Shut up, or I’m telling.”

            Mark elbowed me. I smacked him in the side of the head. He got teary-eyed, squirmed around onto his knees and leaned his head around the cab into Dad’s window. I couldn’t hear what he told him, but Dad shook his big finger at me. Big deal.

            “Tattle-tale,” I said.

            “Butt-face,” Mark said back.

            Lukey suddenly said: “Hey, look it.”

            We looked in the direction he was pointing. What looked like a black skeleton lay along the road on its side. It was an old man. A woman with a pile of red and white cloth balanced on her head and another woman with a basket full of fruit and vegetables under her arm and another balanced on her head walked right by him. His eyes were open. His hand reached out.

            Mr. Stubblefield turned the truck into a vacant area in front of a small open market, flies buzzing around everything. Women and children shopped, ignored the flies. 

            “Boys, you want something?”

            We looked at each other and said all at once, “No thanks.”

            “Something to drink?”

            Heat, odor and flies seemed to trap me into silence. I was miserable. Sick to my stomach.

            “Water,” I said finally.

            “No water here,” Mr. Stubblefield said. “Have to wait for that. How about a Coke?”

            “They got Cokes?”

            “Just like home.”

            Lukey said: “Yeah!” Mark nodded.

            “Thanks, Mr. Stubblefield,” I said.

            Mr. Stubblefield’s first name was Henry, but Dad told us on the plane not to call him by his first name, out of respect. He grinned at us and Dad followed him up some broken steps to the little, tree-shaded market.

            Across the street, the old man rolled onto his back. Mark saw him too.

            “Why doesn’t anybody help him?”

            I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know.

            “What’s wrong with him?” Lukey asked.

            I didn’t answer.

            “Maybe we should help him,” Mark said.

            “Help him do what?”

            “Call an ambulance or something.”

            “I don’t think they have ambulances here.”

            “How do you know?”

            I didn’t.

            The old man’s skin was like beef jerky stretched over his bones. He wore a ragged pair of shorts, nothing else.

            A beat up old van, decorated like a circus wagon, people crammed inside, hanging from all sides, streaked by, and nearly ran him over. He had to be moved off the road or he’d get hit. Something inside of me said, Go do it. I crossed the road.     

            Mark yelled: “I’m going to tell.”

            As I got closer, the old man’s sunken eyes focused on me. His hand reached up. I stopped a couple yards from him.

            “Can I help you off the road?”

            He said something in his language—Dad said they spoke Creole, but his voice was so raspy I don’t think I could have understood him even if I knew the language.

            I stepped closer. He gently took hold of my leg. I reached down and took his hand. Felt like a paper bag. I lifted and he rolled onto his rear end, using his other hand. When I got him sitting up, dirt in his kinky black hair poured down his face. He didn’t care. He smiled at me. There were only two teeth left in his mouth—in front at the bottom—his gums were black and his tongue was gray.

            “You should get up off the road.”

            A thick, white liquid ran from his eyes down his cheeks, and a fly the size of a beetle hopped through it. For a few seconds, the man sat there with his legs crossed and smiled up at me. Then his eyes closed. He fell backwards. His head hit the ground; sounded like when Mom thumped a watermelon.

            “Son. Step away.” Dad took my arm and pulled me back. Mr. Stubblefield bent to one knee, put his hand against the old man’s neck. When he stood up, he shook his head at Dad.

            Dad turned me away, walked me to the truck. Mr. Stubblefield followed.

            “Get in the truck,” Dad said.

            I joined my brothers in the back.

            “What happened to him?” Lukey asked.

            “Never mind,” Dad said. Then Dad and Mr. Stubblefield got in the cab of the truck. I couldn’t believe it. They were going to leave him there.

            “Dad! You can’t leave him there!”

            Dad motioned for Mr. Stubblefield to wait, got out and came around to where we three sat leaning against the cab.

            “We’ll call someone when we get to the school. They’ll take good care of him.”

            “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

            Dad nodded. He glanced at the dead man lying beside the road.

            “This is why I’m here. To help these people.”

            “How’s driving away helping anybody?”

            Dad’s frustration rose quickly at that remark. “You don’t get it. You don’t have to get it. Just trust me.”

            He got in, and we drove away. I’ll never forget that old man’s face. I couldn’t help him, but he wasn’t alone when he died. The last thing he got to do on this planet was smile. Guess God had a reason for me to be there. Maybe Dad was right.

