Land of Mountains
by
Jinx Schwartz
Land of Moutains
First Edition copyright 2003 by Jinx Schwartz
Second edition copyrright 2010 by Jinx Schwartz
First Electronic Publication 2010
Second Electronic Publication by Jinx Schwartz at Smashwords 2011
Front cover Art Cover art by Nicole Skillern
The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons, whether living or dead, is strictly coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning to a computer disk, or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without express permission in writing from the publisher.
See back of book for a Lexicon of terms and characters
Other Books by Jinx Schwartz
The Texicans
Troubled Sea
Just Add Water *
Just Add Salt *
Just Add Trouble
Just Deserts*
* Hetta Coffey Mystery Series
.
Acknowledgements
I guess there are writers out there who get by without help from others, but I’m not one of them. For their contributions of both time and encouragement, I am grateful to all who aid and abet this writing addiction of mine. One special person, however, deserves not only mention, but a medal: Bob (Mad Dog) Schwartz, my husband and best friend, who is stuck on a boat with me when I am doing my most intensive scribbling.
Thanks to the following: Monica Brooks. Lurah Magee, Rebecca Dahlke, Geary Ritchie, Katherine Baccarro, Marilyn Ortega, Jim and Gale Wilkins, and Cynthia Smith.
So with all that help, plus my superduper editor, Holly Whitman, wouldn’t you think Land of Mountains would be flawless? One could only hope, but any goof-ups that slipped through are purely mine.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the loving memory of Lloyd Dooley.
Chapter One
Weclom to Port-au-Prince
Some welcome. They couldn’t even spell it.
Gooey tarmac oozed around my brand new patent leather shoes, and damp heat wilted the Shirley Temple curls my mother forced my hair into earlier in the day. I could practically feel the ringlets springing back to their natural orange frizz. I began to glow. Southern girls don’t sweat, they glow. Rivers of glow ran through my scalp, and down my neck.
I looked back toward the DC-3 airplane, hoping to see my mother and little sister. No luck. I should have waited inside with them where it was cooler but, as usual, I was in a big old hurry. Grownups jostled by me, headed for the terminal building. I was of a mind to follow them, but I’d promised Mama I’d wait until she could get Sister awake enough to leave the plane.
I fanned myself with my hand and cocked my head. From somewhere, drum beats echoed. Not the tinkling,cheerful sound of a Havana steel band. More like a tom-tom sound, with a steady, hollow, thump, thump, thumping, that reminded me of movies set in Africa.
My nose twitched. Something stunk up the thick air. Smelled to high heaven. Worse than my grandfather’s one-holer outhouse in July. I sniffed the stink, tracking it toward the WECLOM sign, and what I spotted was far more rotten than their spelling. Stuck on posts next to the misspelled greeting was something really, really, ugly. Several somethings.
Daddy says I have eyes like an eagle, but even so it took a second or two for what I saw to sink in. Or maybe I just didn’t want it to. Matter of fact, if I hadn’t spent so much time at all-day-for-a-dime matinees back in Texas, I probably wouldn’t have even recognized a human head on a stake, but believe you me, that’s what they were. Four of‘em. And even though I was upwind, my smeller told me they’d been there awhile.
I pinched my nose and held my breath, waiting for Mama and Sister to finally make it to the bottom of the clanky old ramp, but at about the same time they arrived, my brain and mouth went all cottony. I tugged at my mother’s hand, thinking to tell her about those fly-covered, stinking heads, but could only manage, “Mama, I’m fixin’ to throw up.”
“Not now, Lizbuthann. I see your father,” Mother snapped. She was a mite miffed with me because I’d gulped down two frozen daiquiris, which I thought were slushy lemonades, during the flight. I was asking for another when my mother took a sip of hers, realized they were laced with rum, and gave me a talking to. I protested that it wasn’t my fault the stewardess was dumb enough to give a ten-year-old like me a loaded snow cone, but Mama wasn’t having any of it.
She made a beeline for the terminal building, yanking me along behind her. As I threw a last look over my shoulder at the scary heads, I decided it was probably a good thing Mama only had eyes for my daddy, because if she’d seen those heads, we’d surely have been marched right back onto that plane. The last thing my stomach needed was a bumpy return trip to Cuba.
Daddy had a big smile on his face in spite of the fact that he was surrounded by gun-toting Negroes wearing wrinkled shorts.
My father never wears shorts, nor do any other grown men I know, but I’d seen those snooty-accented explorers wearing them in Tarzan movies. Since they, like whoever was out there on the posts, occasionally lost their heads to savages, maybe my father was smart to stick with long pants, just in case there was a connection.
I longed to be in shorts myself. Mama had us gussied up, right down to white gloves, like we were going to church instead of taking a tummy-jolting flight just above the wave tops. It’s a wonder they even managed to pass out those rum- laced daiquiris.
While Mama and Daddy hugged, Sister and I gawked at a huge black woman swathed in layers of multi-hued scarves who, like some exotic butterfly, floated toward us.
She fluttered to the floor in front of me, lowered the basket she had balanced on her head, and uncovered a collection of the most beautiful dolls I’d ever seen. Their heads, wrapped in brilliantly colored scarves, were topped with tiny baskets brimming with tropical fruit and flowers. Like the woman who sold them, the dolls were dressed in frilly blouses and brilliantly colored skirts. Sister and I were bewitched. We’d never seen a black-faced doll, much less any so spectacular.
I was reaching for one when Mother called out, “Girls, come over here and give your Daddy a hug.” She talked in a real happy voice, even though her eyes were wet.
Tearing myself away from the dolls, I pushed Sister in front of me. I hadn’t seen Daddy in six months, and before he left Texas he and I hadn’t been on the best of terms. Even though mother read us his letters each week, my three-year- old sister barely remembered him. Sister whirled and buried her face in my waist, so it was left to me to break the ice.
