We were soon seated at a long table in the garden, where on Kay’s instructions I was nestled between LBJ on my left and Baker on my right. Kay was directly in front of me, talking to the French lady from the WHO. The others in our group, who did not know one another, made polite conversational forays. The only thing that brought us all together was that we were acquaintances of Kay White.
I said, “Now, LBJ, tell me what brought you down to Haiti.”
“You want the long version or the short version?”
Seeing me hesitate, LBJ smiled. “Short version is I used to have quite a serious drinking problem. Came to Haiti and stopped drinking.”
LBJ picked up a roll from the basket, pulled it open, and smeared it with butter.
“And the long version?”
LBJ said, “Long version is I had more money than I needed and more time than I could handle and I was wasting my life away swimming laps in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. That’s a real long story right there. Long version is I got to the point where my wife was going to walk right out the door if I didn’t clean up my act. So I went to my pastor, and he told me to come with him down to a village in Haiti for a week.”
Up there in Fond Rouge, LBJ continued, the nearest water was from the Artibonite River, an hour away on foot. There was no water for bathing or for washing clothes or for irrigating crops or for drinking — no water except what people could carry on their heads. So the local people walked to the river, then walked back home, picking their way along the rocky paths, five-gallon buckets balanced on their heads. The kids were skipping school just to lug the gallons up the hill. Not only was the water inaccessible, it wasn’t even all that clean: it was river water, and there were villages crapping and pissing in the river long before the residents of Fond Rouge got it in their buckets.
Maybe three days into his trip, LBJ told me, he got to watching a local carpenter making a child’s coffin. He stopped in the sun and watched the carpenter working. He had never seen a child’s coffin before — that’s a beautiful fact right there about American life, that you can live an ordinary American life and never see a carpenter making a child-size coffin. An undertaker in the States has to special-order that cruelest box. But this carpenter in the Haitian hills that day was talking with some other fellow and laughing, painting the varnish on this coffin, making it pretty. Brother — how many of those things you make a month? Too many, too many.
On his last night in the mountains, LBJ told me, he got himself a bottle of the local rotgut. He’d been holding out all right until then, more for appearance’s sake than anything else, but that last night in Haiti one of the local guys offered him a tot and he was off to the races. This stuff was raw white rum, strong like the call of Satan and as mean as an alley cat. He was halfway through the bottle when he had the thought that would change his life — that he, Larry Bayles Jameson, was in possession of everything necessary to improve the lives of the inhabitants of Fond Rouge, Haiti. What they lacked, he had. He could give them water if he wanted to, and if they had clean drinking water, nobody would be making child-size coffins; and if they didn’t have water this time next month, next year, or however long it took — it was because he, Larry Bayles Jameson, chose not to give it to them.
Now, twenty years, LBJ said — that’s a long time. Lots of twists and turns in that time, and he wasn’t going to pretend he never touched another drink or was always a fine husband or a perfect father. But come hell or high water, twice a year every year, three weeks in winter and three in summer, he was down here digging a well or capping a spring, making sure someone who didn’t have water had some.
“Now, that’s just sheer goodness,” Kay said. “Is there anybody who doesn’t want to be a good person deep down?”
LBJ smiled modestly and took a sip of his sparkling water.
From Terry’s side of the table there were raucous bursts of laughter. Terry said, “The whole thing?” and the man beside him, who I believe came from Brazil, spread his arms out wide. Terry said, “That’s not so big.” On my side of the table, Kay remained engrossed in conversation with her French friend; and Baker, to my right, was hunched over his phone, tapping out a long description for his Facebook page of the experience of sitting at this table. At one point I started to ask him a question, and he said gently, “I’m sorry — just a minute,” and were I to have said something else, I would have been considered an irritant or a scold.
LBJ started talking to Kay about a band they both liked. Only in Haiti do you meet people who find it a diversion to build infrastructure. But in Haiti you meet people like that all the time. One hundred percent true story: Fellow makes a fortune down in Texas building big-box retailers. Buys a bulldozer, ships it down to Haiti. Starts building roads. Ends up medevaced out of the country after driving that bulldozer off a cliff. Who just shows up in a sovereign nation with his own private bulldozer and builds roads? How many people do you know who have built a charitable hospital? In Haiti, I met three. Orphanages, latrines, and wells? I lost track. And because in Haiti you meet people like that all the time, it comes to seem normal. That’s why so many outsize schemes and megalomaniac ambitions were hatched in Haiti, because it is a place where nobody ever says no.
I had been in poor countries before I came to Haiti, but never in a place — not India, not Africa — where nearly everyone was poor. Walking around Haiti, I sometimes felt like one of those Saudi sheiks who install gold-plated hot tubs in their retrofitted 747s, wealthy beyond imagination or hope. I too had visited villages that, like the village of Fond Rouge in LBJ’s story, were without clean drinking water; and like LBJ, I had seen carpenters cutting, sawing, sanding, and planing lumber into a child’s coffin. But then I had let the matter slide. Deep, deep inside me there was a voice that said, Let them walk for their water. There is no other way to put it: had the voice said anything else, and had it been loud enough, I would have acted. My ability to remain happy while intimately aware of the sufferings of others was a discovery about myself.
Now it was time to order. This proved complicated. Some people at the table had yet to open their menus, and others could not read French; some people were very hungry and wished to order full meals, while others were treating dinner as an opportunity to snack and drink. In the delay and hesitation and confusion you could feel the mood of the table souring. So Kay suggested ordering an assortment of appetizers to be shared. In this way, people could consider the menu at their leisure. Terry from his end of the table said, “You go, girl,” which made our end of the table laugh. Then Kay spoke with the waiter, who was glad to have a single interlocutor from this large and demanding group. She ordered efficiently and lavishly: plates of deep-fried okra and bruschetti topped with diced tomatoes and basil, and little bite-size portions of this and that.
I was still waiting for Baker to finish sending his message when Johel and Nadia arrived.
4
I had told Kay that I had never seen her, but I was wrong: I had seen this woman many times in Jérémie, but I had not known that she was Nadia, the judge’s wife. I had never made the connection between them. From Kay’s stories I had been on the lookout for a woman with a certain kind of beauty. But the woman I had seen at the market or at the boulangerie was plain. She was neither tall nor short, but slender, almost willowy, which in consumptive, malnourished Haiti is rarely considered attractive. Her skin was very dark, almost greenish — I had imagined Nadia as cocoa-colored, like the judge. Kay had mentioned her striking eyes, but I had not noticed them. Indeed, I might not have noticed her at all — fixed her as a face and person — if it had not been for one incident.