The Poisonwood Bible (10 page)

He leaned forward to give us the full effect of his red eyebrows and prominent jaw. “Elephant grass,” he pronounced triumphantly.

We sat frozen, the food in our mouths momentarily unchewed.

“A dozen little boys rode on the back, weaving fan belts out of grass.”

Leah blurted out all in a rush, “So the plain simple grass of God’s creation can be just as strong as, as rubber or whatnot!” She sat ramrod straight as if she were on television, going for the sixty-four-dollar question.

“No,” he said. “Each one wouldn’t last but two or three miles.”

“Oh.” Leah was disconsolate. The remaining nitwits ventured no other guesses.

“But just as soon as it gave out,” he explained, “well, they’d have another one at the ready.”

“Keen,” Rachel said, unconvincingly. She is the most dramatic member of the family, and the worst actress, which in our family is a crucial skill. All of us were giving diligent attention to our powdered potatoes. We were supposed to be reaching an understanding here about the elephant-grass fan belt illustrating God’s vast greatness; nobody wanted to be called on.

“A Mercedes truck!” he said finally. “The pinnacle of German invention, can be kept in business by twelve little African boys and some elephant grass.”

“Sister, shut the door! Wenda mbote!” Methuselah called out. Then he shouted, “Ko ko ko!” which is what people in Kilanga shout in someone’s doorway when they come visiting, since generally there is no door to knock on. This happened often at our house, but we always knew it was Methuselah, since we did have a door and did not, as a rule, have visitors. If anyone actually ever came, usually in the hope of selling us food, they did not knock on the door but merely hung about the yard until we took notice.

“Well, I expect you could keep anything going with enough little boys and enough grass,” our mother said. She did not sound all that pleased about it.

“That’s right. It just takes adaptability.”

“Damn damn damn!” observed Methuselah.

Mother shot the bird a worried glance. “If that creature lives through nine hundred Baptist missions he will have quite a lot to say.”

She stood up then and started stacking the plates. Her Living Curl had long since been pronounced dead, and on the whole she appeared to be adapted to within an inch of her life. She excused herself to go boil the dishwater.

Unable to work either the dishwater or Methuselah’s long memory into a proper ending for his parable, Our Father merely looked at us all and heaved the great sigh of the put-upon male. Oh, such a sigh. It was so deep it could have drawn water from a well, right up from beneath the floor of our nitwit household. He was merely trying, that sigh suggested, to drag us all toward enlightenment through the marrow of our own poor female bones.

We hung our heads, pushed back our chairs, and filed out to help stoke up the firebox in the kitchen house. Cooking meals here requires half the day, and cleaning up takes the other half. We have to boil our water because it comes from the stream, where parasites multiply in teeming throngs. Africa has parasites so particular and diverse as to occupy every niche of the body: intestines small and large, the skin, the bladder, the male and female reproductive tracts, interstitial fluids, even the cornea. In a library book on African public health, before we left home, I found a drawing of a worm as thin as a hair meandering across the front of a man’s startled eyeball. I was struck through with my own wayward brand of reverence: praise be the lord of all plagues and secret afflictions! If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.

Outside I saw Mama Tataba, on her way to the kitchen house, dip in a hand and drink straight out of the bucket. I crossed my fingers for her one good eye. I shuddered to think of that dose of God’s Creation going down, sucking her dry from the inside.

Leah

MY FATHER had been going to the garden alone, every day, to sit and think. It disturbed him that the plants thrived and filled the fenced patch with bloom like a funeral parlor, but would not set fruit. I knew he was praying about it. I sometimes went out to sit with him, even though Mother held it against me, saying he needed his solitude.

He speculated that there was too much shade from the trees. I thought long and hard about this explanation, as I am always eager to expand my understanding of horticulture. It was true, the trees did encroach on our little clearing. We constantly had to break and hack off branches, trying to win back our ground. Why, some of the bean vines had wound themselves all the way into the very treetops, striving for light.