“Hi, Daddy. Are there head hunters here?”
Mama shot me an exasperated look. “Don’t pay any attention to her, Bud. Your daughter’s drunk.”
Daddy, who evidently hadn’t seen those heads out on the fence, looked bewildered by my question, but he did that a lot with us kids. Especially me.
This little reunion wasn’t going as planned and I could tell Mama was getting upset, because her eyebrows twitched. All she’d talked about since my father left San Antonio was how, as soon as school let out, we’d join him, and she was real happy about that. As for me, I had serious doubts about this so-called great new life Mama talked about, what with me having to give up my school and friends, but even so, I’d thrown up my hand during Show and Tell so I could share it with my classmates. “My Daddy’s a dam builder, he’s going to Hell, and he’s taking us with him,” I’d begun, only to have my favorite teacher, Mrs. Baldwin, grab my hand and march me straight to the principal’s office.
The principal’s job, as far as I could figure, was to spank kids who messed up, which I’d never done until now, so naturally I was a mite nervous. Mama says I have lots of nerve.
Principal Young didn’t look young at all, but more like an old owl. Tufts of hair stuck out of and around his pointy ears. Coke-bottle-bottom glasses magnified his yellowish eyes. I expected him to hoot, but instead he asked me to explain myself, which I was much too scared to do, even if I knew what I’d done, so he sent me out into the hall while he and the teacher called my house.
When Mrs. Baldwin came out of Mr. Young’s office she was smiling. She said they’d talked with my grandmother Hetta, and that I should have a little talk with her and then, the next day, I could retell my story to the class. When we got back to the classroom she told the kids there had been a little misunderstanding and I wasn’t in any trouble, but they crawdad-eyed me the rest of the day, like I had cooties or something.
I was still worried about how I’d messed up when I got home from school, but nobody was mad at me. Mama smiled while Grandmother Hetta showed me this tiny dot on my little tin world atlas. Haiti, it was called, and we were going to live there because Daddy was going to build a dam.
I was mighty relieved to find out that I hadn’t, with an angry, silent wish all those months ago, sent my daddy straight to Hades after that little set-to we had. Especially since I thought we had to go with him, which would have been pretty danged unfair, in my book.
That night in bed I eavesdropped on Mama and Grandmother Hetta’s conversation in the living room. I’d never told anyone that, through some miracle of air vents, I could hear everything that happened in the living room clear as a bell. That’s why I never protested when I was sent to bed, even when there was a program on the radio I wanted to hear. That alone should have alerted the grownups that something was amiss, but they never figured it out.
I am an excellent dropper of eaves. For instance, one night I overheard my Aunt Marjorie, who doesn’t have any kids and doesn’t seem to like ‘em much, telling another aunt that I was annoyingly precocious, and even though she mispronounced it, I now knew, thanks to those air vents, how she really felt about me. I continued to be precious andshe continued to pretend to be annoyed. I gotta say, though, she’s a pretty good pretender.
Anyhow, this night I was keeping my ears open for what my mother and grandmother had to say. Mama sighed and said, “I swear, sometimes I just don’t know what to do with Lizbuthann.”
Of course, my ears perked upon hearing my name. Grandmother Hetta laughed softly. “Johnnie Ruth, I think you named Elizabeth for the wrong aunt. She’s a sight more like your Aunt Arleigh than your Aunt Elizabeth. I should know, I was the oldest of all the sisters and practically raised her. And what Elizabeth Ann—Grandmother Hetta is the only person in all of Texas who pronounces my name so it doesn’t sound like Lizbuthann—did today pales in comparison to what you did to me when you were a girl.”
Oh, this was getting good.
“When you were about her age, your wild aunts, and you know what pistols they are, came for a visit to the farm and one of them told this off-color joke.” She lowered her voice and told the joke to my mom, but I couldn’t hear it, darn it. When they both started laughing, I knew I’d missed a good one.
Grandmother Hetta continued talking in a normal voice, saying, “You children were supposed to be asleep, but evidently you heard your aunt’s joke and told it the next day. In Vacation Bible School.”
Mother gasped, but she was kind of giggling, too. “That must have set the gossips’ tongues to wagging.”
“Oh my, yes. I thought I’d never hear the end of it. The preacher almost had apoplexy and suggested that since your father died recently maybe you’d fallen in with a bad lot. As if there was a bad lot to be found in Locker, Texas.” They continued to talk and I drifted off, happy to be off the hook at school, and at home. Grandmothers are good that way.
So, thanks to grandmother’s patient explanation that day after school, I knew I wasn’t following Daddy into Hades when I stepped off the plane in Port-au-Prince, but it sure felt like it. I’d seen paintings in Aunt Marjorie’s art books of sinners burning in Hell, their mouths open in silent screams for help from Heaven—like it wasn’t too darned late—and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have expected old Lucifer himself to suddenly appear in that sweltering terminal building.
Maybe it was the daiquiris, the heads, the heat, or a combination of all of them, for the next thing I knew, I woke up with my head in the doll seller’s lap. People fanned me while my mother hovered and Daddy paced and twirled a curl of hair that Mama called his worry lock.
Mama elbowed aside a couple of Haitian kids who’d dashed in to snatch a few strands of my red hair when I conked out. Sitting me up, she looked back over her shoulder at my father. “Lizbuthann’s fine, Bud,” Mama reassured him. “She does this a lot.”
Daddy did not look reassured.
Chapter Two
All four of us crammed into the front seat of Daddy’s spankin’ new 1953 Ford pickup for the trip from the airport to the hotel.
I wanted to ride in the truck bed, but after I’d fainted flat out at the airport my parents didn’t think it was such a hot idea. Besides, Daddy had already hired some raggedy Haitian kid to ride back there so nobody would steal our luggage when we stopped for traffic or whatever.
