The Dew Breaker

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.

He listened for hours as the president read what seemed like a hundred-page book, in perfect nasal French. From the entire speech, he managed to retain only a few lines. If anyone tried to topple him, the president threatened, blood would flow in Haiti as never before. The land would burn from north to south, east to west. There would be no sunrise and no sunset, just one big flame licking the sky. He also remembered the tall tan woman in a teal dress at the president’s side, the president’s wife, fresh and buoyant as an azalea floating in a stream, staring uninterested down at the crowd. He had wondered if she had a handgun under her dress and wouldn’t have been surprised if she did. He didn’t move his head the whole time the president was speaking.

After the third, fourth, or fifth hour of the speech, he found himself dreaming. He thought he saw a flock of winged women circling above the palace dome, angry sibyls ranging in hue from cinnamon, honey, bronze, sable, to jet-black, hissing through the rest of the speech.

Later he would tell one of the many women he’d eventually take to bed, “I thought they were angels, caryatids, maybe a soul for each of us standing there in the sun.”

And the woman would reply, “You can’t afford to be a spiritual man.”

The boy was standing there not moving, even after he had given him the money. He pulled an additional fivegourdes bill from his pocket and handed it to the kid. He suddenly wanted to have some company, so he decided to engage the boy in conversation. There was a part of him that wished he could buy that child a future, buy all children like that a future. Perhaps not the future he would have himself, not the path his life would take, but another kind of destiny.

“What do you study?” he asked.

The boy replied, “History.”

And he requested that the boy recite for him the lesson of the day. The boy stuttered and appeared nervous, as if recalling school punishments, rulers on the knuckles, harsh words from the teachers for not getting his lessons right.

He asked to see the boy’s palms, for you could always tell how bright a student was, or how good he was at memorizing his lessons, by examining his palms and knuckles for ruler calluses and splinter marks.

The boy’s hands were calloused indeed, but maybe it wasn’t because he was dumb. Maybe it was because he didn’t have the proper light in his house or because he had a book with missing pages or because he didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast every morning.

He gave the boy yet another five gourdes and told him to go away. Too much was gathering in his head now around the kid’s fate. He watched as the boy bought himself a pack of gum and two cigarettes, green Splendides, menthol. The boy inhaled deeply and exhaled with equal ability, forming a series of cloudy rings in the air. He then bought a handful of goat meat and fried plantains and shared them with five of his young friends, who were also milling around beneath the street lamp sharpening the tips of their pencils with razor blades as they recited their lessons to one another.

The boy would later tell a Le Monde journalist, “We saw him sit there all afternoon. I bought him cigarettes. With the money he gave me extra, I bought supper and candy and shared with my friends.” But the boy would not mention the two loose cigarettes he had purchased for himself.

With the smoke clouding his lungs, he tried to forget about the boy by concentrating on his longing for a bottle of rum. He yearned for dominoes, a card game, sweet words, a bare thigh to run his hand up and down on, some close dancing, and a girl to polish his expensive belt buckle with the tip of her belly button. But all this would have to wait until the preacher was dead. And so he watched the boys suck the marrow out of the fried goat bones until the bones squeaked like whistles and clarinets and he thought of how hungry he’d been after the president’s speech, when the crowd was left to find its own way home and when one of the many men in denim who were circling the palace that day had approached him and asked him whether he wanted to join the Miliciens, the Volunteers, what later would be called the macoutes. He had gotten an identification card, an indigo denim uniform, a homburg hat, a.38, and the privilege of marching in all the national holiday parades.

He didn’t like the uniform. He thought it made him look like a dancer in a folklore show. And so he asked to wear regular clothes, eagerly provided for him when he appeared at the rich merchants’ shops and showed his Volunteers membership card. His favorite line for them was, “I volunteered to protect national security. Unfortunately, or fortunately as you like, this includes your own.”

With these words, restaurants fed him an enormous amount of food, which he ate eagerly several times a day because he enjoyed watching his body grow wider and meatier just as his sense of power did. A doctor, his landlord, gave him two rooms on the lower floor of a two-story house for free. Bourgeois married women slept with him on the cash-filled mattress on his bedroom floor. Virgins of all castes came and went as well. And the people who had looked down on him and his family in the past, well, now they came all the way from Léogâne to ask him for favors.

Dressed in their best city outfits, they arrived at the dark little office he closed off for himself in one of the back cells at the military barracks and called him “Sergeant,” “Colonel,” “General.” Some even blasphemously ennobled him “Little President.”

“It’s been ten days,” they would say, “since my son was taken.”

“My daughter is gone,” they’d sob. “And I know it was not of her will.”

Whenever he wanted to, he could solve their problems by simply writing a note to the Léogâne chiefs, who, because he was located in the capital and could read and write, deemed his position above their own.

He made a few trips a month to Léogâne, to visit his father, whose insanity manifested itself in his walking naked to the marketplace twice a week, clutching a rock in each fist.

Once when he was in Léogâne, he went and talked to each of the officials who’d taken over his father’s land. He told them all, “We’re all the same now, but I’ll never forget what you did to my parents. Now I’m the one everyone comes to in the capital. A closed mouth doesn’t catch flies, so I won’t say any more. But watch yourself.”

It was a simple monologue that, even though it didn’t get him back all their land, regained his father the house where both he and the father were born and stopped the requests for favors from the hometown for a while.

The way he acted at the inquisitions in his own private cell at Casernes eventually earned him a lofty reputation among his peers. He was the one who came up with the most physically and psychologically taxing trials for the prisoners in his block. He was suffering, he knew it now, from what one of his most famous victims, the novelist Jacques Alexis, had written was the greatest hazard of the job. Tu deviens un véritable gendarme, un bourreau. It was becoming like any other job. He liked questioning the prisoners, teaching them to play zo and bezik, stapling clothespins to their ears as they lost and removing them as he let them win, convincing them that their false victories would save their lives. He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn’t hear the orders he was shouting at them, tie blocks of concrete to the end of sisal ropes and balance them off their testicles if they were men or their breasts if they were women.

When one of the women who had been his prisoner at Casernes was interviewed three decades later for a documentary film in her tiny restaurant in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, the gaunt, stoop-shouldered octogenarian, it was said, would stammer for an hour before finally managing to speak, pausing for a breath between each word. She couldn’t remember his name, nor could she even imagine what he might look like these days, yet she swore she could never get him out of her head.

“I know they say ‘the fish don’t see the water,’ ” she would say, “but this one, he saw the water fine. He used to call me by my name. He’d lean close to my ears to tell me, ‘Valia, I truly hate to unwoman you. Valia, don’t let me unwoman you. Valia, tell me where your husband is and I won’t cut out your… I can’t even say it the way he said it. I refuse to say it the way he did. He’d wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he’d wound you again. He thought he was God.”

2

“I know my God and I’m placing myself in His hands,” the preacher said as he devoured his supper of four squares of pulpy bread and a steaming cup of ginger tea. The preacher was dressed in his best cream jacket and vest ensemble, one he usually wore on Sundays with a striped red and ocher tie.

