The Forgetting Tree

by Tatjana Soli

  “Somebody needs to work the orchard,” Claire said.

  “I told you. Jean-Alexi is here. He is studying the situation.”

  “Let me meet him.”

  “He’s busy now.”

  Claire stopped and glared at her. “I don’t believe anyone is here.”

  “You’re going crazy.”

  “I need to call Forster. Why isn’t the irrigation on? Why is everything dying? I told you to have the armoire put back in the house.”

  “You’ll see,” Minna said, walking away. “You be patient for once.”

  * * *

  Again the elixir, and again she swooned into a deep, pleasurable torpor. Claire heard a man’s voice when she woke from an afternoon nap. A man’s voice like cascading water and then Minna’s voice arguing. Claire stared at the stained mattress ticking, trying to gather enough energy to rise and go to her bedroom window. When she did, she could see nothing through the thick veil of overgrown trees. When had the coral tree got so large? So monstrous? Large enough to obstruct, large enough to crush the house? Was it a fairy tale? Paranoia? Then the voices stopped. Instead of going to investigate, and possibly angering Minna, Claire lay back down, promising herself she would get to the bottom of this. Soon she was back asleep, dreaming, and the waking time melded into the dreamtime so that she could not distinguish if the yelling had been real or not.

  * * *

  She found herself on the living-room couch—the last remaining piece of furniture in the room. Minna insisted Claire drink another large cup of the elixir.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You must.”

  “It makes me sick.”

  “It’s part of the cure.”

  “I’m healthy now.”

  “You are ungrateful.” Without explanation, Minna carried in the small television from the barn, plugged it in, and left on soap operas to occupy her. The volume turned so high it gave Claire a headache.

  Minna was in the laundry room when Claire poured the drink down the back of the sofa cushions and made her break for the front door. She wobbled on unsteady, rubbery legs but cleared the porch steps, shuffled down the road to the barn. As much as she knew anything in this life, she knew what she would find there. Which ended up being both true and not. When she flung the large slider door open, a black man spun around and shielded his eyes from the shock of sunlight, like a lizard startled from under a rock.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Who are you?” Claire said, her voice loud and false as if in a play. She felt as if she would fall over any moment.

  She blinked hard at him, thinking he was some kind of phantom from her addled, fogged brain. But she could never have dreamed anyone quite like him—he was outside her imagining. One can only make up what one has some passing familiarity with, and he was as foreign to her world as the man on the moon. Bone thin and loosely jointed, he was like a raggedy-man doll strung together. His skin had a jaundiced, yellowish-brown hue. A network of tattoos spread across his chest and arms, partly covered by a T-shirt. Great, dusty coils of hair sprang along his head, gathered and partly tucked inside a large knitted tam. What she saw in his eyes terrified her. Eyes like shattered glass. Crazy eyes. His look answered all the questions she’d been avoiding.

  “You fou, woman?” he yelled.

  “Who are you? You are trespassing.” Of course, she was crazy. But she was returning. She had simply been gone, lost somewhere in her coiled mind, the labyrinth of illness. She backed away.

  “It’s cool, lady. You talk to Maleva, and she introduce us proper like.”

  “Maleva.” Claire nodded, backed away, stumbled, then ran. He did not follow, but stood in the gaping passageway, his jaw working up and down like a puppet’s.

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Maman, she tell her daughter the story of the olden days when the sun was like a sweet orange in the sky. All the days back then were buttery, she sang, the rivers ran like honey, and the people were as often happy as not. Maman, she tell that when the Troubles came, even God in his house could not help them, and he squeezed down on that orange sun, but the juice that should have been sweet, when it met this world, it turned to salt, it filled the oceans, it came out of the people’s eyes. Maman say, “Marie, all your life you must look for the sweet, it is there for the finding.”

  * * *

  Marie’s maman, Leta, was always singing, a throb of sadness in her voice that felt like softest suede brushing against bare skin. She sang because she did not wish to remember how her life had changed.