That ragamuffin had himself a full-time job, I’ll tell you, even though Daddy hardly slowed down all the way through Port-au-Prince, especially when people looked like they were fixin’ to throw themselves in front of us. Daddy said they were just looking to get hit because they figured we were rich and we’d give ‘em money. Which I did.
Daddy’d given me a bag of centimes and candy when we left the airport, and it was my job, when we got completely bogged down, to toss a handful of the coins and sweets out the window to clear the crowd. So, while Daddy blasted the horn, cussed a blue streak and steamrolled our way along thejampacked, narrow streets, I tossed the money and mints to those we grazed.
Mama surely didn’t approve of our methods, saying something about the dignity of the natives, but as far as I could tell the natives were enjoying themselves no end. Daddy said it was the custom, so Mama said, “Oh, well, then,” and pulled Sister a little closer, like she thought I might get carried away and toss her tyke out with the money.
‘Course, I wouldn’t do that, since Sister was holding the two fantastic dolls Daddy bought from the riled up fat lady I’d scared half to death by collapsing in her lap, drawing the attention of two armed soldiers who thought she’d done something to me.
Daddy had sorted out the mess at the airport, and now he steered us through the shambles that was Port-au-Prince. Between cussing and honking he growled, “I need me a cold beer,” and when I said, “Me, too,” Mama gave me the look and said I was getting to be quite a handful.
I was about to say something that would land me in a heap of trouble, like, “Thank you,” when Daddy took a sharp left turn through a gate that was thrown open in the nick of time by a grinning man in a white uniform.
We screeched to a halt in the courtyard of Heaven. Okay, so it wasn’t really Heaven, but after the stinky hot airport and the filthy, crowded streets of Port-au-Prince, the Sans Souci Hotel and its park-like courtyard looked pretty heavenly to me.
Painted a dazzling white, the wooden building resembled a frosted gingerbread house splashed with gumdrop colors that turned out to be flowering plants so brilliant and fragrant that they stung my eyes and tickled my nose. Lacy porches with curly eaves and banisters surrounded the whole hotel.
I instantly fell in love, enchanted with the exotic charm of the San Souci’s mystique. I’d learned those words, exotic mystique, in Vocabulary, and it’s a good thing because otherwise I wouldn’t have the words to describe such a place. Vocabulary, a special class at school, was where I showed my stuff. Mama said it was fine and dandy to learn new words so long as I didn’t put on airs and sound too snooty around my cousins, who, to my mind, were dumb as dirt anyhow. Right now, though, even with my new fancy words, I was, well, speechless.
“Lizbuthann, you might want to shut your mouth before you catch a fly,” Mama teased as we left the pickup and entered a reception area where black folks in white uniforms grabbed our bags and stared, wide-eyed, at my hair before backing out of the room. After being in the country for only a couple of hours I was wondering if I should borrow one of Mama’s headscarves.
We passed through the hotel lobby and out to a garden, swimming pool, and outdoor bar area. Trees dripping with tropical fruits and bushes dotted with six-inch flowers surrounded a grinning bartender. He turned up his radio as a greeting to us. The music, as strange to me as everything else in Haiti, had an exotic clanking thump that didn’t sound anything at all like Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, but I liked it anyway. A body could hardly stand still. The rhythm moved you, made you want to shuffle your feet, sort of like a two-step, but faster.
Parking ourselves on cool, lacy ironwork chairs in the shade of a flame tree, which looked for all the world like an enormous poinsettia bush, Sister and I ordered limeade while our parents had a couple of beers.
Just as my drink, a tall frosty affair decked out with a gigantic red flower, cherries, and lime slices, arrived, a blue and yellow bird danged near the size of a wild turkey, shook the air with raucous squawks while clumsily dive-bombing the table. After a few passes, the parrot crash-landed onto my shoulder, almost knocking me out of my chair. When we both caught our balance, he leaned down, his claws digging through my dress and into my arm, fished a cherry from my glass with his horny beak, and proceeded to demolish it.
Mama shrieked louder than the parrot and tried to shoo him away, but it was too late. Cherry juice dripped a bright pink design onto my new white dress.
Holding a seltzer bottle in one hand and a banana in the other, the bartender rushed over, wrestled what was left of the cherry from the bird’s beak and sprayed my shoulder with ice-cold fizzy water. To stop the macaw’s ear-splitting protest, he gave it a banana just in time to save my hearing. The parrot, whose name was Christopher Columbus, quieted down, held the banana in one crusty black claw and snapped it in half with that frightful beak.
I was giggling so hard that Mama eyed my frilly drink with suspicion. She looked as if she were about to reach over to take a test sip, but changed her mind and said she’d probably lose a finger to that overgrown parakeet. I imagine I was grinning like a simpleton for I had fallen head over heels in love with the tropics, Port-au-Prince, and my surprise-around-every bend new country. I wanted to live in Haiti forever. Heads and all.
After another limeade, Mama said it was time to look at our rooms and made me return Christopher Columbus to his perch. He didn’t like it much and grumbled in a language I couldn’t understand.
Sister and I had our very own room with a porch that connected us to our parents’ suite. With its dark, cool interior, smooth mahogany floors, ceiling fans and two big beds tented with mosquito netting, the room looked like the drawings of tents in a book called The Arabian Nights. One of my aunts owned that book, which I really hadn’t read, even though I surely gave it a try after my great grandmother Stockman said it was a heathen work of evil. It was really too hard to read, what with all those old fashioned words and such, so I soon gave up looking for the evil parts, but how I loved those drawings.