The preacher was a dapper man, graceful and elegant, in spite of his disproportionately long limbs, which appeared slightly unbalanced with the rest of his body.

At his long mahogany table, which he’d designed and built himself for meals with church members, the preacher was surrounded by three of his deacons, who were trying to convince him to cancel the evening service and stay home.

“Let the people come to you tonight,” suggested the senior deacon, a house builder who’d known the preacher since they were both fourteen years old.

“We can have the service here in the house,” chimed in one of the younger deacons, Lionel Noël, the third being his brother, Joël Noël.

Ever since he’d begun broadcasting his radio show and had lost his wife, perhaps as a result of what he said on the air, the preacher had grown accustomed to these displays of fearful affection and had hence learned that the best way to appease them was to maintain his calm, while citing Bible passages, almost as incantations to soothe those who thought they could save his life.

What they didn’t realize, or didn’t want to acknowledge, was that he’d already decided to give his life, had made a pact with Heaven to be sacrificed for his country. Besides, there was no point in running or hiding. If the people in power truly wanted to find him, they could. They could enter his house and drag him away, from his bath, from his supper table, from his bed. They could find someone to poison him just as they had his wife.

The night before, nineteen members of the palace guard had had their executions announced on the radio by the president himself. If this could happen to former allies of the government, how much harder could it be to capture and kill him?

He’d dreamed his own death so many times that he was no longer afraid of it. He’d imagined himself being pushed off the highest mountain peak in Port-au-Prince, forced to drink a gallon of bleach, burned at the stake like Joan of Arc, beheaded like John the Baptist. In all of his dreams, however, he always saw himself being resurrected. When he was thrown off the top of Mòn Lopital, he sprouted wings and soared to the clouds. When he was made to drink a gallon of bleach, it went through his body like water and forced itself out through his urine. When he was bound to firewood, sprinkled with kindling and gasoline, and set on fire, the flames burned through the ropes that bound his wrists and ankles, the smoke blinded his enemies, and he strolled past them without being seen. When he was decapitated like John the Baptist, he bent down to the floor, picked up his own head, and fitted it back on as though he were a plastic doll.

That night at the supper table, just as he had during every other difficult moment in his life-including when he was just a boy and had lost his young brother in the sea and when his wife had died a few months before-he reminded himself of his own personal creed, that life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should also lose it on your own terms.

Rising from his chair, he picked up his Bible, a leather-bound monogrammed volume, and thumped it against his palm as if to pound away his last shreds of doubt about going into the night.

“It’s time for the service,” he said to the deacons, while stroking the front cover. “I don’t think you three should walk with me to the church tonight. I’ll walk alone.”

The senior deacon stretched his body upward, extending his right hand toward the preacher’s face. For a brief second the preacher thought his friend was going to slap him, or perhaps signal to the sons, the preacher’s godchildren, to grab and bind him, but all the elder did was remove an errant black string from the preacher’s shoulder. Still, finding the string seemed like a slight ploy, something to delay them, to earn one more minute, to keep him inside the house a bit longer.

The preacher tapped the Bible against the elder deacon’s lowered arm, signaling him and his sons to remove themselves from his path.

When it seemed like there was nothing else to do, the deacons stepped aside and allowed him to walk through the doorway. Once the preacher had carefully padlocked his front door, the three men reluctantly followed him across the shaky wooden bridge over the narrow rain canal that separated his house from the unpaved street.

As usual, Rue Tirremasse was muggy, dusty, and loud, and seemed much brighter than it should have with only one distant street lamp in sight. The preacher waved to his neighbor across the street, an old man who sold cassava bread bathed in homemade peanut butter from a stall in front of his house.

A konpa song praising the government (you have led us/you have fed us was the chorus) blared from the makeshift barbershop operating out of someone’s living room in the house next to the old man’s. Two young men were sitting inside playing cards as a boy’s head was shaved of hair and lice. The preacher waved to the barber and the men, who waved back. Could they be his executioners? The ones he’d been told would be waiting out on the street for him?

A woman selling grilled corn in front of the barbershop called out to the preacher, “How are we tonight, Pastor?”

Just as he always did whenever she greeted him that way, he nodded that he was fine, but this time took the extra step of bowing in her direction.

The preacher then spotted a young couple he’d married. They had notebooks pressed against their chests as they walked toward him. The wife was taking a secretarial course, while the husband was studying to be an accountant. Their parents had rushed to have the preacher marry them when the girl became pregnant, but she’d suffered a miscarriage soon after the wedding.

“How are you, Pastor?” she asked when they stopped to greet him.

“How are the courses coming?” the preacher asked.

“They’re very difficult, Pastor,” the young husband answered. “We have a lot of studying to do. This is why you haven’t seen us at the weekday services.”

The three deacons were still following closely behind the preacher. They were a bit more comfortable now, feeling protected by the geniality of each of the preacher’s encounters. They too participated in the greetings, nodding and waving hello.

A widow whom the preacher occasionally hired to wash and iron his clothes stopped him to ask when she should come by for the next batch.

“Pastor, you’re not kind,” she said. “You wear the same clothes all the time so you won’t give me the work.”

The preacher laughed before moving on to the house of a shoeshine man, who, when he wasn’t shining shoes, always sat in a low chair in his doorway watching the street. The shoeshine man was one of many who’d conspired to empty slop jars from their roofs over the heads of some Volunteers who’d come to arrest a group of philosophy students who’d performed Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot at the nearby student center.

“We are all born mad.” The preacher now recalled that particular line from the play. “Some remain so.”

The Volunteers had shot at all the surrounding houses the night after the play was performed, but thankfully no one had been hurt.

“Pastor, your shoes look a little dusty tonight.” The shoeshine man reached under his chair and pulled out his shine toolbox.

“Léon, there’s no need to have polished shoes at night,” the preacher said.

“Pastor, a man like you should always have clean shoes,” Léon argued.

“They won’t stay clean for long,” the preacher said.

“Pastor, before you can say Amen, I will be done.”

“Maybe tomorrow, Léon,” said the preacher.

The “tomorrow” made the shoeshine man smile. The deacons smiled also, finding further reason to hope.

The men were almost at the church when they reached the one street lamp on their stretch of Rue Tirremasse. A group of boys was gathered there in the direct path of the light beam. Some of the boys were singsonging their school lessons to one another, while others studied alone, pacing back and forth with their heads bowed. The preacher made out one of the boys who faithfully attended Sunday school with his mother, a ten-year-old who despite the mother’s scoldings was not above begging from the vendors and passersby. The boy had a cigarette butt in his hand. When he spotted the preacher, he threw the butt on the ground and darted down a dark alley away from the street.

On another occasion the preacher might have remarked to the deacons for their own information, “Do you see that? Do you see what Satan’s doing to our youth, our jeunesse étudiante?” However, as he approached the gates of his church and looked up to greet the image of the Christ with the pale arms extended toward him, his mind was less on the flock than the wolves who though he hadn’t noticed them were certainly looming.

Inside, the preacher flipped a light switch. The dangling bulbs flickered from high in the middle of the room. As the preacher strolled casually to the altar, the deacons brought out the kerosene lamps they always had on reserve in case there was a blackout, the collection baskets they passed at every service for offerings, and a gallon of water that they parceled out in a glass to the preacher to refresh his voice during the service.

