The Poisonwood Bible (56 page)

tasted like burning tar and were going to kill you in a jiffy. African tobacco is not a pretty picture.

“So,” I finally said, nudging Leah. “Dear old Dad. What’s the scoop?”

She continued looking out at the street, where all kinds of people were going by. It was almost like she was waiting for somebody. Then she sighed, reached over and shook out one of my last precious cigarettes and lit up.

“This is going to make me sick,” she said.

“What, smoking? Or telling about Father?”

She kind of laughed. “Both. And the beer, too. I’m not used to this.” She took a puff, and then frowned at the Lucky Strike like it was something that might bite her. “You should hear how I get after the boys for doing this.”

“Leah, tell!”

“Oh... it’s kind of awful. He’d been up there for a while on the north bend of the Kasai, in the area where they grow coffee. He was still trying to baptize children, I know this for a fact. Fyntan and Celine Fowles get up that way every few years.”

“Brother Fowles” I said. “You still keep in touch with him? Jeez Louise, Leah. Old home week. And he still knows Father?”

“They actually never got a look at him. I guess Father had reached a certain point. He hid from strangers. But they always heard plenty of stories about the white witch doctor named Tata Prize. They got the impression from talking to people that he was really old. I mean old, with a long white beard.”

“Father? Now I can’t picture that, a beard,” I said. “How old would he be now, sixty?”

“Sixty-four,” Adah said. Even though she talked now, it was like she was still handing over her little written announcements on notebook paper.

“He’d gotten a very widespread reputation for turning himself into a crocodile and attacking children.”

“Now that I can picture,” I said, laughing. The Africans are very superstitious. One of my workers swears the head cook can turn himself into a monkey and steal things from the guest rooms. I believe it!

“Still trying to drag the horse to “water,” Adah said.

“What horse?”

“So there was a really horrible incident on the river. A boat full of kids turned over by a croc, and all of them drowned or eaten or maimed. Father got the blame for it. Pretty much hung without a trial.”

“Oh,Jesus”I put my hand on my throat.”Actually hung?”

“No,” Leah said, looking irritated but getting tears in her eyes at the same time. “Not hung. Burned.”

I could see this was hard for Leah. I reached out and took hold of her hand. “Honey, I know,” I told her. “He was our daddy. I think you always put up with him better than any of us. But he was mean as a snake.There’s nothing he got that he didn’t deserve.”

She pulled her hand out of mine so she could wipe her eyes and blow her nose. “I know that!” She sounded mad. “The people in that village had asked him to leave a hundred times, go someplace else, but he’d always sneak back. He said he wasn’t going to go away till he’d taken every child in the village down to the river and dunked them under. Which just scared everybody to death. So after the drowning incident they’d had enough, and everybody grabbed sticks and took out after him. They may have just meant to chase him away again. But I imagine Father was belligerent about it.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “He was probably still preaching hell and brimstone over his shoulder while he ran! “Which is true.

“They surrounded him in an old coffee field and he climbed up on one of those rickety watchtowers left over from the colonial days. Do you know what I’m talking about? They call them tours de maitre.The boss towers, where in the old days the Belgian foreman would stand watching all the coffee pickers so he could single out which ones to whip at the end of the day.”

“And they burned him?”

“They set the tower on fire. I’m sure it went up like a box of matches. It would have been twenty-year-old jungle wood, left over from the Belgians.”         ;

“I’ll bet he preached the Gospel right to the very end,” I said.

“They said he waited till he was on fire before he jumped off. Nobody wanted to touch him, so they just left him there for the animals to drag off.”

I thought, Well, nobody around there’s going to be drinking any coffee for a while! But it seemed like the wrong moment for a joke. I ordered another round of Elephant beers and we sat pondering our different thoughts.

Then Adah got a very strange look and said, “He got The Verse.”

“Which one?” Leah asked.

“The last one. Old Testament. Second Maccabees 13:4: ‘But the King of Kings aroused the anger of Antiochus against the rascal.’“

“I don’t know it,” Leah said.