Better yet, little chartreuse lizards hung all over the ceiling above our tent-beds, and although Mama wasn’t crazy about them, they didn’t bother Sister and me. We left a pet horny toad back in Texas, so lizards and the like didn’t bother us much as long as they stayed on the ceiling and didn’t drop on a kid’s head when we least expected it.
Once in our room, we peeled off our sweaty dresses, put mine in the sink to soak out cherry juice, wiggled into bathing suits, and streaked back to the bar area.
Mama said we could go into the swimming pool only if we stayed in the shallow end, didn’t swallow any water, and Sister wore her Mae West, which Daddy inflated and put on her before we were allowed to leave our room. The bartender, whose name seemed to be Robber, said he’d dumped chlorine in the pool that very morning, and since he was also the lifeguard, he’d see to it that we didn’t drown.
I guess Mama and Daddy really wanted to be alone, because I know my mother saw the green stuff growing at the pool’s waterline and normally she wouldn’t have let us in there for all the tea in China, chlorine or no. As it was, I knew we were still in for peroxide drops in our ears before the day was out.
Robber made us rum punches without the rum, adding extra grenadine syrup. He cut up pieces of mango and pineapple for Christopher Columbus, and taught us to say eye-eee-tee: Haïti. He also told me his name was actually Robert, but was pronounced Row-bear, and the name of the hotel, Sans Souci, meant carefree.
After sitting in the pool to cool down for a while, we climbed onto barstools and ate as many olives as we wantedfrom a dish behind the bar. Robert said hardly anyone ever ordered a Martini anyhow. Robert was my kind of babysitter, even if it did turn out that he was also a schoolteacher.
Teaching school in Haiti, he told us, didn’t pay much, so he worked part-time as a bartender. He spoke English, French, and the language of Haiti, Creole, which is like French but sounds like you’ve got a mouthful of grits. We spent the afternoon sipping exotic fruit concoctions and learning some basic words and phrases. He wouldn’t teach me any bad words, just zut, which means something like, darn it.
“Monsieur Row-bear,” I said, ready to try out my best new accent, “ou et le … movie theater?” I knew we wouldn’t be in town long, but what the heck, maybe there was a movie playing that I could talk Daddy into.
“Élisabet,” he replied, shaking his head and making my name sound sooo sophisticated, “en Port-au-Prince, il n’ya pas une cinéma.” Port-au-Prince sounded like Port-aww- Prance.
“Well zut, alors!” says I. “If there’s no, uh, cinéma, what do kids here do for fun?”
Mr. Robert grinned. “Few of them sit around swimming pools drinking up my grenadine. We are a very poor country, so most Haitian children make their own games, swim in the rivers and in the sea, and many work.”
I almost dropped my mango slice. “Work? Kids?”
“Oh, yes. They help in the fields, cutting sugar cane, as well as harvesting cotton, coffee beans and fruit. Some fish with their fathers or make baskets to sell to the tourists.”
I had to think about that. It never occurred to me that kids might have to work, even though I remember my daddy telling me that when he was a boy he’d picked cotton and fed pigs. He’d made it sound like regular chores, like mowing grass and washing dishes.It was something to ponder, but I figured I had plenty of time since I was gonna be here for practically my whole life. Mother had packed shoes for us for four years or so, guessing what size we’d be wearing year after year. Or rather, I’d be wearing, since Sister would probably get stuck with my hand-me-downs when she grew some. I was fixin’ to ask another question about this kid labor thing when I heard voices in the lobby.
Two Negro men wearing dark glasses and Humphrey Bogart-style hats swaggered out to the bar. Their loud laughs and talk made me fidgety, even though I couldn’t understand what they said. Maybe I just felt uncomfortable because I saw Robert sort of shrink, like he was trying to become invisible.
Back in Texas, Negroes mostly had their own bars, restaurants, and even their own bathrooms. Once in awhile, when we were traveling, I was tempted to use their bathrooms when the Whites Only one was busy, but Mama wouldn’t let me. She said it wasn’t Christian to separate people like that, but if it was the law, I had to be respectful of the signs and besides, she doubted if the Colored would want me in their bathroom anyhow.
The Haitian men gave Sister and me the once-over and asked Robert something that sounded suspiciously like, “Who are the brats?”
“Touristes,” Robert told them with a shrug, making us sound mighty unimportant. He was suddenly all humble, which, even though my Grandmother Mabel told me on more than one occasion that I could use a dose of, I didn’t like Robert humble. It didn’t fit his nature any more than it did mine and it made me wonder who these men were that they could cow a grown man so’s you could almost hear him moo.
Robert wouldn’t meet their eyes, keeping his on the already-polished bar he was polishing. He gave them their drinks and began re-shining the sparkling glassware. I couldn’t understand the men—and therefore eavesdrop—and since Robert was now ignoring me completely while kowtowing to the men, and Sister had dozed off in a lounge chair, I wandered off to the lobby and picked brochures from a rack. I had just finished reading the last one when the men threw a few gourdes on the bar and left, and Robert came back to life.
“Who were those guys?” I asked. I wanted to add, And why are you afraid of them? But I didn’t.
“No one important,” he said, with a nervous shrug.
“They look like gangsters.”
Robert blinked, looked a little shocked, and then grinned. “You, my little American friend, are too smart for your own good.”
“Smart alecky is what most grown-ups say.”
Robert was much too polite to agree. He picked up one of the brochures. “So, what have you learned about Haiti?”
“Well,” I sorted through the stack and pulled one out, “you have beautiful beaches, friendly people and,” I read, “‘Haiti’s major exports are coffee—’”
Robert cut me off with a laugh. “These pieces of paper,” he waved one in front of my nose, “are propaganda.” He saw the question on my face and explained. “Propaganda is what you tell people who have no brains. No ears.” Poking his finger between my eyes, he added, “You have to use your head to observe, think about what you see and hear for yourself. And most important, listen to the sounds of my country.”
