Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  Returning with her daughter to the kitchen, Lee found her husband with the wooden box in his arms, about to carry it out to the Jeep. He looked so wonderfully fit these days. In spite of the terrible things happening in Haiti under Papa Doc, he was happy with his work at the Kelleher where his patients were simple peasants not the politicos responsible for the mess the country was in. Still, a weekend of total relaxation at Roddy's resort would be good for him. He worked so hard.

  Looking at her, Carey was thinking the same thing about her at that moment. This wife he loved so much—this mother of his beloved daughter—needed a few days of complete relaxation.

  What a wife she was! What a partner! What a worker! He would never forget how, after their marriage, she had made up her mind to become a nurse in the very shortest time possible. Fortunately the private school she had attended in Jamaica had given her a solid background on which to build, and the Kelleher staff was always trainingHaitian young women. But no Haitian girl had toiled any harder than she . . . and she was now one of the best nurses the Kelleher had ever had.

  "Are we ready?" he asked her.

  "I think so. I've just double-checked. Carey—how was little Mandieu this morning?" The boy in question, only a year older than Carita, had been brought in on a crude litter yesterday from some village far up in the mountains, after falling from a tree and breaking both legs.

  "He's going to be all right. Lee."

  "I can't forget the look on his face. Not the pain. The look that said he knew he'd be all right because he was at the place that 'made people well again.' They feel that way, you know. You Kelleher doctors are gods."

  "Who need a break now and then." But he smiled as he turned to Tina. Garde caille-la bien, Tina, eh? Na toune lundi."

  Smiling back at him, the housekeeper said proudly in English, "Yes, Doctor. I will guard the house well, and you will return on Monday."

  Little Carita clapped her hands in delight, and a moment later the Aldreds began their journey, with the housekeeper waving goodbye, from the doorway. Lee looked at her watch. The time was 8:15.

  Down the Artibonite to the main coastal road, north through the town of Gonaives with its showplace modern church, over the Massif du Nord on a road that seemed ever to be coiling back in search of its own tail . . . that route to Roddy's place was one they knew well by now. Over certain stretches there would be the usual limestone dust to contend with—between rains, Haitian country roads were always dusty—and usually something went wrong somewhere: a washout, a river overflowing its banks, a broken-down bus blocking the road, a tire slashed by an unseen chunk of broken bottle.

  Carey drove. The sun shone. Birds sang. Country women waved as they strode proudly along roadside footpaths with things on their heads. With little Carita on her lap, Lee relaxed beside her husband. The talk drifted easily from one subject to another.

  "Lee, are you looking forward to seeing Glencoe again?" They would soon be flying over to Jamaica for the wedding.

  "Of course."

  "Do you sometimes regret leaving there?"

  "Don't be silly."

  "No, I'm serious. Life must be so much easier in Jamaica. And it isn't going to get better here under Papa Doc, you know. The writing went up on the wall when he rigged the election two years ago and won a second term in spite of a constitution that says a president can't succeed himself. The most outrageous steal in Latin American history, the New York Times called that."

  "Carey, there's nothing we can do about this country's politics. Or the tortures and murders in Fort Dimanche, either. We can do something about the peasants here. Hey, come on, let's talk about something more cheerful."

  "Carey."

  "Yes, love?"

  "Look." Lee pointed to a mountainside that resembled a hairbrush run over by a lawnmower, with only stumps of bristles remaining. "Why, Carey? Why do they do it? Don't they know that when all the trees are gone, the rains will wash all the soil into the sea?"

  "Lee, ever since I came here, agricultural experts have been telling them. They just won't listen."

  "Why won't they listen? They're not stupid people."

  "Making charcoal is something you can do without capital. All you need is time and sweat."

  "Come again, please."