The service went on as usual that night, but many of the members who usually came didn’t attend. A few new faces were spotted in the congregation, however-people who had wandered in off the street to rest a few minutes on their way somewhere else, others like Léon who weren’t religious but had heard about the militia men milling about and thought they might be of help to the preacher should an ambush be attempted against him.

Throughout the service, which ran longer than the usual hour, the preacher sang with all his might; he swayed his body back and forth, pounded his fists on the pulpit, stamped his feet, jumped up in the air and back, and dashed up to each pew to encourage the congregants to join them.

His sermon that night was more like a testimony. It was a remembrance of the day of his wife’s death.

He would always remember her eyes, he said. There was something about them that wasn’t quite right that afternoon. Maybe it was the way the tear ducts kept filling up and drying up again, with the tears never spilling down her face. Or maybe it was the way her pupils were so enlarged that they became one with her irises. Or maybe it was the way she kept fighting to keep the upper and lower lids apart, as though it was the greatest battle of her life. In any case, it was obvious as soon as she staggered home and slipped into bed that she was going to die.

Her limbs were all moving slowly but separately, as though they were no longer controlled by the rest of her body. She had already lost her power to speak, her ability to answer when he called her name, begging her to tell him what was wrong. Her lips moved, but no sounds came out of them. Still, he did his best to follow their laggard course to get some idea, some clue as to what she wanted him to do.

He screamed for a neighbor to run and get his friend, the elder deacon, the one with the car. They would take her to the General Hospital on the chance that the doctors could do something to save her.

In all the confusion, he had forgotten to pray. Maybe his prayers could have brought her back. Even though her body was growing colder, she was not yet dead.

By the time the neighbor returned with the elder deacon, his wife was no longer breathing. She had let out one final sigh right before they’d walked through the front door. He would always remember that sigh, dislodged almost out of frustration, as if to say, Why don’t you hear me? Why don’t you understand me? Why can’t you save me? He had wondered then if his wife’s death had had anything to do with the women’s auxiliary meeting that she’d just attended, a meeting called by a fellow pastor’s daughter, a girl who’d shown no interest in religion before but who was all of a sudden saying that she wanted to know God.

The autopsy showed that his wife had been poisoned, something fast and deadly that the General Hospital coroner couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify. He’d felt some sense of vindication when the girl who might have poisoned his wife had disappeared, reportedly arrested and confined to the torturous dungeons of Fort Dimanche prison for some other crime. But he could never shake from his thoughts the notion that his wife’s death had been his fault, that she’d been killed to punish him for the things he said on his radio program or from the pulpit of his church.

So he was now publicly begging his dead wife’s forgiveness. He was hoping she would hear him from Heaven and absolve him.

A few of the faithful in the congregation, those who thought they knew the preacher well, including the Noël deacons, shifted in their seats, looking sad and puzzled but mostly fearful for the preacher and for themselves. They were glad that the preacher was finally showing some sign of grief and hinting that he might change his ways, back down from his verbal attacks on the government, but they worried that this was the wrong way to do it, on a night when anything that came out of his mouth might further enrage his enemies.

A group of women got up and quickly walked out. Those passersby who’d simply stopped in to rest filed out behind them, not quite understanding what was going on but sensing somehow that it could lead to trouble, that they might be fingered as anti-patriots merely for listening to what was being said.

Léon, the shoeshine man, wiped a tear from his eye, remembering his own son who was one of those men who roamed the night in denim uniforms and carried people away to their deaths. His son might have been one of those he’d emptied the slop jars on and who had shot in his direction in return, for a good Volunteer, it was said, should be able to kill his mother and father for the regime.

Even though Léon hated what his son did, he still had to let his boy come home now and then for the boy’s mother’s sake and still had to acknowledge that maybe it was because of his boy that he’d not yet been arrested.

The preacher continued talking about his wife, remembering how her lips were so memorable, bright pink against her very dark face, how the space between her mouth and nose was cupped, shaped like a seashell, how the tip of her nostrils seemed to dip into the shell whenever she smiled, and how he’d done his best that day to try and make her smile, just to see that one last time.

He had loved his wife as soon as he saw her-his voice was growing hoarse and tired-he’d had no family in the city when he came to her father’s church at fourteen. He said as much to her when he met her at the first service he attended in this church, and she insisted that her parents take him in.

He converted from Catholicism so he could sit in this church with her, becoming a minister so her parents-he was so glad that she was now with them in Heaven-he became a minister so her parents would let him marry her.

He was still speaking out his reverie when his stepsister Anne walked in and out of the congregation within seconds. Anne was returning from her first cosmetology class. He’d signed her up that morning, her third in the city. He could tell from the cool, distant look on her face that she knew nothing of the immediate threat, the killers lurking about, his possible arrest. His sister-for his father and her mother had ordered them to always call each other frè, sè, “brother,” “sister”-had remained in their home village until a few days ago. In the seventy-two hours she’d been with him, however, he’d told and retold her of the day of his wife’s death and now it was too much. She was angry, angry at him for spending so much of his time and energy on the people in government, tired of his delusions to one day unseat them and set the masses free when he’d simply walked away from his own family, his old life, the place where the brother, with whom she shared a mother and he a father, had drowned. She would now go to his house and wait for him, to tell him all this once he returned. Besides, she was hungry and wanted to get something to eat.

His sister’s quick appearance and departure did not break the preacher’s flow of reminiscences, however. A half hour later, as the preacher was still recounting the sad tale of his wife’s death, a fat man, whose very large head was crowned with a deep widow’s peak, burst through the church’s front door. Behind the fat man was a group of Volunteers, all dressed in denim uniforms and wearing dark glasses whose front surfaces were like mirrors, distorting the room into curvatures and the churchgoers into miniatures. The men waved their handguns and rifles at the congregation and told them to keep their heads down, their foreheads pressed against the pews in front of them. The fat man wobbled down the aisle toward the preacher, held a.38 in one hand and with the other grabbed the preacher’s neck, wrapping his long, plump fingers around the preacher’s Adam’s apple, putting extra pressure on the preacher’s voice box to keep him from speaking. The extra force was not necessary, for the preacher had spent months preparing himself for a moment such as this, imagining what he would or would not do in this exact situation, and now that the moment had come, he was glad that his body was cooperating, no unexpected pulmonary attacks, no sudden bowel movements.

A few of the Volunteers joined the fat man and the preacher at the altar. Two of them grabbed the preacher’s arms and swung them around behind his back and held them there. The preacher winced in pain only once as the fat man and the others shoved him toward the front door.

The street outside the church was suddenly empty, all the merchants and children gone, all doors padlocked, with no light streaming out.

The preacher imagined his neighbors trembling in their hiding places, wondering if they would be visited next. But tonight, it seemed, was his night, and his alone.

The preacher was thrown in the back of a truck. A group of Miliciens piled on top of him. He raised his feet close to his chest as they shoved him from side to side, pounding rifle butts on random parts of his body. His face was now pressed against the metal undulations of the truck bed, boot soles and heels raining down on him, cigarette butts being put out in his hair, which sizzled and popped like tiny grains of rock salt in an open fire. He was hit with jolts of shock from what felt like portable electric devices pressed against the heels of his now bare feet.

