jesus in the coffee tree (story)

Jesus in the coffee tree

By Moonshine



(Author’s note)


This is the author’s first attempt in several long frustrating years to try and write something besides limericks, letters and lies. After realizing in his mid-twenties that he was not going to be discovered as a fantastic genius, and have it by the balls as early on as George Harrison had, great doubt of his worth as a scribe befell him. He moped and doped, and kicked his fat ass in the sand. Now the great hurricane, perhaps the wildest since white man’s history, has shaken his bones: and now he writes. He concentrates effort before this tacking machine. Before and after any self wrought lust, the hurricane, like Van Gogh’s ear, has shook him to the bones, has hammered in his ears, has made him close his eyes, and barely squint into the hard spiked wind, filled with leaves, and bark, and sheets of galvanized tin, and splintered dreams, and two-by-fours. The tempest wind turns his eyes into indian’s. He tries to see among the dust of wind, to peer down from the cliffs. The sea, a gray swollen monster devouring the shore. The palms twisted wreckage, wind snapped backs: Snapped like victims hit by a semi on an interstate head on. He tries to watch, to witness, but only seconds, and the wind drives him back behind the wall. He rushes to what was the kitchen. His wife and two babies huddled under a table. The roof is a mile away over the side of a mountain, and the world howls impossibly for them. And piss streams out his body. Out his soul, beyond control; and the building, what’s left of it, the island, what’s left of it, trembles. He shivers before it, as he tries to see into the wind. And the storm is breaking the buildings all around. He gazes down upon his ten day old son and finds the blow of hurricane pressing on his bones.

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The day we first decided to take old Honest Able up on his offer to visit his place up on Coco Ridge was a typical Dominica, Calibishe morning.

The sun rising through the slight, low lying clouds beyond the point, through the coconut groves, over the hills. The island complete green the sea complete blue. The sunlight diffused into a thousand strands of gold beyond gold, streaming everywhere. The coolness in the morning air. The coolness coming from the great mountain that always loomed up behind us.

The million bird songs, and the quiet lapping of the water at the base of the great black cliffs.

The slight buzz of the fishing skiffs leaving from way up on the other side of the bay.

The fresh home grown, sweet as chocolate, coffee brewing, and the cool morning dew on your bare rough feet as you go out to collect papaya, or coconuts for breakfast.

But most of all the morning was the incredible hot sun breaking up the clouds, all golden. And the blueness of both sky and sea. And the wonderful coolness in the air that the gold would soon dissolve. And the wonderful, always trade wind that made the morning full, and fine, and strong.

We descended our hill the back way, on a trail up and down, in the soft sweet dark earth. Past springs and streams, and banana plantings, missing the village and the bay front, only touching the far corner of the cricket field by the public school at the low point of the trail, and then climbing up, and up, and up to Coco Ridge.

Toulouse, our baby climbed all the way from the corner of the cricket field up to the place where the trail leveled off on the ridge. (Both our sons seemed to love climbing at around a year or so of age better than anything else.)

When we arrived at Honest’s house, he was out back cutting up fire wood with an axe, his old strong body naked from the wait up, wearing an old pair of tattered cut off pants, his veins all full of blood pumping up his muscles, sweat glistening on his shoulders and forehead, his breath not heavy, but strong and balanced.

As soon as he sees us he lets up and comes quick to greet us.

“You cum! You cum! Cum! Cum! Dat’s right. Dat right, Toulouse, cum right here and says hello nice now,” and he holds the baby in his arms, and a broad smile is forever his countenance.

“So you finally cum see old Honest, Mitchell boy? Dat nice Dat just fine!”

“Well, I said we’d make it up here sometime.”

“Yes sir! Dat you did boy! Well cum and sit down now. Toma siento! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“This is a nice place you have here, Honest.”

“Well she’ll do! She’ll do just fine! We have a look about after a piece.”

“Great.”

“You thirsty, want some water?”

“Thanks.”

Honest’s spread was typical of a Dominican farmer’s, the size, and the layout: A house with a small parlor filled with thin wooden furniture. The walls lined with endless pictures from magazines, cricket stars, and a million other things. Five or six kerosene lamps all around, not quite half of them functional.

All in a rectangular little wooden building with a tin roof, divided in the middle by a wall that doesn’t reach the ceiling, just a plywood partition, and a bed and a very few things behind it.

On the other side of the compound, in a purposefully separate building, the kitchen: One room with dried fish and hot peppers dangling everywhere, and old tin plate filled with limes, a stock of green bananas over by the simple elevated fireplace. Just an old piece of tin up off the ground with some ancient automobile iron used to support the pots, and in the roof a smudged opening to the sky.

“So how you all doin’ Mitchell?”

“Oh just fine. Waiting for the flying fish to start coming in.”

“They be cummin’ real soon now, don’t you worry ‘bout dat! You see flyin’ fish! You see boats filled to da top wit it! You want to eat sum fish?”

