The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [68]
“We are all born mad.” The preacher now recalled that particular line from the play. “Some remain so.”
The Volunteers had shot at all the surrounding houses the night after the play was performed, but thankfully no one had been hurt.
“Pastor, your shoes look a little dusty tonight.” The shoeshine man reached under his chair and pulled out his shine toolbox.
“Léon, there’s no need to have polished shoes at night,” the preacher said.
“Pastor, a man like you should always have clean shoes,” Léon argued.
“They won’t stay clean for long,” the preacher said.
“Pastor, before you can say Amen, I will be done.”
“Maybe tomorrow, Léon,” said the preacher.
The “tomorrow” made the shoeshine man smile. The deacons smiled also, finding further reason to hope.
The men were almost at the church when they reached the one street lamp on their stretch of Rue Tirremasse. A group of boys was gathered there in the direct path of the light beam. Some of the boys were singsonging their school lessons to one another, while others studied alone, pacing back and forth with their heads bowed. The preacher made out one of the boys who faithfully attended Sunday school with his mother, a ten-year-old who despite the mother’s scoldings was not above begging from the vendors and passersby. The boy had a cigarette butt in his hand. When he spotted the preacher, he threw the butt on the ground and darted down a dark alley away from the street.
On another occasion the preacher might have remarked to the deacons for their own information, “Do you see that? Do you see what Satan’s doing to our youth, our jeunesse étudiante?” However, as he approached the gates of his church and looked up to greet the image of the Christ with the pale arms extended toward him, his mind was less on the flock than the wolves who though he hadn’t noticed them were certainly looming.
Inside, the preacher flipped a light switch. The dangling bulbs flickered from high in the middle of the room. As the preacher strolled casually to the altar, the deacons brought out the kerosene lamps they always had on reserve in case there was a blackout, the collection baskets they passed at every service for offerings, and a gallon of water that they parceled out in a glass to the preacher to refresh his voice during the service.
The service went on as usual that night, but many of the members who usually came didn’t attend. A few new faces were spotted in the congregation, however—people who had wandered in off the street to rest a few minutes on their way somewhere else, others like Léon who weren’t religious but had heard about the militia men milling about and thought they might be of help to the preacher should an ambush be attempted against him.
Throughout the service, which ran longer than the usual hour, the preacher sang with all his might; he swayed his body back and forth, pounded his fists on the pulpit, stamped his feet, jumped up in the air and back, and dashed up to each pew to encourage the congregants to join them.
His sermon that night was more like a testimony. It was a remembrance of the day of his wife’s death.
He would always remember her eyes, he said. There was something about them that wasn’t quite right that afternoon. Maybe it was the way the tear ducts kept filling up and drying up again, with the tears never spilling down her face. Or maybe it was the way her pupils were so enlarged that they became one with her irises. Or maybe it was the way she kept fighting to keep the upper and lower lids apart, as though it was the greatest battle of her life. In any case, it was obvious as soon as she staggered home and slipped into bed that she was going to die.
Her limbs were all moving slowly but separately, as though they were no longer controlled by the rest of her body. She