Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

“We’ve passed the cemetery,” she heard her daughter say.

Anne had closed her eyes without realizing it. Her daughter knew she reacted strongly to cemeteries, but Anne had never told her why, since her daughter had already concluded early in life that this, like many unexplained aspects of her parents’ life, was connected to “some event that happened in Haiti.”

“I’m glad Papa doesn’t have your issues with cemeteries,” the daughter was saying, “otherwise we’d be in the cemetery ourselves by now.”

The daughter pulled out a cigarette, which the father objected to with the wave of a hand. A former chain-smoker, he could no longer stand the smell of cigarettes.

“When you out the car,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” the daughter replied, putting the loose cigarette back in its pack. She turned her face to the bare trees lining her side of the parkway and said, “Okay, Manman, please, tell us about another miracle.”

A long time ago, more than thirty years ago, in Haiti, your father worked in a prison, where he hurt many people. Now look at him. Look how calm he is. Look how patient he is. Look how he just drove forty miles, to your apartment in Westchester, to pick you up for Christmas Eve Mass . That was the miracle Anne wanted to share with her daughter on this Christmas Eve night, the simple miracle of her husband’s transformation, but of course she couldn’t, at least not yet, so instead she told of another kind of miracle.

This one concerned a twenty-one-year-old Filipino man who’d seen an image of the Madonna in a white rose petal.

She thought her daughter would dismiss this and just say, “Cool,” but instead she actually asked a question. “How come these people are all foreigners?”

“Because Americans don’t have much faith,” her husband quickly replied, turning his face for a moment to glance at his daughter.

“People here are more practical, maybe,” the daughter said, “but there, in Haiti or the Philippines, that’s where people see everything, even things they’re not supposed to see. So if I see a woman’s face in a rose, I’d think somebody drew it there, but if you see it, Manman, you think it’s a miracle.”

They were coming off the Jackie Robinson Parkway and turning onto Jamaica Avenue, where traffic came to an abrupt stop at the busy intersection. Anne tried to take her mind off the past and bring her thoughts back to the Mass. She loved going to Mass on Christmas Eve, the only time she and her husband and daughter ever attended church together.

When her daughter was a girl, before going to the Christmas Eve Mass, they would drive around their Brooklyn neighborhood to look at the holiday lights. Their community associations were engaged in fierce competition, awarding a prize to the block with the best Nativity scenes, lawn sculptures, wreaths, and banners. Still, Anne and her husband had put up no decorations, fearing, irrationally perhaps, that lit ornaments and trimmings would bring too much attention to them. Instead it was their lack of participation that made them stand out, but by then they had already settled into their routine and couldn’t bring themselves to change it.

When her daughter was still living at home, the only way Anne honored the season with her daughter-aside from attending the Christmas Eve Mass-was to put a handful of shredded brown paper under her daughter’s bed without her knowledge. The frayed paper was a substitute for the hay that had been part of the baby Jesus’ first bed. Over her bedroom doorway, she also hung a sprig of mistletoe. She’d once heard a mistletoe vendor say that mistletoe had all sorts of reconciliatory qualities, so that if two enemies ever found themselves beneath it, they would have to lay down their weapons and embrace each other.

By offering neither each other nor their daughter any presents at Christmas, Anne and her husband had tried to encourage her to be thankful for what she already had- family, a roof over her head-rather than count on what she would, or could, receive on Christmas morning. Their daughter had learned this lesson so well that Christmas no longer interested her. She didn’t care about shopping; she didn’t watch the endless specials on TV. The only part of the holiday the daughter seemed to enjoy was the drive from block to block to criticize the brightest houses.

“Look at that one,” her husband would shout, pointing to the arches of icicle lights draped over one house from top to bottom. “Can you imagine how high their electricity bill is going to be?”

“I wouldn’t be able to sleep in a place like that,” the daughter would say, singling out a neon holiday greeting in a living room window. “It must be as bright as daylight in there, all the time.”

The traffic was flowing again. As they approached St. Thérèse’s, her husband and daughter were engaged in their own Christmas ritual, her husband talking about the astronomical cost of Christmas decorations and her daughter saying that one lavishly decorated house after another looked like “an inferno.” Meanwhile, Anne tried to think of the Christmas carols they would sing during the Mass. “Silent Night” was her favorite. She hummed the peaceful melody and mouthed the words in anticipation.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

The church was packed even though the Mass would not begin for another fifteen minutes. Their daughter was outside in the cold, smoking. Anne and her husband found three seats in the next-to-last row, near a young couple who were holding hands and staring ahead at the altar. Anne sat next to the woman, who acknowledged her with a nod as Anne squeezed into the pew.

The daughter soon joined them, plopping herself down on the aisle, next to her father. Anne had tried to convince her to wear a dress, or at least a skirt and a blouse, but she had insisted on wearing her paint-stained blue jeans and a lint-covered sweater.

Anne thought the church most beautiful at Christmas. The Nativity scene in front of the altar had a black Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus, the altar candles casting a golden light on their mahogany faces. The sight of people greeting one another around her made her wish that she and her husband had more friends, beyond acquaintances from their respective businesses: the beauty salon and the barbershop. She was beginning to rethink the decision she and her husband had made not to get close to anyone who might ask too many questions about his past. They had set up shop on Nostrand Avenue, at the center of the Haitian community, only because that was where they had the best chance of finding clients. And the only reason they rented the rooms in their basement to three younger Haitian men was because they were the only people who would live there. Besides, soon after her husband had opened his barbershop, he’d discovered that since he’d lost eighty pounds, changed his name, and given as his place of birth a village deep in the mountains of Léogâne, no one asked about him anymore, thinking he was just a peasant who’d made good in New York. He hadn’t been a famous “dew breaker,” or torturer, anyway, just one of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again.

The church grew silent as the priest walked in and bowed before the altar. It was exactly midnight. Midnight on Christmas Eve was Anne’s favorite sixty seconds of the year. It was a charmed minute, not just for her but, she imagined, for the entire world. It was the time when birds were supposed to begin chirping their all-night songs to greet the holy birth, when other animals were to genuflect and trees bow in reverence. She could picture all this as though it were being projected on a giant screen in a movie theater: water in secret wells and far-off rivers and streams was turning into wine; bells were chiming with help only from the breeze; candles, lanterns, and lamps were blinking like the Star of Bethlehem. The gates of Paradise were opened, so anyone who died this minute could enter without passing through Purgatory. The Virgin Mary was choosing among the sleeping children of the world for some to invite to Heaven to serenade her son.