you need to pay or we’ll cut your head off.”
The chief dread particularly cited the cases of two young men my uncle knew, both not yet twenty years old. During the raid, a bullet had fractured one’s ribs. The other had been shot in the stomach. Their families were afraid to take them to the public hospital, the chief dread said, because, assuming that they were all criminals, the police routinely shot young men with bullet wounds there. They needed money to find a doctor for these men and others, a doctor who would come to them.
The amount he was asked to pay was too impossibly high to even remember. It might as well have been a billion dollars. Hoping to bargain, reason, my uncle reached over and tried to touch the dread’s burly arm. The dread shoved his hand aside with enough force to make him nearly lose his balance. As he steadied himself on his feet, my uncle raised his voice box to his neck and said, “Tande.”
The chief dread motioned for quiet from the growing crowd.
“I need time,” my uncle continued. “I need to make some phone calls. I need to get in touch with my family in New York. I need to ask them to send me some money. My phone is not working. I have to find a phone. Come back this afternoon, at one, and I’ll have something for you.”
The chief dread looked over at the crowd, then up at the classroom balconies, eyeing those gathered for their approval. He then raised his sizable hands in the air and like Moses parting the Red Sea, signaled for them to scatter. But they didn’t go far. Splitting into smaller groups, they stormed the terraced classrooms and began grabbing whatever was within reach: the blackboards, benches. Some detached the doors from the hinges and took off with them. The top dreads moved aside, allowing more people into the courtyard even as they stepped out.
My uncle was completely surrounded, but no one was touching him. Everyone was heading farther into the compound, toward his apartment, the church. From where he was standing, totally frozen in a spot near a small outdoor grill that Maxo’s wife sometimes used to cook their meals, he could see many of his neighbors scurrying off with his things: Nana, an old woman limping with a cane, carrying some of his dinner plates, Danielle, a small girl whose mother sold water to him now and then, joining strangers as they walked by with a handful of Maxo’s children’s clothes. He could now see the navy blue cotton and Lycra suit he’d worn to his wife’s funeral, the one in which he wanted to be buried, walking away on some boy’s arms. As the crowd rushed back and forth around him-there went the charcoal grill and his windup alarm clock-he did not dare move to the other side of the courtyard, where a plume of smoke was rising outside the church.
They’re burning the altar of the church, someone yelled, and some of the direksyon, that is, the school principal’s office.
The crowd began heading that way, but he remained in place, not moving. He wanted to go to the church, to see it, to defend it, to reclaim the altar. But what if the crowd decided at that moment to burn him too?
What he couldn’t see was the pews and altar being dragged into the middle of the street and set on fire. Part of his office, which was directly beneath the church, was also burned, his papers, including the dozens of notepads in which he’d jotted down words and sentences, his observations about the neighborhood, in good times and bad, they were all scattered now, all over the streets, being trampled, carried away, or burned.
The courtyard was nearly empty now, with everyone’s focus shifted to the church. The few people who were still milling about shamefully avoided his eyes as they walked by, one with a handful of new toothbrushes that he’d kept on the night table in his bedroom upstairs.
He had to get out now, finally leave the neighborhood for good. But how would he get through the barricades, where surely the dreads had people waiting, watching for him? As he moved toward the gate, he spotted Anne, the niece of his old friend Ferna, standing there across the alley, watching him. Had she turned against him too? Had her aunt? Anne held out her empty hands, showing that she was carrying nothing. She had not stolen from him.
“Vini,” she said. Come.
He went without thinking, letting her drag him by the hand. Walking the slippery incline that separated his house from another small courtyard, he kept his face down, his chin as close as he could to his chest without blocking his tracheotomy hole. He did not dare look back toward the church as a new wave of looters brushed past him, heading there. He might have been tempted to follow them, to try to stop them, reason with them. He thought about all the wounded who might be lying somewhere dying. He thought of their mothers, fathers, standing over them unable to do anything but watch. The country was once again losing a generation of young people, some violent, some bystanders, but all in the line of fire, dying.
The courtyard he and Anne stepped into led to a series of narrow alleyways, some haphazardly paved in slippery concrete, some packed with dirt and mud and others dotted with pools of stagnant dirty water. The neighborhood’s labyrinth of corridor-sized alleys was like tunnels, leading everywhere, but alas, only within the neighborhood. He was not too familiar with the path Anne was leading him on now. New houses, shacks, were being built all the time, creating newer and narrower trails. Finally, she opened a corrugated iron gate, pasted together from several rusting pieces, and stepped inside.
The yard was only large enough for a latrine and a concrete water basin capped by a rusting faucet. Without saying a word, Anne’s aunt Ferna, a beautifully portly young woman, motioned for him to enter the crowded darkness of her house. Hot and sweaty now, he felt his way past a beaded curtain to a corner between a small dining room table and her bed.
“Pastor, you can stay here until dark,” she said. “Then we’ll find somewhere for you to go.”
The wicker chair she gave him to sit on was much too low and his back ached as he shifted now and then, hoping to find a more comfortable position. But he had to remain there, she insisted. In case someone walked into the house, he could easily slide under the table and remain out of sight. Crouched there, he could hear the normal sounds of the day, a woman chiding her maid for a lunch that had been burned, a father cursing the school master who had sent his son home because the father had not been able to pay that month’s tuition. At the same time, some people were walking by saying, “Did you hear, they nearly killed Pastor?”
He heard many variations of this, people dashing to the church to see, to his apartment to find out what they could get. His entire life was now reduced to an odd curiosity, a looting opportunity. He was grateful, however, that no one seemed to know he was there, hiding. Some thought he had actually been killed. Others seemed certain he had fled.
The neighborhood talk soon moved on to other things. Again the more mundane details of daily life. The egg seller came to collect a debt from Ferna. A friend stopped by to braid Anne’s hair. The visitors were greeted at the door and not allowed inside. He tried to think of where he might go next. Surely the dreads had now gone to look for him. Perhaps they’d only wanted him to flee, to leave the compound so they could confiscate it. Ferna and Anne had no news. They, like him, had no landline or cell phone. They were even afraid to turn on their radio, afraid that might draw someone’s attention. Had they turned on the radio, they might have heard that the Haitian riot police and the MINUSTAH were out on another sweeping operation. This time it was in nearby Fort National, not far from the country’s national archives, where twelve young men were shot and killed.
Later that afternoon, my uncle somehow managed to drift off to sleep. Thankfully he had always been able to sleep no matter what. Perhaps it was because he was constantly busy, waking up early and going to bed late. He also liked to walk, often overexerting himself. No matter what, his body could always shut itself down, forcing him to rest.
When he woke up, Ferna was shaking him. He could feel her breath on his face, but could not see her in the dark.
“Pastor,” Ferna said, her voice dragging with worry and sleep, “you should go now. You should leave.”
“What time is it?” he asked, making sure that his voice box was at the lowest possible volume.
“Three thirty a.m.,” she said. Nearly the same time, he remembered, that Maxo, his aunt and uncle and the children had left. Where would he go now? He could go to Leogane and join