            I tilted back the warm Coke bottle to drink. I stopped. A couple of humongous flies danced around the opening. I blew at them, but they didn’t move.  

* * *

            Twenty minutes later we arrived at the Light of God Bible School, a walled compound in the foothills of the countryside, surrounded by fringes of jungle. We passed through the front gate. To the left was the tiny, block-wall church with a steeple made of tin, topped by a steel cross. Off in the distance were dormitories. The driveway curved to the right and ended at a long, white plastered house with a roof made of wood and tar paper. Everything was clean. The paths and driveway were neatly bordered with rocks painted white.

            Six native students gathered out front and greeted us in English, shaking our hands like they hoped to pump water out of us. They wore the same kind of clothes we wore: white button-up shirts, ties and slacks. Two of the younger men carried big Bibles under their arms and grinned like crazy. Dad got out his camera and shot movies of all of us for when we got back home.

            Inside Mr. Stubblefield’s home, we sat around a long black wood table. His wife, Ida, had short gray hair. She wore a blue dress and sandals. And she was very pretty for an old lady, but much younger than Mr. Stubblefield.

            “Bet you folks are hungry as horses,” she said, pulling out chairs for us. “Sit down, sit down.” She patted the table. “You boys have stew written all over your faces.”

            Lukey looked at his reflection in the glass cabinet behind the table, then at me. “Something on my face?” he whispered.

            “You boys like stew, don’t you?”

            “Yes, ma’am,” we said in unison.

            “Good. John, you want stew?”

            “That’d be great, Ida.”

            “Henry?”

            Mr. Stubblefield nodded impatiently and went back to talking to Dad. The six native men found chairs. Four of them were close enough to Dad to listen to his conversation with Mr. Stubblefield. The other two, the youngest, sat at our end of the table. One was black as black could be. His skin was shiny with sweat. His hair was very short. There was a wide bald spot running along the left side of his head where the hair didn’t grow at all. Looked like a scar. He wore glasses that slipped down his nose when he moved his head and had to push them up with his finger. The other student was a boy, maybe eighteen. He was lighter skinned, heavier, with big eyes.

            “My name is Paul,” the younger man said, offering his hand.

            I shook it. “I’m Matthew, this is Mark and he’s Luke.”

            Paul laughed. “Ah, we have the Gospel at our table!”

            I’d heard it a million times, but I smiled. He spoke in Creole to the other man, who introduced himself as Jean-Luc. I shook his hand across the table. Hearing Negroes speak what sounded like French was like hearing a girl swear: shocking but beautiful. His English wasn’t as good as Paul’s.

            “You have good fly?” Jean-Luc asked.

            Lukey leaned back, checked the zipper on his pants. I gave him a look.

            Mark said: “Yes, thank you.”

            “You like Haiti?” he said to me.

            “So far, it’s really...pretty neat, yeah, I mean we haven’t seen much of it.”

            “Smells funny,” Lukey said. I kicked him under the table, but he didn’t say anything.

            Paul said: “America smell better, no?”

            “Parts,” I said. “Lukey’s just...a kid, you know. Says stupid things.”

            “Kids got noses,” Lukey said. I kicked him again. He didn’t react.

            “Three brothers, four sisters I have,” Jean-Luc said. “I know.” He rolled his eyes, dabbed his forehead with a hankerchief.

            “That’s a lot,” Mark said. “Were you Catholic?”

            “Voodoo.”

            Mark’s eyes grew big. We’d been told that in Haiti most people worshipped the Devil. It was called voodoo. Dad had brought home a voodoo drum from his first trip, with a goat skin wrapped around it, and four hand-chiseled wood pegs to stretch it tight across the top. The edges were fringed with dark brown goat hair and when the drum was beat with the fingers it had a high, hollow tone. I played it once in the dark. Scared myself.

            “Did you worship the Devil?” I asked him, trying to sound more like I was investigating the topic than horrified by the idea.

            “The Loas.”

            Mark and I exchanged glances.

            Lukey said: “You go to Hell for that, don’t you?” I kicked him under the table. He only frowned at me.

            Jean-Luc frowned, too. “May I ask question?”

            “Sure,” I said.

