Photo by Zayne Airall, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda.
The hope was that eventually his bowels would empty themselves out. That eventually, the draining diarrhea would stop. It had to. And when it did, there would be a period of rest where they could have the boy drink the powdered solution stirred inside the calabash dish. Electrolytes fresh from the UN Peacekeepers’ Camp Clinic a mile out from the village. Yonel had fetched them himself.
The hope was this was not what they feared it was, that it was just a bout of indigestion, something he ate in the lalo leaves the night before, the grease it cooked in having sat too long in the overheated plastic jugs in the Haitian heat. Anything but that. Their hope was a prayer. All merciful God, please, anything but that.
“Have him drink,” Yonel said. “Start now. Don’t wait.”
Henry’s body was no longer small. He’d just turned six and already his legs were long, too tall to be picked up and carried. But when his mother tried to scoop him up and lift him, the boy wailed. His limbs were stiff, so stiff he’d become like gwayak wood to the touch. This nearly broke Anne, but she didn’t let go. There was no other choice but to make him drink. There was no other remedy.
They’d already tried everything. Every broth, every cup of fresh squeezed lime juice, every attempt at getting him to eat was rejected with a stiff jaw that only opened to let out a moan. He could not take anything in, and what he could take in he could not keep down. When the afternoon came, he’d started vomiting. And that’s when they knew in their bones this was beyond their control. Cholera had already started reaping lives by the thousands, and now it was coming for them.
Anne agonized in silence, but when she threw looks at her husband, he read her suffering, and it was too much to bear. A plague had fallen upon their house and it filled him with dread. Yonel ran out bare-chested into the night, racing against the shadows, disregarding the possibility of trespassing onto armed bandits, gangs, or the territories of chanpwèl or zobop or lougawou, secret occult societies. No spirit or guards of the night could keep him from finding salvation for his son.
When he made it to the UN camp, the clinic was open but everything was still. There were doctors there fraternizing with the soldiers, whose blue helmets turned at attention to face a breathless Yonel when he arrived. That was when Yonel realized he’d forgotten to button his shirt. He asked for help. “Pitit mwen malad, li bezwen swen. Please help my son.”
The interpreter asked him questions and he answered with all the symptoms. His shirt stuck to his skin, the sweat dripping down his back while he spoke, but Yonel caught his breath and said it all. Since noon, the boy had been soiling himself with diarrhea, the worst kind, so watery it could not be controlled or contained. And he was thirsty, but he couldn’t keep liquids down. And in the corner of his eye, as he talked, he noticed how everything and everyone seemed to also glisten with sweat in the glow of the night lanterns, how the soldiers under the tent shifted their gaze from staring ahead to now staring at the ground, as if they’d seen something there. As if they could no longer contain their own selves.
“And that’s when they knew in their bones this was beyond their control. Cholera had already started reaping lives by the thousands, and now it was coming for them.”
One of them seemed especially dazed, lost in thought, and Yonel stared at him long enough to make him feel watched. The soldier looked up. Yonel’s eyes went to the small UN emblem patch on his shoulder. Nepal. He’d learned the flags since their peacekeeping forces had gotten here, in the village, and set up camp by the Mirebalais river. They were mainly from Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and Yonel didn’t know if that was on purpose. Maybe, he thought, they were sent to Haiti because they were brown in skin tone and could be more accepted. Seem friendlier. More familiar. Establish some kind of kinship that white soldiers could not. Build trust.
The soldier nodded toward him as if to greet him, politely. Yonel tried to respond, but he was too caught up in the doctor’s instructions. He listened, he memorized them. And then he repeated them, step by step, hoping this would save his son.
*
“I’m going to fetch Mézaire!” Yonel said. “Maybe he’ll have something.”
Half an hour later, the child was still sick. Anne was lying in bed with him, holding a compress against his forehead. At this point, she’d thrown herself into motherhood so much that he knew, by looking at her, that he’d already lost her too. He could tell by the way she doted on Henry, cradled his head against her bosom, and hummed him a little song to help him sleep. She had crossed the threshold of fear.
