Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

Brother Joe stood there and watched us with his arms crossed. At first he looked angry, but then he looked scared. His foot was tapping. I felt for him. Real softly, I touched his shoulder. I said, “Brother Joe, we really need your help right now.”

He kind of dropped his gaze and went into the storehouse and came back out half-dragging a hundred-pound bag of rice. He helped us and didn’t complain anymore. The four of us hauled all that food out by the gate. Then Sam climbed up so his head was sticking up over the gates. He started calling names. Pierre, Carlo, Kenel, Michel, Victor. I did not see any of them standing nearby, but they were friends. Sam knew they would be watching over us. They came from the places where they were hiding, and told the other people near the gates to stand aside. Sam told them about the food. He said it was a gift to the village to celebrate the flight of the Duvalier family from the country. He said we were going to open the gate, and would the people stand back so we could bring the food outside?

Pierre and Kenel began to yell orders to everyone to stand aside, and because they are such big men and so respected in the village, people backed away as they approached. Sam came down from the wall, and he said, “Move fast, because there’s gonna be a crush.”

We opened the gate to about three feet wide. Pierre and Kenel stood guard at the threshold. Sam, Joe, T. C., and I lifted, carried, and dragged the various bags and boxes of food outside. Right away the people began to press in on us, to get at the food. Carlo, Michel, and Victor called for orderliness. Pierre and Kenel crossed their arms. At first, that was enough to slow the press, but now people were coming from all over the village. Others came from the direction of the road and the smoke. People running, people yelling, people whistling for more people. The noise of it was astounding. “It’s too much,” Brother Joe said. He was yelling over the din. Sam nodded his assent. I noticed that we were all waiting for Sam’s assent. When he nodded, we went back inside the gates. Pierre and Kenel helped hold people off as we closed them.

Plenty of the extra food was still inside the gate. “What now?” Brother Joe said. Now he was looking to Sam, too. It seemed to trouble Sam that Brother Joe was treating him as the leader, even though you would think it was what he had wanted all along. Maybe it wasn’t. He said, “Brother Joe, should we haul the rest back into the storehouse? In case somebody peeks over the wall and sees it?”

Brother Joe seemed to expand to full size again in response to Sam’s deference. “We don’t want them breaching the gates,” he said. We hauled it all back into the storehouse. It was probably half what we had hauled out.

Now Kenel was calling out from the other side of the gates. Sam and Brother Joe, both, went running toward him. T. C. saw him running and said, “Would you look at that?” It was strange to see Brother Joe in fast motion, a man his size. We had never seen him at the gates before except to come and go. Now he climbed up alongside Sam, and they poked their heads over the top to speak with Kenel.

By now the noise from the other side was such that we could not hear what they were saying. After a while, they both jumped down and headed toward the residences. Brother Joe went right past us without saying a word, but Sam put a hand on T. C.’s shoulder and mine and said, “Best get on in with your families now.” Then he went in, too.

Me and T. C. followed as far as the exterior doors to the residences. T. C. stopped me there. He had something to say. I encouraged him to come out with it. He said, “I keep a.22 in Thelma’s personal drawer. I keep it loaded. I love my children.”

I don’t think at the moment he was worried about the mission board’s rules against guns or any such thing. At the moment, I wished I had one, too. T. C. said, “You want, you bring Patty and the kids over, and we’ll hunker down together.”

I didn’t know what to do. “You think,” I said, “a little.22 is gonna keep us safe?”

“Nope,” T. C. said. He didn’t even blink. “Thelma’s in there with the kids praying, and I don’t know if that will make a difference beyond calming them all down some.” He was probably doing the recent missionary death tally, same as me. Luc Preval, in Gonaïves. Ed Reelitz, up in Okap. Ben Miller, in Les Cayes. Salvador Arruza, in Carrefour. Even the natural causes, like the heart attack that took Brother Joe’s Junie last fall. The Lord’s ways are not our own.

Brother Joe came out again with his canteen on his belt, and saw us and said, “Get on inside.”

“You, too,” T. C. said.

Sam came outside and said, “Brother Joe, you ready?”

Brother Joe nodded. “You fellas aren’t welcome to join us,” he said, “but they’re up there busting up the water station.”

“You think you’re gonna stop them?” T. C. said.

“I think we’re gonna go up there with Pierre and Kenel and tell them to come get the rest of our extra food,” Sam said. “Ya’ll better haul it out again.”

Brother Joe was nodding, even though he had just told us to get inside. The color was out of his face. I could tell he didn’t want to go up to the water station, but he didn’t want Sam to go when he himself wouldn’t go, either. It was a matter of his own pride working on him, I think.

T. C. tried to let Brother Joe off the hook. “Let Sam go,” he said. “Pierre and Kenel will take good care of him. We need you here. All this extra food is too much for me and Larry to haul out alone again.”

Brother Joe just shook his head. The two of them walked toward the gates, and then they scaled them together. They disappeared to the other side, their bodies first, then their heads.

T. C. said we better wait a little while to start hauling the food out. It took forty or fifty minutes to walk to the water station, and it seemed risky to leave the food very long in an open sightline of any heads that might raise themselves over the walls. The broken glass on top of the mission walls didn’t seem much a deterrent anymore. I went inside and got Patty and the kids and we went over to T. C.’s and brought some blankets and spread them out on the floor and we all lay down on them and stayed real still.

By then it was starting to get dark. With the generator out and the dark out the windows and all the truly terrifying sounds — the vodou drums unsettling, but the familiar uses of the human voice-box worse — it was all we could do to keep calm. The children, ours and the Johnson’s, were preternaturally calm. I feared some kind of shock had taken them. Thelma and Patty prayed in whispers, and T. C. and I spelled them here and there, just to keep soothing voices in play. Every once in a while, the orange red of some roaring fire someplace up the mountain flared up high enough to be visible against the dark of the window.

None of us gave thought enough to Sam’s wife, Sheila. All that time, she was alone. It was Patty who realized it first. She leaned against me on the blanket on the floor and said, “Oh no, Larry. Sheila.”

T. C. overheard and said, “We got to go out and get the food, anyway, Larry.”

We went out into the hallway, toward the old housekeeper’s suite where she and Sam stayed. She didn’t answer when I knocked. T. C. said, “She’s scared.” I said, “Sheila, honey, it’s me and T. C.,” and right away regretted talking to her like a child, saying honey. Sam was always hair-trigger sensitive to anybody saying anything to her that made her feel like a child.

But when she came to the door, she looked for all the world like a child. Her face was ashen and tear-streaked, and her hair was disheveled, and she was a girl whose hair was never disheveled, even after whole days spent in the village. I felt the weight of conviction, looking at her, knowing she had been in there alone and afraid all this time. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said.