Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

I’m sure it was quite a sight, the three of us parading those suitcases through the mission. You should have seen all the extraneous material in those suitcases. Blowdryers, curling irons, hot rollers, makeup boxes, all varieties of shoes, cassette tape players and headphones, all manners of shoes and clothing, dolls and stuffed animals, books and magazines, a small record player and stereo system, bubble-wrapped record albums, colored pens and pencils and drawing papers, feminine sundries, boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes, a typewriter, postage stamps and envelopes, rolled wall posters, a snorkel and fins set.

I pulled Brother Tillotson aside and asked him if he had given any thought to the matter of where Sheila would be housed, much less where her things would be housed. “My room,” he said, not having given a moment’s thought, obviously, to the notion that perhaps his room was too small to house a larger bed, too spartan to house a woman, too full already to accommodate all the possessions she had seen fit to bring. “It’s not as though she overpacked for a holiday,” Brother Tillotson explained to me. “She’s come here to make a home.”

How, Ervin, could I spell it out for him? How could I help him come to terms with the deep and abiding nature of his selfishness? Surely this girl had not undergone a period of preparation for living in a country such as ours, with all its hardships. Surely he had not considered the strain upon our facilities and resources which she now represented. Surely we had not been party or even privy to the decision-making process by which he had imposed her upon us.

Immediately and right away, the other women began to complain about her. Sheila in her vanity was burning the available electricity early, every day, running her hair dryers and her curling irons. Sheila was running around in shorts rather than dresses, her bare long legs hanging out in contravention of the long tradition of women in this place. Sheila was out in the village with the boys and their drums, teaching them American rock and roll songs instead of hymns, or doing the hymns themselves as though they were American rock and roll songs. Sheila’s French was abysmal, and instead of bringing it up to speed, she was privileging the local Creole she was learning out in the village, and in so doing, setting an example that would keep the lower classes low, in contravention again of our long practice. On Sunday mornings, Sheila was overdoing it with the lipstick and the eyeshadow, overdoing it with the brightly colored dresses, making a show of herself that made the other women feel less desirable themselves, that made them worry that their own husbands’ heads would be turned inappropriately, not because their husbands were bad men, but because their husbands were, quite simply, men, and it is the responsibility of a godly woman, they wanted to tell her (and did, repeatedly), to avoid making herself into an unhealthy distraction.

Brother Tillotson, for his part, was not strongly receptive to various kinds of advice and wise counsel offered for his benefit by others on our staff. To the contrary, he was full of suggestions for how we might adjust to Sheila, for how we might better understand Sheila, for how we might make Sheila more comfortable. Now, Ervin, I am not suggesting that it is inappropriate for a man to wish to please his beloved, nor am I suggesting that there isn’t more we could have done on our part to ease the transition despite its having so caught us by surprise. But many of these suggestions seemed less like suggestions than demands, and they were quite often couched in rather manipulative phrasings that made them difficult to properly deflect. For example, the matter of housing. “I can’t help but notice,” Brother Tillotson said, “how Brother T. C. and Sister Thelma, or Brother Larry and Sister Patty, are quartered in large bedrooms with large beds, attached to private bathrooms, while me and Sheila are still in a tiny outer room where we have to walk to single-sex community showers with the staff members who are single. Haven’t I been here longer than any of them? Don’t I outrank them? For me, I don’t mind, but now I have a family to think about. I have Sheila to think about.”

This argument extended to his stipend. It is true that single staffers are paid fairly less than married staffers, and that a married man must think about putting money away for his eventual return to the States. But when we evaluate staff members for our mission, we evaluate them as single or married people, and make our choices taking into account their own character and the character of their spouses, and the resulting financial need, with an eye toward our own budget. Certainly we would expect that some of our single staff members would one day want to marry, but we would expect a reasonable time of waiting, and a conversation within our community about the marriage. That way, we could help prepare the couple for marriage, offer wise counsel to the intendeds, make budgetary and housing arrangements for the year forthcoming. I’ll admit, Ervin, to losing my patience with Brother Tillotson after one of these conversations. I’ll admit to speaking to his selfishness, dragging that girl down here. “But now, friend,” I told him, “what’s done is done.” I said we would revisit the salary issues at the annual board meeting, but for now we could move the Haitian maids out of the housekeeping suite and move him and Sheila into their place.

Mind you, Ervin, this room moving was quite the undertaking. I would estimate I personally lost three days of mission work accomplishing it. The maids were understandably upset to be so uprooted, and, strangely, they bore no ill will toward Sheila or Brother Tillotson, but reserved all of it for me, the decision maker. They were afraid we would move them out to the village, which perhaps we should have done, because they had grown unnecessarily fat in the comfort of the mission. Instead, Brother Tillotson, Brother Johnson, and I refurbished six storage areas, which, with the room the Tillotsons had abandoned, provided seven single-occupant rooms for the maids. We expanded the women’s shower from three nozzles to five, and my Junie even made new cloth privacy curtains to replace the old ones, which had grown rather moldy and raggedy. Brother Tillotson negotiated a price with a man who had some wooded property up the mountain a ways, chopped down eight pine trees, hauled them to a warehouser in Pétion-Ville, traded them for the cured cedar boards Sheila coveted, and fashioned by hand a new queen size canopied bed for his and Sheila’s new room, with matching nightstands and a five-drawer dresser. For all the concerns I have about Brother Tillotson, his woodwork is not one of them. Ervin, the only word I can use to describe this bed is decadent — sheer lines, intricate woodcuts up and down the four posters — the whole thing done without benefit of table saw, belt sander, lathe, or router. It cost Brother Tillotson three weeks of evenings in his own labor. When he was done, he drove down to the shop in Port where Michèle Duvalier herself buys bedroom furniture, somehow established a line of credit, and returned with a queen size mattress, bedsprings, black silk bed-skirts, and a garish silk canopy, the color a deep garnet fit for the Queen of Sheba.

I did not and will not begrudge a man nice things, especially nice things made nice by the sweat of a man’s own brow. The problem with the bed was not its luxury. The problem with the bed was the noises that came from it, night after night, often late into the night, disturbing the sleep of other men’s wives, causing troublesome questions child to parent. An informal council of married men was convened, not out of secrecy or malice or any other ill motive, but in order to come to a decision about how to handle the matter of the bed and the noise quietly and delicately, with a minimum of embarrassment to either of the offending parties. After much prayer and discussion, we decided that the wise course of action would be to invite Brother Tillotson into our meeting that very day, and confront him directly about the noise, to say, as married men ourselves, we understood the prerogatives of the newly wedded, and that we were not people who bought into the idea that God is some kind of cosmic killjoy, that we knew full well that the pleasures of the marriage bed are God-ordained, and that he and his bride had our blessing on their goings-on, not that our blessing was necessary. But that we requested — out of courtesy, out of decency — that they keep it down in there, bearing in mind that the designers of the mission had been strategic in placing the old housekeepers’ quarters quite centrally, so that the maids could have quick and efficient access to the beds they were expected to make daily, and that the unforeseen placement of the Tillotsons in the housekeeping suite had the unexpected side-effect of making efficient the broadcasting of the noises coming from inside.