“Anne?”
“Hmmm?”
“What do you think?” he asked. “I’ll go fetch Mézaire?”
She considered what he said and he saw, in this moment, how beautiful she was. The angles of her face, her cheekbones, her eyes a rare reddish brown he’d never seen on anyone else before.
“If you want,” she shrugged. She sounded resigned, and this gutted Yonel. “I guess it doesn’t hurt. But so we’re clear…I don’t believe there’s anything a bush doctor can do for us.”
“You don’t know that!” Yonel snapped. “How can you say that?” He was already putting his shirt back on, tucking it in this time. “We have to try.”
“Why would he save our boy but not the others?”
Yonel paused at the door, but didn’t open it. Anne’s words landed and lingered.
“Why would he have a remedy that works for us when everyone else around us is dying, Yonel? Everyone else. This sickness is our end.”
At that moment, Henry moaned, whispered something unintelligible, and Anne quickly reached for some water. She brought the calabash close to his mouth and let him drink.
“We need more water, we’re running out,” she said. “Fetch more from the well. Will you? That’s what we need.”
The kanari was empty when Yonel tipped it over. He picked it up and squeezed it under his arm before bolting out the door. The night was blacker than he remembered, and in it, time stood still. Nothing stirred, not even the crickets. They too seemed paralyzed with fear since the sickness had struck and the first few children and elders had died. And now that death was marching with machete in hand, reaping everyone in its path like dry grass, the few frizé owls left on the island and the croaking toads in the rice paddies were stunned to silence. All Yonel heard was the sound of his own shoes crushing the gravel as he rushed down to the river, urgently, racing against time he knew he didn’t have.
He knew the pattern by now, they all did. A day was all it took, and he feared that if he wasted a minute more out there, he would lose his son. Yonel stifled a hiccup, something so painful inside him it begged to come out. Instead, he ran. He let his feet carry him to the well, his calves burning, his arm tight around the clay jug, praying he wouldn’t drop it and lose everything. He watched the water pour into the kanari and wished it could pour faster.
In the distance, something was moving. A shadow. A silhouette, someone running toward him. Yonel stopped in his tracks, froze. A man was running in his direction, up the path from the river, and for a moment he wasn’t sure what to do. Instinctively, Yonel felt for his machete hanging at his waist, grasped the handle firmly and pulled it out of its sash. He held it high in the air. It wasn’t a sickle of death, but it was sharp enough to do the job in the fields all day. And sharp enough to chop a lougawou to pieces in self defense, if needed.
Except it wasn’t a lougawou. As the man got closer and stopped a few feet away, panting, hands on his knees and drenched in sweat, Yonel recognized him. He knew that little bag worn across his body, that straw hat, the red ascot around his neck.
“Mézaire?”
“Frèm, listen!” The bush doctor tried to catch his breath, but at his age, the effort looked intense. “Don’t drink it. Don’t drink the water!”
Yonel lowered his machete and put it back in his sash, confused, and now frustrated. This was interfering with his time. But Mézaire stood in his way, would not let him pass.
“Listen to me, brother, you’re not hearing me? It’s in the water! Don’t drink the water.”
“What are you saying?”
“They’re killing us,” Mézaire said. The old man’s face was contorted with a look Yonel had never seen before. Pain? Sadness perhaps…Devastation. “They’re putting the shit in the water and they’re killing us all.”
Yonel’s body was here, but he was not. He was floating outside of it, living in a different reality. Nothing he was hearing was making sense, even when Mézaire urged him to follow him down the path to the river. “See for yourself. Come see it.”