Once he asked me suddenly as we sat mulling over the pumpkins, “Leah, do you know what they spent the last Bible convention in Atlanta arguing about?”

I wasn’t really expected to know, so I waited. I was thrilled by the mere fact of his speaking to me in this gentle, somewhat personal way. He didn’t look at me, of course, for he had much on his mind, as ever. We’d worked so hard for God’s favor, yet it seemed God was still waiting for some extra labor on our part, and it was up to my father to figure out what. With his stronger eye he stared deeply into a pumpkin blossom for the source of his garden’s disease. The flowers would open and close, then the green fruits behind them would shrivel and turn brown. There wasn’t a single exception. In

exchange for our honest sweat we’d so far earned flowers and leaves, but nothing we could actually have for supper.

“The size of heaven,” he finally said.

“I’m sorry?” My heart skipped a beat. Here I’d been trying to second-guess Father, working out the garden business. He is always two steps ahead of me.

“They debated about the size of heaven, at the Bible convention. How many furlongs it is. How many long, how many wide—they set men with adding machines to figuring it out. Chapter twenty-one of Revelation sets it out in reeds, and other books tell it in cubits, and not a one of them quite matches up.” Inexplicably, he sounded put out with the men who brought their adding machines to the Bible convention, and possibly with the Bible itself. I felt extremely uneasy.

“Well, I sure hope there’ll be room enough for everybody,” I said. This was a whole new worry to me. Suddenly I began to think of all the people already up there, mostly old, and not in particularly good shape either. I pictured them elbowing each other as if at a church rummage sale.

“There will always be room for the righteous,” he said.

 “Amen,” I breathed, on safer ground.

“Many are the afflictions of the righteous, and the Lord delivers him out of them all. But you know, Leah, sometimes He doesn’t deliver us out of our hardships but through them.”

“Heavenly Father, deliver us,” I said, although I didn’t care for this new angle. Father had already bent his will to Africa by remaking his garden in mounds, the way they do here.This was a sure sign to God of his humility and servitude, and it was only fair to expect our reward. So what was this business of being delivered through hardships? Did Father aim to suggest God was not obligated to send us down any beans or squash at all, no matter how we might toil in His name? That He just proposed to sit up there and consign us to hardships one right after another? Certainly it wasn’t my place to scrutinize God’s great plan, but what about the balancing scales of justice?

  Father said nothing to ease my worries. He just plucked up another bean flower and held it up to the sky, examining it in the African light like a doctor with an X-ray, looking for the secret thing gone wrong.

His first sermon in August waxed great and long on the subject of baptism. Afterward, at home, when Mother asked Mama Tataba to go put the soup on the stove, Mania Tataba turned and walked smack dab out the front door in between the words “soup” and “stove.” She went out and gave my father a good talking to, shaking her finger at him across a row of tomatoless tomato plants. Whatever it was he’d done wrong in her opinion, it was really the last straw. We could hear her voice rising and rising.

Naturally it shocked us half to death to hear somebody caterwauling at Father this way. It shocked us even more to see him standing there red-faced, trying to fit a word in sideways. With all four of us girls lined up at the window with our mouths gaping open, we must have looked like the Lennon Sisters on Lawrence Welk. Mother shooed us from the window, ordering us to go hunt up our schoolbooks and read them. It wasn’t the proper time for school, or even a school day, but we did everything she said now. We’d recently seen her throw a box of Potato Buds across the room. After a quiet eternity of the Trojan War, Mama Tataba burst in and threw her apron on a chair. We all closed our books.

“I won’t be stay here,” she declared. “You send a girl get me at Banga you be need help. I go show you cook eel. They got a big eel downa river yesterday. That fish a good be for children.” That was her final advice for our salvation.

I followed her out the door and watched her tromp down the road, the pale soles of her feet blinking back at me. Then I went to track down my father, who had wandered a little distance from the fenced garden and was sitting against a tree trunk. In his fingers he carefully stretched out something that looked like a wasp, still alive. It was as broad as my hand and had a yellow 8 on each clear wing, as plain as if some careful schoolchild or God had painted it there.

