Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

They had been driving all morning, Terry and Johel switching places behind the wheel, when Johel’s phone rang.

* * *

Rumors, like fire, drift in subterranean currents until exploding promiscuously: some had known for days that there was a dead boy lying behind the market, and others knew that he had died in the riots, hit in the chest by a tear gas grenade, and still others whispered that the PNH had taken his body and thrown it behind the market, where the pigs gathered. Then everyone knew about the dead boy who was lying in the field, until eventually the juge de paix heard the story, came to the market, and ordered the cadaver transported to the morgue, where the attendants rifled through his pockets, found his phone, and called his mother, wanting to know if she knew what everyone knew, that Toussaint was dead.

* * *

I went with Madame Legrand to retrieve Toussaint’s body from the morgue. She owed morgue fees for the three days they’d held him.

They hadn’t done much for him in the morgue. You sure wouldn’t want your mother to see you like that. It was just a concrete box with three dead people on the floor, and one of them was Toussaint. He was lying on the stained concrete floor, facedown, butt in the air, no shirt, blue jeans down around his hips, no underwear. His chest had been bruised by the force of the projectile, but the thing that got your eye wasn’t the wounds, it was Toussaint’s ass, hanging out in the air. What the dead don’t have is any dignity.

Madame Legrand looked at her son. I thought for a moment that she was going to vomit or faint, but she just stood there trembling, as if she were very cold. We watched Toussaint for a long time, both of us waiting for him to move, but he didn’t, not so much as a twitch. The room smelled of decomposing flesh and Lightning. Then we walked into the morgue attendant’s little office.

“He’s mine,” Madame Legrand said. “He’s my child.”

The morgue attendant was fiddling with a pencil, trying to figure out the secrets of the lottery. It was all in the numbers, and he was adding and subtracting long columns. He looked up from his work and said, “You got to give him a good funeral now.”

“I didn’t know that,” Madame Legrand said.

The morgue attendant scratched at the paper, wrote some more.

“You can’t leave him here,” he said.

“It’s the first child I lost,” she explained.

“You’ll lose them all.”

“All of them?”

“Even if you have ten, they’ll all come here.”

“All ten?”

“A good funeral’s what you need.”

“Did you lose your children?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Who killed my child?”

Madame Legrand took a step toward the morgue attendant. I guess the numbers were getting somewhere, because it took him a couple of minutes before he answered.

“I didn’t see, I didn’t hear.”

Madame Legrand said, “It’s not my child who’s dead. Don’t you tell me my child is dead.”

He looked up, looked down again at his papers. “Madame, you go see. It’s you who tells me your child is lying there.”

“It’s not Toussaint. It’s not Toussaint who’s lying there.”

She was angry now. But the morgue attendant only said, “Go see. I got work to do.”

Madame Legrand went back into the morgue. I was still standing there when we heard her cry out. The morgue attendant just kept adding up rows and rows of numbers, crossing some out, subtracting others.

* * *

There was to have been a celebration for the judge on the Place Dumas when he came back into town, but with Toussaint dead, that had been canceled. In any case, Toussaint would have organized it and hired the paid supporters, who would have cheered and danced until the judge rolled up his shirtsleeves and gave a speech.

The judge, Terry, and Nadia rolled into town late that evening, all three exhausted. The road had been brutal. A bus had broken an axle near the Rivière Glace, where the route was narrow, and they’d had to sit by the side of the car until a mechanic from Les Cayes could weld the axle in place, four hours of waiting in the hot sun. Then, an hour later, their own car had a flat. Terry had fixed it, cursing under his breath, while Nadia and Johel sat side by side on a rock, staring at him.

Back in the car, not even the judge wanted to talk. Terry could hear him muttering under his breath.

“What are you saying?” Terry finally asked.

The judge looked at Terry, startled. “Who?”

“You. You’ve been talking to yourself for an hour.”

The judge smiled. “He told me he wanted to be a poet.”

After a minute Terry said, “What he told me was that he was going to be a neurosurgeon.”

It didn’t seem right to the judge to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself.

The sound of the men’s laughter irritated Nadia. She wanted to tell them to be quiet, but her own voice wouldn’t come. She had met Toussaint only once. He had come by the house to drop off the judge’s motorcycle at the conclusion of one of his scouting missions, and they had ended up talking for an afternoon. When he learned that she sang with Galaxy and had sung with a famous band like Erzulie L’Amour, he admitted his own ambition, to one day be a musician himself. He knew the region, if not the village, that she came from, and they were able to exchange stories about a dozen or more local personages. Toussaint reminded Nadia of her own older brother, another skinny layabout big talker with a charming smile. She had wanted that afternoon to warn Toussaint. She had wanted to tell him to stay away from the judge.

It was a moonless night. The headlights of the car lit up only the short stretch of bad road ahead, and looking out the window, Nadia could see nothing of the hills through which they traveled. She had never lost her girlhood fear of the dark. Soon she was aware that she was hardly breathing. She had heard stories as a child of the loup-garou : the neighbor who shed his humanity at sunset to steal a feast of children. The loup-garou might be your neighbor, your friend. The loup-garou had come for Toussaint.

She could hear the judge’s voice and then Terry’s. It occurred to her that she and the baby she carried were at their mercy. She imagined them looking back at her, their eyes bright red, fangs elongated; she wondered how she would defend herself if they came for her. She felt the child inside her, still not strong enough to kick, but rolling weight. Nadia felt her body pitch forward and sway backward. They were descending the final hills before the bridge over the Grand’Anse. Now they were in Jérémie.

On his first morning back from Port-au-Prince, the judge called his staff one by one, asking them to meet him at his campaign headquarters. There had been some doubt the night before whether he would even continue the campaign in Toussaint’s absence. Johel himself had considered dropping out of the race.

But that morning, still sore from the road, he had awoken early and sat on his back porch as the first sun lit up the town. He heard a chorus of children singing at the Baptist church, their song faint at first, and then louder as the music caught on the wind and echoed through the town’s bowls and canyons. He had never heard singing at this early hour, and he sat up straighter in his chair. Soon the choir sang the Haitian national anthem. It was vigorous music, expressing all the martial energy of a great warrior people. “Marchons unis, marchons unis,” the choir sang. For a moment Johel imagined his enslaved forebears rising up to fight the blan , dying, and with each death encouraging a dozen like-minded patriot souls. The swelling of young voices in the apricot light of dawn stiffened his resolve.