Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Nowadays, it was said that in Père Samedi’s parish, there was only one voter, and that was Père Samedi. He had learned in his youth a hard lesson in the importance of politics. At the pulpit, he was not afraid to identify the candidate in each election whom he supposed would best benefit his flock. For a great many of his parishioners, confident in his judgment and grateful for his assistance, that would be enough. His parishioners knew that those who had voted for the candidate of Père Samedi’s choice would be rewarded. Père Samedi seemed to always know who had voted for whom, and he could be trusted to arrive at your homestead with a small envelope in which could be found a petit cadeau in appreciation of one’s trust and fidelity. Others of independent mind who persisted in rallying or campaigning for the opponents of the lanky priest would find themselves visited at night by Père Samedi, who would sit for hours in attempts at gentle persuasion.

But when this failed, fields would mysteriously be set aflame. Women who crossed Père Samedi would sit in the market and not sell so much as a clove of garlic. Yet the most dramatic sanction the priest could impose was to withhold Communion: for many years, Père Samedi had seen to it that there were no Protestant churches in his parish, and to be outside the safe confines of the Church was to lay oneself open to every kind of danger.

By one means or another, Père Samedi succeeded in delivering the votes of his parish, all of them, election after election, for the Sénateur or for some other candidate of his choosing. It was to deliver his votes to the judge that we were in Abricots.

The judge had been selling himself vigorously to Père Samedi for maybe twenty minutes when he asked Terry and me to wait for him outside. The judge was a professional negotiator, and he knew that the only people who belonged in a room when final terms were discussed were the principals themselves.

Terry and I went outside. He had the kind of pale Scotch-Irish complexion that turned crimson the instant it was in the sun.

“Christ, it’s hot,” he said.

“He’s good,” I said.

“I told you. And he will get it done. These people will have that dentist if he says they’ll have a dentist.”

Terry pulled a packet of Marlboro Reds out of his pocket. “I hate these things. Eight years I didn’t smoke. First cigarette was twelve minutes exactly after I landed. That’s what this country does to you.”

I looked at Terry for a long time. His face was too irregular, too puffy to be handsome, but he’d seen a lot of life, and that gives a man’s face something attractive also.

He said, “You ever wonder why he doesn’t want to build that road?”

“The Sénateur?”

“I’ve got a theory,” he said. “I used to think he was after the money. I didn’t know how it all worked, but I figured if you traced it all back to where it came from, you’d find money. But I got to thinking more and…”

Terry walked over to the car and pulled out a bottle of water. He took a long swig from it and handed it to me. “What you got to understand is that they’re his. That’s how he sees it. If they build that road, what the hell do they need Sénateur Maxim for? They’ll sell the frigging mangoes in Port-au-Prince, or fish, or they’ll plant gardens and sell tomatoes. The way Maxim Bayard sees things, these people don’t need him, it’s like he doesn’t even exist.”

There was an open cement cistern covered in a scum of rainwater and algae. Mosquitoes danced across the surface. Terry bent over, picked up some loose gravel, and started tossing pebbles into the water.

“He says they’re his children, but I tell you, a father can hate his children too. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. I once had a guy who found out his wife was cheating on him, he took his two kids and slit their throats. This guy told me he felt evil in their hearts. That was my death-row case. And that’s the way Maxim Bayard loves his quote-unquote children. He feels evil in their hearts.”

The world makes you, and then you see it through the eyes it gives you. Another man sees the same world, but he doesn’t have the same eyes. I didn’t want to debate Terry. I just let him talk.

Terry said, “There was this time — I guess it must have been, I don’t know, 2004. Something like that. Rainy night, right in front of me, two out-of-state vehicles, head-on. One guy died, name was Terry Moore, still remember that, Terry just like me, and the car that hit him, that was this old couple, down from Maine. Here I was in Florida, one car was from Virginia and the other car from Bangor, Maine, and they meet two hundred yards in front of me.”

Terry started laughing.

“So why I remember all this, is what I had to do was call this guy’s wife and tell her that her husband was dead in Florida. And she’s like, ‘Florida? What’s he doing in Florida? He told me he was going to Graceland with Al. You tell that fat bastard I never want to hear from him again. Tell him I die, he ain’t invited to my fucking funeral.’ She was going nuts, that lady. Finally, I was just, ‘Lady, I’m going to go tell his cadaver everything you just said.’ Next thing I know, the woman’s wailing into the phone. ‘Please don’t tell him nothing. Oh, he knows, he knows!’”

Terry kept chucking gravel. The pebbles formed small circles in the water that expanded and encroached and interfered with one another.

“Any case, what I keep thinking to myself, you know, couple thousand miles of road between them, and if those old folks had just gone a touch slower or Terry Moore had stopped for an extra cup of coffee, everyone would have been fine. You ever think what a thing like that means? I mean, really think about it? It’s just — there’s gotta be some kind of plan. Some kind of plan that makes those two cars slam into each other. Like you ever think of all the fucked-up things that had to happen before I meet Nadia? It’s some crazy shit.”

I picked up a branch and tossed it into the water. It broke up Terry’s circles.

“So you think there’s a point to it all?” I said.

“There better damn be,” he finally said.

Terry and I didn’t talk for a while. That house was making both of us feel pretty lugubrious. I let Terry chuck gravel in the water like he was taking aim at bad memories, and I walked out onto the road. Nobody shouted at me or asked me for money. People just averted their eyes when they walked in front of Père Samedi’s house. I was so grateful when a little kid ran up to me with a big smile that I gave him all the change in my pocket.

Finally the judge came out of the house.

“Père Samedi sends you his best,” he said.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” I said.

“He’s not feeling well.”

A few minutes later we were on the road back to Jérémie.

“How’d it go?” Terry said.

“He told me he’s had the same donkey a lot of years, but it wasn’t carrying its weight. He told me he’s in the market for a new beast of burden.”

“And what’d you say?”

“Hee-haw.”

He said it with so little affect that I couldn’t figure out what happened.

“So that’s good news?” I said.

“He’s got it in for the Sénateur, that’s for sure.”

“That’s good for you, then,” I said.

The judge nodded. His face was like a mask. He had imported the heavy air of the priest’s house into the vehicle. It wasn’t easy to breathe.

“It’s about the dentist?” I said.

The judge shook his head. “No. The Sénateur could find a dentist, that’s what it took. No, there was a little girl on the Trois Rivières. That’s what this is about.”