“No, not right now, we just had some breakfast.”

“For dinner den! You stay for dinner! We have some nice king fish from da capin! You stayin’ for dinner!”

After shooting it for a while longer Honest suggess we go down to his garden.

“Got plenty nice plantain down by da riber der!”

And I follow him over the hillside, down past the tall rows of coconut trees, many of them with vanilla orchids, their vines climbing up and up toward the football sized green cocos, down out of sight of the sea, through wide-leafed green plants still moist with the dew. And I slip on a patch of slick red mud, right down hard on my fat butt.

Life is death. Love, hate. Honest’s wonderful natural laughter quickly breaks my embarrassment.

“Get up! Get up now! Dat’s all right! You O.K. now Mitchell?”

My white tennis shorts are no longer that. Haven’t been from the first slipping and sliding down the steep valleys everywhere about us. Don’t think I ever saw a Dominican slip, though. Well, maybe on the trail down to the spot they’d first given me for a garden, especially in the morning. It was the steepest trail around. The first thing I had to do to get my garden growing was make steps, cut steps in the mud on my trail.

“You just have to take your time, and watch what you doin!”

“Yeah, I think you’re right there, Honest.”

The tiny creek is in sight over the last steep lip, with huge banana plants somehow growing up the muddy almost-cliffs, and we make our way slowly down to the river. ( Any moving stream of fresh water running down quickly to the sea is called a river in Dominica. The Billyboo, in which we used to wash our clothes, sometimes was just three inches deep and two feet wide, but there was a nice spot by the road where the water slapped over a good sized boulder and made a slight pool. But the mullets would always take pecks at your feet. Tin mullets the size of large minnows. And Honest’s river was even slighter than the Billyboo. I’m sorry I never learned its name.)

Some of the banana stocks on the steep river rim had fallen recently because of the extreme weight of the banana bunches too big, some of them, to continue growing on such a steep, steep hill.

“Dis one look pretty good!” and Honest jabs his tiny cutlass into the now horizontal stock, making a truly killing sound, causing the living clear ooze to bleed out from the cut he has made.

I step forward to examine the bunch. It looks pretty good, I think. Only a couple pecked out by birds, not one spoiled or rotten.

And Honest hands me his little cutlass. (When you buy a new cutlass---machete---in Dominica, they are all the same. Made somewhere in the middle of England with a nice, big wooden riveted handle, the blade extending a good two feet and coming out up to three inches wide, before curing and tapering as it wings up into a point sort of like a scimitar.

But Honest’s cutlass now was the size of a carving knife; after years and years of sharpening, the shortening of a blade is inevitable.

Whack! And a pretty nice bunch of bananas is mine. A hundred pounds of sustenance, just like that. Only to take it back on up the hill.

I have been working a garden in the very bottom of one of the deepest valleys in our neighborhood, and spending three or four hours spear fishing in the seas nearly daily now, and I hike the big bunch right up over my shoulder, and we start on up.

When we reach the red mud again, I remember what Honest had just told me, and take my time, and watch my feet, and where to place them very carefully this time, and I have no problem.

“You see what I tell you Mitchell boy!” And there is no place in the world I’d rather be.

By the time we have ascended enough to again hear the ocean over the hillside, I am soaked in sun and sweat, but feeling very fine, and strong, and good.

“You doin’ just fine with them plantain, boy! You cummin’ strong over here in Dominica!”

I can feel the load in my back and legs. Feel my body strong and tight, and alive against the gravity. The sound of the sea, and then reemerging into the wind that blows wonderfully through the sweat and in my hair. Taking big clear breaths, and pushing upward. Coming to the ridge top, the black roof of the copra drying shed, and my woman and our son smiling as we arrive.

“Wow, that’s a nice bunch of plantains. Oh you’re sweating.”

“He doin’ good, Claudine! He plenty strong now! You got a strong daddy now right Toulouse. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

“I’m getting there.”

“You better be by now,” kids Claudine, and we are all very happy.

Again we gravitate into sitting and talking, and Honest constantly speaking in sentences that must truly all be written down with exclamations points (honest!).

It’s true that people spend most of their time simply talking of the weather and such, and somehow we soon got around the beautiful, very large Arabian coffee trees Honest had back behind the kitchen. They were filled with very large bright red coffee beans, but still had some of their lovely little pink and white flowers on too, and still had much of their very sweet perfume. They were truly very lovely.

“You want to pick up some da coffee?”

“Come on Honest, you’ll be giving me your farm here next.”

(He really had offered to sell me an acre or so very cheap, to build a place out at the very end of the ridge with a spectacular view of many other island and the sea.)

“You pick ‘em please. I can’t drink dat coffee no more, no sir!”

“You sure?”

“True. True, Mitchell boy! Dat stuff too strong for me, makes your insides boil!”