“I hear sounds, all right. Drums. Mama says they’re going to drive her nuts.”
“Your mère will get used to them. They never stop, except...” He stopped talking and got that nervous look again.
“Except when?” I prompted.
“Nothing for you to be concerned with. Just remember that here in Haiti, and especially in the mountains where you will live, nothing is as simple as it seems.” He looked over at my sleeping sister, whose arms were wrapped around her new doll. “That doll, for instance. She looks like a toy, but is much more than that.”
“I think she looks like that singer in the movies, Carmen Miranda, only darker. But she’s just a doll.”
“True, she is a doll, but she is made in the likeness of a very famous voudou priestess who lived here many years ago. A maroon.”
Now this was getting interesting. While I’d seen plenty of voodoo stuff in movies, I never recalled seeing a purple person.
“My grandmamma says that movie hooey is mumbo jumbo and the work of Satan. She danged near had apoplexy when I told her about this one movie where voodoo folks were all dancing around, chewing on pieces of a roasted explorer. None of those dancers looked anything like Sister’s doll, though, and I don’t think they were purple, either.”
Robert laughed his soft laugh. “Maroon is a word used to describe an escaped slave, not a color. And, like your grand-mère, many consider voudou the work of Satan, but it is much more complex than that. Here in Haiti, the slaves were not allowed to practice their own African religions, but were forced to convert to Catholicism. They did so, but incorporated their own gods and customs to form a religion of their own. But for your information, the followers of vodun, voudou, or as you call it, voodoo, do not eat people. That is only made up by your Hollywood.”
“Hey, I thought you said there was no movie theater here, so how come you know about Hollywood?”
“Oh, we have films, just no real theaters. They are shown out of doors, and people sit on the ground. There is no schedule. Someone just tells someone, who tells someone else, that there will be a film on a certain night and where to go.”
“Sounds like fun to me. By the way, Monsieur Robert, you aren’t one of those voodoo people, are you?”
“No, I am Baptist. I was raised in Cap Haitian by missionaries. They left a few years ago, when a new president of Haiti declared that our country have only two official religions, Catholicism and Voodou.”
Oh, boy, my Grandmamma Hetta, a died-in-the-wool Baptist, surely was not going to like the sound of that one little bit. I decided not to mention it in my letters, in case she’d change her mind about coming to visit.
Robert was telling me as how maroons were escaped slaves who revolted against the French, and used voodoo to get back at their owners, when he saw my parents coming and clammed up. Shoot, things were just getting interesting, but I followed his lead and began talking about the Citadel, a fortress in his hometown of Cap Haitian. I didn’t want Mama getting wind of this voodoo thing.
My mother had changed into a white linen sundress and let her shiny, coal black hair fall around her shoulders. Daddy’s starched shirt and knife-pleated khakis sported a few dark drips from his shower-sparkled hair. The scent of her l’huere bleu cologne, which she’d bought in the Havana tax-free store and was just about the best thing I’d ever smelled, blended with Daddy’s Aqua Velva aftershave. A couple of people peered out from the lobby, trying to decide if they were someone famous. They looked like movie stars. Everyone always said so. I figured I must be secretly adopted.
During my very first five-course dinner, I shared my fried plantains with Christopher Columbus while giving Daddy a running commentary of our trip from San Antonioto New Orleans to Miami to Havana, what my cousins were up to back home, and how many cows I now had in my herd at Aunt Anna’s.
Mama eyed the macaw and said I’d probably catch some bird disease and Daddy said that that was the last thing I needed because he figured, what with the way I went on, I’d already been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. But he said it real nice, not like he was mad at me, and we laughed until tears ran down our cheeks. Sometimes we’d laugh so hard about something that I’d nearly wet my pants. Other people would look at us funny, but we didn’t care. Those were the times I loved the most.
Sister—her real name is Arleigh, after my grandmother’s sister, but I just called her Sister —was so worn out that she had to be carried back to our room. Our parents tucked us in under the mosquito netting, reminded us to only drink water from the jug on the bed stand, turned out the lights, left the porch doors wide open, and went to their own room.
Faint drumbeats floated in with a warm breeze as I cuddled my new voodoo priestess doll and slid into exhausted slumber.
I’d almost forgotten about the heads.
Chapter Three
I was the first one up the next morning, so I tippy-toed to the bathroom, struggled into my still-damp, slightly mildewy bathing suit and made a beeline for the pool where I shared café au lait and a beignet with Christopher Columbus. I was sipping my second cup and pumping Robert for information when Mama and Daddy showed up, told me to stop pestering the poor barman, and discovered I was drinking coffee, which was news to me. Ever since we’d left Texas, it seemed people kept giving me stuff to drink that got me in hot water. Back home I’d never had any choice; grownups just naturally knew what was bad for a kid.
Robert, while sprinkling powdered sugar on my fritter and mixing cane syrup into what I now knew was chicory coffee, taught me to read the breakfast menu, so after Mama snatched away my coffee, I translated the breakfast food choices for my family. Daddy, who hadn’t learned much Creole because he had an interpreter working for him, was impressed and said I always was a quick learner and designated me as the family translator. I basked in the glow of his praise. Evidently he’d forgiven me for going against him back in San Antonio, painting the inside of his tow trailer Royal Blue—I had commandeered it for my clubhouse for a club of which I was, quite naturally, president—even though he’d told me not to. That was just before he’d left for Haiti, so I secretly figured I’d had a hand in running him out of town. Now it seemed all was forgiven, which made me real happy.
Before my parents showed up for breakfast, I had learned a lot from Robert. There was, he explained, a petite guerre, a little war, going on between the rich folks in the government, and the poor ones he called The People. That’s the way he said it: The People. I didn’t exactly know who The People were, but I said I sure didn’t want to be one of them if it would get my head plunked on a post.