  "All right, look at it this way. My name is Noel Baptiste and I'm a Haitian. A peasant. I have a woman I love—you—and a child. Maybe four or five children. We all need clothing. We're all hungry. But Le Bon Dieu hasn't answered my prayers lately. The half acre of land I own hasn't produced even enough food to feed us—certainly not enough to sell in the market for the few pennies we need for other things. And there are no jobs for a man like me in the country village where we live. So what to do?"

  As Carey turned his head to look at Lee and the child on her lap, his face wore the desperation it might have worn had he actually been a peasant farmer. He was like that, Lee knew. When treating a patient he often seemed to know what the patient was thinking and feeling. It was a little uncanny sometimes, but it was also one of the reasons he was such a good doctor—and one of the reasons she loved him so.

  "I understand," she said.

  "So, this Noel Baptiste sees a mountainside covered with trees. To earn some money, all he has to do is cut some of them down, chop them up, and make charcoal out of them. There's always a demand for charbon —except for the city dwellers, everyone in Haiti uses it for cooking—so he'll have no trouble selling as much of it as he can produce. All he has to do is load it onto his donkey and take it to the nearest marketplace."

  "And the forests get thinner and thinner."

  "In some parts of the country they've all but disappeared. Between Port-au-Prince and St. Marc, for instance, all you see is bare mountainsides. It's sad. This whole country is slowly committing suicide while its leaders think only of dealing with their political opponentsand stashing stolen money away in Swiss bank accounts."

  With Carita asleep on her lap and the coastal town of Gonaives behind them, Lee reached for a map. On trips such as this, she always had to know the name of every village on or near the roads they traveled.

  "Souvenance. Haven't I heard that name before?"

  "Uh-huh. The last time the Kellehers had us to dinner. He and I were talking about the big annual ceremony there."

  "Yes, of course. La Souvenance, that lasts a week. Carey, why does voodoo have such a bad reputation? At the hospital I've talked to all kinds of voodoo people—patients, I mean—and I have yet to meet a monster. Only last week I had a long talk with a woman who said she was a mambo. She was as gentle as my own mother."

  "What was the question?"

  "Why does it have such a terrible reputation when it really seems to be so harmless? It is harmless, isn't it?"

  "Some psychologists I've talked to think it's actually a good thing. It unifies the people. Take it away, they say, and this country's poor would have no hope for a better life, nothing ever to look forward to. Besides, the houngan is often a Docteur Feuille, a leaf doctor, and some of them are very good at it, possessing a knowledge of leaves and herbs that's been passed down to them from generation to generation. That's important in a country where most of the poor people can't get to a real doctor. The houngan may not be able to handle a serious illness, but he's better than no doctor at all. Don't you agree?"

  "Yes, I do."

  The very word “Voodoo” conjured up dark images of people sticking pins in dolls and demonic possession. Never mind that a lot of what went on at certain voodoo services —the Hail Marys, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed— would be familiar to any Catholic. In fact, it isn't at all uncommon for a peasant to spend most of Saturday night at a voodoo service and goto Mass Sunday morning. Of course, Hollywood had done nothing to discourage that awful image, with its movies filled with people biting the heads off chickens and casting curses. To them, it was part of the money-making machine. To the Haitians, it was a way of life.

  "It's really a simple peasan
t religion, isn't it?" Lee added at length.

  "Well, maybe not so simple. One or two important ceremonies like La Souvenance last a week, and even some of the less important ones go on all night and involve a lot of ritual. But, yes, it'sa religion. They believe in the same God we do, only they feel their Bon Dieu is too busy to be bothered with little people, so they've invented a whole slewof intermediaries —the loa—with whom they believe they can communicate. When you want to talk to a certain loa, you hold a service, draw his or her symbol on the peristyle floor in cornmeal or ashes or whatever, sing the appropriate songs and dance the proper dances, and the loa will respond to your summons. You've seen it happen in some of the services we've attended."

  Lee nodded. "I can't see anything so terribly wicked in that."

  "There are some wicked houngans and mambos, however. Just as there are wicked leaders in any religion."

  "But no one uses a renegade minister or priest as an excuse to condemn an entire religion.”