He welcomed the sudden jerk of the truck taking off to race down the empty streets, because it provided a brief interruption of the assaults. He felt a flurry of hands sweep over his face. Some raised his head, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of the unfamiliar faces surrounding him, many now with the dark glasses off.

A dusty black rag was wrapped around his eyes, then tied in rigid knots around the back of his head. Now that his eyes were covered, he craved to see.

The truck suddenly stopped. The men nearest to him exchanged a few words with the people in a car up front. It seemed to him that the conversation was about where to take him, the nearby military barracks or the prison, Casernes or Fort Dimanche. It was said that if one went to the former there was a small chance of coming out alive, but the latter was literally a sepulcher from which no one was ever expected to resurface.

He thought he heard Casernes, the barracks. The truck was off again, and the blows resumed for the rest of his journey. He lost track of his own movements, his body cringing at every strike.

The truck stopped once more, and he felt the truck bed slowly rise as the Miliciens jumped off.

He heard a woman scream, “Jean! Jean! Is that you?” And if his name had been Jean, he would have thought himself already dead, being called forward by his wife from the other side.

He tried for the first time to loosen his hand and foot restraints so that he could perhaps move closer to the empty space where the woman’s voice was coming from.

A shot was fired somewhere. In the air? At him? At the woman calling Jean? He didn’t feel the expected hot burst of flames anywhere on his skin. Someone dragged him by the legs, pulled him forward, removing his jacket, and then he felt himself falling from the back of the truck onto the concrete. He fell on his face, crushing his forehead. His blood quickly soaked the blindfold, a warm veil of red covering the darkness over his eyes. He was being dragged by the legs over the rise of a curb. With each yank forward, a little bit of him was bruised, peeled away. He felt as though he was shedding skin, shedding voice, shedding sight, shedding everything he’d tried so hard to make himself into, a well-dressed man, a well-spoken man, a well-read man. He was leaving all that behind now with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards, and cracks in the concrete.

He tried to make himself as limp as possible as he was pushed down some uneven steps that at different moments in his descent wedged themselves between his ribs.

He was probably in a cell now, for he heard the rattling of bars and a lock being turned. He heard some breathing, some of it labored, and loud, moaning men. The smell of rotting flesh made him want to sneeze. There were some shadows circling him, sniffing like rats following the scent of blood. His head was spinning like a child’s top. The shadows were spinning too and then faded all together.

He was disappointed to find himself awakened again sometime in the night. A warm liquid was trickling down on his face and when he opened his mouth to quench his thirst with it, he realized it was urine.

Ave urina! The ridiculous thought entered his mind from some source he couldn’t quite recall. Morituri te salutant, I who am about die salute you.

His blindfold was now gone, but his inflamed eyelids formed a cover of their own. He fell into his darkness once more, this time even more abruptly than before.

3

The lights suddenly went out in the house and all over Rue Tirremasse, just as Anne was feeling one of those odd sensations she’d been experiencing since childhood. Even though it was pitch-black, she felt a slight pinch in both her eyes, another curtain of darkness settling in, further deepening the obscurity around her. Her face was growing progressively warmer, as though the candle she now so longed to light had already been ignited beneath the skin on her cheekbones. A high-pitched sound was ringing in her ears, like a monotonic flute, just as her nose was being bombarded with the sweet, lingering smell of frangipanis in bloom. Anticipating the convulsions to follow, she lowered herself to the ground and lay on her back, spreading her arms and legs apart. She imagined observing herself from somewhere high above, perhaps perched from the ceiling, watching herself on the cool cement floor, looking like a butterfly whose wings had been fractured, forcing it to set down and slowly die. Her breathing was shallow, the pauses growing longer between each cycle. Her body stiffened and the inside of her mouth felt crowded, her tongue swelling and spreading out over her teeth, filling them with the briny taste of dirty seawater. Fragmented moments from her life were filing past her, event after event streaming by at high speed on the giant puppet screen she now imagined her mind to be: her younger brother’s drowning, her stepbrother’s departure from their seaside village, perhaps to avoid the waters that had taken their brother’s life, their respective parents’ death from either chagrin or hunger or both, her recent move to the city to join her older brother, his inability to stop speaking about his wife’s death, which, it seemed, was not so unlike this death she was sure she was experiencing.

Maybe she shouldn’t have left the church a few moments ago. He was going on again about his wife and she was tired of it. Based on her brother’s own accounts, she couldn’t help but blame him for his wife’s death. What made him think he could denounce the powerful on the radio, of all places, and not risk the safety of those he loved? She wanted to tell him these things, hoped she would get the chance. Yet there she was, dying again or possessed again, she couldn’t tell which. If she were possessed, then why did the spirits wait until she was alone to enter her body, mount her the way she’d mounted docile horses as a child? There was no one there to hear whatever revelations the spirits would communicate through her, and when she came around again, if she came around again, she would have no recollection of this semi-mortal trance, except perhaps the sudden certainty that even as she was lying there, somewhere her older brother too was failing. Either his body itself was dying or something inside him was dying, but she feared that she might never see him again.

4

He was told to release the preacher. The change of orders had come directly from the national palace. He had missed an important nuance; the preacher had been arrested rather than killed. The arrest had been sloppily handled.

It was supposed to be a quiet operation, his superior, Rosalie, a short, stout, bespectacled woman, told him. She was in her fifties and one of the few high-ranking women in the barracks. Somehow she had become a friend, even though he didn’t see her often. She was frequently at the palace, where she had direct access to the president, for whom she was trying to recruit more female volunteers. Like the president, she had a deep love for folklore, which according to her they discussed frequently. And since the president had named his volunteer militia after the mythic figure of the Tonton Macoute, a bogeyman who abducted naughty children at night and put them in his knapsack, she wanted to name her female force Fillette Lalo, after a rhyme most of the country grew up singing, a parable about a woman who eats children.

When she’d shared all this with him, over glasses of rum and Cuban cigars, she even sang the rhyme, as if he needed to be reminded of it.

For others, the song recital might have seemed menacing, like a blatant effort to cast herself as the hummingbird to his soursop, but not for him. She had taken him under her wing, seeing in him some of her own zeal for the job. But now she wasn’t singing or laughing. She was angry.

“By all accounts, the arrest turned into a cockfight,” she said. She had long tried to copy the nasal inflection of her boss, the president, coming up with her own variation of it. “You went into a church filled with people when you could have gotten him on the street. Why did you bring him here?”

There were too many people milling around outside the church, he wanted to say, including that damned boy. He hadn’t been able to get a clear shot. He thought he could do the job better right here, in the barracks.

“You wanted him to suffer,” Rosalie was saying, smirking almost as if in admiration. “You took too many liberties. You disobeyed.”

He had failed her, and himself. Now the palace wanted the preacher released. They wanted the preacher sent out into the night, fearful and powerless, wondering when he would see them next. They didn’t want him to become some kind of martyr.