Robert assured me that I was definitely not one of The People because I was white and not even Haitian and we didn’t have anything to worry about, because whacking off foreigners’ heads with a machete was real bad for tourism. Like setting anybody’s head on a post in plain view of arriving tourists wasn’t? Anyhow, that’s when I definitely decided not to tell my family about the heads; Mama would get all fidgety and maybe not let me wander off like I’m prone to do.
He also told me that Haiti means Land of Mountains in some ancient Indian language. Indian?
“Indian language, Robert? How’d Indians get clear over here? I thought they were all in Oklahoma.”
Robert smiled. “Not the same Indians as in your cowboy movies. These Indians, the Arawaks, lived here many, many years ago, before Hispañola—that’s the name of this island—was so-called discovered by the Spaniards.
“In fact, it was Christopher Columbus, the explorer,not this badly behaved bird,” Robert scratched the macaw’s head, “who bears responsibility for the slaughter of many Arawaks. Now Haiti is inhabited by the descendants, not of Indians, but of slaves brought from Africa to work after the Indians were annihilated, murdered, by the Spaniards.”
“Wow. You mean we get a school holiday for a murderer?”
“History books do not always tell the whole story, and I guess to most of the world a few less Indians here and there were not important in the larger scheme of life. Or so many still think. Someday I hope history will reflect the truth, but what does it really matter? Especially to my country. Haiti is so small, with so many problems, past history matters little. It is our future that concerns me.”
A bell rang and Robert left for the front desk, so we didn’t get to talk any more about this fascinating subject. I’d always had a sneaking suspicion that History was a waste of my valuable time since everyone seems to have his own version. Feeling that Robert had let me in on a big secret, I stored the information away for later use, like as an excuse not to do my History homework. I returned to slurping steaming café au lait, at least until Mama showed up and snatched it away.
After breakfast I reluctantly packed my bags, bid Robert and Christopher Columbus adieu and quickly found out why Haiti is called Land of Mountains. The first hour’s worth of narrow, unpaved road leaving Port-au-Prince for what Daddy called Camp climbed upward through a series of dizzying switchbacks. Daddy said it was only fifty miles or so to Camp as the crow flies, but this road looked to be laid out by goats, not crows. The company my father worked for planned to grade the washboards soon, but for now the trip took at least three bumpy hours.
My father pounded the horn constantly as we climbed. Even though he blew first and loudest, we had to back down several times to let brightly painted camions, a kind of bus, squeeze by us. In fact, they really are just beat up old flatbed trucks with bench seats in the bed, and galvanized tin roofs for shade.
These brightly painted camions overflowed with Haitians, goats, chickens, pigs, parrots, and baskets of fruit and vegetables. Some people rode the running boards, clinging on for dear life, and trying to suck themselves up small when we passed. Others rode on the roof. All, it seemed, were laughing, singing, squawking, squealing or bleating. I couldn’t wait for a chance to ride on one of those exotic-looking buses, even if, like Daddy said, they had bad brakes. To make his point, he showed us what was left of a few buses at the bottoms of cliffs.
In addition to the camions, there were lots of people and animals walking, most of them right down the middle of the road. Little rickety-looking, overloaded donkeys struggled with cargos of baskets, sugarcane, and bananas.
Women with stacks of stuff balanced on their heads and wearing bright skirts and blouses, and men sporting loose white shirts, khaki pants and tall straw hats, led those poor little donkeys, swaybacked, rib-pooching-poor horses, or the occasional scrawny cow, alongside the road. Everyone was barefoot, which I thought was a grand idea, but my mother said we’d get hookworms.
No one tried to jump in the truck bed because Daddy had covered it with a stretched tarp. Otherwise, he said, we’d have a bed full by the time we got to the top of the mountain, and his pickup could barely make it as it was. We did get a few bumper riders, but we let them be. Almost everyone we passed waved and smiled. If they thought we were being snooty by covering up the pickup bed, they sure didn’t show it.
At the top of the mountain Daddy pulled to a stop a little too close to the edge for my druthers. When he lifted the hood, steam poured out around the radiator cap and Haitians gathered to give Daddy advice he couldn’t understand.
Mama made us back off just in case it blew. She did let Sister and me buy some bananas and mangoes because they could be peeled, so while we ate them we looked down, way down, at Port-au-Prince and the winding road we’d climbed.
It was much cooler up this high and my backside got cold because my sweaty shorts and shirt had been stuck to the plastic truck seat. While Daddy vented the radiator and added water, I looked back at the turquoise of the Caribbean Sea far below, then walked to the other side of the road and gazed in the direction where Daddy said we were to live.
The road snaked downward into a deep green sea of jungle, then rose again into even higher mountains. I could just make out the shine of a meandering river.
My ears picked up a steady, faraway drum beat and I was reminded of those Saturday afternoon Tarzan movies where the natives got restless and folks generally ended up tied to a stake while savage voodoo worshipers or fierce warriors danced around threatening them with spears. It suddenly occurred to me that since leaving Havana the day before I hadn’t seen another white person outside my family.
“Daddy, is everyone here Negro?” I asked.
That’s not the way my cousins would have fashioned the question, but Mama never allowed us to use bad names for people. My mother always made us call all grownups, no matter what color, Mister and Missus.
“Pretty much,” he said, screwing the cap back on the radiator. “But I’ve noticed that most of the money belongs to the light-skinned guys married to really beautiful French wives.”
Mama’s eyebrows shot up, and he added, “Uh, or so your Uncle Lloyd tells me.”
