He looked up at the diamonds sparkling overhead. “Look.”
The children followed their father’s finger as he pointed upward, and their jaws dropped as they tilted their heads back, their eyes shining with starlight. He released Adeline’s hands, now that she was distracted.
“See the biggest one, the shiny one over there?” he whispered. ‘That’s the one the three kings followed when Jesus was born. That’s how they knew he was born, and that’s the same one I followed every time I got lost in the fields with Uncle Nicolas.”
“How do you know it’s the same one?” Adeline asked.
He’d told them the story many times, of playing soccer with his brother all afternoon and getting lost as they walked back through the fields. He’d told them how he navigated by the stars while Nicolas cowered against him, terrified of loup-ga-rou—werewolves—roaming the dark. He was also haunted by thoughts of evil spirits, but Raymond had kept his eyes riveted on the guiding star and led his brother to the main road and safely home. He wanted his children to know there was nothing shameful about manual labor—it was good for the soul; it helped him understand the mechanics of the world—and he wanted them to know that their uncle, Nicolas, didn’t understand it like he did—that his nice house, his beautiful wife, their beautiful clothes and shiny car didn’t mean they were better. Just luckier.
“It’s that same one, and it always takes you home,” Raymond said.
“That star is old,” the girl whispered in the dark.
He chuckled silently and felt her fumble around for her brother. They always managed to make him smile. That’s what children do: patch up the wounds their parents spend a lifetime licking.
Raymond relented and let the children play games with the water until, little by little, it ran out. He didn’t have the heart to break the spell cast by night and water.
FOUR
Since boyhood, Raymond L’Eveillé had accepted that he wasn’t destined to be someone important like his brother. Nicolas was the anointed one and Raymond the worker, the man of humble but practical skills, just another one of the millions of Haitians seeking a modest lavi miyò, a better life, in Port-au-Prince. Still, he’d come to suspect that this “better life” everyone chased after was a lie—and it wasn’t just him. This realization was spreading through the slums like cholera. In fact, he was pretty sure there was nothing “better” than the life he’d left behind when he moved to the city.
Raymond had grown up in a small farmhouse in the valley of L’Artibonite, north of Port-au-Prince, where his parents had spent their lives harvesting rice. The path was paved for Raymond and Nicolas to take over the farm, but their parents had dreams of giving their sons more and put every cent they could wring out of the little farm toward tuition at the neighborhood Catholic school. Raymond was never good at school. The complexities of mathematical formulas eluded him, and language became his enemy on the classroom’s battlefield. He learned to remain quiet instead of raising his hand and risking ridicule for mistaking a feminine pronoun for a masculine one. Pages of text paralyzed him, his tongue tying itself in knots each time he tried to string letters into sentences. The jeers were cruel: “Analphabèt se bèt!” If you can’t read, you’re stupid. Raymond, ashamed, retreated behind his desk, constructing cars out of plastic juice bottles and soda caps.
The friars were efficient at sorting the mediocre students from the best ones. Unlike his brother, Nicolas was eager to please and driven to learn, and he quickly became the friars’ favorite. He had a natural intelligence, a remarkable capacity for memorizing tables and retaining conjugations. “Nicolas est brillant, especially in French and Haitian literature,” the teachers wrote in his report card. “Would make an excellent professor.” Raymond’s report card rarely had any comments on it. The few he got went something like: “Student seems ill suited for academia.”
Creole was comforting to Raymond, whereas Nicolas’s elegant French made the headmaster’s blue eyes shine with pride. While Nicolas devoured books and aced his tests, Raymond, feeling inadequate, spent his time sitting in the shade of orange trees. Their mother, deeply superstitious like so many peasants, had chalked up his deficiencies to the supernatural, convinced that someone had hexed her eldest. “Someone wants to harm my baby,” she said. “I dreamed I found two nickels wrapped in a notebook page inside his pillowcase. Someone’s cursed my boy. But I will find out who the culprit is. They will pay.”
For a while, Raymond wondered if he might really be cursed. Who would want to harm him? It was true that his family’s farm did better than others in the village, but they were still part of the community, and they had their hardships. It didn’t make sense to him, and in the end, it didn’t matter why he struggled in school—just that he did. His mother brewed him special tea in the mornings, placed leaves between the pages of his books, encouraged him to sleep with lessons under his pillow, discouraged him from accepting gifts from strangers or even friends. Still, his grades never improved. Raymond gave up. Perhaps it was God’s will.
As they walked home from school, Nicolas would begin his own brand of teasing. His academic excellence made him feel superior to his embarrassing big brother.
“You’re going to end up growing rice all your life, just like Mother and Father,” he’d say, trailing behind his brother. “Is that what you want?”
Raymond shrugged his shoulders. “At least I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty,” he said. “I can work the field, and I’m pretty good at fixing things. Why does it matter that I can’t read?”
“But you’ll never be important,” Nicolas said. “That’s why you go to school. To become somebody, to get out of this place. Me? I’ll never be a farmer. Never.”
He meant it. On konbit days, when all the villagers rose before dawn to work together, Raymond had to prod Nicolas from his natte and drag him to the rice fields. “Father’s going to be mad if you don’t hurry up,” he’d say.
Nicolas would kick rocks on the way as the sunrise blanketed the rice fields with a soft pink glow; he refused to put his feet in the cold mud while Raymond masterfully wrapped his large brown hands around a bundle of rice. When their father was far in the distance, plowing the ground with his pick, joining in the collective call-and-response song, Nicolas would even pull out a book. He’d find a strong calabash tree root to sit on and forget all about the farmers, the cook who stirred the hot pot for the workers, the cows’ tails whipping flies away in the morning air. When he caught Nicolas reading, their father would beat him. “Are you ashamed of farming?” he’d roar as his belt smacked the boy’s hips. “You’ll get your hands dirty like the rest of us whenever it’s required, you ingrate!” Raymond stayed up many nights tending to welts on his brother’s body.
When Raymond turned fifteen, he dropped out of school and found a job at a mechanic shop in the nearby city of Saint-Marc. “Let’s face it,” he told his parents, “I’ll never be like Nicolas. Don’t waste any more money on that school. If I do good work as an apprentice mechanic, maybe I can open my own shop one day.”
Saint-Marc was known for a neighborhood of graceful, old streets that eased up the hills away from the bay and the parks. It was called La Ville des Bicyclettes, aptly named because its residents’ preferred mode of transportation was bicycles. Raymond’s early work as a mechanic entailed fixing chains and replacing wheels with broken spokes. Over time, he moved on to oiling the engines of trucks that traveled to and from the capital. He learned how to drive, shuttling customers from the shop to wait at a nearby bar. In the evenings, he came home with greasy hands and his pants stained with oil that his mother could never fully wash out. But he came home