Every sweating pilgrim crammed into the bed of this pickup truck, traveling through the rolling, green countryside on the way to Saut-D’Eau, is heavily burdened.

Since the world shook late in the afternoon of January 12, six months gone, they carry things inside their heads that weren’t there before: collapsed cathedrals and clouds of dust, crushed concrete homes-now-gone and sad, confused ghosts who used to be living, breathing love that walked beside them.

Yet these pilgrims sing.

Erzulie, it’s you who is my mother…

The woman in the coke-bottle glasses and her beautiful smile of teeth-awry and the scraggly-bearded man with kind, kind eyes, all of them, they sing to the Virgin Mary or Erzulie Dantor—the voodoo spirit of motherhood—whichever mother who, for them, appeared in a palm tree near a waterfall so many years ago, way before they were born.

The mother is in the water—the mother is the water—and she will come crashing down from the heights to wash them off, to wash away these troubles.

It’s you who breastfed me…

So they sing to the smell of exhaust and sticky-sweet pine, to the weary whine of tires that goes high when the truck descends and low when it ascends, to the blue sky and its soaring birds and the sun-glistening streams that scurry through the hills around them, and to the steady rumble of the tired, hopeful engine that will carry them to the waterfall, to the mother, who will clean them right down to their souls.