  "Right. As I said before, voodoo has had a bad press from people who sat in on certain services or ceremonies without having any real understanding of what they were seeing." Carey was off on a favorite subject. "Take zombies, for instance. Use that word in the States, and nine out of ten people at once think 'voodoo.' But it's the bocor, the witch-doctor, who turns out zombies, not the voodoo priest. The same bocor who'll poison someone for you if you pay him enough."

  "Tell me again about the man with the chicken. I'm going to write it down someday."

  "What for?"

  "Maybe I'll end up trying to write a book. Anyway, tell me."

  "Well, before I was lucky enough to meet you I used to go exploring whenever I could get away from the hospital for a few days. I was in this country village near Pilate one day and had just gashed a finger changing a tire, so I stopped at a little shack of a pharmacy to get something to put on it. When the fellow who ran the shop found out I was a doctor at the Kelleher, we got to talking. You know the story of Pilate, don't you?"

  Lee shook her head.

  "Well, pay attention now if you're going to write a book, because in this land where incredible tales are common, the Pilate story is one of the strangest. I heard it first at the hospital, from a government fellow who worked in the town. Later I heard it from a patient who'd lived in the Plaisance River valley for eight years." Carey turned his head, grinning. "What do I get for telling you this?"

  "Ask me tonight. Right now, go on or I'll kill you."

  "Okay. Pilate was once just another peasant village in an almost inaccessible valley. Coffee grew in the valley but no one paid much attention to it beyond buying it from peasants who brought it to market a few pounds at a time. Then coffee prices soared and strangers showed up. It seemed they owned much of the land and had decided to move in."

  "And?"

  "A primitive country village wasn't their idea of a proper place to settle down in, so they set about rebuilding it. According to my two patients—not just one, mind you, but both of them—these people enlisted the aid of bocors and laid the foundations for the present town of Pilate with zombie labor."

  Lee blinked at him. "And you believe that?"

  "'If you don't believe me,' my government fellow said, 'go there and see for yourself. The moment you enter that town you will know something is wrong with it. You will feel it. It repels you. It's an unnatural place, cut off from the rest of the valley by a wall of suspicion and hostility. The valley people are afraid of it—nothing could induce them to walk alone through Pilate after dark—and the people of the town itself are afraid of something too, and won't talk to you. Go there,' he said. 'Then you'll know.'"

  "Did you go?"

  "Yes, I did. I was in Port-de-Paix one time, headed for Cap Haitien, and I took the Pilate road because it was shorter. On the map that road follows the Plaisance River. But soon I was in low gear, climbing, and a hard rain was falling."

  Carey's head-shake said he still found the story he was telling hard to believe. "Brother. There may be times when a car without four-wheel-drive can make that trip, but that day wasn't one of them. For miles the road twisted up to dizzy heights, then plunged down again to the river's edge. The rain became a downpour. The Jeep was an ant in a rock pile. Then just before dark, with the mountains looming black and formless all around, I reached Pilate. Crawling along the river's edge there, that crazy road all at once became the cobblestoned main street of a weird little city."

  "Cobblestoned?"

  "That's right. And hey, my patient was right. 'You will feel it,' he'd said. You do feel it. You'd have to be a clod without a shred of imagination not to feel it. No town in such a place should be a maze of narrow, winding, cobblestoned lanes bordered by crowded concrete houses with iron roofs. You expect muddy paths leading to the river. The river front at Pilate is a massive concrete retaining wall, for God's sake. You expect people and motion and noise. Pilate was strangely deserted, almost static, unnaturally still."

  With Carita asleep on her lap, Lee had turned her head to fix her gaze on him. "So what did you do?"

  "I left the Jeep and walked about the town, through cobbled lanes so narrow a car couldn't have entered them. Some of the houses seemed very old. Some of the shops in the heart of town had obviously once been residences. The rain poured down on me from overhanging iron roofs, and on some of the roofs were metal ornaments in the shape of upthrust hands."

