A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (29 page)

“The owner of the cattle has already paid. The husband will not trouble you. Give something to the mother. What do you say? A gift of love?”

Emma had her hand at her breastbone. “What would be acceptable?” She looked at Jacob.

“Ah,” the king said. “You are a mother. You can know.”

The king ushered the lad in her direction. The boy stood at her side and she leveraged herself up using his shoulders. A breeze came through from the palace door. The toddling girl passed by again, falling and picking herself up. Emma glanced once again at her combs. “Thank you,” she said, patting the boy’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she said toward the Baale, bowing her head slightly.

Jacob led them home. Emma’s hair loosened in the breeze, and her hat flew off. Jacob retrieved it, and she felt cleansed and hopeful in the minor gesture of kindness.

In the bedroom, Henry woke and asked the time.

“Late afternoon,” Emma said.

“Why haven’t you gotten me up?” He pulled himself to sitting, and she thought he looked better restored. She moved to sit next to him. Her fingers traveled across his forehead.

“I thought you needed to rest,” she said. “While I was in town, I stopped by the Baale’s palace. He knew of the trouble. You were exactly right. He is on our side. The girl’s father has already been paid by the owner of the cattle. The king believes it will ameliorate the chief if we invite him to a meal.”

“I should have met with the Baale,” Henry said. He pulled at the bedsheet as if it hobbled him. She smoothed the sheet and leaned over so her abdomen was against his lap and kissed his ear.

“They had no more complaints about the tree or the girl?” Henry said.

“No,” she said.

From the window they could see Jacob and his friend Tunji raising a bamboo frame for the church.

“The work here must be done by Africans,” Henry said. “We are like that frame put up for scaffolding. But we will be torn down once the brick is laid while they will remain.”

When she walks out the front door and down the lane, carrying her teapot to the woman whose daughter was killed, Emma does not imagine being torn down. She wants something of herself—the wave of her hair, the impress of her hand, words she writes into a wall—to be in this place forever.

* * *

F
RIDAY CAME.
E
MMA
had made a sweet potato pie, which the chief found powerful enough to shout over. The most surprising moment occurred when the native executive asked Henry if they could salute his ancestor. Henry had looked up as if it were the very question he had hoped for. “You can salute my mother. Her name is Lila Bowman. I’ve missed her a great deal.” So the chief and all his men with him saluted Lila. It was Emma who wept, not Henry.

Though she intended to take control of herself, first thing Saturday morning, Emma went to her writing box. It seemed the light of the new house had brought to it the look of rosewood. Its sheen like his skin. Whose skin?

Open. The interior a heart. A heart with four rooms.

Press Here. A hand.

A page.

Write. Breathe.

A word, an utterance of being. Ineffable.

Her private thing as complex as life. The same word truth or untruth.

Depending. Depending on everything.

The note she hoped for lay gently upon her red journal.

Another runner has been sent to bring Hathaway. Jacob

The letters were neatly formed, more vertical than forward-leaning, a kind of artistic printing. Jacob had undertaken to act of his own accord, and he had signed his name. Emma placed the note back in the box, as if it were a living creature that might escape.

When she finished her toilet, she found Henry outside with Duro, drinking coffee. She went back inside and wrote a response.

Give word when you hear from Ibadan.

She did not sign it. What name would she use? Emma, Mrs. Bowman? She closed the lid.

When she reached the yard again, Henry was talking with Jacob about topsoil for the garden. He was squatted at the fire, sunlight through the trees falling on his hands. “Jacob has found a wagon and horse. We’ve only got one shovel,” he said to Emma. “My assistant has claimed it. Don’t worry about me. We’ll be back with a load of topsoil before the sun peaks.” He was still so handsome, and it hurt Emma’s heart that her feelings did not match his intention of pleasing her.

The men left, and in her morning with Abike she was suddenly seized with how the girl needed a corset.

The next note she claimed more eagerly than the last. She was in two lives, the one propelling the other.

I will assure you when I hear.
No signature. Was that good or bad?