  Ersulie nain nain oh! Ersulie nain nain oh!

  Ersulie ya gaga gaaza, La roseé fait bro-

  dè tou temps soleil par lévé La ro seé fait bro-

  dè tou temps soleil par lévé Ersulie nain nain oh!

  Leta’s fondest wish as a girl was to become a teacher at the convent—a place of peace and order. Her life till then was a small circle made up of her family’s house and her friends’ houses; the girls were chaperoned on special trips to the beach or the mountains. She was raised a stranger to her own country. She studied hard and the Sisters praised her for her studiousness, in time allowing her to teach a class. The first colored teacher, necessary now that the danger in the country scared foreign missionaries away.

  Each day Leta rose in the darkness to ready herself, preparing meticulous lesson plans and memorizing each student’s name on the first day. Leta always wore a crisp white blouse and a pressed, dark blue skirt because she felt so privileged to teach, wanting to prove herself worthy. Each day she picked her way through the dirty streets to the school, avoiding the piles of trash, avoiding the stray animals and the straying eyes of men, avoiding the open sewers by walking on the rickety boards fording them, trying also to avoid the sun darkening her creamy skin. An implied lesson that lightness was closer to God.

  Her family’s house was not large but not small either, not in a rich neighborhood but not in a poor one. A house perfect for as much happiness as living in the capital would allow. One day, walking home, a car sped by and spattered mud over her skirt and shoes. Near tears, Leta stopped and looked down as a young man jumped out of the back to apologize. A famous politician who was running for election sat in the back and tapped impatiently on the window.

  “We are sorry,” the young man said, although the driver in front and the politician in the back did not seem the least bit sorry. “What can I do? Can I pay you?”

  “To wash the mud away?” Leta said, and looked up, laughing.

  If her mother had had the ability of foresight, to look at her life as Marie was able to later, backward and forward, she would have known to turn and run, that mud was the smallest price by far she could pay out of this meeting, but of course she knew no such thing. Instead, she looked up into the handsome young man’s eyes as the car spun its wheels and took off, the politician tired of waiting on his love-struck assistant. Mud now spattered the young man’s pants, too. What she noticed was the way his suit fit him. Noticed also that rare thing—he treated her like a gentleman.

  “Looks like we are in the same boat,” he said, looking into Leta’s moss-green eyes brimming with tears, then at the flashing white teeth of her laugh. How to explain that he fell in love with how easily her emotions transformed one to another. A useful gift in a troubled country.

  * * *

  Marcel had just been made judge when they married; they had had their first baby, a girl named Marie, when the next elections again tore the country apart. The politician whom he had supported lost, this time narrowly, and beat a fast exile to Miami. The military scoured the streets each night, disposing of his supporters to avoid a coup. They had a name for this from when Duvalier left, dechoukaj, uprooting, like what the peasants did when they pulled the manioc roots from their fields, except it was never clear who needed to be uprooted, or rather, it depended on who momentarily held power.

  First Marcel was fired from the position he had been promoted to, Cou
rt of Appeals. A week later arrested at his house during dinner. The Tonton Macoutes waited patiently while he pushed his chair back and laid down his napkin, kissing his young wife on the forehead before he left. One of the Tontons grabbed a chicken leg on his way out. They would not let Marcel go to the bedroom to kiss his baby girl good-bye.

  Alone, having nothing else to do (electricity out as usual at night, phones not working), Leta cleared the dishes. In her vanished Marcel’s place, she found a puddle of urine soaking the chair cushion and the floor beneath.

  The next day, the mother superior called Leta in. Mother had a big, round Irish face and innocent blue eyes that refused to acknowledge the horrors in front of them. An accommodationist’s salvation. Dechoukaj.

  “You must fire me,” Leta said.

  “Otherwise they said they would take the girls. They will burn down the church.”

  “I’ll be gone in five minutes.” Leta went for a last time into the empty classroom and cried the way it is only possible when you are sure what you have lost is gone forever. She stole a blackboard eraser and put it into her purse. She did not care if mother superior forgave her.

