The Poisonwood Bible (15 page)

I inspected Anatole’s special kind of face scarring instead. It is evidently considered beautifying in that region, or one of the places he’s lived at any rate. Around here the people seem content to settle for whatever scars life whangs them with as a decoration. That plus the splectacular hairdos on the women, which, man alive, don’t even get me started.

But Anatole not being from here, that explains why he doesn’t have his mother and father and fourteen hundred cousins living with him like everybody else does. We’d already heard part of the story, that he was an orphan. The Underdowns took him on as a project because his family all got killed in some horrible way they love to hint at but never exactly tell. Back when they used to live here, they heard about Anatole from some other missionaries and saved him from the famous diamond mines and taught him to love Jesus and how to read and write. Then they installed him as the schoolteacher. Father says Anatole is “our only ally in all this,” which is as clear as mud to me, but apparently Father’s say-so was a good enough reason to invite him to dinner. At least it gave us something to look forward to besides these wonderful dead animals we get to eat. And it provided Mother something to get all franticky about. She declared she was at her wits’ end to come up with a presentable meal. She’d cooked up some antelope meat and tried to make fried plantains that turned into something like black horse-hoof glue in the pan. She tried to make up for the food by using the white tablecloth and serving those pitiful black plantains in the bone-china platter with the forget-me-nots that she was so proud of—her one pretty thing in this big old mess we have to live in. And I will say she did her best to be the graceful hostess. Anyways Anatole gave her compliments right and left, which tells you right there he was either a polite young man or mentally cracked.

The small talk and compliments went on so long I was fixing to croak. My sisters gawked at the fascinating stranger and hung on his every syllabus of English, but as far as I was concerned it was just exactly like dinner with Father’s prissy Bible-study groups back in Georgia, only with more repulsive food.

Then all of a sudden the fire hit the pan.

Anatole leaned forward and announced, “Our chief,Tata Ndu, is concerned about the moral decline of his village.”

Father said, “Indeed he should be, because so few villagers are going to church.”

“No, Reverend. Because so many villagers are going to church.”

Well, that stupefied us all for a special moment in time. But Father leaned forward, fixing to rise to the challenge. Whenever he sees an argument coming, man oh man, does he get jazzed up.

“Brother Anatole, I fail to see how the church can mean anything but joy, for the few here who choose Christianity over ignorance and darknessl”

Anatole sighed. “I understand your difficulty, Reverend.Tata Ndu has asked me to explain this. His concern is with the important gods and ancestors of this village, who have always been honored in certain sacred ways. Tata Ndu worries that the people who go to your church are neglecting their duties.”

“Neglecting their duties to false idolatry, you mean to say.”

Anatole sighed again. “This may be difficult for you to understand. The people of your congregation are mostly what we call in Kikongo the lenzuka. People who have shamed themselves or had very bad luck or something like that. Tata Boanda, for example. He has had terrible luck with his wives. The first one can’t get any proper children, and the second one has a baby now who keeps dying before birth and coming back into her womb, over and over. No one can help this family anymore. The Boandas were very careful to worship their personal gods at home, making the proper sacrifices of food and doing everything in order. But still their gods have abandoned them for some reason. This is what they feel. Their luck could not get any more bad, you see? So they are interested to try making sacrifices to your Jesus.”

Father looked like he was choking on a bone. I thought: Is there a doctor in the house? But Anatole went right on merrily ahead, apparently unaware he was fixing to kill my father of a heart attack. “Tata Ndu is happy for you to draw the bad-luck people away,” he said. “So the village’s spirit protectors will not notice them so much. But he worries you are trying to lure too many of the others into following corrupt ways. He fears a disaster will come if we anger the gods.”

“Corrupt, did you say,” Father stated, rather than asked, after locating where the cat had put his tongue.

 “Yes, Reverend Price.”

“Corrupt ways. Tata Ndu feels that bringing the Christian word to these people is leading them to corrupt ways’’

“That is the best way I can think of to translate the message. Actually he said you are leading our villagers down into a hole, where they may fail to see the proper sun and become trapped like bugs on a rotten carcass.”