My father looked like he’d just had a look down Main Street, Heaven.

He told me, “There aren’t any pollinators.”

“What?”      .

“No insects here to pollinate the garden.”

“Why, but there’s a world of bugs here!” An unnecessary remark, I suppose, as we both watched the peculiar insect struggling in his hands.

“African bugs, Leah. Creatures fashioned by God for the purpose of serving African plants. Look at this thing. How would it know what to do with a Kentucky Wonder bean?”

I couldn’t know if he was right or wrong. I only faintly understand about pollination. I do know that the industrious bees do the most of it. I mused, “I guess we should have brought some bees over in our pockets too.”

My father looked at me with a new face, strange and terrifying to me for what it lacked in confidence. It was as if a small, befuddled stranger were peering through the imposing mask of my father’s features. He looked at me like I was his spanking newborn baby and he did love me so, but feared the world would never be what any of us had hoped for.

“Leah,” he said, “you can’t bring the bees.You might as well bring the whole world over here with you, and there’s not room for it.

 “ I swallowed.” I know.”  

We sat together looking through the crooked stick fence at the great variety of spurned blossoms in my father’s garden. I felt so many different things  right then: elation at my father’s  strange expression of tenderness, and despair for his defeat. We had ‘worked so hard, and for what? I felt confusion and dread. I sensed that the sun \vas going down on many things I believed in.

From his big cage on the porch, Methuselah screeched at us in Kikongo. “Mbote!” he said, and I merely wondered, Hello or goodbye?

“What was Mama Tataba so mad about just now?” I dared to ask, very quietly. “We saw her hollering.”

   “A little girl.”

 “She has one?”                                

 “No. A girl from here in the village that got killed last year.” I felt my pulse race ahead. “What happened to her?” He did not look at me now, but stared off at the distance. “She got killed and eaten by a crocodile. They don’t let their children step foot in the river, ever. Not even to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb.”                             

 “Oh,” I said.

My own baptism, and every one I have witnessed so far, took place in something like a large bathtub or small swimming pool in the Baptist Church. The worst harm that could come to you might be that you would slip on the stairs. I hoped there would be room in heaven for that poor little girl, in whatever condition she’d arrived there.

“I fail to understand,” he said, “-why it would take six months for someone to inform me of that simple fact.” The old fire was seeping back into this strange, wistful husk of my father. I felt gratified.

“Ko ko ko!” Methuselah called.

“Come in!” my father retorted, with impatience rising in his craw.

“Wake up, Brother Fowles!”

“Piss off!”my father shouted.

I held my breath.

He shoved himself straight to his feet, strode to the porch, and flung open the door of Methuselah’s cage. Methuselah hunched his shoulders and sidled away from the door. His eyes in their bulging sockets ticked up and down, trying to understand the specter of this huge white man.

“You’re free to go,” my father said, waiting. But the bird did not come out. So he reached in and took hold of it.

In my father’s hands Methuselah looked like nothing but a feathered toy. When he hurled the bird up at the treetops it didn’t fly at first but only sailed across the clearing like a red-tailed badminton shuttlecock. I thought my father’s rough grip had surely got the better of that poor native creature, and that it would fall to the ground.

But no. In a burst of light Methuselah opened his wings and fluttered like freedom itself, lifting himself to the top of our Kentucky Wonder vines and the highest boughs of the jungle that will surely take back everything once we are gone.          

Book Two

THE REVELATION

And I stood upon the sand of the sea,

and saw a beast rise up....

If any man have an ear, let him hear.

REVELATION 13:1,9

Orleanna Price SANDERLING ISLAND, GEORGIA

ONCE EVERY FEW YEARS, even now, I catch the scent of Africa. It makes me want to keen, sing, clap up thunder, lie down at the foot of a tree and let the worms take whatever of me they can still use.