  That night her husband’s family home was burned to the ground. Marcel’s body was found macheted and set on fire on the Grande Rue.

  Leta borrowed money from her parents and boarded a tap tap with little Marie bundled in her arms. She headed north since that was the direction of the first available bus. She was going to the pevi andeyò, the outside country, an exile into a country she did not know. Wherever she ended up, it could never again be in the capital.

  * * *

  Marie grew up in a small, rickety house by the sea, with a corrugated-tin roof. She was not saddened by the way Maman now was because she didn’t remember her any other way. What she was told when she was older was that upon coming to the poor village of her great-grand-maman, Leta handed over the baby and refused to care for her again. What had brought her such joy before now only reminded her of no longer, as in she was no longer a schoolteacher, no longer a wife. Her bright future gone, never to reappear. But Grand-Maman would not give up. She forced Leta to attend the ceremonies, and for the first time in her young life Leta experienced what her parents had tried so hard to keep from her—the wild, irrational strength in powerlessness.

  Leta saw women who begged or worked all day long in rags come to the ceremonies in the middle of the night freshly bathed, dressed in immaculate white. They beat their drums, they sang, they danced, with a freedom and dignity she had not imagined for them. The first time a goat was sacrificed, the blood drained into a bucket, she was horrified, but then she remembered the horrors she had fled, and she understood that this was nothing worse than the truth that had been kept from her before.

  Now she wore the loose dresses of the peasant women, kerchiefs over her head. No one would ever guess what Leta had been before, and that was as she wanted it, because as the saying went, revenge has long arms, and a widow was considered vengeful. After a year of dancing and spirits and magic powders, Leta came one day to Grand-Maman’s house and took back her baby girl. Then she began instruction in the old ways.

  * * *

  During the years of the drought, food was scarce, and Maman would boil up yam, next day boil the peelings from the yam, then, if they still didn’t get lucky, sugarcane, or bitter plantain. She convinced Marie the jellied, sweetened water was the most wonderful food in the world, manna from the gods, and she was the luckiest of girls to have it. Marie was ashamed to admit her stomach still stabbed with hunger because that would be a breach of faith to Maman. Instead she wrapped the hunger belt tighter around her waist. On the darkest days Maman would bake dirt cookies, mixing a pat of butter and bit of sugar with clay that tasted like the ghost of food. Only a cook as good as Maman could make starvation taste good.

  * * *

  Their luck seemed to change when the blans in the pink house were looking for a new cook. They despaired of hiring another French, one who wouldn’t endure being out in the hinterlands. A friend of Maman’s knew her skill and suggested her. After that, at least there was no more hunger. Growing up, Marie always saw Maman working, either cooking at the pink house or healing as medsen fey, leaf doctor. After Grand-Maman passed five years later, maman also served as a priestess. She had become another kind of teacher, knew all the people of the village, and helped them through her new abilities. Understood it was always the choice of the gods, the béké, if a ceremony worked or not.

  * * *

  Marie’s happiest memories as a young girl were watching her mother painting sacred figures on walls, doors, or drapos, flags. Often the two of them went off for the day into what remained of the ancient forests to search for the ingredients in her remèd, her powders and elixirs. They would walk single file, hiking the steep trails for hours, stopping only for a simple meal of fruit and bread. At those times, resting under a tree and holding Marie in her arms, Leta could recall what happiness felt like.

  “The trees are sacred,” she said.

  On Marie’s eighth birthday, Maman took her to a sacred mapou tree. “This is the forgetting tree,” she said. “Like the ones in Africa but different. When anything bad happens, I want you to come here. The tree is where you leave the bad memory behind so that it doesn’t poison your life.”

  Marie fidgeted, wanting to go home, but Leta shook her.

  “Listen to my words. My words are all you will have someday.”

