The Beach
The goat bleating woke me up again—a most reliable alarm clock. But I was ten and on summer vacation; I had no need for such certainty. Eventually the goat would be silenced, simply disappear in the night, somewhere during the beating of drums. The goat was tied up on the witch doctor’s compound a few feet outside my window. A wall and hedge stood between indicated where my safe place ended and the witch doctor’s place began.
I opened my eyes to the bright sunlight and glared through the overwhelming whiteness to my sister’s bed. She too was awake, lying stiffly on top of her covers. Her sandals were strapped firmly to her feet, scuffing the bed. Seeing them, I remembered the hand-sized spiders that had scared her into wearing shoes to bed and tried not to think about their large legs. Shoes were not much of a defense against banana spiders: you couldn’t fit one under your foot.
As we lay, trying to ignore the goat’s eager bleats, the ceiling fan began to spin. Even though the windows were open, the covers piled to the end of my bed, I was eager to feel the coolness peel the stagnant air from my skin. We were on a missionary compound that shared a generator with the hospital the across the street. It was turned off during the night. When the sun went down, we would light kerosene lamps, like the miniature toys I’d seen in the American Girl catalogue. For a moment before I went to bed each night, I was a patriot in 1774, not a schoolgirl in 1996.
Most days my sister and I would eat breakfast and trudge to the children’s hospital to have non-conversations with non-playmates who were riddled with tuberculosis. Their medication required refrigeration, which required electricity, which was sparse. Parents left their children here for the six-month treatment. Although some were developmentally disabled, or malnourished, and were not left to be treated for tuberculosis.
But today we had been promised a trip to the beach. A mile or more down the road was the Caribbean Sea, splashing its exotic turquoise waves against the white sand shore. The only evidence that the ocean was nearby was the salty smelling breeze. I would wake up too hot in the middle of the night and pray for a strong gust to bring goose bumps to my sticky skin.
When we left for the beach I plodded toward the compound gate with heavy sandals through the itchy grass. We were a large group, my siblings, the missionaries’ kids, one of the missionaries and my mom. Outside the red, paint-chipped gate we turned left and headed down the dirt road. Chickens bocked alongside us, poking the ground hungrily. Palm trees wiggled their fronds in a light breeze that did little to shake the oven-hot swelter; it pursued my skin with avarice but I was too young be embarrassed by my sweat.
In the distance a donkey brayed, hee-hawing violently: I had started calling them asthmatic car horns. It was not the polite Sunday School noise that paper-bag-puppets had made earlier in my youth. The donkeys steered clacking wooden carts, dodging the too-dry summer ravines that had cracked the hard dirt surface of the roads. In a few months hurricanes would come and feed the plants and ravish the land.
On the sides of the road, men worked making coal. The coal pits emanated an aching scent; pungent like wet bark, sour and strong. Workers watched as we walked by, their black eyes watching our white faces bounce merrily down the way.
The other side of the road boasted multilevel, cement houses; the most extravagant structures I’d seen in weeks. The houses were incomplete with cement walls missing. Their floor plans—winding staircases, separated rooms—were bared to the world. Such features made them stunning. The stark grey walls-floors-ceiling, all identical and dusty, looked cold to touch and inviting. A spacious shady place.
“Drug dealers,” the resident missionary said. “They’re the only people around here who have enough money for houses like that. Or they sell stuff on the black market in Miami.”
Farther down the road was a graveyard. Bright cement towers, crumbling and nameless, spattered the grassy field. Like the houses, these graves had missing walls exposing black caverns inside. Other walls were covered, indicating their occupancy.
“Families rent the graves for about three years, and then they move the remains elsewhere. They have to cement them in, otherwise the witch doctors will steal the remains”
I imagined large cauldrons bubbling, sucking the human bones and sinew into their demon conjuring stews. I stared at the empty graves as my feet continued to plod against the road.
We neared the beach, and the breeze grew stronger, cooling my forehead, peeling the flyaways from my hairline, wrapping its cool fingers around me in a refreshing hug. To the right a row of palm trees provided shade for the livestock in the fenceless field. Each goat or cow, sinewy and skeletal, stood still with a rope tied around its neck. Each had spent the first few years of life tied to a fence, and no longer believed they could wander if they could feel the splintered rope around their neck.
The road finally opened to a brown beach, sloping toward the water. On the left a carpenter sawed a thick stake by hand, standing in the shade of a large wooden boat.
I walked to where the water splashed and whispered its waves against the shore. Each lap was brown and cloudy.
“Let’s go around the point. The water’s cleaner over there.” The missionary directed us.
I proceeded down the beach. The sand wasn’t white the way I had pictured the Caribbean. And the water was no turquoise. My friends would never know, though. When I explained to them where Haiti was, I could say ‘the Caribbean’ and let their minds fill it in with the same set of pictures I mine had.
“There’s a lot of history here. This straight you’re looking at is where Columbus sailed on his first trip to the new world. That’s why the island is called Hispañola.”
I looked at the blue expanse that swayed and swelled before me, imagining giant wooden ships like the carpenter’s behind me, tall sails full of wind flapping loudly, propelling the ship off the edge of its map. 1492. Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria. That was something to impress my friends with.
“And that island across the way…” I looked up, “… is called La Tortugue. It used to be a pirating island. Pirates would meet and trade there.” Pirates were also impressive.
We finally arrived at bluer waters, safe for swimming. The sand was still brown, the water still dark. Had there been no beating heat or palm trees, it could have been the Pacific Coast at Ocean Shores, Washington. If there hadn’t been the slight waves, minimized from standard ocean height by La Tortugue across the way, it could have been Lake Coeur d’Alene.
I stripped to my swimsuit beneath my clothes and approached the water with trepid steps, uncertain what floated beneath the surface. But the water finally reached my toes and the rest of me was eager to share in its cool respite.
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