The Poisonwood Bible (46 page)

As far as the actual day he flew me out of the Congo in his plane, it’s hard for me even to remember what I thought was going to happen next. I was so excited to be getting out of that horrid mud hole I couldn’t think straight. I’m sure I said good-bye to Mother and Adah and Leah, though I really don’t remember giving a second thought to when I would ever see them again, if ever. I must have been in an absolute daze.

It’s funny but I do recall just this one thing. Eeben’s plane was hundreds of feet up in the air already, way over the clouds, when I suddenly remembered my hope chest! All those pretty things I’d made—monogrammed towels, a tablecloth and matching napkins—it just didn’t seem right to be getting married without them. As befuddled as I was, I made him promise he’d go back someday and get those things from our house in Kilanga. Of course he hasn’t. I realize now it was just plain foolish of me to think he ever would.

I guess you might say my hopes never got off the ground.

Adah Price

EMORY UNIVERSITY, ATLANTA 1962

I  TELL ALL THE TRUTH but tell it slant,  says my friend Emily Dickinson. And really what choice do I have? I am a crooked little person, obsessed with balance.

I have decided to speak, so there is the possibility of telling. Speaking became a matter of self-defense, since Mother seems to have gone mute, and with no one to testify to my place in the world I found myself at the same precipice I teetered upon when entering the first grade: gifted, or special education with the ear-pulling Crawleys? Not that I would have minded the company of simple minds, but I needed to flee from Bethlehem, where the walls are made of eyes stacked in rows like bricks, and every breath of air has the sour taste of someone’s recent gossip. We arrived home to a very special heroes’ welcome: the town had been starving outright for good scuttlebutt. So hip hip hooray, welcome home the pitiful Prices! The astonishing, the bereft, bizarre, and homeless (for we could no longer live in a parsonage without a parson), tainted by darkest Africa and probably heathen, Orleanna and Adah, who have slunk back to town without their man, like a pair of rabid dalmations staggering home without their fire engine.

We were presumed insane. Mother took the diagnosis well. She moved our things out of storage into a plywood cabin on the piney outskirts of town, which she rented on the strength of a tiny legacy from Grandfather Wharton. She did not hook up the telephone. She took up a hoe instead, and began to put every square inch of her sandy two-acre rented lot under cultivation: peanuts, sweet potatoes, and four dozen kinds of flowers. She seemed determined to grow tragedy out of herself like a bad haircut. A neighbor down the road had a mean goose and hogs, whose manure Mother toted home daily like a good African in two balanced bushel pails. It would not have surprised me to see her put a third bucket on her head. By midsummer we could not see out the windows for the foxglove and the bachelor’s buttons. Mother said she aimed to set up a plank shack by the road and sell bouquets for three-fifty apiece. I wondered what Bethlehem would say about that. The minister’s wife gone barefoot to roadside commerce.

As earnestly as Mother had taken up seed catalogs, I took up the catalog of Emory University and studied my possibilities. Then I rode the Greyhound to Atlanta and limped into the admissions office. I was allowed to have an interview with a gentleman named Dr. Holden Remile, whose job I think was to discourage people such as myself from asking for interviews with people such as himself. His desk was immense.

I opened my mouth and waited for the sentence I hoped would arrive. “I need to go to your college here, sir. And when I am done with it, I will need to go to your medical school.”

Dr. Remile was quite shocked, whether by my deformity or my audacity I can’t say, but probably less shocked than I was by the sound of my own voice. He asked whether I had funds, whether I had high school transcripts, whether I had at least taken high school chemistry or advanced algebra. The only answer I had was “No, sir.” But I did mention I had read quite a few books.

“Do you know what calculus is, young lady?” he asked, in the manner of a person who is hiding something frightening in one of his hands. Having grown up around the hands of Reverend Price, I am fairly immune to such fright.

 “Yes, sir,” I said. “It is the mathematics of change.”

His telephone rang. While I waited for him to have his conversation, I worked out in my head both the sum and the product of the numbers on the large numbered set of files on his bookshelf, which were all out of order, and made up an equation for righting them, which I wrote down for him on paper. I had to use algebra, though, not calculus. I also observed that his name, backward, was the French verb for wearing one’s clothes threadbare, so I told him that as well, with no offense intended as his clothes were fine.