“He’s your responsibility,” she told him, turning on her heel, as if for a military-style about-face. “I’ve seen him and he looks very bad. Under no circumstances should he die here.”

He called out to one of the many low-level Volunteers who were always waiting in the prison’s narrow corridors for the next order. “Bring the preacherman in,” he said.

As the Volunteer disappeared from the doorway, he felt the usual tightening in his throat. It was something he always faced in the few moments before confronting a prisoner. Would the prisoner be fearful, bold? Would he/she put up a fight?

He was not anticipating a struggle. He wouldn’t try the usual methods on the preacher. He would simply encourage the preacher to abandon his activities, then tell him to go home.

5

“Hey, preacherman!” a voice was calling from outside the dark cell. “Come on over here!”

The preacher had no idea where “here” was. The Voice would have to keep shouting if it wanted him to find it. The preacher was half sitting, half squatting, with his back against a clammy wall. He was surrounded by the half dozen prisoners who had pissed on him. Others were curled on the filthy floor, sleeping. The ones who had pissed on him were exchanging a few words. From their garbled conversations, he gathered that they’d performed a kind of ritual cure. They believed that their urine could help seal the open wounds on his face and body and keep his bones from feeling as though they were breaking apart and melting under his skin. When the prisoners who’d pissed on him heard the Voice calling from outside the cell, they quickly parted around him, leaving the preacher a blurred view of a single shadow peering in through the rusting cell bars.

“You,” the Voice called out to the others inside the cell. “Bring the new prisoner here.”

Once again the preacher felt the agonizing sensation of many hands grabbing him at once, then carrying him from the back to the front of the cell. His head was still spinning, but somehow he managed to make his feet touch the ground, even as he was being held up high by his armpits. When he reached the bars at the front of the cell, he grabbed them and held on tightly. The men who were holding him up must have felt his unexpected surge of strength; they released him and left him standing on his own.

The Voice was now only a few inches from the preacher’s face. It broke into a halting laugh.

“You’re a lucky man,” it was saying. “This is your lucky day, you lucky man.”

The metal bars slid open, displacing his grip on them; then the shadow grabbed him and slammed him against the outside wall. He couldn’t tell how many people were there, in the cell or in the cramped corridor between the wall and the cell. His body crumpled, his legs buckling under him as he slipped to the slimy foul-smelling ground.

The Voice ordered him to get up and follow it down the corridor. Was he moving or were the walls, caked with blood and fecal stains, moving on their own?

“Hurry up or I’ll leave you here,” the Voice said.

The preacher didn’t want to be left there, squatting in the squalid limbo between freedom and imprisonment, between life and death. He thought of his wife and his sister, imagining himself moving closer to one and farther away from the other. His sister would survive without him, he told himself. She was strong; she had always known how to do for herself. She had her faith, no matter that unlike him she’d remained a Catholic. She also had his house, which she could sell if she needed money. She’d just begun that cosmetology course. Once she was done with her course, she could work as a beautician or open a shop. The only thing that worried him as far as she was concerned was her epilepsy. Even when she was a child, she never seemed to accept or understand that she was epileptic, coming up with all sorts of mystical reasons for her seizures, everything but the disease itself. He hoped she would never choose to have children. She’d had one of her seizures at the beach while watching their young brother and had let him drown. It’s possible that his wife had also had epilepsy, had died from it. But he couldn’t be distracted by these things now. The Voice was slipping away from him. He had to focus, concentrate all the strength he had left on his legs. Using the wall to support his weight, he climbed onto his feet and followed.

There was light waiting for him at the end of the corridor, all of it spilling out from one room, which he assumed was his destination. He could see a little better now. Maybe the urine cures had helped.

Dozens of eyes were peering at him from behind the cell bars on either side of the corridor. Some of the prisoners whispered, “Bonne chance.” They also thought him lucky. He was going to be released or he was going to die. Either way, he was going to be free.

6

Anne loved miracles, read about them whenever she could, listened to religious radio stations for testimonies of manifestations of the miraculous in everyday life. Her reawakening was a miracle. Once again she had returned from the dead. Her body was aching from whatever contortions the spirits had put it through, but she was back now and she wasn’t alone. The shoeshine man, Léon, was standing over her, holding a kerosene lamp while peering down at her on the ground. He helped her onto a chair and asked if she was all right. She nodded.

He had bad news, he said. Her brother had been arrested at the church. It seemed like an army had come for him. It didn’t look good. He’d learned that they’d taken him to Casernes.

She had seen Casernes, the mustard-colored building that looked like a warship, anchored in the middle of downtown Port-au-Prince. They’d walked past it that same morning when he had taken her to enroll for her course. The cemetery was not too far away.

She didn’t take long in deciding to go.

“Excuse me, Léon,” she said. “I can’t stay here.”

He handed her a cup of water. She sipped some of the water, used the rest to wet her face, then got up, walked past him, and sprinted out the door. He ran after her, but could not keep up.

When she looked back, she saw him standing in the middle of the empty street, holding the lamp up with one hand while trying to motion for her to come back with the other. Standing there, he looked like both the angel of life and the angel of death, she thought as she continued running.

7

The death chamber was not what the preacher was expecting. He thought he would see all kinds of animate and inanimate contraptions, from killer dogs and voracious snakes to crosses to nail the prisoners side by side, heavy river rocks to grind their skulls, ice picks, clubs and knuckle-dusters, guillotines and syringes for lethal injections. The preacher was frankly disappointed when he staggered into the nine-by-twelve-foot mustard-colored prison office and forced his bloody, swollen eyes farther apart only to find the same large man who had taken him from the church sitting behind an old desk that took up half the room and the blurry vision of a single lightbulb dangling directly above the fat man’s head. The room was hot and foul-smelling with the stench of body fluids mixed with tobacco. The Voice shoved the preacher toward the fat man’s desk, which the preacher nearly toppled onto.

The fat man asked the Voice to bring in a chair and the Voice rushed out and came back with a low sisal chair the size of a child’s rocker, the kind of chair the peasants called a “gossiping” chair because it made it so easy to squat and chat. The chair was much lower than the fat man’s desk, and it was obvious that the height and size of the chair were meant to make the preacher feel smaller than the fat man, who was a whole lot larger than most people anyway.

The preacher decided to squeeze himself into the chair, which squeaked and swayed unsteadily beneath him. The fat man signaled for the Voice to leave the room and the Voice did so immediately. Even though the wobbly metal mustard door was still open, the size of the room made the preacher feel as though it had been suddenly sealed shut.

The fat man got up from behind his desk and strolled to the preacher’s side. From the preacher’s angle, the fat man seemed quite massive, like some kind of ambulant mountain on giant feet.

“Listen, I’m going to tell you something,” the fat man began in a rather slow, scratchy voice. To the preacher’s wounded, much-pounded-on ears, it sounded as though the fat man was speaking from inside a bucket. “All I want to tell you is that you must stop what you’ve been doing.”

