Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [61]
“We have been damned by our sins,” Father Paul preached to the small crowd of survivors gathered in the church. “God has punished us. We must repent and do penance. Blood was spilled. What right do we have to make our own justice when God is watching over us?”
Bodies were piled in the freshly made puddles. They were identified and the municipality inscribed their names on a list. The dead included: Tonton Mathurin, who had, we later learned, left his fortune to Georges Soubiran, who went to study in France; Laurent; Mme Marti; and all those who had in one way or another tried to rescue their possessions from destruction.
Up there, the mountains greened, resplendent despite the ruins, in spite of death. All of nature seemed to rise up purified from the squalls. At Lion Mountain, the coffee plants lay destroyed and uprooted atop a foot of soil that had been churned up by spindrift. In town, waterlogged goods piled up unrecognizable in the stinking muddy shopwindows. Haitian and Syrian storekeepers alike were crying and wailing. Of course, those hit hardest were the peasants. Homeless and destitute, they came down the mountain to swell the ranks of the beggars. The harsh sun returned after the hurricane and dried out the enormous mounds of garbage choking the streets. Mud turned to dust, a thick, blinding dust that became a whirlwind at the slightest breeze. Typhoid, malaria, and influenza kept everyone in their sickbed. Poor children died every day by the dozen for lack of care. Father Paul continued to draw on our devotion and the Daughters of Mary worked like galley slaves. Eugénie Duclan, Jane Bavière, Dora Soubiran and I helped Mme Camuse, whom Father Paul made president of the Relief Association. Mme Marti, our dressmaker, had died under rather mysterious circumstances. She was found at her home, her neck half-slit. “She tried to save our little dog! She ran in to get our little dog!” her children sobbed. Mme Camuse took them in. Fifty coffins were blessed in a ceremony attended even by the least pious among us. Father Paul’s sermons spared no one. Our bloodstained land had been washed clean by God’s mighty waters, he repeated, and the wind, he hoped, had by the same measure cast out the Evil Spirit. One strange detail troubled me, however: M. Petrold’s house had suffered no damage, and at that moment I began reconsidering God’s ways. Despite the failure of the harvest, M. Petrold bid on our piece of land and bought my factory, my piano and the sixty remaining acres of Lion Mountain. Discouraged, many of the landowners followed my example and sold their fields and went to work for him. I had put my money in the bank, following Dr. Audier’s advice. I calculated that by living frugally, we could hold out for a few years. Life stretched before me flat and hard, without joy or surprise, and I lost hope of ever getting married.
When the streets were nearly cleared by the prisoners and other volunteers, we received a delegation of doctors and an American commission who arrived by boat from Port-au-Prince. The State Department, without any bitterness, played its philanthropic role, for the Americans had left our country four years ago. I saw Frantz Camuse at his mother’s. He seemed astonished by my self-assurance. His eyes