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By Root 809 0

the preacher’s imminent encounter with the forces in power started as soon as he’d begun broadcasting his sermons on the radio the year before. Those at the presidential palace who monitored such things were at first annoyed, then enraged that the preacher was not sticking to the “The more you suffer on earth, the more glorious your heavenly reward” script. In his radio sermons, later elaborated on during midmorning services, the preacher called on the ghosts of brave men and women in the Bible who’d fought tyrants and nearly died. (He’d started adding women when his wife passed away six months before.) He exalted Queen Esther, who had intervened to halt a massacre of her people; Daniel, who had tamed lions intended to devour him; David, who had pebbled Goliath’s defeat; and Jonah, who had risen out of the belly of a sea beast.

“And what will we do with our beast?” the preacher encouraged his followers to chant from beside their radios at home, as well as from the plain wooden pews of his sanctuary.

He liked to imagine the whole country screaming, “What will we do with our beast?” but instead it seemed as if everyone was walking around whispering the sanctioned national prayer, written by the president himself: “Our father who art in the national palace, hallowed be thy name. Thy will be done, in the capital, as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive us our anti-patriotic thoughts, but do not forgive those anti-patriots who spit on our country and trespass against it. Let them succumb to the weight of their own venom. And deliver them not from evil.”

The church members who were the most loyal of the radio listeners, when they were visited at home in the middle of the night and dragged away for questioning in the torture cells at the nearby Casernes Dessalines military barracks, would all bravely answer the same way when asked what they thought the preacher meant when he demanded, “What will we do with our beast?”

“We are Christians,” they would say. “When we talk about a beast, we mean Satan, the devil.”

The Human Rights people, when they gathered in hotel bars at the end of long days of secretly counting corpses and typing single-spaced reports, would write of the flock’s devotion to the preacher, noting, “Impossible to deepen that night. These people don’t have far to go to find their devils. Their devils aren’t imagined; they’re real.”

Not all the church members agreed with the preacher’s political line, however. Some would even tell you, “If the pastor continues like this, I leave the church. He should think about his life. He should think about our lives.”

The light of day vanished as he waited, the street vendors exchanging places around him, day brokers going home to be replaced by evening merchants who sold fried meats, plantains, and more cigarettes, late into the night. Among the dusk travelers were his colleagues in their denim uniforms. He didn’t know them intimately, but recognized a few. Those he did know loved to wear their uniforms, even though he didn’t think they should on jobs like this. Not that there was anything subtle about this job. He was sure that even before the “uniforms” had arrived some of the neighborhood people, upon observing him, had already gone off to warn the preacher. He was equally certain that neither he nor his uniformed acquaintances would deter the preacher. From what he knew of the preacher’s reputation, he was certain that the preacher would come and the evening service would go on. For if he stayed home, it would mean the devil had won, the devil of his own fear.

The preacher didn’t live far away. Four agents were even now in front of his modest two-room house, waiting to snatch him in case he tried to escape. Somehow he found it hard to imagine the preacher even being afraid. Perhaps he too was falling for the religious propaganda. The preacher would not be like the others, he told himself, who in the final hours before their arrests would plot impossible departures, run to trusted friends or relatives to parcel out their goods and their children.