Well, that did it! Father was going to keel plumb over. Call the ambulance. And yet, here was Anatole looking back at Father with his eyebrows raised very high, like “Do you understand plain English?” Not to mention my younger sisters, who were staring at Anatole like he was the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Two-Headed Calf. “Tata Ndu asked you to relay all that, did he?”

 “Yes, he did.”

“And do you agree that I am leading your fellow villagers to partake of the meat of a rotten corpse?”

Anatole paused.You could see him trying out different words in his head. Finally he said, “Reverend Price, do I not stand beside you in your church every Sunday, translating the words of the Bible and your sermons?”

My Father did not exactly say yes or no to that, though of course it was true. But that’s Father, to a tee. He won’t usually answer a question straight. He always acts like there’s a trap somewhere and he’s not about to get caught in it. Instead he asked, “And, Anatole, do you not now sit at my table, translating the words of Tata Ndu’s bible of false idolatry and his sermon aimed at me in particular.”

“Yes, sir, that is what I am doing.”             

Father laid his knife and fork crossways on his plate and took a breath, satisfied he’d gained the upper hand. Father specializes in the upper hand. “Brother Anatole, I pray every day for understanding and patience in leading Brother Ndu to our church,” he said. “Perhaps I should pray for you as well.”

This was Big Chief Ndu they were talking about, or “Mister Undo” as Ruth May calls him. And I don’t mind saying he is a piece of work. It is hard to muster up the proper respect for a chief who wears glasses with no glass in them (he seems to think they raise his intelligence quotient), and the fur of a small animal clasped around his neck, a fashion trademark he shares with the elderly churchgoing ladies of Georgia, charmed I’m sure.

“If you are counting your enemies, you should not count me among them, sir,” Anatole said. “And if you fear the rivals of your church, you should know there is another nganga here, another minister. People also put their trust in him.”

Father loosened his tie and the collar of his short-sleeved Sunday shirt. “First of all, young man, I do not fear any man in Kilanga. I am a messenger of God’s great good news for all mankind, and He has bestowed upon me a greater strength than the brute ox or the most stalwart among the heathen.”

Anatole calmly blinked at that. I reckon he was wondering which one Father had him pegged for, brute ox or stalwart heathen.

“Second,” Father went on, “I’ll point out what you clearly must know, which is that Brother Ndu is not a minister of any kind. His business concerns the governing of human relations, not matters of the spirit. But you are quite right, there is another preacher aside from myself guiding my own right hand. The Lord is our Shepherd’’ Naturally Father had to give the impression he knew who, or what, Anatole was talking about, even if he didn’t. What with him being the Father Knows Best of all times.

“Yes, yes, of course, the Lord is our Shepherd,” Anatole said quickly, like he didn’t believe it all that much and was just getting it out of the way.”But I am speaking of the ngangaTatu Kuvudundu.”

We all stared at the middle of the table like something dead with feet had just turned up there. Why, we knew Tata Kuvudundu. We’d seen him babbling and walking cockeyed down the road, leaning over so far you keep thinking he’ll plumb fall over. He has six toes on one of his feet, and that’s not even half the battle. Some days he sells aspirins in the market, all dignified like Dr. Kildare, yet other days he’ll turn up with his body painted top to bottom (and I do mean bottom) in some kind of whitewash. We’ve also seen him squatting in his front yard surrounded by other old men, every one of them falling over from drinking palm wine. Father told us Tata Kuvudundu conducts the sin of false prophecy. Supposedly he and his grown-up sons tell fortunes by throwing chicken bones into a calabash bowl.

“Anatole, what do you mean by calling him a preacher?” Mother asked. “We kind of thought Tata Kuvudundu was the town drunk.”

“No Mama Price, he is not. He is a respected nganga, a priest of the traditions, you might say. He is quite a good advisor to Tata Ndu.”

“Advisor, nothing” said Father, raising halfway up out of his chair and starting to get his Baptist voice. His red eyebrows flared above his scowling eyes, with the bad one starting to squint a little from the strain of it all. “He is a rare nut, is what he is. A nut of the type that never falls far from the tree-Where I come from, sir, that is what we call a witch doctor!”

