The Poisonwood Bible (45 page)

I went in that canoe. I could tell the river was receding from its rainy-season flood by its peculiar rank smell and all the driftwood stranded along its banks. I marveled that I’d learned so much about Congolese rivers. I thought of my mother’s lifelong warning to us children whenever we entered a boat: if it overturns, grab hold for dear life! Yet Congolese pirogues are made of such dense wood if they capsize they sink like a rock. All these thoughts passed through me while the fishermen paddled urgently across the swift, boiling Kwenge. I clung to the rough plank, poised far out over the water, giving all my might to the service of balance. I don’t remember letting out my breath until we were safely across.

Possibly I’ve imagined this; the whole episode seems impossibly strange. I mentioned it later and Anatole laughed at what he called my reconstructed history. He claims I rode inside the canoe, at my own request, because the weight of the oddly shaped battery tipped the boat dangerously. Yet the event keeps returning to me in my dreams exactly as I’ve described it, with all the same sights and smells occurring in sequence as I stretched my weight over the water. It’s hard for me to doubt this is how it happened. I can’t deny my brain was still muddled, though. I have only the haziest recollection of waving at my mother and sister in a rising cloud of diesel exhaust and mosquitoes as they began their slow, permanent exodus from the Congo. I wish I could remember their faces, Adah’s especially. Did she feel I’d helped to save her? Or was it just more of the same parceling out of fortunes that had brought us this far, to this place where our path would finally divide into two?

I’ve compensated by remembering everything about Anatole in the days that followed. The exact green taste of the concoctions he boiled to cure me; the temperature of his hand on my cheek. The stitched patterns of light through thatch when morning entered the darkness where we slept, I against one wall, he against the other. We shared the fellowship of orphans. I felt it acutely, like a deep hunger for protein, and despaired for the flat-dirt expanse between Anatole and me. I begged him closer, inch by inch, clinging to his hands when he brought the cup. Now the bitterness  of quinine and sweetness of kissing are two tastes perfectly linked on my soft palate. I had never loved a man before, physically, and I’ve read enough of both Jane Eyre and Brenda Starr to know every first love is potent. But when I fell into mine, I was drugged with the exotic delirium of malaria, so mine is omnipotent. How can I ever love anyone now but Anatole? Who else could make the colors of the aurora borealis rise off my skin where he strokes my forearm? Or send needles of ice tinkling blue through my brain when he looks in my eyes? What else   but   this   fever   could   commute   my  father’s   ghost   crying, “Jezebel!” into a curl of blue smoke drifting out through a small, bright hole in the thatch? Anatole banished the honey-colored ache of malaria and guilt from my blood. By Anatole I was shattered and assembled, by way of Anatole I am delivered not out of my life but through it.

Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say, for I’ve loved my father fiercely my whole life, and it changed nothing. But now, all around me, the flame trees have roused from their long, dry sleep into walls of scarlet blossom. Anatole moves through the dappled shade at the edges of my vision, wearing the silky pelt of a panther. I crave to feel that pelt against my neck. I crave it with a predator’s impatience, ignoring time, keening to the silence of owls. When he’s gone away for a night or two, my thirst is inconsolable. When he comes back, I drink every kiss down to its end and still my mouth aches like a dry cave.

Anatole didn’t take me: I chose him. Once, long ago, he forbade me to say out loud that I loved him. So I’ll invent my own ways to tell him what I long for, and what I can give. I grip his hands and don’t let go. And he stays, cultivating me like a small inheritance of land where his future resides.

Now we sleep together under the same mosquito net, chastely. I don’t mind saying I want more, but Anatole laughs and rubs his knuckles into my hair, pushes me playfully out of the bed. Tells me to go get my bow and hunt a bushbuck, if I want to kill something. The word bandika, for “kill with an arrow,” has two meanings, you see. He said it wasn’t the time for me to become his wife, in the sense used by the Congolese. I was still mourning, he said, still sick, still living partly in another place. Anatole is a patient farmer. He reminds me that our arrangement is not at all unusual; he’s known many men to take even ten-year-olds as brides. At sixteen I am worldly by some people’s standards, and by anyone’s I’m devoted. The fever in my bones has subsided and the air no longer dances with flames, but Anatole still comes to me at night in the pelt of a panther.