  "The shape of what?"

  "Upthrust hands. Don't ask me what they signified. I've never seen such ornaments anywhere else in this country, and no one I've asked about them has been able to explain them—not even voodoo people. And on the outskirts of the town, on a hillside, were some really impressive houses, some of them seemingly abandoned."

  "Did you talk to anyone?"

  "There weren't many people about, but I tried to talk to the few I met. All I got was silence. Not even marchandes in the marketplace or coffee buyers sitting by their scales would speak to me. I tell you there was something weird about that town. Really weird. I was glad to get out of there."

  "Maybe something had happened there that day."

  "Maybe. But the legend persists that Pilate was built by zombies, and behind the legend may lie some fragments of fact. First, the region itself has long had a reputation for witchcraft. 'That whole valley is a bad place,' the people of nearby districts tell you. 'Many bocors live there.' Second, the landowners who rebuilt Pilate apparently had no love for things African—or, to put it another way, had a pronounced passion for things French—and in pursuing their natural inclinations they erected a cultural wall between themselves and the valley's inhabitants. If that's true, the concrete buildings of Pilate—at least the first ones—were probably constructed not by the residents of the valley but by imported labor. Chances are no one explained this sudden influx of strange workmen to the valley people. They were left to explain it for themselves and the answer, logical enough to them, was zombies."

  "Which brings you back, full circle, to the pharmacy and the chicken," Lee said. "So come on. Let's hear it for my book."

  "Just a minute, please. There's a bang-up ending to the Pilate story. When I got to Plaisance that evening I stopped for a drink and told the shopkeeper what had happened. She didn't seem at all surprised. 'Those people are not like other people,' she said. 'One day two of them, cousins, met on a Pilate street. They had been quarreling. They got into an argument and insulted each other. This was in broad daylight, understand, and there were witnesses. Suddenly one of the men drew a revolver and shot the other three times at point-blank range. And do you know what happened? The man who was shot simply laughed and walked away. This is a true story I am telling you, m'sie. I heard it from townspeople who were there and saw it happen.’"

  "Blanks," Lee said.

  "What?"

  "If I wanted people to credit me with supernatural powers, I'd load a gun with blank cartridges and put on just that kind of performance. It should be pretty convincing."
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  "Okay. Probably if you really dug into the Pilate thing, you'd uncover some long-forgotten incident to be responsible for most of the stories. Still, it is a strange place . . . and who can separate truth from superstition in this country where the two walk hand in hand all the time?"

  "The chicken, please," Lee said. "If I remember right, that story has to be true because it happened to you."

  "Right."

  "And no more digressions, if you don't mind. You were in a village near Pilate. You'd changed a tire and cut your hand. You went into the village pharmacy for something to put on it. Then what"

  "I asked the fellow about Pilate and, of course, we talked about zombies. A customer came in—an old fellow, rather seedy looking, barefoot but wearing black pants and a black coat, not the usual denim. He joined in the conversation. I said I was a doctor and didn't believe in zombies."

  "Which, of course, you don't."

  "Which, of course, I didn't—then. But the old fellow insisted I was wrong, and ended up shaking his fist at me."

  "An angry peasant? That's unusual."

  "Not in this case. When the old guy stormed out of the shop, the pharmacy fellow told me he was a well-known bocor. He'd barely got the words out when the man was back. All he'd gone out for was a chicken, which he'd snatched up in the yard."

  "The chicken. Ah, yes."

  "Well, he put the bird on the counter and it stayed there. Don't ask me why it stayed there; I don't know, unless it was scared by the way he was glaring at it. He didn't hold it; his hands were busy doing something else. He'd reached into a pocket of his black coat, see, and produced a bunch of leaves—dull, grayish-looking leaves with ragged edges—and he was rubbing them between his palms. Suddenly he reached out and cupped both hands around the chicken's head and held them there. And after a minute or so the bird toppled over and just lay there on the counter, looking dead."