motioned for Liline and me to leave the room.
“Who’s the father?” we heard him ask as we left.
Liline and I didn’t wander too far from the doorway. The father, Marie Micheline stammered, was Jean Pradel, the oldest of five brothers who lived across the alley from us. Jean had four brothers, our neighbors often whispered, because his mother had been in pursuit of a girl.
The Pradel boys were handsome young men, well built and, thanks to the financial gains from their mother’s ice and soda shop and their father’s tailoring business, well educated. Their father was somber and fussy and was always well groomed, spending the days when he wasn’t working in a rocking chair on his immaculate front porch.
“Does Jean know he’s the father?” my uncle asked. “Will he deny it and humiliate us? Or will he own up to it like a man?”
“I don’t know,” Marie Micheline answered.
“Get up and get dressed,” my uncle said. “We’re going to have a visit with Monsieur and Madame Pradel.”
Liline and I scattered as they left Marie Micheline’s room and began to move toward us. While Marie Micheline dressed, Tante Denise and Uncle Joseph waited in front of her bedroom door, not saying a word to one another.
Marie Micheline came out in her too-large white nursing school uniform. Her belly was still undetectable under her clothes, but now she put less effort into hiding it, letting her body move naturally in a way that clearly showed her struggles with sluggishness and the extra weight.
Sandwiched between the only parents she’d ever known, she slowly walked toward the Pradels.
The meeting didn’t last long. When they returned, we could tell by the angry look on Tante Denise’s and Uncle Joseph’s faces and by Marie Micheline’s despondent gaze that Jean Pradel had denied being the father.
“See what you get when you lie down with pigs,” Tante Denise said loud enough for the Pradels to hear as they sat huddled at a table by their front door.
“Get your things,” Tante Denise told Marie Micheline. “You’re going to live with one of my cousins in Leogane. We’ll send you money and food. You can come back when the baby’s born.”
“Let’s not be rash,” Uncle Joseph interjected. “We can go back and see what the boy says. He’d obviously not told his parents and was taken by surprise.”
“This is women’s business,” Tante Denise said. “Let me take care of it.”
We were not allowed to say good-bye to Marie Micheline when she left the next day. Many of our neighbors assumed she was sent abroad to join Maxo. Tante Denise did not send her to Leogane either, but to live with Liline’s mother in a distant and destitute part of town. Soon the Pradels also sent Jean to Montreal, where he had some relatives, and we never saw him again.
During the two months that Marie Micheline was gone, Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise visited her several times but never took any of us children with them. After one of the visits I overheard Tante Denise telling her sister Leone that Marie Micheline, heartbroken over Jean Pradel’s rejection, had gotten married in a civil ceremony.
“Who would marry a pregnant girl?” asked Leone.
“A kind man who wants to give an abandoned child a name,” Tante Denise answered proudly.
“He must want something,” Leone countered.
The next piece of news was that Marie Micheline’s baby was born, healthy and a girl. My uncle rented a small apartment for Marie Micheline, her new husband and the child, then he and Tante Denise went to pick them up and bring them back to Bel Air. They paid a few months’ rent, then the husband was supposed to pick up the rest.
We knew little about Marie Micheline’s new husband except his name, Pressoir Marol, and the fact that he was in his thirties. After my uncle had moved them into their new place, I overheard him telling one of his friends that Pressoir spoke some Spanish, which indicated that he might have spent some time working as a cane laborer or construction worker either in Cuba or in the Dominican Republic. The fact that Pressoir walked with a slight limp also hinted at the possibility of an injury acquired doing that type of work.
Marie Micheline, Pressoir and the baby, whose name was Ruth, often came to eat at the house. As she walked over from her place to ours, Marie Micheline would have to pass by the Pradels’ house, where Monsieur Pradel was frequently sitting out on the porch, either pedaling at his sewing machine or watching the street.
One afternoon, Marie Micheline stopped right in front of Monsieur Pradel and waited for him to look up and acknowledge her. When he didn’t, she turned the baby’s tiny face toward him and said, “I’m not interested in Jean anymore, Monsieur Pradel. Wherever he is, I just want him to acknowledge his daughter.”
“Don’t you already have a husband?” Monsieur Pradel asked scornfully.
Dressed in the indigo denim uniform of the Tonton Macoutes, Pressoir was waiting on our front gallery, where Nick, Bob and I were playing, and he too overheard this exchange. He was wearing the macoute’s signature dark reflector glasses, which completely hid his eyes. Enraged, he dashed toward Marie Micheline and grabbed her by the elbow, nearly shaking Ruth out of her grasp. Pressoir hadn’t yet been assigned a gun, which is perhaps the only reason he didn’t shoot both Marie Micheline and Monsieur Pradel on the spot.
“You whore, you shameless bouzen,” he yelled as he pushed Marie Micheline into our house.
My uncle went to Marie Micheline’s aid. By then, Ruth had woken up and was wailing.
“What’s happening here?” My uncle seemed as perplexed by Ruth’s distress and Marie Micheline’s sobs as he was by Pressoir’s menacing uniform.
“You’re a macoute?” my uncle asked Pressoir, all the while shaking his head, showing his shock and disapproval.
“My wife will no longer be coming here,” Pressoir said, ignoring my uncle’s question. “From now on, if you want to see her and the baby, you’ll have to come to us.”
Tante Denise stumbled out from the kitchen and wiped the sweat from her crinkled forehead with a corner of the flowered scarf around her head.
“What are you saying?” she asked, also sobbing now. “She’s our daughter. This is our grandchild.”
“Just what I say,” Pressoir replied. “I thought she was coming here to see you. That’s not what she’s doing. So she’s no longer allowed to come.”
Two days later, Pressoir moved Marie Micheline and Ruth out of the place my uncle had rented for them. He left word with their landlord for my aunt and uncle that he now had bullets and that Marie Micheline was forbidden to see anyone. To keep them from finding Marie Micheline and Ruth, he moved them constantly, staying with other macoutes only a few days at a time, sometimes separating them and placing Ruth in the temporary care of strangers.
My uncle eventually managed to track them down near the ocean a few miles south of Port-au-Prince and visited with them when Pressoir was away. When Pressoir heard that he’d been there, he moved them back to the outskirts of Latounel, a small village in the mountains of Leogane.
After two months with no word from Marie Micheline, my uncle finally learned where she was from a family friend who lived in the same area. He decided that no matter what the risks, he would go there and bring her home.
