The Poisonwood Bible (8 page)

Our house is made of mud-battered walls and palm thatch, but is different from all other houses in Kilanga. In the first place it is larger, with a wide front room and two bedrooms in back, one of which resembles a hospital scene from Florence Nightingale’s time, as it is chock-full of cots under triangles of mosquito net for the family surplus of girls. The kitchen is a separate hut, behind the main house. In the clearing beyond stands our latrine, unashamed, despite the vile curses rained upon it daily by Rachel. The chicken house is back there too. Unlike the other villagers’ houses, our windows are square panes of glass and our foundation and floor are cement. All other houses have floors of dirt. Curt, subvert, overexert. We see village women constantly sweeping their huts and the barren clearings in front of their homes with palm-frond brooms, and Rachel with her usual shrewdness points out you could sweep a floor like that plumb to China and never get it clean. By the grace of God and cement our family has been spared that frustration.

In the front room our dining table looks to have come off a wrecked ship, and there is an immense rolltop desk (possibly from the same ship) used by Our Father for writing his sermons. The desk has wooden legs and cast-iron chicken’s feet, each clutching a huge glass marble, though three of the marbles are cracked and one is gone, replaced by a chink of coconut husk in the interest of a level writing surface. In our parents’ room, more furniture: a wooden bureau and an old phonograph cabinet with no workings inside. All brought by other brave Baptists before us, though it is hard to see quite how, unless one envisions a time when other means of travel were allowed, and more than forty-four pounds. We also have a dining table and a rough handmade cupboard, containing a jumble-sale assortment of glass and plastic dishes and cups, one too few of everything, so we sisters have to bargain knives for forks while we eat. The cabinet also contains an ancient cracked plate commemorating the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and a plastic cup bearing the nose and ears of a mouse. And in the midst of this rabble, serene as the Virgin Mother in her barnful of shepherds and scabby livestock, one amazing, beautiful thing: a large, oval white platter painted with delicate blue forget-me-nots, bone china, so fine that sunlight passes through it. Its origin is unfathomable. If we forgot ourselves we might worship it.

Outdoors we have a long shady porch our mother in her Mississippi-born way calls a veranda. My sisters and I love to lounge there in the hammocks, and we longed for refuge there even on the day of our first downpour. But the storm lashed sideways, battering the walls and poor Methuselah. When his screaming got too pathetic to bear, our grim-faced mother brought in his cage and set it on the floor by the window, where Methuselah continued his loud, random commentary. In addition to papism, the Reverend probably suspected this noisy creature of latent femaleness.

The deluge finally stopped just before sunset. The world looked stepped on and drenched, but my sisters ran out squealing like the first free pigs off the ark, eager to see what the flood had left us. A low cloud in the air turned out to be tiny flying antlike creatures by the millions. They hovered just above the ground, making a long, low hum that stretched to the end of the world. Their bodies made clicking sounds as we swatted them away from us. We hesitated at the edge of the yard, where the muddy clearing grades into a long grass slope, then charged on into the grass, until our way was barred by the thousand crossed branches of the forest’s edge: avocado, palms, tall wild sugar-cane thickets.This forest obscures our view of the river, and any other distance. The village’s single dirt road skirts our yard and runs past us into the village to the south; on the north it disappears into the woods.Though we watch MamaTataba vanish that way and return again, intact, with her water buckets full, our mother did not yet trust the path to swallow and deliver her children. So we turned and tromped back up the hill toward the pair of flowery round hibiscus bushes that flank the steps to our porch.

What a landing party we were as we stalked about, identically dressed in saddle oxfords, long-tailed shirts, and pastel cotton pants, but all so different. Leah went first as always, Goddess of the Hunt, her weasel-colored pixie haircut springing with energy, her muscles working together like parts of a clock. Then came the rest of us: Ruth  May  with  pigtails  flying behind her, hurrying  mightily because she is youngest and believes the last shall be first. And then Rachel, our family’s own Queen of Sheba, blinking her white eyelashes, flicking her long whitish hair as if she were the palomino horse she once craved to own. Queen Rachel drifted along several paces behind, looking elsewhere. She was almost sixteen and above it all, yet still unwilling for us to find something good without her. Last of all came Adah the monster, Quasimodo, dragging her right side behind her left in her body’s permanent stepsong sing: left... behind, left... behind.

