The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [67]
That night at the supper table, just as he had during every other difficult moment in his life—including when he was just a boy and had lost his young brother in the sea and when his wife had died a few months before—he reminded himself of his own personal creed, that life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should also lose it on your own terms.
Rising from his chair, he picked up his Bible, a leather-bound monogrammed volume, and thumped it against his palm as if to pound away his last shreds of doubt about going into the night.
“It’s time for the service,” he said to the deacons, while stroking the front cover. “I don’t think you three should walk with me to the church tonight. I’ll walk alone.”
The senior deacon stretched his body upward, extending his right hand toward the preacher’s face. For a brief second the preacher thought his friend was going to slap him, or perhaps signal to the sons, the preacher’s godchildren, to grab and bind him, but all the elder did was remove an errant black string from the preacher’s shoulder. Still, finding the string seemed like a slight ploy, something to delay them, to earn one more minute, to keep him inside the house a bit longer.
The preacher tapped the Bible against the elder deacon’s lowered arm, signaling him and his sons to remove themselves from his path.
When it seemed like there was nothing else to do, the deacons stepped aside and allowed him to walk through the doorway. Once the preacher had carefully padlocked his front door, the three men reluctantly followed him across the shaky wooden bridge over the narrow rain canal that separated his house from the unpaved street.
As usual, Rue Tirremasse was muggy, dusty, and loud, and seemed much brighter than it should have with only one distant street lamp in sight. The preacher waved to his neighbor across the street, an old man who sold cassava bread bathed in homemade peanut butter from a stall in front of his house.
A konpa song praising the government ( you have led us/you have fed us was the chorus) blared from the makeshift barbershop operating out of someone’s living room in the house next to the old man’s. Two young men were sitting inside playing cards as a boy’s head was shaved of hair and lice. The preacher waved to the barber and the men, who waved back. Could they be his executioners? The ones he’d been told would be waiting out on the street for him?
A woman selling grilled corn in front of the barbershop called out to the preacher, “How are we tonight, Pastor?”
Just as he always did whenever she greeted him that way, he nodded that he was fine, but this time took the extra step of bowing in her direction.
The preacher then spotted a young couple he’d married. They had notebooks pressed against their chests as they walked toward him. The wife was taking a secretarial course, while the husband was studying to be an accountant. Their parents had rushed to have the preacher marry them when the girl became pregnant, but she’d suffered a miscarriage soon after the wedding.
“How are you, Pastor?” she asked when they stopped to greet him.
“How are the courses coming?” the preacher asked.
“They’re very difficult, Pastor,” the young husband answered. “We have a lot of studying to do. This is why you haven’t seen us at the weekday services.”
The three deacons were still following closely behind the preacher. They were a bit more comfortable now, feeling protected by the geniality of each of the preacher’s encounters. They too participated in the greetings, nodding and waving hello.
A widow whom the preacher occasionally hired to wash and iron his clothes stopped him to ask when she should come by for the next batch.
“Pastor, you’re not kind,” she said. “You wear the same clothes all the time so you won’t give me the work.”
The preacher laughed before moving on to the house of a shoeshine man, who, when he wasn’t shining shoes, always sat in a low chair in