I find it impossible to bear.

Ripe fruits, acrid sweat, urine, flowers, dark spices, and other things I’ve never even seen—I can’t say what goes into the composition, or why it rises up to confront me as I round some corner hastily, unsuspecting. It has found me here on this island, in our little town, in a back alley where sleek boys smoke in a stairwell amidst the day’s uncollected refuse. A few years back, it found me on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where I’d returned for a family funeral: Africa rose up to seize me as I walked on a pier past a huddle of turtle-headed old fishermen, their bait buckets set around them like a banquet. Once I merely walked out of the library in Atlanta and there it was, that scent knocking me down, for no reason I can understand. The sensation rises up from inside me and I know you’re still here, holding sway. You’ve played some trick on the dividing of my cells so my body can never be free of the small parts of Africa it consumed. Africa, where one of rny children remains in the dank red earth. It’s the scent of accusation. It seems I only know myself, anymore, by your attendance in my soul.

I could have been a different mother, you’ll say. Could have straightened up and seen what was coming, for it was thick in the air all around us. It was the very odor of market day in Kilanga. Every fifth day was market day—not the seventh or thirtieth, nothing you could give a name like “Saturday,” or “The First of the Month,” but every thumb if you kept the days in your hand. It makes no sense at all, and then finally all the sense in the world, once you understand that keeping things in your hand is exactly how it’s done in the Congo. From everywhere within walking distance, every fifth day, people with hands full or empty appeared in our village to saunter and haggle their way up and down the long rows where women laid out produce on mats on the ground. The vendor ladies squatted, scowling, resting their chins on their crossed arms, behind fortresses of stacked kola nuts, bundles of fragrant sticks, piles of charcoal, salvaged bottles and cans, or displays of dried animal parts. They grumbled continually as they built and rebuilt with leathery, deliberate hands their pyramids of mottled greenish oranges and mangoes and curved embankments of hard green bananas. I took a deep breath and told myself that a woman anywhere on earth can understand another woman on a market day. Yet my eye could not decipher those vendors: they wrapped their heads in bright-colored cloths as cheerful as a party, but faced the world with permanent vile frowns. They slung back their heads in slit-eyed boredom while they did each other’s hair into starbursts of astonished spikes. However I might pretend I was their neighbor, they knew better. I was pale and wide-eyed as a fish. A fish in the dust of the marketplace, trying to swim, while all the other women calmly breathed in that atmosphere of overripe fruit, dried meat, sweat, and spices, infusing their lives with powers I feared.

One particular day haunts me. I was trying to keep track of my girls but could see only Leah. I recall she was in the pale blue dress with the sash that tied behind her back. All the girls but Rachel generally ran ragged, so this must have been—for our family—a Sunday, a coincidence of our big day and the villagers’.

 Leah had a basket in her arms, carrying for me some burden that held her back from her preferred place at the head of the pack. The others had moved out of sight. I knew Nathan would be impatient for our return, so I beckoned to Leah. She had to cross over a row of produce to get to me. Without a thought, as the twin whose legs never failed her, she shifted the basket to her left hip and took a giant step over a pyramid of oranges. I stretched out my hand to her. Right there as she reached for it, though, she got stuck somehow, mid-straddle over the oranges, unable to bring the other foot over.        The woman squatting beside the oranges leaped up hissing, slicing her hands like scissors blades at the two of us, scorching me with eyes so hot the angry chocolate irises seemed to be melting into the white. A row of men on a bench looked up from their bowls of new beer and stared at us with the same clouded eyes, all motioning for me to move my child: stupid ghost! non-person! straddling a woman’s market-day wealth. I can’t stop being embarrassed by the memory of myself and Leah there with her genitals—bare, for all anyone knew—suspended over a woman’s oranges. A foreign mother and child assuming themselves in charge, suddenly slapped down to nothing by what they all saw us to be.