            “Your brother speak, you kick me. He speak again, you kick me. Again, kick. This American thing?”

            “Oh, jeez, was that you? Oh—heck, no—sorry.” I was overwhelmed by embarrassment. Wanted to run, is what I wanted to do. “I’m really sorry.”

            Lukey grinned. I glanced under the table. He sat cross-legged in his chair.

            “No worry,” Jean-Luc said. “Do as I.”

            “What’s that?”

            “Little brother make angry, hang from banana tree all night. In morning, he is ripe to be picked.”

            We all laughed. Except Lukey. He tried not to show it, but he was slightly afraid of the idea. After all, this was a place where the people were different, and, even though he knew it wouldn’t happen back home, he wasn’t too sure about what could happen to him here.

            “You scare him,” Paul said, patting Lukey’s head. “Do not be afraid, Luke. Nobody hang you from a banana tree.”

            Lukey moved his head away from Paul’s hand and said:  “I know that.”

            Ida delivered large wooden bowls of stew filled with carrots, potatoes and a chewy, salty meat. It was good. Not like Mom’s, but good. Lukey picked out all the chunks of carrot, set them on the edge of his plate. Then Ida brought a platter piled high with cantaloupe, watermelon and bananas.

            I was so hungry, the stew was gone in no time. The fruit washed the taste of the salty meat from my mouth. It wasn’t cold, but it was sweet and juicy and reminded me of home.

            Mark had trouble eating his stew. He ate the vegetables, but he left the meat. He whispered to me: “This ain’t beef.”

            I wished he hadn’t said that. I didn’t really want to know what it was. But he was going to tell me anyway.

            “Probably goat.”

            “I don’t want to hear it.”

            “Not probably—is.” He pointed to my bowl. “You’re eating billy goat.”

            “Just shut up.”

            “How is it?” he asked, taking a bite of banana.

            I glared. “Not ba-a-a-a-ad,” I bleated.

            He tried not to laugh, but the mushed-up banana flew from his mouth, splattering the table. Got him.

            “Mark choke?” Jean-Luc asked concerned, leaning back to reach behind me and pat him on the back.

            “No. Mark not choke,” I said. “I joke.” I pointed to my mouth. “Banana. Joke.” I pantomimed the banana flying out of Mark’s mouth. “American thing.”

            “Oh, American thing,” Jean-Luc said. He glanced politely at Paul. Paul couldn’t tell if I was kidding or not. He nodded, as if he appreciated the fact that I’d let them in on something American. But I could tell by their short discussion in Creole that they thought we were absolutely barbaric.  

            “How long you be here?” Paul asked.

            “Until our Mom—” I stopped. “Month or so.”

            This was fun. I don’t know why it was fun. Maybe the fun came from talking about simple things in a confusing way to these guys. Turned dumb table talk into a game, where the rules didn’t matter, because they didn’t know a game was going on in the first place.

            “Tell us,” Jean-Luc asked, pleading, grinning. “What is mom?”

            Lukey explained: “Mom’s the opposite of Dad.”

            They were still confused.

            I pointed to Dad. “He’s our Dad. His wife is our Mom.”

            Big light bulbs lit over their heads. They laughed, saying “Mom” and “Dad,” like they should kick themselves for not understanding.

            “No say mother, father, mama, papa?” Jean-Luc asked.

            “Rich kids, yeah. Rest of us say Mom and Dad.”

            “Rich kids,” he repeated.

            I rubbed my fingers together. “They have money? You know, rich people.”

            “Oh, yes, rich. Americans rich.”

            “Not all of them.”

            Jean-Luc’s eyebrows raised in surprise. He dabbed his forehead with the handkerchief again, spoke in Creole to Paul.

            Paul asked: “Jean-Luc says Haitian know Americans very rich, but you say not true. He think you make joke to him.”

            “No joke. There’re lots of poor people in America. We’re not rich. We’re...we’re kind of in the middle. Middle-class, yeah. We’re middle-class, some are poor-class, some are rich-class.”

            “You have house?” I nodded. “You have television?”

            “Two of them.”

            The Haitians were silently surprised. Paul put his hand over his mouth in awe. Might as well give them the whole tour.

            “Got a backyard, a front yard, nice Dichondra, couple palm trees—”

            “Trees,” Paul said proudly, “we have.”

            I nodded, but I wasn’t impressed.