Allison Coffelt slapping the hull. There are quick breaks and stops, dips and highs, before the song comes in again through the static radio. But they could be talking about donkey shit and I might think it is a song. Out here on the veranda the rooster crows, the lambs ba, the birds call, the motos honk, and all begins to blend together until it’s hard to see or hear who does what. Gardy, as he says to call him, speaks English very well. And Creole. And French. And Spanish and German. He learned Creole, French, and English growing up here in Haiti, Spanish in the Dominican Republic where he went for medical school, and German when he met his partner, a German aid worker. “It’s good to learn languages when you’re young. You can do it now. For me, now I’m getting older, I sometimes mix them up.” Gardy is just reaching his mid-40s. He shaves his head. His lower jaw juts out a touch from his oval face and his serious expression melts when he sees someone he knows, which happens everywhere. A slanted scar reaches across the right half of his forehead. When I see him, he wears dark wash jeans and either a navy OSAPO T-shirt or a button-down dress shirt. As we drive through the streets of Les Cayes on the only twolane highway that connects the South with the capital, we chat about the city. He grew up in Les Cayes. He points to his mother’s house as we pass. We talk about my time at Maison de Naissance. To get there every morning, we would pass rice paddies, farmers with hand tools, fires of burning brush, donkeys, and thin cows. Gardy and I begin to talk beaches as we curve in and out, heading for the mountains. I had spent the day before in Port Salud, which Gardy tells me is one of the best beaches. We had piled nine people into our friend’s Nissan Pathfinder and drove an hour out of town. White sand, cerulean water, and tables and chairs under big shade trees at the water’s edge. Port Salud is a public beach with some souvenir stands and people snapping photos, but also other Haitians relaxing on a Saturday. Relax is a saying. “It is Relax,” my translator would tell me. “Relax in Haiti means everything is fine, everything is good.” I kicked a soccer ball with young boys in the surf, took our friends’ kids into the ocean, and drank Prestige, the Haitian beer that claimed to be “American Style Lager.” We ate fish on checkered table cloths in the shade. I floated on my back while the warm waves cradled my body, rocking me. Crab Orchard Review
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