The preacher was feeling restrained in the little chair as if he were chained to it. The tiny bloodsucking pinèz bugs, which inhabited such chairs, were already digging through his now torn and filthy pants, mining his buttocks for their nourishment. The preacher didn’t dare move or scratch himself. Obviously the fat man had some childish game in mind for him. The fat man was going to give him hope and then take it away. He would be questioned, then returned to his cell to wait for his execution or for the next inquisition, which would be even more brutal than his capture.

The fat man was moving closer to him, extending his hefty hand as if to help him out of the small chair. This was probably one of the subtle torture methods the fat man used, reasoned the preacher. He made you uncomfortable, then pretended to relieve your discomfort so you’d feel grateful to him and think he was on your side.

As the fat man leaned in, the preacher began to shake. He didn’t want to appear afraid, but he was. He had been counting on a quick death, not one where he would disappear in stages of prolonged suffering interrupted by a few seconds of relief. He had never thought he’d have reason to hope that maybe his life might be spared. He hadn’t expected the kindness of his cellmates, men of different skin tones and social classes all thrown together in this living hell and helping one another survive it.

From their skeletal frames and festering sores, he could tell that some of them had been there for a long time, waiting, plotting, and dreaming of their release. Many of them were forgotten by the world outside, given up for dead. For indeed they had died. They were being destroyed piece by piece, day by day, disappearing like the flesh from their bones. He didn’t want to die like that, stooped in a filthy corner of the cell with parasites burrowed in his flesh.

Still the fat man’s face kept moving closer to his and the fat hand was still extended, offering to grab him out of the chair. For what? To take him to the real torture chamber? The one he’d always imagined?

The preacher pushed his body back, moving away from the fat man’s hand. The chair squeaked underneath him and crashed, breaking the wooden legs into several pieces and dropping him on the floor. The fat man was still leaning down to him, his hand still extended. Now the hand seemed compelling, urgent, for he needed it to get off the ground. He was going to reach for it when he noticed the fat man smiling, his giant face growing wider with his cheeks spread apart.

The preacher wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t let the devil see him weep, so he lowered his head and pushed his arms behind him to balance himself on the floor.

His hand landed on one of the chair’s broken pieces. He ran his fingers over the ragged edge, which sloped upward toward a sharp tip. He grabbed the piece of wood and aimed. He wanted to strike the fat man’s eyes, but instead the spiked stub ended up in the fat man’s right cheek and sank in an inch or so.

The fat man’s shock worked in his favor, for it allowed him a few seconds to slide the piece of wood down the fat man’s face, tearing the skin down to his jawline.

The fat man snatched the preacher’s wrist and pressed down on it hard, almost stopping the blood flow to his fingers. The piece of wood slipped from the preacher’s hand, falling on his lap. The fat man grabbed the preacher by the shoulders and slammed his body against the concrete. The space was small, leaving the preacher little room to budge. The fat man checked his face with his hands even as the blood was dripping down his neck onto the front of his shirt. He pulled out his gun, the same.38 he’d waved at the congregation at the church, and fired.

The preacher knew that as soon as the burst of light that had left the fat man’s gun landed on his body, it would be over. Were he to come back, he could preach a beautiful sermon about this day. He would tell everyone how he’d seen the bowels of hell, where not one but several devils rule. But he would also speak of angels, man-angels who saw in his survival hope for their own.

One bullet landed, then another, then another, hammering the preacher’s chest to the ground. The single lightbulb was fading.

“I bet you regret…” He heard the fat man’s voice trail off as though it were moving farther and farther away from his ear.

Regrets? Did he have any? What would be the meaning of life, or death, without some lingering regrets?

Maybe he shouldn’t have preached those “sermons to the beast,” as he liked to think of them. But someone needed to stir the flock out of their stupor, the comfort that religion allowed them, that it was okay to have wretched lives here on earth so long as Heaven was glowing ahead. Maybe his death would do just that, move his people to revolt, to demand justice for themselves while requesting it for him. Or maybe his death would have no relevance at all. He would simply join a long list of martyrs and his name would vanish from his countrymen’s lips as soon as his body was placed in the ground.

Oh, what a great sermon he could have preached about this, but alas he would never be able to. There would be no resurrection. He wouldn’t sprout wings and soar to the clouds, vomit the bullets, whole, out of his mouth. The battle would be someone else’s to fight from now on. And yet he had not been completely defeated. The wound on the fat man’s face wasn’t what he had hoped; he hadn’t blinded him or removed some of his teeth, but at least he’d left a mark on him, a brand that he would carry for the rest of his life. Every time he looked in the mirror, he would have to confront this mark and remember him. Whenever people asked what happened to his face, he would have to tell a lie, a lie that would further remind him of the truth.

8

Anne had no idea where she was finding all this strength to run, but as she raced toward the barracks, she felt as though she were parting the night around her, creating a new path with every leap. She was speeding by everything so fast that it all became a dusky blur, all darks and grays, barely any shadows. She left Rue Tirremasse to join Rue du Peuple, the people’s street, then Rue des Miracles, the street of miracles, and then Rue de l’Enterrement, burial street. She passed the archives building, the public school, Lycée Pétion, the old cathedral. As she neared Casernes, she charged through a pitiful pack of emaciated dogs fighting over scraps of garbage in the middle of the street. They joined her in her run for a while, then scattered and reunited, returning to the same refuse pile.

The streets were otherwise so empty that she felt she was the only person still alive in the entire city and that thought kept her running, and she would continue to run until something was able to stop her.

9

Rosalie rushed into the fat man’s office, squatting in firing position. Behind her was a large cadre of military officers and militiamen, all with pistols and rifles drawn. The fat man was bent over his dead prisoner, checking for throbbing arteries in his neck. His face was covered with blood, and as he staggered to his feet he needed help from his colleagues to stand and lean against his desk.

“What have you done?” Rosalie shouted, her pistol aimed at his head.

“He attacked me,” the fat man replied, catching his breath.

“How could you let this happen?” Rosalie slowly lowered her pistol. She seemed aware that all the wardens and militiamen were watching her and taking note of her reaction. She was like the queen of a fire ant nest. If she needed to, she could leave the other ants behind to attack, but she didn’t. Not yet.

“I told you to let him go,” she said.

When he looked down at the preacher’s corpse, his arms and legs spread out, a puddle of blood growing around his torso, the fat man wanted to vomit. Since he’d disobeyed the palace’s orders twice now, it was possible that he would be arrested, even executed.

He took a few steps away from the body. Stumbling past his colleagues, he tottered through the prison corridor, and soon he was out in the yard where the prisoners were allowed an hour in the sunlight each day.

“Where are you going?” Rosalie was following him.

He kept on walking until he’d crossed the entire yard, shuffling through a smaller building until he was outside again, this time in a patch of dried-out dandelion weeds near the front gates. It was only then that he emptied his stomach and once he’d begun, it seemed as if his retching would never stop.

At first he was alone out there near the gates; then Rosalie and the others joined him, circling him.

When there was nothing left in his stomach, Rosalie leaned toward him and said, “You’re not well. I’ll take you home.”

“I’ll get there myself,” he said.

Then Rosalie signaled for the gatekeeper, whom the wardens had nicknamed Legba, to open the gates to let him out.

“You should be all right,” Rosalie said, patting him on the back. “I’ll think of something to explain all this.”