Daddy and my Uncle Lloyd had arrived in Haiti first to build houses and get the construction camp ready for all the rest of the families who were coming to build the dam. Daddy said there’d be about fifty families, mostly Americans from Texas, and ten thousand Haitians, living at the jobsite. They’d already cleared the jungle, run water pipes from a stream, installed a generator, and strung power lines to Camp. There was still a lot to do, he said, but shoot, by the time everyone else got there we’d have the place real modernized.
The best part of the trip to Camp was fording the rivers. Daddy stopped the truck, walked to the edge of the muddy, swift, water and squinted at a pole, which he called a depth gauge, in the middle. White rings were painted on the gauge and he knew how many had to show above the water before we could cross.
He got back behind the steering wheel, told us to open the passenger side door, and to put our feet on the dashboard. He then took off his shoes, rolled up his pants legs, and left his door open.
Sister and I squealed with delight and Mama giggled as we bounced across the rocky streambed, water running in one door and out the other. I wondered what the gas station guys back home, the ones who vacuumed our car floorboards every time we filled up, would think about this method of cleaning. Seemed real practical to me.
Also practical, if slightly embarrassing, were the little kids wearing shirts. Only shirts. They also had these little round bellies, which I thought were real cute until Mama told us they were malnourished, which means they didn’t get enough to eat, or not enough of the right stuff. We knew about the right stuff, which in our case included Mama sprinkling wheat germ on just about everything we ate, and making us take daily doses of thick liquid vitamins that tasted okay, but went down like glue. Daddy warned my mother to leave that germ stuff out of his food, but I saw her sneaking a cupful into the meatloaf now and again.
Anyhow, most of the tiny villages we saw were near streams, and when one of these half-naked little kids needed cleaning up, mothers just dunked their babies’ fannies right into the water and let them drip dry, so they didn’t have to waste money on the likes of diapers. Now that’s what I call practical, but I didn’t think Sister would go for it.
We passed through a small village on the river, Mirebalais, where whitewashed houses, huts really, topped with a mishmash of palm-thatch and rusting tin roofs, leaned every which way in contrast to the straight walls of a tiny church that Daddy said was Catholic. I knew we wouldn’t be going there on Sundays because my great-Aunt Elizabeth says the only thing worse than a Catholic is a Democrat.
Some homeowners had gotten artistic and painted flowers and animals on their huts, and one bright purple house had a beautiful lime green and gold mermaid over the door. All the buildings were lined up around a dusty public square where a statue of some Haitian hero, his name long ago erased by tropical rain and heat, shared the space with a few palm trees.
There seemed to be no one around, but when we got out to stretch, a few heads popped out of darkened doorways to get a better look at us.
I was drawn toward the purple house, but when I wandered in that direction, Mama called me back. As I turned around, I caught a glimpse of a face in the window below the mermaid, but it was gone so fast I thought maybe I had imagined it. All the way back to the pickup, though, I had that feeling of being watched. Little hairs stood up on my neck as I walked a little faster than usual.
After that small town, we didn’t see another house for twenty miles, until we reached a village which Daddy said was just on the outskirts of Camp. He said that was because the company had recently built the road, and the Haitians just hadn’t had a chance to build near it yet. He must have been right because we did see scads more poor-looking folks walking on the road or clinging to bouncing camions.
I figured they must be the People that Robert talked about because if, like Daddy said, only the light-skinned ones had money, these folks must be flat broke; some were so dark they looked almost purple.
I considered warning these travelers headed toward Port-au-Prince that their heads might end up at the airport, but then I’d have to tell Mama about that gruesome scene, so I let well enough alone. Knowing my mother, she’d probably take us right back to Texas, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as Haiti.
Best I could tell, my new country was a child’s paradise. It didn’t take Mama long to figure out it was a grown-up’s nightmare.
Chapter Four
Camp, which was actually named Péligre after a small village nearby, sat on a plateau overlooking the Artibonite River Valley and the steep mountains beyond.
I knew all about plateaus because my Aunt Anna, who is actually my great aunt because she’s my grandfather’s half-sister, lives on one. Whenever we went to Grandmother Mabel and Paw Paw’s ranch near Lake Travis in the Texas Hill Country, I’d stick around just long enough to be polite, then streak the half-mile up the hill to Aunt Anna’s plateau.
I was named for this favored aunt. She had never married because she was rattlesnake bit when she was a little girl and couldn’t have babies. She lived in a trolley car, the very one she’d ridden from her Hyde Park home to the governor’s mansion in downtown Austin. She’d worked there as his seamstress, making all the gov’s clothes, right down to his skivvies. On the side, she also fashioned fancy dresses for rich debutants, which was interesting since Aunt Anna wore only what Mama called shifts.
Anyhow, my great-aunt and the trolley system retired about the same time, so she bought the tram, had it hauled out to the ranch, and set it on her plateau. My daddy and his brothers added a stone storage shed and bathroom, built a cistern for storing rain water, connected all of it with a patio, then roofed over the whole danged shebang.
Aunt Anna placed her bed in what used to be the rear of the trolley, where scads of tiny windows gave you a view all the way to Lake Travis. Out what used to be the back exit was her bathroom, and the front door was, well, the front door. She had a wood stove for heat and cooking in the winter; in the summer she cooked outside on the patio. I loved staying with her because we ate fresh baked bread washed down with cistern water for breakfast and then bathed in the creek. Mama said if she tried feeding me bread and water and making me take cold baths, I’d have a conniption fit. She was probably right about that, but somehow Aunt Anna made it all seem like a grand adventure.
Hanging above Aunt Anna’s upright piano, written in Arabic script and English, was a quote, “Women and men have been and will always be equal in the sight of God—Bahá’u’lláh,” which just about drove my grandpa nuts, because as much as he loved his half-sister, she was a Bahá’í and believed everyone in the whole world was equal. There were always lots of little dark people speaking strange languages camped out around her house which, of course, I loved, even though the members of the Bee Caves Baptist Church shot strange looks in my direction when Grandmother Mabel dragged me away from that “heathen on the hill” for Sunday services. When I grew up I wanted to be just like Aunt Anna: unmarried and a little loony. I’d as soon skip that snakebite, though.