Adah closed her eyes and thought for a second and then quoted the whole thing out: ‘“The King of Kings aroused the anger of Antiochus against the rascal. And when Lysias informed him this man was to blame for all the trouble, he ordered them to put him to death in the way that is customary there. For there is a tower there seventy-five feet high, filled with ashes, and there they push a man guilty of sacrilege or notorious for other crimes to destruction. By such a fate it came to pass that the transgressor died, not even getting burial in the ground.’“

“Holy shit!”I declared.

“How come you know that verse?” Leah asked.

“I must have gotten that one fifty times. It’s the final ‘The Verse’ in the Old Testament, I’m trying to tell you. One-hundred-count from the end. If you include the Apocrypha, which of course he always did.”

“And what’s at the finish of it?” I asked. “The take-home lesson?”

“The closing statement of the Old Testament: ‘So this will be the end.’“

“So this will be the end,” Leah and I both repeated, in complete amazement. After that we were speechless for approximately one hour, while we listened to each other’s throat sounds every time we took a swallow of beer.And Leah smoked the last two Lucky Strikes in West Africa.

Finally she asked, “Why would he give you that verse so many times? I never got that one.” Which if you ask me is really not the point.

But Adah smiled, and answered like it mattered, “Why do you think, Leah? For being slow.”

After a while I smelled wood smoke. Some vendors were setting up to grill meat along the side of the street. I got up and bought some for everyone with my own money, so I wouldn’t have to hear Leah gripe that it was too expensive, or Adah telling us what exact germs were living on it. I got chicken on wooden skewers and brought it back to the table wrapped in wax paper.   

“Eat up and be merry!” I said. “Cheers.”

“In memory of the Father,” Adah said. She and Leah looked at their shish kebabs, looked at each other, and had another one of their private little laughs.

“He was really his own man, you have to give him that,” Leah said, while we munched. “He was a history book all to himself. We used to get regular reports from Tata Boanda and the Fowleses, when he was still around Kilanga. I probably could have gone to see him, but I never got up the nerve.”

“Why not?” I asked her. “I would, just to tell him where to get off.”

“I guess I was scared of seeing him as a crazy person. The tales got wilder and wilder as the years went by.That he’d had five wives, who all left him, for example.” 

“That’s a good one,” I said. “Father the Baptist Bigamist.”

“The Pentecostal Pentigamist,”Adah said.

“It was really the best way for him to go, you know? In a blaze of glory,” Leah said. “I’m sure he believed right up to the end that he was doing the right thing. He never did give up the ship.”

“It’s shocking he lasted as long is he did,”Adah said.

“Oh, true! That he didn’t die fifteen years ago of typhus or sleeping sickness or malaria or the combination. I’m sure his hygiene went to hell after Mother left him.”

Adah didn’t say anything to that. Being the doctor, of course, she would know all about tropical diseases and wouldn’t care for Leah sounding like the expert. That’s how it always is with us. Step too far one way or the other and you’ve got on your sister’s toes.

“For gosh sakes,” I said suddenly. “Did you write to Mother? About Father?”

“No. I thought Adah might want to tell her in person.”

Adah said carefully, “I think Mother has presumed him dead for a long time already.”

We finished our shish kebabs and talked about Mother, and I even got to tell a little about the Equatorial, and I thought for once in our lives we were going to finish out the afternoon acting like a decent family. But then, sure enough, Leah started in about Mobutu putting her husband in prison, how the army terrorizes everybody, what was happening with the latest payola schemes in Zaire, which between you and me is the only reason I have any customers at all on my side of the river, but I didn’t say so. Then she moved on to how the Portuguese and Belgians and Americans have wrecked poor Africa top to bottom.

“Leah, I am sick and tired of your sob story!” I practically shouted. I guess I’d had one too many, plus my cigarettes were gone, and it was hot. I’m so extremely fair the sun goes straight to my head. But really, after what we’d just seen in that palace: wife murdering and slave bones in the walls! These horrible things had nothing to do with us; it was all absolutely hundreds of years ago. The natives here were ready and waiting when the Portuguese showed up wanting to buy slaves, I pointed out. The King of Abomey was just delighted to find out he could trade fifteen of his former neighbors for one good Portuguese cannon.