He didn’t feel reassured. Ultimately she would do what was best for her, taking responsibility if the president changed his mind once again and applauded the preacher’s death or leaving the blame on him if she was reproached.

He walked out through the front gate thinking he was going to be shot in the back, either by his colleagues or by Legba, the gatekeeper. However, he managed to cross the threshold alive.

Once he was out on the street, he felt for his face, finding his fingertips delving inside his own flesh, as though he’d been wearing a rubber mask that was peeling away. Following the contour of the prison wall, he continued walking until he thought he was out of the range of fire, then stood at the corner on the edge of the block where the prison ended and the rest of the neighborhood began.

What would he do now? Where would he go? He should go to a hospital, but would he be safe there?

He felt another urge to retch, but even as his body tried its best to pour out his stomach contents, nothing came out. Then something hit him, something like a large, blind animal fleeing at a hundred miles per hour.

It was a woman, a madwoman it seemed. She was wearing a white satin nightgown that looked like a full slip. The nightgown was entirely soaked with sweat that glued it to her bony body. Her short hair was wild, as though each strand were standing up in protest, her eyes filled with rage and confusion.

After she’d slammed her body into his, she stopped and looked up at his lacerated face. He hoped she wasn’t someone he’d harmed or nearly killed, someone who’d been in the torture chamber adjacent to his office, for he wanted sympathy, compassion from her. He wanted her to have pity on him, take him to her house and bandage him. Even if she despised him for some reason or another, he wanted her to help him, so he quickly mouthed the word “Tanpri,” Please, and heard the same word come out of her mouth at the same time, and he remembered how his mother used to say that when you spoke the exact same words as someone else at the exact same time, it meant that the two of you would die on the same day. He hoped that his plea merging with hers wouldn’t lead to her dying sooner than she was supposed to. Who was she, anyway? Was she a mother, a wife, a sister who was keeping a vigil for someone? Was she the one who called out “Jean” each time a new prisoner was brought in, the one in whose direction the officers and militiamen often shot?

He felt dizzy and, forgetting his own massive size and the fact that he could easily slam her down to the ground with his weight, he leaned toward her. She opened her arms and somehow managed to catch him and hold him upright. She was still looking closely at his face, her hands reaching over to touch his wounds in a way that seemed both healing and curious. She grabbed his head and sobbed in his hair.

“In there,” she said. “I need to go in there.”

“People who go in there,” he said slowly, “don’t come out.”

At that moment he would have done anything to keep her with him. Besides, he wasn’t lying. If she went in there, at that time of night, the men would make her all kinds of false promises, then have their way with her.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Quickly.”

She looked at his face again, reached up and picked a few large splinters out of the wound, then followed him.

His home wasn’t too far away. They walked fast, hurrying past the soccer stadium and the cemetery. Her body stiffened and she seemed to hold her breath until they passed the cemetery. He decided not to question her about that. Perhaps if she weren’t a little mad, she wouldn’t have been helping him at all.

10

When he got home, he stumbled onto the bare mattress on his bedroom floor and fell asleep. He didn’t care whether or not he bled to death, didn’t care about the cuts on his swelling face. He was happy she was there to watch him sleep or maybe even crawl up next to him and share his bed. In the morning, he would make all the important decisions that needed to be made, but for now all he wanted to do was slip into the kind of slumber from which it seemed there would be no awakening.

11

His face had stopped bleeding, but it was now covered with several layers of blood. She watched as the tint of the blood faded from bright red to dark brown to almost black.

The sun was coming up with a gentleness that surprised her. It was the reverse of what was happening to his face. First the black mist dulled to gray, then to the slight orange tint of a sunrise, then finally to the sheerness of glass.

From his louvered window, she watched an early-morning funeral procession on its way to the cemetery. There was no fanfare, no musical band accompanying the hearse and the family members walking behind it. Perhaps these people, who looked as though they were muffling their sobs with their dark handkerchiefs, were indigents who couldn’t afford a more elaborate afternoon funeral and were so ashamed of this that they preferred to bury their loved one when most people were still asleep.

Once the funeral procession had passed, she looked around his house for something to clean his even more enlarged face. The house was mostly empty save for the mattress he was lying on, a few pieces of clothing scattered here and there, some toiletries in the bathroom, and a few rusty forks and spoons in his kitchen. There was nothing with which to dress his wound. So she decided to go out and find a few pieces of ginger, a small bottle of honey, and some yerba buena with which to make an infusion for him.

On the street she did her best to avoid the cemetery. There were a few people out already, hurrying as if they were late for appointments made for the night before. She lowered her head as these people walked by her, staring.

There were only a few vendors in the open market when she arrived. The first one she approached, a skeletal dwarf with a large head, had a radio on, which was reporting some news from the night before. He had the ginger, yerba buena, and honey she needed, but she had no money to pay for anything. She didn’t even have any clothes on, aside from her nightgown.

The vendor told her she could have these things if she would come back later and pay him. They weren’t expensive, just five gourdes total, for everything.

“Are you buying these for a sick person?” he asked.

She nodded.

It occurred to her that maybe he was giving them to her because he thought she was a healer or a madwoman who all of a sudden was sobbing.

12

He was dreaming. Once again he was a boy in Léogâne, and he and his mother were working together in her garden. It was a cool morning and the sun was just rising, a golden mist surrounding them.

The earth was warm and moist when he touched it, the seedbeds smelling of decaying vegetable peel. As the sun rose higher in the sky, he could hear cocks crowing, dogs barking, birdcalls, and wings flapping, and his father gently moving toward his mother and himself to quietly watch them work before heading out to one of his early-morning mason lodge meetings.

Once more he was alone in the garden with his mother. Her long thick black hair, freed from the dark rag she usually kept it wrapped in, rose and fell on her shoulders in the morning breeze. Around them the seeds they’d planted together had magically taken root and were turning into trees-mango, papaya, guava, and avocado trees. From among the roots, herbs, and healing weeds, his mother reached down and plucked a bundled fern, a fèy wònt, a mimosa pudica or shame plant. She took one of his hands and guided it toward the tiny leaflets. When his index finger touched the prickly spine, the little leaves collapsed onto themselves as if to shut him out. She motioned for him to wait a while, for she never spoke in his dreams, and magically the leaves turned outward and reopened. She encouraged him to try this a few more times, tapping the shame plant to watch it close, then open and close once more. Then she handed him a sprig, motioning for him to hold on to it.

His dream abruptly ended with the sound of his front door being opened and shut. He sat up quickly to receive his visitor, reaching for his.38 where he usually kept it on the floor near the mattress by his head. But he didn’t find it there. Emptied of bullets, it had remained, like his car and his hidden money, at the barracks. Then the events of the previous night came back to the forefront of his mind. The wait. The church. The minister. The shots. His throbbing, itching face, which felt as though it were being clawed. And this woman, this woman who had opened and closed his door, this woman who was standing there in a nightgown or a slip, covered with dirt and blood (his blood?), her eyes reddened, her face streaked with tears. This woman, she was holding a bottle of honey, three pieces of ginger, and a sprig of yerba buena that she probably meant to pound into some concoction to place on the wound on his face. This woman? Who was she again?

