Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [45]
At first I’d say, “Can you believe we’re talking to each other?” And he’d say, “Can you?” But after a few minutes, as he caught me up on things, his life, Tante Denise, political news from Haiti, his voice seemed no more unusual than mine or anyone else’s. He was expanding his work, he said, adding to the school and church in Bel Air a clinic that was run by Marie Micheline.
Marie Micheline had left her job as head nurse at the other neighborhood clinic and was now helping him with his work. They were together more than ever. She was thirty-seven years old but, from the pictures I saw of her, looked no older than she did at twenty-two. She’d had three boys after Ruth, with two men who, as my uncle put it, again had not loved her enough. I often imagined myself all grown up and my father talking about me in the same forgiving way that my uncle talked about Marie Micheline. Perhaps because he had rescued her not once, but twice, he loved her even more deeply, more unconditionally.
After he left for Cuba, Marie Micheline’s biological father had never contacted them, prompting Tante Denise to call her their Moses girl. She was their baby, but unlike Tante Denise, who thought Marie Micheline was spoiled, Uncle Joseph thought she could do no wrong.
“She needs to realize she’s not a girl playing with boys anymore,” Tante Denise would say even after Marie Micheline had had four children.
“She attracts bad, just like she did Pressoir,” Uncle Joseph would say, “but she’s not a bad person.”
On February 7, 1986, my uncle’s sixty-third birthday, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled Haiti for France, leaving a military junta in charge of the country. The junta, which ruled for two years, was led by an ambitious army officer, Lieutenant General Henri Namphy. A new president, Leslie Manigat, was sworn in on February 7, 1988, my uncle’s sixty-fifth birthday. Because Baby Doc’s departure had taken place on February 7, my uncle’s birthday had become the official date for Haitian presidential inaugurations and swearings in.
Four months after he was inaugurated, Leslie Manigat was ousted by Lieutenant General Namphy. Soon, Namphy was himself deposed by a military rival, General Prosper Avril. In April 1989, a group of former Tonton Macoutes and hard-line Duvalier loyalists tried to topple Avril in a failed coup, creating hostilities within the army.
The battle between the opposing military factions came to Bel Air one April afternoon when one group chased the other to Rue Tirremasse and the wrought-iron gate of the church clinic. Marie Micheline was sitting alone, behind her desk, looking through some notes she’d scribbled on the twenty or so patients she’d seen that day. They were all minor cases, for once, mostly cuts and scrapes and two infants with low-grade fevers. She’d not had to send anyone to the public hospital.
She was probably just reaching over to slip the files into a small metal cabinet beside her when she heard one gunshot followed by a volley of bullets. Looking up, she would have seen a whirl of camouflage racing past the open metal gate. At this point, she may have thought of the forty people who according to newspaper reports had died that week, caught in the crossfire of such battles all over Port-au-Prince. She may have thought of Ruth or of her three young sons, Pouchon, Marc and Ronald, who were due back from school at any time. She may have thought of Tante Denise, to whom she was to give an insulin shot in a few minutes. Of Uncle Joseph, whose blood pressure she also monitored daily at the same time.
She got up from her desk and ran to the gate, hoping to close it before one of the soldiers barged in. But what if someone needed her help? And how would she feel if Ruth,