I’m well enough to travel now. It’s been true for a while, really, but it was easy for me stay on here with Anatole’s friends in Bulungu, and hard for us to speak of what comes next. Finally, this evening, he had to ask. He took my hand as we walked to the river, which surprised me, as he’s normally reticent to show affection in public. I suppose it wasn’t very public—the only people we could see were the fishermen mending their nets on the opposite shore. We stood watching them while the sunset painted the river with broad streaks of pink and orange. Islands of water hyacinths floated past in the drowsy current. I was thinking I’d never felt more content or known such beauty in all my life. And right then he said, “Beene, you’re well.You can go, you know. I promised your mother I would see that you get home safely.”  

My heart stopped.”Where does she think home is?”

“Where you are happiest.”

“Where do you want me to go?”    ,

“Where you will be happy,” he said again, and so I told him where that place is. Nothing could be easier. I’ve thought about it long and hard and decided that if he will tolerate me as I am, I’ll decline to return to all familiar comforts in order to stay here.

It was an unusual proposal, by the standards of any culture. We stood on the bank of the Kwenge listing the things we’ll have to abandon or relinquish. It’s important information. For all I may be forsaking, he’s giving up a good deal more: the possibility of having more wives than one, for instance. And that’s only the beginning. Even now, I think Anatole’s friends doubt his sanity. My whiteness could bar him outright from many possibilities, maybe even survival, in the Congo. But Anatole had no choice. I took him and held on. There’s enough of my father in me that I had to stand my ground.            

Rachel Price Axelroot

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA 1962

VAANT so LIEF HET GOD die werddgehad, dat Hy sy eniggebore Seun 1 ‘ ‘ SeSee het, sodat elkeen wat in Homglo, nie verlore maggaan nie, maar die ewige lewe kan he.

How do you like that? Ha! That is John 3:16 in Afrikaans. For the last entire year I have worn my little white gloves and pillbox hat to the First Episcopal Church in Johannesburg and recited it right along with the best of them. And now one of my very close friends happens to be from Paris, France, and has taken me under her wings, so I can also go to the Catholic service with her and recite: Car Dieu a tant aime le monde qu’il a donne son Fils unique ... In French, another words. I am fluent in three languages. I have not remained especially close with my sisters, but I dare say that for all their being gifted and what not, they can’t do a whole lot better than John 3:16 in three entire languages.

Maybe that won’t necessarily guarantee me a front-row seat in heaven, but considering what all I have had to put up with from Eeben Axelroot for the last year, just for starters, that ought to at least get me in the door. His gawking at other women when I am still so young and attractive myself, and with my nerves shot already, I might add, since I have been through so much. Not to mention his leaving me alone while he goes on all his trips, getting rich on one crackpot scheme after another that never did pan out. I put up with him out of gratitude, mainly. I guess trading away your prime of life is a fair price for somebody flying you out of that hellhole. He did save my life. I promised him I would testify to those very words: Rescued from imminent prospect of death. And I did, too, in a whole slew of forms, so we could collect the money from the U.S. Embassy. They had emergency money available to help their citizens in reaching safety after the Communist crisis with Lumumba and all of that hubbub. Axelroot even got himself a little medal of honor for heroic service, which he is very vain of and keeps in a special box in the bedroom. For that reason we couldn’t actually get legally married right away. The way he explained it was it wouldn’t look right for him to collect money on saving his own wife. That kind of thing you would just naturally be expected to do on your own, without getting paid for it or winning any medals of honor.

Well, dumb me, I believed him. But it turns out Axelroot could collect medals galore in the department of avoiding holy matrimony. He has a hundred and one reasons not to marry the cow so he can buy the milk for free.