Until that moment I’d thought I could have it both ways: to be one of them, and also my husband’s wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

We would all have to escape Africa by a different route. Some of us are in the ground now and some are above it, but we’re all women, made of the same scarred earth. I study my grown daughters now, for signs they are resting in some kind of peace. How did they manage? When I remain hounded by judgment? The eyes in the trees open onto my dreams. In daylight they watch my crooked hands while I scratch the soil in my little damp garden. What do you want from me? When I raise up my crazy old eyes and talk to myself, what do you want me to tell you?

Oh, little beast, little favorite. Can’t you see I died as well? Sometimes I pray to remember, other times I pray to forget. It makes no difference. How can I ever walk free in the world, after the clap of those hands in the marketplace that were plainly trying to send me away? I had warnings. How can I bear the scent of what catches up to me?

There was so little time to ponder right and wrong, when I hardly even knew where I was. In those early months, why, half the time I would wake up startled and think I was right back in Pearl, Mississippi. Before marriage, before religion, before everything. Mornings in the Congo were so steamy you couldn’t see a thing but cloud come to earth, so you might as well be anywhere. Mama Tataba would appear to me standing in the bedroom doorway in her olive-green cardigan half buttoned up, with the five-dollar holes in the elbows, a knit cap of pilled wool pulled down to her eyebrows, her hands thick as hide; she could have been a woman standing in the alley door of Lutton’s General Store in the year of our Lord and my childhood, 1939.

Then she’d say, “Mama Prize, a mongoose be got in the white flour,” and I would have to hold on to the bed frame while the landscape swirled like water down a drain and pulled me back to the center. Here. Now. How in the world did a person get to be where I was?

Everything turned on the day we lost them both, Mama Tataba and the accursed parrot, both released by Nathan. What a day that was. For the native members of our household, Independence Day. The bird hung around, casting his vexed eye down on us from the trees, still needing to be fed. The other, she on whom our lives depended, vanished from the village. And the rain poured down and I wondered, “ Are we lost right now without knowing it? It had already happened so many times in my life (my wedding day comes to rnind) that I thought I was out of the woods, not realizing I’d merely paused on the edge of another narrow precipice in the midst of a long, long fall.

I can still recite the litany of efforts it took to push a husband and children alive and fed through each day in the Congo. The longest journey always began with sitting up in bed at the rooster’s crow, parting the mosquito curtain, and slipping on shoes—for there were hookworms lying in “wait on the floor, itching to burrow into our bare feet. Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day.

Dreaming of coffee. I’m afraid I didn’t miss the physical presence of my husband in his absences as much as I missed coffee. Out the back door, into the shock of damp heat, straining for a look at the river: resisting the urge to run.

Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sandbars to the sea. The hardest work of every day was deciding, once again, to stay with my family. They never even knew. When I pried open the lock meant to keep the beasts and curious children out of our kitchen hut, I nearly had to lock it again behind me, to keep myself in. The gloom, the humidity, the permanent sour breath of rainy season all bore down on me like a bothersome lover. The fresh stench of night soil in the bushes. And our own latrine, which was only one step removed.

Standing at the work table I would leave my own thoughts and watch myseF murdering oranges with our single dull knife, slitting their bellies and squeezing out the red blood. But no, first the fruit had to be washed; these strange, so-called blood oranges were gathered wild from the forest. When I bought them from Mama Mokala I knew they’d passed through the hands of her boys, all of whom bore white crusts on their eyes and penises. Washed, then, with a drop of precious Clorox bleach, measured out like the Blood of the Lamb. It’s comical, I know, but I carried through those days the image of a popular advertising campaign from home that pictured teams of very soiled children under the bold invocation: CLOROX NEEDED HERE!