He was afraid to ask her name, afraid that he would recognize it. Maybe she was someone he’d been with before, someone he’d once brought home when he was too drunk to remember.

He was relieved when she asked a question first. And though she looked shell-shocked and insane, her voice didn’t sound it. It was as calm as a stream or one of those tranquil brooks his mother was repeatedly taking him to in his dreams.

“What did they do to you?” she asked.

This was the most forgiving question he’d ever been asked. It suddenly opened a door, produced a small path, which he could follow.

“I’m free,” he said. “I finally escaped.”

Her posture was crooked, but her mind seemed clear. She had placed her wares on the floor, laid them out one by one at the foot of the mattress.

One day he would try to make her understand why he’d put it like that. In many ways it was true. He had escaped from his life. He could no longer return to it, no longer wanted to.

He would tell her the real truth later, much later, once he’d told her a series of other things, about his mother, his father, the garden, Léogâne.

What made him think there would be a later? Why was he so sure that she wasn’t going to walk out on him in the next minute, the next hour, even the next day? Because she also looked as though there was something she was anxious to tell. Perhaps it was the thing that just then was making her cry. Or maybe it was the answer to those very questions that he so wanted to ask: Why had she been outside the prison so late at night? Who was she waiting for?

It was obvious that she now felt she’d been there to save him, to usher him back home and heal him.

13

It would be impossible to explain all that followed, to her daughter or to anyone. It wasn’t that she thought the fat man was her half brother, the one who’d disappeared into the sea so long ago, that this girth, this vastness was something the youngest child in her family had garnered from his lost years of inhaling seawater and weeds. It wasn’t that she thought he’d emerged from the cemetery, enlarged by the bones and souls of other ghosts. It wasn’t that she believed he could help her find her stepbrother, the minister, the one they’d just arrested and taken to jail the night before. It wasn’t that she was thinking of the selfsacrificing martyrs who now made miracles possible: Saint Rose de Lima, who’d sanded and blistered her face with peppers to avoid vanity; Saint Veronica, who wiped floors with her tongue; or Saint Solange, who, after being decapitated, had carried her own head to a church altar. It wasn’t even that it had occurred to her that if he wasn’t one of her brothers he was surely someone else’s, who had just surfaced from another kind of grave. Maybe it was none of these things. Maybe it was all of them. Plus a hollow grief extended over all these years, a penance procession that has yet to end.

A few minutes later, when he got his landlord, the doctor, out of bed to sew his face, she watched from a corner as the doctor pulled a silver thread in and out of his skin. It seemed like some kind of torture, the type you might inflict on someone you truly hated, but he didn’t seem very pained from it. Heeding the doctor’s warning that if he grimaced too much or insisted on smoking a cigarette while his wound was being sewed, his face would heal in a way that would make him look like a monster, he remained still until the doctor was done.

She couldn’t easily remember when she’d first heard that her stepbrother, the preacher, had died. It might have been from the vendor’s radio, the one that was giving the news that morning. Or it may have been from the doctor’s casual chatter, something about “a preacher from Bel-Air killing himself at Casernes.” But she’d slipped out of her own body then, just as now.

When her daughter called her from Lakeland after her husband’s confession to ask, “Manman, how do you love him?” she was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a piece of pie. It was not what she thought she’d be doing when that question finally came. Like her husband, she’d thought she might be on a trip, some kind of journey with her daughter. She had imagined the two of them, just the girls, on the ocean, on a cruise liner or some other place from which her daughter couldn’t escape. But here they are, thousands of miles apart and not even looking into each other’s eyes as she attempts an explanation.

“He tell you?” Instead she replies with another question.

“Yes,” the daughter says. Her voice is cold and dry, unlike the high-pitched shrill it was when she’d been so worried about her father’s disappearance earlier. From the tone of her daughter’s voice, she gathers that their child is already passing judgment on them. And she hasn’t even heard the whole story.

She puts her spoon down next to her half-eaten piece of pie, walks over to the garbage pail, and drops it in. Now she’s tapping her fingers against the telephone mouthpiece and clicking her tongue, to eliminate the distracting silence all around her.

“Is there more?” the daughter says. And she sounds afraid that the “more,” the rest, the whole story could be worse than what she’s already heard.

Unlike her husband, she would never know how to tell a story like this, how to decipher all the details and make sense of them. But this much she wants her daughter to know.

“What he told you, he want to tell you for long time,” she hears herself whispering now in her awful English. But in her head, her words have a little more order. It was a miracle, be it a sad one. The day after she met her daughter’s father, he used most of the money he was keeping in his mattress to procure them passage on a Pan American flight to New York. And he had never killed anyone again.

When they arrived in New York and an old army friend of his met them at the airport and he introduced her as his wife, she did not disagree. Theirs became a kind of benevolent collaboration, a conspirational friendship. With few others to turn to, it became love. Yes, love. But not the kind of love her daughter or girls like her stumbled into or might expect one day. It was a more strained kind of attachment, yet she could no longer imagine her life without it.

In the early years, there had been more silence than words between them. But when their daughter was born, they were forced to talk to and about her. And when their daughter began to talk back, it made things all that much easier. She was like an orator at a pantomime. She was their Ka, their good angel.

After her daughter was born, she and her husband would talk about her brother. But only briefly. He referring to his “last prisoner,” the one that scarred his face, and she to “my stepbrother, the famous preacher,” neither of them venturing beyond these coded utterances, dreading the day when someone other than themselves would more fully convene the two halves of this same person.

He endorsed the public story, the one that the preacher had killed himself. And she accepted that he had only arrested him and turned him over to someone else. Neither believing the other nor themselves. But never delving too far back in time, beyond the night they met. She never saw any of the articles that were eventually written about her brother’s death. She was too busy concentrating on and revising who she was now, or who she wanted to become.

In the middle of all this incoherent muttering, she realized that her daughter had hung up the phone. Or maybe the phone had come out of the wall while she was pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor. There was now a strange mechanical voice on the line telling her to “hang up and try again.”

She wished she had someone with her now, to get her past the silence that would follow the trying again. She was no longer used to this particular type of loneliness, this feeling that you could be alive or dead and no one would know. She had hoped to close the call by saying something tender and affectionate to her daughter, something like, “You are mine and I love you.” Or maybe she would reach for a now useless cliché, one that she had been reciting to herself all these years, that atonement, reparation, was possible and available for everyone. Or maybe she would think of some unrelated anecdote, a parable, another miracle story, or even some pleasantry, a joke. Anything to keep them both talking. But her daughter was already gone, lost, accidentally or purposely, in the hum of the dial tone.

There was no way to escape this dread anymore, this pendulum between regret and forgiveness, this fright that the most important relationships of her life were always on the verge of being severed or lost, that the people closest to her were always disappearing. The spirits had long since stopped coming through her body via her mysterious spells, which she now knew had a longish name with a series of nearly redundant syllables. These spirits, they’d left her for good the morning that the news was broadcast on the radio that her brother had set his body on fire in the prison yard at dawn, leaving behind no corpse to bury, no trace of himself at all.