Anatole took one of Mother’s cloth napkins and blotted his face. Dots of perspiration were running into the little ridges along his nose. My sisters were still staring at him with all their might, and no wonder. We hadn’t had any company since Mother vanished Mr. Axelroot from our table way last summer—merely because he spat and cursed; we didn’t even know yet that he was a criminal element that would charge us for our own things. Since that time we hadn’t heard word one of English at our dinner table from any mouth but a Price’s. Six months is a long time for a family to tolerate itself without any outside distractions.

Anatole seemed to be getting ants in his pants but was still bound and determined to argue with Father. In spite of the seven warning signals of “You’ll be sorry” written all over Father’s face. Anatole said, “Tata Kuvudundu looks after many practical matters here. Men go especially to him when their wives are not getting children, or if they are adulterous.” He glanced at me, of all things, as if I in particular were too young to know what that meant. Really.

Mother suddenly snapped out of it. “Help me out, girls,” she said. “The dishwater is boiling away on the stove, I forgot all about it.You all clear the table and start washing up. Be careful and don’t get burned.”

To my surprise, my sisters practically ran from the table. They were curious, I’m sure, but the main consideration had to be Father. He was as frustrated as it gets and looked like he was fixing to throw a rod. I, however, didn’t leave. I helped clear the dishes but then I sat back down. If anybody presumed I was too young for a conversation about adulters and not getting babies they had another think coming. Besides, this was the most exciting occasion that had happened to us since Ruth May fell out of a tree, which goes to show you how fascinating our life was. If big Daddy-O was going to blow his stack over a witch doctor, here’s one cat that wasn’t going to miss it.

Anatole told Father he ought not to think of Tata Kuvudundu as competition. He said barrenness and adultery were serious matters that probably ought to remain separate from Tata Jesus. But he assured us that many people in Kilanga remembered the missionary times, when Brother Fowles had gotten practically the whole town praying to Jesus, and it was their recollection that the gods hadn’t been too angry over it, since no more bad things had happened in Kilanga than usual.

Well, that did it. Remembered the missionary times? This was a nerve shock even to me, to hear that the villagers thought Christianity was like some old picture show that was way out of date. What did that make Father then, Charlie Chaplin, waddling around duck-footed, waving his cane and talking without any sounds coming out?          

Mother and I watched him, expecting the dreaded atomic blowup. Father actually did open and close his mouth like a silent-picture version of “What!” or “Waaa!” and his neck turned red. Then he got very still.You could hear Ruth May’s creepy pet mongoose scurrying around under the table looking for somebody to drop something. Then Father’s whole face changed and I knew he was going to use the special way of talking he frequently perpeturates on his family members, dogs that have peed in the house, and morons, with his words saying one thing that’s fairly nice and his tone of voice saying another thing that is not. He told Anatole he respected and valued his help (meaning: I’ve had about enough of your lip, Buster Brown) but was disappointed by the villagers’ childlike interpretations of God’s plan (meaning: you are just as big of a dingwit as the rest of them). He said he would work on a sermon that would clear up all the misunderstandings. Then he announced that this conversation had come to an end, and Anatole could consider himself excused from the table and this house.

Which Anatole did, without delay.

“Well, that puts a whole new outlook on things, doesn’t it?” Mother asked, in the very quiet silence that followed. I kept my head down and cleared off all the last things except the big blue-flowered platter in the middle of the table, which I couldn’t reach without crossing into Father’s atomic danger zone.

“I wonder what outlook you might think that to be,” he said to Mother in that same special voice, for bad dogs and morons.

She brushed her hair out of her face and smiled at him as she reached across for the china platter. “Well, for one thing, sir, you and the good Lord better hope no lightning strikes around here in the next six months!”

“Orleanna, shut up!” he yelled, grabbing her arm hard and jerking the plate out of her hand. He raised it up over her head and slammed it down hard on the table, cracking it right in two. The smaller half flipped upside down as it broke, and lay there dribbling black plantain juice like blood onto the tablecloth. Mother stood helplessly, holding her hands out to the plate like she wished she could mend its hurt feelings.