Very well then, the juice wrenched from the disinfected skin, and then the pulpy liquid had to be diluted with water if I hoped to make the precious oranges last at all. It’s hard to say which cost me more dearly: bleach, oranges, or water. Bleach and oranges both I had to bargain for, or beg for in the case of supplies flown in to us by the awful man Eeben Axelroot. Every few weeks he turned up without warning, a sudden apparition in rotten boots and sweat-stained fedora, smoking Tiparillos in my doorway and demanding money for things that were already ours, donated by the Mission League. He even sold us our mail! But then nothing came to us free. Not even water. It had to be carried a mile and a half, and boiled. “Boiled,” a small word, meant twenty minutes over a roaring fire on a stove that resembled the rusted carcass of an Oldsmobile. “Fire” meant gathering up a pile of sticks in a village that had already been gathering firewood for all the years since God was a child, picking its grounds clean of combustibles as efficiently as an animal combing itself for lice. So “fire” meant longer and longer forays into the forest, stealing fallen branches from under the blunt-eyed gaze of snakes, just for one single bucket of drinkable water. Every small effort at hygiene was magnified by hours of labor spent procuring the simplest elements: water, heat, anything that might pass for disinfectant.

And food, that was another song and dance. Finding it, learning its name, cutting or pounding or dashing its brains to make it into something my family would tolerate. For a long time I could not work out how all the other families were getting by. There seemed to be no food to speak of, even on a market day -when everybody came around to make the tallest possible pile out of what they had. It didn’t seem to stack up to enough sustenance for the two dozen families in our village.Yes, I could see there was charcoal for cooking it, and shriveled red pili-pili peppers for spicing it, and calabash bowls to put it in, but where was the it, whatever it was? What on God’s earth did they eat?

At length I learned the answer: a gluey paste called fufu. It comes from a stupendous tuber, which the women cultivate and dig from the ground, soak in the river, dry in the sun, pound to white powder in hollowed-out logs, and boil. It’s called manioc, I was informed by Janna Underdown. It has the nutritional value of a brown paper bag, with the added bonus of trace amounts of cyanide. Yet it fills the stomach. It cooks up into the sort of tasteless mass one might induce an American child to try once, after a long round of pulled-up noses and double-dog dares. But for the people of Kilanga fufu was the one thing in life, other than time, that appeared to be taken for granted. There will always be manioc. It is the center of life. When the tall, narrow women dressed in their sarongs returned serenely from the fields, they toted it in huge parcels impossibly balanced on their heads: manioc-root bundles the size of crumpled horses. After soaking and peeling it, they arranged the long white roots into upright sprays in enamel tubs and passed single file through the village like immense lilies on slender, moving stalks. These women spent their days in the steady labors of planting, digging, and pounding manioc, though the dreamy way they moved through that work made it seem entirely separate from any end product. They reminded me of the groups of black men called gandy dancers in the Old South, who would come along the railroad track chanting, nodding, stepping forward and back in unison, banging out a rhythm with their steel rods, captivating children and moving on before you realized they had also, incidentally, repaired the track. That is how these women produced manioc, and that is how their children ate it: with no apparent thought to the higher purposes of production and consumption. Fufu was simply another word for food. Any other thing a person might eat—a banana, an egg, the bean called mangwansi, a piece of fire-blackened antelope flesh—was just the opposite, and its consumption was seen as a remarkable, possibly uncalled-for occasion.

My family required remarkable occasions three times a day. They couldn’t understand that the sort of meal they took for granted, a thirty-minute production in the land of General Electric, translated here to a lifetime of travail. A family might as well sit waiting for Mother and her attendants to come out of the kitchen with three Thanksgiving dinners a day. And Mama Tataba managed to do it, complaining all the while. She muttered while she worked, never resting, only pausing from time to time to hike up the waist of her wraparound pagne underneath her wool sweater. She rolled her eyes whenever she had to undo my mistakes: the tin cans I forgot to wash out and save, the bananas I failed to check for tarantulas, the firebox I once stoked entirely with sticks of bdngala—the poisonwood tree! She slapped the match out of my hand as I bent to light it, then pulled out the green sticks one by one with a potholder, explaining tersely that the smoke alone would have killed us all.