They ran down the path in the darkness together, flanked on both sides by the black silhouette of shrubs and trees all clustered and menacing. All witnessing the terror in these men’s eyes as they descended to the embankment of the Mirebalais river. The water meandered so peacefully, it seemed still and stagnant. But it flowed, like it has since the beginning. It fed into the larger river of L’Artibonite, and sustained a number of villages around it. Farmers and rural villagers depended on the Mirebalais’s river, people like Yonel and his family who brought their cattle here to drink, their clothes for washing, and their children for daily baths. Just two days ago, Henry and his friends were swimming in it.
“Yonel, look over there, look where my finger is pointing.”
Mézaire stood right next to him and showed him, with his pointer finger, something in the distance. Yonel saw nothing at first but darkness, then bushes, then the shape of trees and then lights. Lanterns. Bright lanterns, and the familiar shape of tents and encampments. Barracks. He knew what this was. The UN Peacekeepers’ camp. He’d been there just earlier. Yonel sucked his teeth impatiently.
“What is it you wanted to show me?”
“Look with your eyes, there…Don’t you see?”
Yonel looked again. See what? What was there to see? He stared for a moment, and wondered what he should be seeing aside from what was there, a camp of men in blue helmets wandering around, patrolling, guarding in their tower, probably bored out of their minds in a country they thought they were coming to fight, taking breaks only to go to the toilet.
The toilet leak.
Yonel saw. He saw what Mézaire wanted him to see all along.
In the distance, far away but close enough for him to see, he witnessed the killing of his son. The killing of hundreds. And the sight of it, the fecal waste flowing from toilet to broken pipes, into the still water of their village river, was so much to bear that Yonel’s arm went limp and the kanari fell, shattering at his feet.
*
Yonel was not alone in his rage. When he showed up at the mouth of the camp, machete in hand, other men and women were there waiting. A mob had assembled, the word had traveled, and they came armed with what they had. Machetes, rocks, tree branches, anything that could be made a weapon, even though all of this would be useless against the rifles and sophisticated automatic machinery of these soldiers. But they were angry and agitated enough that the soldiers were now on edge, gathering at attention, prowling along the walls of the camp with the mob in their sight.
“What is going on here?”
The interpreter was tasked to speak for the one in charge, the soldier with the most flags on his shoulder, including one with a blue UN emblem patch featuring leafy branches. He clenched his jaw as he spoke.
“You’re killing us!” Yonel shouted. He was at the helm of the mob, his machete in hand, aware of all these soldiers facing him, their blue helmets now prepared to fire if they had to. “You killed my son! You’re killing all of us!”
The interpreter spoke quickly to the officer, but there was confusion, and denial. The officer shook his head.
“I don’t understand, we are here to help. We are here for peace. Tell him: peace. They must understand that!”
But Yonel was seized with a fire he could not contain, and he would not hear of peace, or lies. He slashed the edge of his machete against a sandbag at the foot of the tent. There was instant commotion, the soldiers raised their weapons at the gesture. The sand poured out of the bag and Yonel watched it spread at his toes. This, they saw as a threat.
But Yonel was prepared. He had thought of all the possibilities of how this could end.
Suddenly, in the distance he could hear a great wailing, a sound so terrible it shattered him. He recognized it instantly, the way a bird recognizes the pleading chirps from its flock. Anne. It was her, wailing like her heart had been plucked out of her chest. And that’s when he knew Henry was gone. And there could be no other ending.
There could be no other way but a fit of chaos, a vortex of misunderstandings and misinterpretations, of stories that will be buried under mounds and mounds of newspapers and press and cemeteries and oblivion, where his death and Henry’s death, and everyone’s death would be meaningless. Because who would hear their voices? Who would tell their stories? Who would call this soldier avoiding his gaze, eyes full of guilt, to task, and hold these men accountable for what they’d done? Who would call this a killing? Who would acknowledge this as murder and deem them worthy of justice? They could never be heard. They could never get their son back.
Yonel raised that machete again and swung it in the air. Once. Twice. Here came the wailing again. He had lost his race against time, and now there was only him and Anne left in the world to count their own hours, and it didn’t seem fair. There was only one way for this to end, and he had to be the one to end it.
