Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

The way he acted at the inquisitions in his own private cell at Casernes eventually earned him a lofty reputation among his peers. He was the one who came up with the most physically and psychologically taxing trials for the prisoners in his block. He was suffering, he knew it now, from what one of his most famous victims, the novelist Jacques Alexis, had written was the greatest hazard of the job. Tu deviens un véritable gendarme, un bourreau. It was becoming like any other job. He liked questioning the prisoners, teaching them to play zo and bezik, stapling clothespins to their ears as they lost and removing them as he let them win, convincing them that their false victories would save their lives. He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn’t hear the orders he was shouting at them, tie blocks of concrete to the end of sisal ropes and balance them off their testicles if they were men or their breasts if they were women.

When one of the women who had been his prisoner at Casernes was interviewed three decades later for a documentary film in her tiny restaurant in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, the gaunt, stoop-shouldered octogenarian, it was said, would stammer for an hour before finally managing to speak, pausing for a breath between each word. She couldn’t remember his name, nor could she even imagine what he might look like these days, yet she swore she could never get him out of her head.

“I know they say ‘the fish don’t see the water,’ ” she would say, “but this one, he saw the water fine. He used to call me by my name. He’d lean close to my ears to tell me, ‘Valia, I truly hate to unwoman you. Valia, don’t let me unwoman you. Valia, tell me where your husband is and I won’t cut out your… I can’t even say it the way he said it. I refuse to say it the way he did. He’d wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he’d wound you again. He thought he was God.”

“I know my God and I’m placing myself in His hands,” the preacher said as he devoured his supper of four squares of pulpy bread and a steaming cup of ginger tea. The preacher was dressed in his best cream jacket and vest ensemble, one he usually wore on Sundays with a striped red and ocher tie.

The preacher was a dapper man, graceful and elegant, in spite of his disproportionately long limbs, which appeared slightly unbalanced with the rest of his body.

At his long mahogany table, which he’d designed and built himself for meals with church members, the preacher was surrounded by three of his deacons, who were trying to convince him to cancel the evening service and stay home.

“Let the people come to you tonight,” suggested the senior deacon, a house builder who’d known the preacher since they were both fourteen years old.

“We can have the service here in the house,” chimed in one of the younger deacons, Lionel Noël, the third being his brother, Joël Noël.

Ever since he’d begun broadcasting his radio show and had lost his wife, perhaps as a result of what he said on the air, the preacher had grown accustomed to these displays of fearful affection and had hence learned that the best way to appease them was to maintain his calm, while citing Bible passages, almost as incantations to soothe those who thought they could save his life.

What they didn’t realize, or didn’t want to acknowledge, was that he’d already decided to give his life, had made a pact with Heaven to be sacrificed for his country. Besides, there was no point in running or hiding. If the people in power truly wanted to find him, they could. They could enter his house and drag him away, from his bath, from his supper table, from his bed. They could find someone to poison him just as they had his wife.

The night before, nineteen members of the palace guard had had their executions announced on the radio by the president himself. If this could happen to former allies of the government, how much harder could it be to capture and kill him?

He’d dreamed his own death so many times that he was no longer afraid of it. He’d imagined himself being pushed off the highest mountain peak in Port-au-Prince, forced to drink a gallon of bleach, burned at the stake like Joan of Arc, beheaded like John the Baptist. In all of his dreams, however, he always saw himself being resurrected. When he was thrown off the top of Mòn Lopital, he sprouted wings and soared to the clouds. When he was made to drink a gallon of bleach, it went through his body like water and forced itself out through his urine. When he was bound to firewood, sprinkled with kindling and gasoline, and set on fire, the flames burned through the ropes that bound his wrists and ankles, the smoke blinded his enemies, and he strolled past them without being seen. When he was decapitated like John the Baptist, he bent down to the floor, picked up his own head, and fitted it back on as though he were a plastic doll.

That night at the supper table, just as he had during every other difficult moment in his life-including when he was just a boy and had lost his young brother in the sea and when his wife had died a few months before-he reminded himself of his own personal creed, that life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should also lose it on your own terms.

Rising from his chair, he picked up his Bible, a leather-bound monogrammed volume, and thumped it against his palm as if to pound away his last shreds of doubt about going into the night.

“It’s time for the service,” he said to the deacons, while stroking the front cover. “I don’t think you three should walk with me to the church tonight. I’ll walk alone.”

The senior deacon stretched his body upward, extending his right hand toward the preacher’s face. For a brief second the preacher thought his friend was going to slap him, or perhaps signal to the sons, the preacher’s godchildren, to grab and bind him, but all the elder did was remove an errant black string from the preacher’s shoulder. Still, finding the string seemed like a slight ploy, something to delay them, to earn one more minute, to keep him inside the house a bit longer.

The preacher tapped the Bible against the elder deacon’s lowered arm, signaling him and his sons to remove themselves from his path.

When it seemed like there was nothing else to do, the deacons stepped aside and allowed him to walk through the doorway. Once the preacher had carefully padlocked his front door, the three men reluctantly followed him across the shaky wooden bridge over the narrow rain canal that separated his house from the unpaved street.

As usual, Rue Tirremasse was muggy, dusty, and loud, and seemed much brighter than it should have with only one distant street lamp in sight. The preacher waved to his neighbor across the street, an old man who sold cassava bread bathed in homemade peanut butter from a stall in front of his house.

A konpa song praising the government ( you have led us/you have fed us was the chorus) blared from the makeshift barbershop operating out of someone’s living room in the house next to the old man’s. Two young men were sitting inside playing cards as a boy’s head was shaved of hair and lice. The preacher waved to the barber and the men, who waved back. Could they be his executioners? The ones he’d been told would be waiting out on the street for him?

A woman selling grilled corn in front of the barbershop called out to the preacher, “How are we tonight, Pastor?”

Just as he always did whenever she greeted him that way, he nodded that he was fine, but this time took the extra step of bowing in her direction.