The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [60]
Both Mariselle and Rézia laugh so loud that it’s all I can hear for some time. Not the fan twirling overhead or the trickle of rum and wine from bottle to glass.
“Look, it’s the seventies,” I protest. “Look at Fidel Castro. He had women with him.”
They’re still laughing, but also drinking. Laughing and drinking.
“It’s not that.” Mariselle is doubled over, clinging to her belly, chortling. “It’s just that if you join a militia, we’ll soon be reading about you.”
“If you join a militia, you’ll die.” Rézia stops to wipe her damp forehead with her vetiver-scented hankie that now looks like a surrender flag. “Then who will sing at your funeral?”
The room is quiet now, except for the fan spinning overhead and a car horn blaring outside. Mariselle throws her head back, empties her entire glass in her mouth, then flings it across the room. We watch it fly, then land on the wall, breaking into a torrent of little pieces.
“Hey!” Rézia shuffles over with a broom and dustpan to pick up the shards. “Don’t wreck my place. If I didn’t have this place, I’d be as crazy as the two of you.”
“We’re not crazy.” Mariselle tries to get up, but her knees buckle under her and she falls back in her chair.
“Freda, why don’t you do it now?” Mariselle says. “Why don’t you sing your own funeral song?”
“We’ll help you,” Rézia chimes in from where she’s sweeping up glass across the room.
I clear my throat to show them that I can do it, am willing to do it, sing my own funeral song. Why not?
And that’s how I begin my final performance as a funeral singer, or any kind of singer at all.
I sing “Brother Timonie.” Brother Timonie, Brother Timonie, we row on without you. But I’ll know we’ll meet again.
Rézia and Mariselle catch on quickly and join in. We sing until our voices grow hoarse, sometimes making Brother Timonie a sister.
When we’ve exhausted poor Timonie, we move on to a few more songs, happier songs. And for the rest of the night we raise our glasses, broken and unbroken alike, to the terrible days behind us and the uncertain ones ahead.
THE DEW BREAKER CIRCA 1967
1
He came to kill the preacher. So he arrived early, extra early, a whole two hours before the evening service would begin.
The sun had not yet set when he plowed his black DKW within a few inches of a row of vendors who had lined themselves along where he’d imagined the curb might be, to sell all kinds of things, from grilled peanuts to packs of cigarettes. He wanted a perfect view of the church entrance in case the opportunity came to do the job from inside his car without his having to get out and soil his shoes.
Catching the street merchants stealing glimpses at his elephantine frame, he shifted now and again to better fit between the car seat and the steering wheel, his wide belly spilling over his belt to touch the tip of the gearshift.
Later one of the women, who didn’t want her name used, would tell the Human Rights people, “He looked like a pig in a calabash sitting there. Yes, I watched him. I watched him for a long time. I tried to frighten him with my old eyes. I belong to that church and I did not want to see my pastor die.”
Rumors had been spreading for a while that the preacher had enemies in high places. His Baptist church was the largest in Bel-Air, one of the oldest and poorest communities in Haiti’s capital, a neighborhood that one American journalist had described a few months earlier in a Life magazine article as “a hilly slum with an enviable view of the cobalt sea of Port-au-Prince harbor.”
The church was called L’Eglise Baptiste des Anges, the Baptist Church of the Angels, which was printed in chalky letters on a clapboard sign over the front doors. Above the sign was a likeness of Jesus, scrawny, with a hollowed ivory face and two emaciated hands extended toward passersby.
The preacher had a radio show, which aired at seven every Sunday morning on Radio Lumière, so that those who could not visit his church could listen to his sermons before they went about their holy day. Rumors of