This is our permanent order: Leah, Ruth May, Rachel, Adah. Neither chronological nor alphabetical but it rarely varies, unless Ruth May gets distracted and falls out of line.

At the foot of the hibiscus bush we discovered a fallen nest of baby birds, all drowned. My sisters were thrilled by the little naked, winged bodies like storybook griffins, and by the horrible fact they were dead. Then we found the garden. Rachel screamed triumphantly that it was ruined once and for all. Leah fell to her knees in a demonstration of grief on Our Father’s behalf. The torrent had swamped the flat bed and the seeds rushed out like runaway boats. We found them everywhere in caches in the tall grass at the edge of the patch. Most had already sprouted in the previous weeks, but their little roots had not held them to the Reverend Farmer’s flat-as-Kansas beds against the torrent. Leah walked along on her knees, gathering up sprouts in her shirttail, as she probably imagined Saca-jaweah would have done in the same situation.

Later Our Father came out to survey the damage, and Leah helped him sort out the seeds by kind. He declared he would make them grow, in the name of God, or he would plant again (the Reverend, like any prophet worth his salt, had held some seeds in reserve) if only the sun would ever come out and dry up this accursed mire.

Even at sunset, the two of them did not come in for supper. Mama Tataba bent over the table in our mother’s large white apron, which made her look’ counterfeit and comic, as though acting the role of maid in a play. She watched him steadily out the window, smiling her peculiar downturned smile, and made satisfied clicks with her tongue against her teeth. We set ourselves to the task of eating her cooking, fried plantain and the luxury of some canned meat.

Finally he sent Leah in, but long after dinner we could still hear the Reverend out there beating the ground with his hoe, revising the earth. No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds.

Leah

IT ONLY TAKES FIVE DAYS in hot weather for a Kentucky Wonder bean to gather up its vegetable willpower and germinate. That was all we thought we needed. Once the rains abated, my father’s garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper. He loved to stand out there just watching things grow, he said, and you could believe it.The beanstalks twisted around the sapling teepees he’d built for them, and then they wavered higher and higher like ladies’ voices in the choir, each one vying for the top. They reached out for the branches of nearby trees and twined up into the canopy.

The pumpkin vines also took on the personality of jungle plants. Their leaves grew so strangely enormous Ruth May could sit still under them and win at “Hide and Seek” for a very long time after the rest of us had stopped playing. When we squatted down we could see, alongside Ruth May’s wide blue eyes, yellow blossoms of cucumber and squash peering out from the leafy darkness.

My father witnessed the progress of every new leaf and fat flower bud. I walked behind him, careful not to trample the vines. I helped him construct a sturdy stick barricade around the periphery so the jungle animals and village goats would mot come in and wreck our tender vegetables when they came. Mother claims I have the manners of a wild animal myself, as I am a toimboy, but I never fail to be respectful of my father’s garden. His devotion to its progress, like his devotion to the church, was the anchoring force in my life throughout this past summer. I knew my father icould taste those Kentucky Wonder beans as surely as any pure soul can taste heaven.

Rachel’s birthday came in late August, but the Betty Crocker cake mix let us all down. Normal cake production proved out of the question.

To begin with, our stove is an iron contraption with a firebox so immense a person could climb right in if they felt like it. Mother yanked Ruth May out by the arm, pretty hard, when she found her in there; she dreaded that Mama Tataba in one of her energetic fits might stoke up the stove with the baby inside. It was a sensible concern. Ruth May is so intent on winning Hide and Seek, or any game for that matter, she would probably go ahead and burn up before she’d ever yell and give herself away.

Mother has figured out how to make bread “by hook or by crook,” she likes to say, but the stove doesn’t really have a proper oven. In fact, it looks less like a stove than a machine hammered together out of some other machine. Rachel says it was part of a locomotive train, but she is famous for making things up out of thin air and stating them in a high, knowing tone.