But I didn’t think about that at the time, of course. Just imagine how it must have been for an impressionable young girl. There I was shivering in the rain, surrounded on every side by mud huts, mud roads, mud everything. People squatting in the mud, trying to cook over a fire in the pouring rain. Dogs going crazy, running through the mud. We walked practically halfway across the Congo. That was my chosen path to suffering, as our dear old dad would have put it, not that I had any choice. I got baptized by mud. I laid me down at night on filthy floors and prayed the Lord I wouldn’t wake up dead from a snakebite as I had just seen happen tragically to my own sister, knowing full well it could just as soon have been me. Words cannot describe my mental framework. When we finally got to that village and there was Mr. Axelroot in his sunglasses leaning against his airplane, all smirking and Sanforized in his broad-shouldered khaki uniform, I only had one thing to say: “Enough already. Get me out of here!” I didn’t care what kind of forms I had to sign. I would have signed a deal with the Devil himself. I swear I would have.

So that’s how it was for me, one day standing there up to my split ends in mud, and the next day strolling down the wide, sunny streets of Johannesburg, South Africa, among houses with nice green lawns and swimming pools and gobs of pretty flowers growing behind their lovely high walls with electric gates. Cars, even! Telephones! White people just everywhere you looked.

At that time Axelroot was just in the process of getting set up in Johannesburg. He has a brand-new position in the security division of the gold-mining industry, near the northern suburbs, where supposedly we are soon to be living in high style. Although after an entire year all his promises are starting to show the telltale signs of age. Not to mention our furniture, which every stick of it has all been previously owned.

When I first got to Johannesburg I stayed for a brief time with a very nice American couple, the Templetons. Mrs. Templeton had separate African maids for her cooking, cleaning, and laundry. I must have washed my hair fifty times in ten days, and used a clean towel each and every time! Oh, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Just to be back with people who spoke the good old American language and understood the principle of a flush toilet.

Eeben’s and my house is not nearly so grand, of course, but we certainly get by, and I supply the woman’s touch. Axelroot did pretty well for himself as a pilot in the Congo, transporting perishable goods from the bush into the cities for retail sale, and he was also active in the diamond trade. He worked for the government, too, with his secret assignments and all, but he has never talked about it all that much since we started living together. Now that we have relations any old time we feel like it, which by the way I don’t think is the worst sin there is when there’s people getting hurt, cheated, or killed left and right in this world, well, now Mr. Axelroot doesn’t have to show off his big secrets to the Princess to get a kiss out of her. So now his number-one secret is: I need another beer! Which just goes to show you.

But I was determined right off the bat to make the best of my situation here in my new home of Johannesburg, South Africa. I just started going by the name Rachel Axelroot, and no one had to be the wiser, really. I’ve always made sure I go to church with  the very best people, and we get invited to their parties. I insist on that. I have even learned to play bridge! It is my girlfriends here in Joburg that have taught me how to give parties, keep a close eye on the help, and just overall make the graceful transition to wifehood and adulteration. My girlfriends, plus my subscription to the Ladies’ Home Journal. Our magazines always arrive so late that we are one or two months out of style. We probably started painting our nails Immoral Coral after everybody sensible had already gone on to pink, but heck, at least we are all behind the times together. And the girls I associate with are very sophisticated in ways that you simply can’t learn from a magazine. Especially Robine, who is Catholic and from Paris, France, and will positively not eat dessert with the same fork she used at dinner. Her husband is the Attache to the Ambassador, so talk about good manners! Whenever we are invited to the better homes for dinner, I just keep my eye on Robine, because then you can’t go wrong.

We girls stick together like birds of a feather, and thank goodness for that, because the men are always off on one kind of business or another. In Axelroot’s case, as I have mentioned, it frequently turns out to be monkey business. For all I know, he’s off somewhere saving some other damsel in distress with the promise of marriage someday after he’s collected his reward money! That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that’s how they do it here. Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

Well, I put up with him anyway. When I get out of bed every morning, at least I’m still alive and not dead like Ruth May. So I must have done something right. Sometimes you just have to save your neck and work out the details later. Like that little book said: Stick out your elbows, pick up your feet, and float along with the crowd! The last thing you want to do is get trampled to death.