Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

We celebrate with her by holding hands and twisting our way through the narrow spaces between the tables.

“And you, Freda, what are you going to do now?” an out-of-breath Mariselle asks when we stop.

“I’m going back,” I say, sinking into a chair. “I’m going to join a militia and return to fight.”

Both Mariselle and Rézia laugh so loud that it’s all I can hear for some time. Not the fan twirling overhead or the trickle of rum and wine from bottle to glass.

“Look, it’s the seventies,” I protest. “Look at Fidel Castro. He had women with him.”

They’re still laughing, but also drinking. Laughing and drinking.

“It’s not that.” Mariselle is doubled over, clinging to her belly, chortling. “It’s just that if you join a militia, we’ll soon be reading about you .”

“If you join a militia, you’ll die.” Rézia stops to wipe her damp forehead with her vetiver-scented hankie that now looks like a surrender flag. “Then who will sing at your funeral?”

The room is quiet now, except for the fan spinning overhead and a car horn blaring outside. Mariselle throws her head back, empties her entire glass in her mouth, then flings it across the room. We watch it fly, then land on the wall, breaking into a torrent of little pieces.

“Hey!” Rézia shuffles over with a broom and dustpan to pick up the shards. “Don’t wreck my place. If I didn’t have this place, I’d be as crazy as the two of you.”

“We’re not crazy.” Mariselle tries to get up, but her knees buckle under her and she falls back in her chair.

“Freda, why don’t you do it now?” Mariselle says. “Why don’t you sing your own funeral song?”

“We’ll help you,” Rézia chimes in from where she’s sweeping up glass across the room.

I clear my throat to show them that I can do it, am willing to do it, sing my own funeral song. Why not?

And that’s how I begin my final performance as a funeral singer, or any kind of singer at all.

I sing “Brother Timonie.” Brother Timonie, Brother Timonie, we row on without you. But I’ll know we’ll meet again.

Rézia and Mariselle catch on quickly and join in. We sing until our voices grow hoarse, sometimes making Brother Timonie a sister.

When we’ve exhausted poor Timonie, we move on to a few more songs, happier songs. And for the rest of the night we raise our glasses, broken and unbroken alike, to the terrible days behind us and the uncertain ones ahead.

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.