Dr. Remile suddenly ascertained that I was due some government benefits, being the child of a veteran. He set me up for taking the entrance examinations, for which I returned to Atlanta one month later. I didn’t miss any of the questions in mathematics. On the verbal portion I missed four questions, all having to do with choosing a word in a series that doesn’t belong. I have always had trouble with that line of questioning. Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

I had told the truth: I needed to go to his college. I needed to get out of Bethlehem, out of my skin, my skull, and the ghost of my family. It is not because I was ashamed of Mother—how could I, the village idiot, be ashamed of her? I somewhat enjoyed the company of her madness, and certainly I understood it. But Mother wanted to consume me like food. I needed my own room. I needed books, and for the first time in my life I needed schoolmasters who would tell me each day what to think about.

In organic chemistry, invertebrate zoology, and the inspired symmetry of Mendelian genetics, I have found a religion that serves. I recite the Periodic Table of Elements like a prayer; I take my examinations as Holy Communion, and the pass of the first semester was a sacrament. My mind is crowded with a forest of facts. Between the trees lie wide-open plains of despair. I skirt around them. I stick to the woods.

Since I can’t call her, I take the bus back on weekends. We drink tea and she shows me her flowers. The odd thing is when Father was around she never gardened at all. That was his domain, and he directed us all in the planting of useful foods, all to the Glory of God and so forth. We never had one flower in our yard the whole of my childhood. Not so much as a dandelion. Now Mother’s shack is the mere peak of a roof surrounded by a blaze of pinks, blues, oranges. You have to bend under a wild arch of cosmos when you come up the walk, and use your whole right arm to push the hollyhocks aside to get in the front door. It turns out Mother has an extraordinary talent for flowers. She was an entire botanical garden waiting to happen.

When I visit her we never talk much, and are both relieved by the silence, I think. There are only the two of us now, and I owe her my very life. She owes me nothing at all.Yet I have left her, and now she is sad. I’m not used to this. I have always been the one who sacrificed life and limb and half a brain to save the other half. My habit is to drag myself imperiously through a world that owes me unpayable debts. I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.

Now I owe a debt I cannot repay. She took hold of me with a fierce grip and pulled me through. Mother was going to drag me out of Africa if it was her last living act, and it very nearly was. This is how it happened: the commerfant whose truck showed up like a rusted-out angel in Bulungu promised us a ride to Leopoldville with his bananas, but he soon changed his mind and dumped us for more bananas. After a conference with some soldiers along the road, he became convinced that fruit was now bringing a higher price than white women in the city. So out we went.

We walked for two days without food. At night we crouched at the edge of the woods and covered ourselves with palm leaves so the soldiers wouldn’t spot us. Late on the second evening an army truck pulled up beside us, and a man threw us suddenly into the back, where we landed across laps helmets rifles. No doubt the soldiers planned to do us harm; I was numb with that expectation. But Mother’s milk-glass eyes frightened them. Plainly she was possessed of some fierce evil that would enter these men if they touched her, or me. Especially me. So they kept their distance from both of us. We bumped along silently in the back of the truck, passing through dozens of military roadblocks, and were turned over to the BelgianEmbassy, which took us in until someone could sort out what ought to be done with us.We spent nineteen days in the infirmary, swallowing a variety of specialized poisons, since we had intestinal parasites, fungus growing on our feet and forearms, and more than the usual degree of malaria.

Then, on a hospital plane full of UN workers and sick white people, we were transported through a long thrumming darkness, in which we slept the sleep of the dead. When the droning stopped we all sat up and blinked like disturbed corpses. There was light at the round windows. The belly of the plane groaned open and we were delivered abruptly into the benign spring air of Fort Benning, Georgia.

It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence?