“Well okay.” And we spend the next two hours nicely busy among the coffee grove, picking and then peeling the bittersweet red husks off the beans with a handmade machine, while Honest went back to work on his firewood, and later was still very busy hand splitting coconuts and getting them ready to be dried in the copra oven.

If you’ve never eaten the outer fruit of a coffee bean, it tastes surprisingly good. The actual skin is very thick and not really easy to swallow. You just sort of do something halfway between chewing and sucking to get the flavor from the greenish pulp that’s clinging to the thick red skin.

It is very sweet in a way that no one will ever truly describe with words in books: But one would not be advised to make such an adventure as herein told merely to suck on coffee bean skins. (Eventually you’ve got to spit them out.)

Finally our plastic bag is filled with over a kilo of still slimy coffee beans, and Honest seems ready for another break, and we all sit on a very beat up used-to-be-painted-white, fantastic looking (Claudine and I both toy with the idea of asking him to sell it to us, but don’t) wicker sofa. Honest says he sleeps most nights on the old wicker sofa that has its own shed. Just a piece of tin on four hand cut poles, dug into the hard dark earth of Honest’s compound.

“When da storm she blowin’ wicked, then I sleep in da house with da ol’ woman.”

“It’s nice sleeping outside,” Claudine agrees.

“Boy, you sure have got some beautiful coffee trees,” and I am happy, still thinking about being all up in the branches. The fragrance of the coffee flowers like a good dream, doing what I call pixie work, Munchkin work Hobbit work. Picking fruit for personal consumption for a picnic.

I mean, migrants working in the Imperial Valley of South Texas probably don’t get that wonderful feeling, but then neither do the Wall Street set. And it’s really too bad . . . so wonderful being with your lover up in a healthy abundant, beautiful fruit tree.

“Ya see dat one over der all by itself?” And we all turn towards the tall, thin, rather unusual looking coffee tree, not wide and full of rows of big read beans like the others in the grove, but sparse and wild and unkept looking. And very old compared to the others, much older than the trees over in the grove.

“One day I see Jesus up in dat coffee tree!”

These are the wonderful moments that I never could seem to find back home.

“Right up in the top of the tree! Jesus Christ! And da Father! And da Holy Ghost! Ya boy! Right up der on dat ol’ coffee tree. Just cum in for a nap, and der he is all on a cloud of gold. Lord Jesus, praise his name, looking down on me, looking all beautiful!”

“How about the Lord?”

“Oh no! I couldn’t see da Lord!” A long pause. “Da Lord don’t have no face, you know. But I sure he was der. Da Father , the Son and Da Holy Ghost!”

I decided quickly not to ask anything about the Holy Ghost, specifically, but could not help myself.

“Did they say anything to you?”

“No boy! Not a word. Dey just appears up on da top of dat coffee tree, and den they’re gone!”

“Oh.”

“Da Devil, now dat’s another story! Dat devil one pretty man! You believe me now. Some folks says he all a monster, but I seen him one time over der, up in Cuba, and dat Devil he a right pretty man!”

“The Devil in Cuba?”

“Dat’s right! And he called me! To take me away wit him! Dat Devil come after me! And he the prettiest man I ever seen. Me out cutting cane. Livin’ out da bush. And he cum right up and tap me on da back, and I turn ‘round, and Lord almighty, it’s da devil cum to take me!”

“What’s ja do?”

“Boy, I run like a crazy man! I run and run and run! And I don’t look back! Boy, when you running from da Devil, you don’t never look back!”

“Well, how did you know it was the Devil?”

“ Just know’d! Boy, dat Devil a pretty man! Prettier dan you, Mitchell! Da prettiest man you ever gonna see! Over der in Cuba! Me cuttin’ cane. Der a rich woman over der, she give me milk and bread in da morning. Rich woman! She say, ‘Don’t tell nobody now!’ Hot milk and bread. Rich woman der in Cuba. Tell me, ‘don’t tell anybody’. I don’t either. No. no. I don’t tell nobody ‘bout dat milk and bread!”

“She must have liked you.”

“Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Dat right, Mitchell! She must a’ liked ol’ Honest! Plenty nice, dat ol’ rich woman over der in Cuba!”

Jesus in the coffee tree. And he told us of it just so . . .so. . . so. . . .Honestly. So much from his heart you were sure it all was true, and it was just a great story, to be part of, to be on the hearing end of. Hell. I know it’s sentimental as hell. Hell, it’s damn over-sentimental to say this now, but that damn ol’ David, dat ol’ hurricane killed Honest as sure as I’m telling this story. Killed him of a broken heart.


Dear Honest,

I will always take my time and make sure I watch each step where it’s steep and where it’s slick. And if I see him, I’ll run like a crazy man, and never turn back to look at the Devil. So God bless you dear old man, and thank you for your being, and telling me of Jesus in the coffee tree.

And I think you’re real right about the Lord, Honest boy, “You just can’t see no face.”