The stove wasn’t even the worst of our cake troubles. In the powerful humidity the powdered mix got transfigured like Lot’s poor wife who looked back at Gomorrah and got turned to a pillar of salt. On the morning of Rachel’s birthday I found Mother out in the kitchen house with her head in her hands, crying. She picked up the box and banged it hard against the iron stove, just once, to show me. It clanged like a hammer on a bell. Her way of telling a parable is different from my father’s.

“If I’d of had the foggiest idea,” she said very steadily, holding her pale, weeping eyes on me, “just the foggiest idea. We brought all the wrong things.”

The first time my father heard Methuselah say, “Damn,” his body moved strangely, as if he’d received the spirit or a twinge of bad heartburn. Mother excused herself and went in the house.

Rachel, Adah, and I were left on the porch, and he looked at each one of us in turn. We had known him to forbear with a silent grimace when Methuselah said, “Piss off,” but of course that was the

doing of Brother Fowles. The mote in his brother’s eye, not the sin of his own household. Methuselah had never said “Damn” before, so this was something new, spoken right out very chipper in a feminine tone of voice.

“Which one of you taught Methuselah to say that word?” he demanded.

I felt sick to my stomach. None of us spoke. For Adah that’s normal, of course, and for that very reason she often gets accused when none of us speaks up. And truthfully, if any of us was disposed to use curse words, it would be Adah, who could not care less about sin and salvation. That’s the main reason I got Mother to cut my hair in a pixie, while Adah kept hers long: so nobody would get our attitudes mixed up. I myself would not curse, in or out of Methuselah’s hearing or even in my dreams, because I crave heaven and to he my father’s favorite. And Rachel wouldn’t—she’ll let out a disgusted “Jeez” or “Gol!” when she can, but is mainly a perfect lady when anybody’s listening. And Ruth May is plain too little.

“I fail to understand,” said Father, who understands everything, “why you would have a poor dumb creature condemn us all to eternal suffering.”

I’ll tell you what, though, Methuselah is not dumb. He imitates not just words, but the voices of people that spoke them. From Methuselah we have learned the Irish-Yankee voice of Brother Fowles, whom we picture as looking like that Father Flanagan that runs the Boys Town. We could also recognize MamaTataba, and ourselves. Furthermore, Methuselah didn’t just imitate words, he knew them. It’s one thing simply to call out, “Sister, God is great! Shut the door!” when the spirit moves him, but he’ll also call out “banana” and “peanut” as plain as day, when he sees these things in our hands and wants his share. Oftentimes he studies us, copying our movements, and he seems to know which words will provoke us to laugh or talk back to him, or be shocked. We already understood what was now dawning on my father: Methuselah could betray our secrets.

I didn’t say so, of course. I haven’t contradicted my father on any subject, ever.              

Rachel finally blurted out, “Father, we’re sorry.”

Adah and I pretended to be fascinated by our books.We brought our schoolbooks with us and study them whenever Mother threatens we’re going to fall behind and wear the dunce cap when we go home, which there’s no chance of really, except for Rachel, who is the one stubbornly mediocre mentality in our family. I think our mother is really just afraid we’re going to forget about normal things like George Washington crossing the Delaware and autumn leaves and a train speeding west toward St. Louis at sixty-five miles per hour.       

I peeped up from my book. Oh, dear Lord. He was staring directly at me. My heart palpitated fiercely.

“The Lord will forgive you if you ask,” he said, very disgusted and quiet, the tone of voice that makes me feel worse than any other. “Our Lord is benevolent. But that poor African bird can’t be relieved of what you’ve taught it. It’s an innocent creature that can only repeat what it hears. The damage is done.” He started to turn away from us. We held our breath as he paused on the steps and looked back, right in my eyes. I burned with shame.

“If there’s anything to be learned from this,” he said, “it’s about the stink and taint of original sin. I expect you’d better think about that while you do The Verse.” Our hearts fell. “All three of you,” he said. “Book of Numbers, twenty-nine thirty-four.”