Then I stared for a while at a traffic light, which was suspended elaborately on wires above the intersection. I couldn’t look at the cars themselves. My brain was roaring from all the color and orchestrated metal movement. From the open building behind me came a blast of neutral-smelling air and a high hum of fluorescent lights. Even though I was outdoors, I felt a peculiar confinement. One discarded magazine lay on the edge of the street, impossibly clean and unblemished. A breeze gently turned the pages for me, one at a time: here was a neatly coiffed white mother beside a huge white clothes dryer and a fat white child and a great mound of bright clean clothes that would be sufficient, it seemed to me, to clothe a whole village; here were a man and woman holding between them a Confederate flag on a vast lawn so flat and neatly trimmed their shadows stretched behind them for the length of a fallen tree; here was a blonde woman in a black dress and pearls and long red fingernails leaning over a blank white tablecloth toward a glass of wine; here was a child in many kinds of new clothes hugging a doll so clean and unrumpled it seemed not to belong to her; here was a woman in a coat and hat, hugging a bundle of argyle socks. The world seemed crowded and empty at the same time, devoid of smells, and extremely bright. I continued to stare at the traffic light, which glowed red. Suddenly a green arrow popped on, pointing left, and the row of cars like obedient animals all went left. I laughed out loud.

Mother, meanwhile, had moved on. She was walking in a trance toward a pay telephone. I hurried and caught up with her, a little timidly, because she had cut straight to the front of a long line of soldier boys waiting to call home. She demanded that someone give us the correct change to call Mississippi, which two boys did in such a hurry you would think Mother was their commanding officer. The unfamiliar American coins felt light in my hands. I passed them to Mother and she dialed some second cousins who promised to come collect us almost immediately, even though Mother had not spoken with them in nearly a decade. She still knew the telephone number by heart.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant. What secret is left in our family to tell? I may have to stop talking again, until I can be sure of what I know. I thought I had it settled long ago, you see. My hymn to God: Evol’s dog, dog ho! My hymn for love: Eros, eyesore! Oh, I knew it all, backward and forward. I learned the balance of power in one long Congolese night, when the driver ants came: the bang on the door, the dark hustle and burning feet, and last of all Adah dragging the permanent singsong of her body lejt... behind. Out into the moonlight where the ground boiled and there stood Mother like a tree rooted motionless in the middle of a storm. Mother staring at me, holding Ruth May in her arms, weighing the two of us against one another. The sweet intact child with golden ringlets and perfectly paired strong legs, or the dark mute adolescent dragging a stubborn, disjunct half-body. Which? After hesitating only a second, she chose to save perfection and leave the damaged. Everyone must choose.

Live was I ere I saw evil I wrote in my journal. Alive one moment, dead the next, because that is how my divided brain divined the world. There was room in Adah for nought but pure love and pure hate. Such a life is satisfying and deeply uncomplicated. Since then, my life has become much more difficult. Because later on, she chose me. In the end she could only carry one child alive out of Africa and I was that child. Would she rather have had Ruth May? Was I the booby prize? Does she look at me and despise her loss? Am I alive only because Ruth May is dead? What truth can I possibly tell?

Recently I rifled through the history of Our Father. An old trunk full of his things. I needed to find his military discharge papers, which would provide for me some benefits in the domain of college tuition. I found more than I was looking for. His medal is not, as we were always told, for heroic service. It is simply for having been wounded and having survived. For escaping from a jungle where all others marched to their deaths. No more than that. The conditions of his discharge were technically honorable, but unofficially they were: Cowardice, Guilt, and Disgrace. The Reverend the sole survivor in a company of dead men who have marched along beside him all his life since then. No wonder he could not flee from the same jungle twice. Mother told me a part of the story, and I realized I already knew the rest. Fate sentenced Our Father to pay for those lives with the remainder of his, and he has spent it posturing desperately beneath the eyes of a God who will not forgive a debt. This God worries me. Lately He has been looking in on me. My sleep is visited by Ruth May and the many other children who are buried near her. They cry out, “Mother May I?” and the mothers crawl forward on hands and knees, trying to eat the dirt from their babies’ fresh graves. The owls still croon and croon, and the air is thick with spirits. This is what I carried out of the Congo on my crooked little back. In our seventeen months in Kilanga, thirty-one children died, including Ruth May. Why not Adah? I can think of no answer that exonerates me.