So, like I said, I know about plateaus. The Haitian plateau at the Péligre dam site was pretty barren because Daddy and Uncle Lloyd—who wasn’t really my uncle, but was taken in by Paw Paw when he and his twin brother were thirteen, but that’s a whole ‘nother story—had made it. Scraped the top right off a hill with a D-8 dozer.
They’d also built fifty houses, a mess hall, and what they called a B.Q., or bachelor’s quarters, which was a kind of hotel where single men like Uncle Lloyd lived. They ate in the mess hall, and so did we for the first few days, until Mama got the house squared away. From then on, we only had dinner at the mess hall on Friday nights. I always had fried chicken, which was actually Guinea hen, and ice cream. Until I got fat and Mama put me on a diet.
The first night in our new house was kind of spooky because we didn’t have our real furniture yet. We had some bamboo stuff with hard cushions in the living room, and Daddy scraped up four army cots, a table, and four chairs. Mama borrowed a few kitchen items from the mess hall so we could make breakfast, but that was it.
My room, which I actually shared with Sister, but she was too young to claim her half, was at the back of the house. Behind it was a regular-sized yard, then a hundred-foot drop off straight down to the main road. Needless to say, Mama had quite a bit to say about that bluff practically on our back doorstep, for there was no fence or anything to keep a kid who wasn’t paying attention from barreling right over the edge.
Way below, across the road, an aggregate plant ground away twenty-four hours a day, sorting rocks and sand into piles. After dark, the bright plant lights shone on the back of our house, streaming through the aluminum window louvers to make shadow-stripes on the wall across from my bed. In the silvery-blue spaces between horizontal bars, I made shadow animals with my hands like I’d done at my great- grandmother’s house back in Austin. She lived right under one of those artificial moonlight towers that were scattered all over the city, put there by some folks who thought moonlight every night would be a neat thing. I agree.
But Austin was a long distance from Péligre, in more than miles.
That first night in Péligre, as I lay in bed listening to distant drums that by now I realized really never stopped, I couldn’t fall asleep in spite of my long, dusty day on the rough road from Port-au-Prince. I was thankful for the light coming through the louvers because when night fell in the tropics, it dropped like a black velvet curtain. Walking back from the mess hall, even though the stars were really bright, we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces until Daddy turned on his flashlight. Outside the circle of light, my imagination—overactive, according to almost every adult I knew—conjured up all manner of frighteningly toothy critters.
Once in my bed, to take my mind from those imagined child-eating monsters, I used both hands to make a shadow-rooster strut across the wall just like Uncle Lloyd taught me. Then I did a bear, but that was scary, so I was attempting a choo-choo train when my hands froze and I stopped breathing. Right in the middle of my shadow show, blocking the light, loomed a human silhouette.
I gasped, staring at the wall, not daring to turn and look at whoever it was just inches from my head, outside the screen. A flimsy screen, I might add; we didn’t have glass windows. The best I could tell, it was a man. A really huge bald man. I could hear him breathing until the blood pounding my ears drowned him out, but when I opened my mouth to yell for Mama I guess I must have fainted or something, because the next thing I knew it was morning and the bright sunlight streaming into my room made me think maybe I’d bad- dreamed the whole thing.
Until I went outside for a look.
“Lizbuthann, where are you going with your father’s boots?” Mother asked as I headed out the back door for the second time that morning.
“Uh, well, I thought I’d shine ‘em.”
“Oh, that’s so...sweet,” she said, eyeing me with slight suspicion like she always did when I volunteered to do something against my nature. But she shrugged, unable to figure what evil motive I could possibly have. “When you’ve finished, come on in and I’ll fix you some breakfast. Your Uncle Lloyd said he’d drop off fresh eggs and fruit this morning.”
I stared at the mud-encrusted construction boots with dismay. A body could starve to death before getting them clean. Sometimes, like my Grandmother Hetta says, a little girl can be too smart for her britches.
I ran to the flowerbed behind my bedroom window, set one of Daddy’s boots in the footprint I’d found on my first trip out, and pulled out the ruler I’d stuffed in my shorts. My father, I knew, wore a size eleven and the bare feet that left the prints under my window were at least four inches longer. Spooked, I skedaddled to the front yard, away from those scary footprints, and plopped into a swing Daddy hung from a tree branch. Sighing, I pondered my plight and began a half-hearted scrubbing of the grubby steel-toed boots.
Should I tell anyone my suspicions? And if so, would my story get my folks so upset that I’d become a prisoner? If my mother thought there was a giant peeping Tom about, I’d never be allowed to wander. ‘Course, if I did tell, I’d get out of the nasty boot job.
I was saved from a decision when Uncle Lloyd drove up. Dropping the boots, I raced to meet him. He scooped me up under the arms and swung me around until we were both good and dizzy.
“Ann you sure are gettin’ big. Won’t be long before you outgrow me being able to lift you.” Uncle Lloyd, like my father, calls me Ann because he and Daddy are partial to my Aunt Anna.
“I grew a whole inch just lately,” I bragged, throwing back my shoulders and locking my knees. It is my opinion that tall people get more respect, so I had been practicing walking with books on my head so I’d look even taller.
“Well now,” Uncle Lloyd said, “I suppose someone as big as you are can handle this little problem I’ve got. I didn’t quite know what to do with him, myself, so I thought of you.” He reached in the back of his truck, handed me a covered cage. What I saw when I pulled the towel from the wire dissolved all thoughts of my shadowy night visitor.
“Open the door and put your hand in. He’s tame,” my uncle prompted. So I did.