Free The Seeds of Fiction by Richard Greene, Bernard Diederich

it’s going to be different with them. Castro started his revolution with twelve men.’
    Graham shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand and looked at me. ‘That’s different. Batista was a fool. And Castro had the support of the people.’
    â€˜I agree. But you try to tell them they can’t do it.’
    Graham looked away where two billy-goats were charging and butting heads against one another.
    We walked back across the garden. Graham paused to observe several of the guerrillas who were completing a new bamboo aqueduct to irrigate their crops of tomatoes and beans. Baptiste pulled me aside.
    â€˜Maybe the Englishman can get guns for us,’ he whispered in Creole.
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘It’s not his business.’
    â€˜Maybe he has connections,’ Baptiste persisted.
    I walked away from Baptiste and met Graham between rows of tomato plants. Later Graham gave the rebels a $30 contribution. Baptiste told him the money would go to purchase hatchlings for a chicken farm.

3 | LOVING HAITI
    The following day I picked up my friend, Jean-Claude Bajeux, an exiled Haitian Catholic priest, and we went to collect Graham. The three of us left Santo Domingo in the pre-dawn darkness and began our trip across the island in my chartreuse Volkswagen Beetle. A snow-white quilt of mist hung over the fields of leafy tobacco in the rich Cibao Valley as we clattered through the Dominican countryside. Mornings are the best time of day in the Caribbean, and that morning in January 1965 was no exception. I made a comment about the air that rushed through the windows carrying the fragrance of tropical flowers, the wet earth and burning charcoal. Graham took a deep breath and said he preferred the smell of Haiti. ‘It is very much like West Africa.’
    The highway to the north coast had no speed limit, so we motored with the accelerator pushed to the floor, and the Beetle’s 36-horsepower engine chattered away like a noisy sewing machine. The Beetle was a despised symbol during the latter years of the Trujillo dictatorship because it had become the preferred vehicle of El Jefe’s dreaded secret police, the SIM (Military Intelligence Service). His
caliés
— plainclothes thugs and spies — rode three to a car with their Dominican-made San Cristóbal rifles at the ready. The noisy putt-putt of a SIM Beetle’s little air-cooled engine when it came up the driveway was enough to freeze the blood of the bravest Dominican. None the less the car was economical and versatile, and it was all I could afford at the time.
    Graham was cheerful. He seemed excited at our starting out. ‘We’ll get a good look at Papa Doc’s Haiti from as close as humanly possible, and perhaps we’ll provoke him a little,’ he said, delighted at the prospect of action.
    But as we cruised along the two-lane road, talking over the sound of the engine and the wind became laborious. Cattle and donkeys attracted to the warm asphalt of the roadway during the night were slow to give up their bed. Avoiding these slow-moving and unpredictable creatures as well as a variety of other animals became a game of Dominican roulette for Graham. He said chickens were fair game, and he displayed a mischievous, boyish delight at the contest of hitting chickens on the road. He peered out his window making cluck-clucking sounds, then snapped back in his front seat as another startled hen fluttered past our windshield, and he would credit me with another point. In the back seat Father Bajeux had managed to curl up his lanky frame and had fallen asleep.
    We stopped for petrol in the city of Santiago. I noticed Graham had trouble with the door handle. He always seemed to have difficulty with mechanical things.
    We drove on in silence, and as we passed the first crossroads out of the city I thought of my own life and the close calls I had experienced in Haiti. I feared what might lie ahead and the risk we