  * * *

  Marie was forbidden to go to the ceremonies deep in the forest. She lay nights in her bed, falling asleep to the soft drumbeats, which comforted like a mother’s heartbeat. In the daytime, no one acknowledged the ceremonies happened because the military had banned them, and this was how the young Marie discovered what a secret, hidden, or even double life meant. Finally one night, Marie, unable to resist any longer, snuck out of bed and followed the sounds past the sacred mapou tree, past the trails that she knew so well from their gathering trips, deeper into the forest than she had ever before been.

  The drums grew so close she felt their vibration in her body. She hid behind a bush and watched her maman in the middle of a crowd of people. In white, she was dancing provocatively back and forth around a large fire, flames nightmarish in the fierce heat, encouraging the drummers to beat even more wildly. Her face, strange and distorted, was unfamiliar: lips pulled back, eyes rolled up into her head, whites visible, head canted as if listening to words instructing her from the open night sky. Marie broke out into a sweat, her eight-year-old’s heart beating madly like a small animal’s. She was about to run into the crowd to rescue Maman when a man joined the dancing. Back and forth they moved, snaking their bodies around each other, and Marie had the frightening thought that this stranger might be her father, that maybe it was he she was being kept away from. Again, she rose from her place of hiding, ready to run to her now reunited parents, when Maman ripped off her shirt.

  Marie had seen her mother’s body many times before. Maman had always told her to be proud of herself, her natural beauty, proud enough to keep it covered from others’ eyes. To see her mother’s nakedness in front of such a large group shook the girl. Having this man who might or might not be her father dancing closer and closer to Maman unnerved Marie, and she closed her eyes, paralyzed about what to do.

  When she opened her eyes again, Maman’s shirt was back on as she gracefully dipped her bare arm into the fire, kept it there until Marie could clearly see the wrist gripped in flame, until she had to turn her eyes away. Now a large knife appeared in the man’s hand, and a scrawny, trussed chicken was brought from the crowd. As the head was cut off, Marie vomited into the bushes, then turned and ran home.

  * * *

  The next morning, Maman cut mango and laid out French bread for breakfast, mild as could be. Marie looked hard at the purple of the skin around her bandaged wrist.

  “It’s nothing, doudou. A burn from the stove.”

  “You’re lying.”

&
nbsp; Maman’s face sharpened. “Watch yourself!”

  “I saw you. You said that such was devil. To stay away.”

  “You know that Grand-Maman taught me the old ways.”

  “But—”

  “We abandoned the old ways. I didn’t know better. The vodou healed me. It is about my relationship to god, to the villagers, to you, to nature. Remember our days under the trees? What did I tell you?”

  “They are sacred.”

  “They will save you when nothing else will.”

  Marie lowered her voice although they were alone in the one-room house. “Was that Papa?”

  “Where?”

  “Dancing.”

  “That was just a man. Vodou brings your father close to me. He is watching over us. Remember that.”

  * * *

  The first time Marie saw Jean-Alexi, she was a girl of ten. The village was celebrating, a wedding or a new car; any excuse was welcome. She was playing with the other children on the beach, and some boys stole the coins Maman gave her to go buy fresco, ices with her friends. As she cried, Jean-Alexi, teenaged with lean muscle, walked along smoking a joint, and looking at the pretty tifis, making loud noises to his gang. He swaggered, his pants riding provocatively low. His hair was done in dreads, which one hardly ever saw in the village. He was tall and thin, loose-jointed, so that he was all arms and legs and head coming toward you, like a fighting rooster. His skin was light almond yellow, his face small-featured, with a pointy chin that bobbed as he chewed—gum, tobacco? When he came by them, he saw her tears and bent down. “Ou byen? You okay? What make this little face go down, mwen petit fi?”

  “They took my coins.”

  In short order, the boys had their arms pinned back painfully, one of them had his finger broken, the coins urgently handed over to Jean-Alexi. “Okay, little Erzulie, what you want happen to des boys?”

  “Kill them,” Marie screamed. She recognized the name Erzulie—the vodou goddess of love, always beautiful—from her maman, and his calling her that made her feel for the first time grown up.