Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

She tries for pea size, but it’s not enough, and he tries to tell her, but the effort sends him into a coughing fit. He drops the teeth, and I have to catch them so they won’t fall onto the floor.

It is the first time I have touched the teeth.

I did not want to touch the teeth.

They are cold in my hand, and wet from his mouth, and sticky from the failed attempts to get the paste right.

I look up at his mouth, and he stops coughing and closes his eyes. His breathing is all wrong, starts and stops. His mouth hangs limp and loose like the mouths of many old people I have known, but it is different with my grandfather, because he is my grandfather. It’s not right for him to be dying here without his teeth, and I decide that I will finish the job. I will apply the paste and put the teeth into his mouth and stay here beside the bed until he dies to make sure that no one takes them out, or, to be more specific, that my grandmother doesn’t come back and tell the nurses to take them out.

But that’s not what happens. What happens is my mother and my father walk back into the room and take charge, ask what is taking so long with the teeth. The nurse snaps to attention, and she’s suddenly competent, takes the teeth from my hand and expands the drop of paste to pea-size, and then two more, one on each side, half an inch from the last molar.

She presses the teeth into my grandfather’s gums, and they stick, and for a few minutes he rallies. He asks if I’m still writing a book about him, and I lie, I say yes, and he knows it’s a lie, and I know it’s a lie, and it’s a lie that pleases him, and I wish for more lies, a hundred lies, a thousand beautiful lies, any ugliness that will nourish him.

I.

Rev. Samuel Tillotson, Baptist Mission, Koulèv-Ville, Haiti, to Mr. Leslie Ratliff, Principal, Good Shepherd Academy, West Palm Beach, Florida, June 11, 1983.

Technically, Leslie, and in keeping with the practice we’re supposed to maintain around here, I’m supposed to be writing to thank you for visiting last month with your graduating seniors, and for the gifts toward the 44 cubic ft. refrigerator for the mission and the new stone cistern for the village and especially the ionized oxygen allotrope gas (IAOG) water filtration system, which, I’ll admit, this place has badly needed for as long as I can remember. I’m also supposed to make you aware of our other needs, among them the replacement diesel generator, the razor-wire project to replace the broken-glass deterrent atop the mission walls, and 142 sponsorships for our planned expansion of the school-and-food project at the Angels of Mercy orphanage up the road.

In many ways, though, it pains me to make you aware of any of it, or to give you the missionary song and dance at all, really. The best thing about seeing you again was taking those long walks out into the village where we could be candid. Leslie, I’m lonely, and wanting for candidness these days. The mission board is threatening to yank thirteen percent of our funding, which means whoever first talks out of turn in front of someone else gets sent home without so much as a kiss goodbye, so here lately I’m silent as a monk. The Haitians are candid among themselves, but not with me. They look at me and all they see is a walking cash machine, and who could blame them? Good people like you come to visit, and we’re not to be candid with you, either, because you’re our cash machine. We scam people, Leslie. The last two groups before you — the bonnet-heads from Pennsylvania I told you about, and the Alabama rednecks whose minister kept sneaking off with his dip can — Brother Joe told Henri, our driver, to take the good tires off the truck before he picked them up from the airport, and put on the old worn-out set instead. Right there in the airport parking lot, he shows the tires to the group leaders, says, “Times are hard. I hope we make it to the mission on those things.” Sure enough, on the way there, both times, one of the tires blows out, and Henri gets out to patch it, and up there in the back of the truck, the group leader is already calculating how much for each tire, and how quickly he can wire the money from the States.

I wouldn’t let them do that to you, Leslie. I probably ought not let them do it to anyone at all, but you have to pick your battles. Remember Professor Phelps, our first year at old Apalachicola Bible College, talking equality this and justice that? He was right, and we all knew it, or ought to have known it: They should’ve been letting blacks into that college all along. But, thinking about it, if Phelps had just kept his mouth shut, say, four more years, history would have caught up to him, because they let the blacks into Apalachicola Bible College eventually anyway, didn’t they? But they never let Phelps back in, ever. That’s something I think about from time to time, when I’m thinking about opening my mouth. Wise as serpents, harmless as doves, the Scripture says.

Enough griping. Here’s the real reason I’m writing you. It’s obvious you are running a quality school up there in West Palm Beach. Your students were uniformly well-behaved, and more mature than many of the ones we get from the church groups or even the college groups. I found them to be highly intelligent, cooperative, and given to the highest standards of moral uprightness. No doubt you think of them as children, since you have seen them along their journey since they were children. But to a person like me, meeting them for the first time at the ages of seventeen and, mostly, eighteen, they didn’t really seem like children so much as they seemed like the young adults they have become. They have graduated now, Leslie, and you have turned them loose into the world knowing that you’ve done your job well. It must be hard for you, to turn them loose, but every year you do it, and I imagine it brings you not a little sadness to go along with your hard-earned pride.

One of these students in particular, the young lady named Sheila Brocken, impressed me even more than most. From day one, it was clear that she was not here to pal around with her girlfriends or have a Third World frolic or impress the boys. She was here to touch the lives of others. You should have seen her up there, Leslie, at Angels of Mercy, combing the little girls’ hair, braiding it, placing beads. Or upstairs, where they keep the retarded kids, touching their faces, picking them up, spinning them around in circles until they were giddy with laughter.

I’m not the only one who noticed Sheila, either. The day after the field trip to our hospital, one of the nurses came over to see me. You met her, remember? Yvonne, from Gonaïves? Sheila’s whole day, Yvonne told me, was spent down in the hospital basement, where we keep the pregnant girls, the ready-to-pop girls who don’t have families, or whose families don’t have a place for them. Haiti is a grim place for girls like these, Leslie. We can only keep them until the babies arrive, and then they’re on their own, and they know it. But this girl of yours, this Sheila, she was only four days in country, and she had already learned the words for good , for beautiful . All day she was touching their faces, touching their swollen bellies, saying bon, bel, bon, bel , and even more than the words was the way she said them, her smile, which — I agree with what Yvonne said — it was like an angel had come down from heaven to lift us all a little closer to it for a little while.

That last day you were here, Leslie, in the morning — I hope you will forgive this small indiscretion — I went to see Sheila before breakfast. My motives were not ulterior, I assure you. It’s just that I had observed in her these very special qualities of faith and goodness, and others had observed them in her as well, and I felt it was my duty, as host and representative of the mission, to praise and encourage these qualities, and to let her know, on behalf of the Baptist Mission, how much I appreciated the way she cared for the children and young women under our care.