But Leah always has an answer for everything, with vocabulary words in it, naturally. She said we couldn’t possibly understand what their social milieu was, before the Portuguese came. “This is sparse country,” she said. “It never could have supported a large population.”

“So?” I examined my nails, which were frankly in bad shape.

“So what looks like mass murder to us is probably misinterpreted ritual. They probably had ways of keeping their numbers in balance in times of famine. Maybe they thought the slaves were going to a better place.”

Adah chimed in: “A little ritual killing, a little infant mortality, just a few of the many healthy natural processes we don’t care to think about.” Her voice sounded surprisingly like Leah’s. Although I presume Adah was joking, whereas Leah never jokes.

Leah frowned at Adah, then at me, trying to decide which one of us was the true enemy. She decided on me. “You just can’t assume that what’s right or wrong for us is the same as what was right or wrong for them,” she said.

“Thou shalt not kill,” I replied. “That’s not just our way of thinking. It happens to be in the Bible.”

Leah and Adah smiled at each other.

“Right. Here’s to the Bible,” Leah said, clinking her bottle against mine.

“Tata Jesus is bangala!” Adah said, raising her bottle too. She and Leah looked at each other for a second, then both started laughing like hyenas.

“Jesus is poisonwood!” Leah said. “Here’s to the Minister of Poisonwood. And here’s to his five wives!”

Adah stopped laughing. “That was us.”

“Who?” I said. “What?”

“Nathan’s five legendary wives. They must have meant US.”

Leah stared at her. “You’re right.”

Like I said: night, day, and the Fourth of July. I don’t even try to understand.

Adah Price

ATLANTA JANUARY 1985

FULL FATHOM five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

This is no mortal business.The man occupied us all in life and is still holding on to his claim. Now we will have to carry away his sea-changed parts rich and strange to our different quarters. Estranged, disarranged, we spend our darkest hours staring at those pearls, those coral bones. Is this the stuff I came from? How many of his sins belong also to me? How much of his punishment?

Rachel seems incapable of remorse, but she is not. She wears those pale white eyes around her neck so she can look in every direction and ward off the attack. Leah took it all—bones, teeth, scalp—and knitted herself something like a hair shirt. Mother’s fabrication is so elaborate I can hardly describe it. It occupies so much space in her house she must step carefully around it in the dark.

Having served enough time in Atlanta with her volunteer work, Mother has moved to the Georgia coast, to a hamlet of hoary little brick houses on Sanderling Island. But she carried the sunken treasure along to her little place by the shore. She stays outdoors a lot, I think to escape it. When I go to visit I always find her out in her walled garden with her hands sunk into the mulch, kneading the roots of her camellias. If she isn’t home, I walk down to the end of the historic cobbled street and find her standing on the sea wall in her raincoat and no shoes, glaring at the ocean. Orleanna and Africa at a standoff. The kids flying by on bicycles steer clear of this barefoot old woman in her plastic babushka, but I can tell you she is not deranged. My mother’s sanest position is to wear only the necessary parts of the outfit and leave off the rest. Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one. “My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.”

Personally I have stolen an arm and a leg. I am still Adah but you would hardly know me now, without my slant. I walk without any noticeable limp. Oddly enough, it has taken me years to accept my new position. I find I no longer have Ada, the mystery of coming and going. Along with my split-body drag I lost my ability to read in the old way. When I open a book, the words sort themselves into narrow-minded single file on the page; the mirror-image poems erase themselves half-formed in my mind. I miss those poems. Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking. Like Jekyll I crave that particular darkness curled up within me. Sometimes it almost comes. The books on the shelf rise up in solid lines of singing color, the world drops out, and its hidden shapes snap forward to meet my eyes. But it never lasts. By morning light, the books are all hunched together again with their spines turned out, fossilized, inanimate.