The Dew Breaker

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 Mon 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.

The preacher then spotted a young couple he’d married. They had notebooks pressed against their chests as they walked toward him. The wife was taking a secretarial course, while the husband was studying to be an accountant. Their parents had rushed to have the preacher marry them when the girl became pregnant, but she’d suffered a miscarriage soon after the wedding.

“How are you, Pastor?” she asked when they stopped to greet him.

“How are the courses coming?” the preacher asked.

“They’re very difficult, Pastor,” the young husband answered. “We have a lot of studying to do. This is why you haven’t seen us at the weekday services.”

The three deacons were still following closely behind the preacher. They were a bit more comfortable now, feeling protected by the geniality of each of the preacher’s encounters. They too participated in the greetings, nodding and waving hello.

A widow whom the preacher occasionally hired to wash and iron his clothes stopped him to ask when she should come by for the next batch.

“Pastor, you’re not kind,” she said. “You wear the same clothes all the time so you won’t give me the work.”

The preacher laughed before moving on to the house of a shoeshine man, who, when he wasn’t shining shoes, always sat in a low chair in his doorway watching the street. The shoeshine man was one of many who’d conspired to empty slop jars from their roofs over the heads of some Volunteers who’d come to arrest a group of philosophy students who’d performed Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot at the nearby student center.

“We are all born mad.” The preacher now recalled that particular line from the play. “Some remain so.”

The Volunteers had shot at all the surrounding houses the night after the play was performed, but thankfully no one had been hurt.

“Pastor, your shoes look a little dusty tonight.” The shoeshine man reached under his chair and pulled out his shine toolbox.

“Leon, there’s no need to have polished shoes at night,” the preacher said.

“Pastor, a man like you should always have clean shoes,” Leon argued.

“They won’t stay clean for long,” the preacher said.

“Pastor, before you can say Amen, I will be done.”

“Maybe tomorrow, Leon,” said the preacher.

The “tomorrow” made the shoeshine man smile. The deacons smiled also, finding further reason to hope.

The men were almost at the church when they reached the one street lamp on their stretch of Rue Tirremasse. A group of boys was gathered there in the direct path of the light beam. Some of the boys were singsonging their school lessons to one another, while others studied alone, pacing back and forth with their heads bowed. The preacher made out one of the boys who faithfully attended Sunday school with his mother, a ten-year-old who despite the mother’s scoldings was not above begging from the vendors and passersby. The boy had a cigarette butt in his hand. When he spotted the preacher, he threw the butt on the ground and darted down a dark alley away from the street.

On another occasion the preacher might have remarked to the deacons for their own information, “Do you see that? Do you see what Satan’s doing to our youth, our jeunesse etudiante?” However, as he approached the gates of his church and looked up to greet the image of the Christ with the pale arms extended toward him, his mind was less on the flock than the wolves who though he hadn’t noticed them were certainly looming.

Inside, the preacher flipped a light switch. The dangling bulbs flickered from high in the middle of the room. As the preacher strolled casually to the altar, the deacons brought out the kerosene lamps they always had on reserve in case there was a blackout, the collection baskets they passed at every service for offerings, and a gallon of water that they parceled out in a glass to the preacher to refresh his voice during the service.

The service went on as usual that night, but many of the members who usually came didn’t attend. A few new faces were spotted in the congregation, however-people who had wandered in off the street to rest a few minutes on their way somewhere else, others like Leon who weren’t religious but had heard about the militia men milling about and thought they might be of help to the preacher should an ambush be attempted against him.

Throughout the service, which ran longer than the usual hour, the preacher sang with all his might; he swayed his body back and forth, pounded his fists on the pulpit, stamped his feet, jumped up in the air and back, and dashed up to each pew to encourage the congregants to join them.

His sermon that night was more like a testimony. It was a remembrance of the day of his wife’s death.

He would always remember her eyes, he said. There was something about them that wasn’t quite right that afternoon. Maybe it was the way the tear ducts kept filling up and drying up again, with the tears never spilling