Bamboo and thatch arrived and a garden fence went up faster than anything Emma had seen in Africa. She looked at Henry with his tossed-up hair and his blue eyes and she prayed.
Let me be true.
In her most interior mind she hoped she would not be required to choose between what was true and what she felt she needed.

Saturday morning they put in seed for squash, radishes, and zinnias. After the planting, they all prayed over the garden. Emma kept her eyes half opened and saw that Wole’s were shut tight. Then she saw Jacob looking at Abike, and she felt stricken.

“You look as if God has left,” Henry said after the long
Amen
. “Tomorrow is the Sabbath. The children are bringing palm branches to services as a sign of peace and hope.” He looked calm and she thought to herself,
I should be reassured but I am not
. That night she wrote another note and put it in the box. There was no need for it but she couldn’t stop.

When do you expect to hear?

A large crowd attended the service under the compound trees. Jacob sat in front of Emma wearing a golden jacket. He had constructed a cross of green bamboo and planted it in the dirt next to Henry’s pulpit, and now he leaned forward, listening. Emma recognized the farmer who had helped with the fencing and a girl who had attended her school for two days before disappearing. She saw the familiar face of a deaf woman who worked at the indigo pots. Sade was there with her bead-covered gourds and shook them when they sang. Rather than using her buttonhole-making skills for buttons, she had put her art to use as a form of embroidery, little holes cut into the neck of her garment stitched all around, her brown skin showing through these tiny windows. It was most becoming, though Emma knew it would not be becoming on her. The Iyalode appeared with two of her girls. The woman looked grand as a peacock. Emma saw them all as her people and felt full and brimming. Rev. Hathaway might arrive any time, but it seemed to her that his coming would no longer be a rescue for her but a respite for Henry. What she wanted now was to be let go. She imagined herself alone in Africa with this full and buoyant congregation, the women swaying, the men too, moving so beautifully in their cloth. This world could carry her, and she could be in it with her child. She would go where she wanted and say what she was led to say. The children started forward carrying palm branches to the foot of the cross, and some of them laid wreaths of red flowers from the African tulip tree that grew in the central market. This was the peace that passeth understanding.

She woke in the night. Her feet slipped across the floor. In the parlor, she lit a candle. She pulled out her journal.

I have begun to dream in Yoruba.

· 42 ·

Jacob’s View

T
HE WOMAN COMES
and stands on the piazza. Routinely, she pushes up her sleeves. She waves at the lizards, trying to get them to move. Her hat is large and round and it casts her face in shadow, but still Jacob knows her eyes. She walks in the shade. Wole goes to her, first skipping, then slowing to a walk, then dashing. She leans to receive him. He talks into her ear. She pulls a book from some pocket of her dress. They point and exclaim. He watches them. She has a great capacity to forget everything but what she is doing. He suspects it is an American quality. In a bit, the woman and Wole put the book aside and stand. They are going to take a walk. They do so naturally, out the front yard and into the street. They walk toward the Ilorin Gate. The way is shaded in trees. Other children come to greet them. The woman used to pick up the toddlers, but now she is too large. She stops to speak with them. They pat her dress. Wole turns on his heels. He waits for her until he is impatient, and then he tugs at her hand and they go on. She used to carry an umbrella, but now she forgets it. That is just the sort of thing she does. She forgets.

She had rested against him once, an accident. She did it again on purpose but also in her forgetting, turning into him, her head against his chest, her breath deepening. He thought she might be ill. But she moved her hands in against him and pressed herself into him and sought him. That was not illness. The smell of her hair was in his nostrils, an earth smell, like water and grass. He had been aroused. He wanted to punish her. Press her head against the wall, her dark eyes wide in wonder and fear. It was he who remembered. No, he had said. That was not what he said. Excuse, he had said. She had looked as if she had been found by the hunter and in her animal mind she wondered for her life.

What sort of name was Emma?

When the correspondence began, she seemed grateful, and he regretted ever wishing her ill. Her hair fell around her face and he saw how young and unpracticed she was. If she were an African he might love her and nothing would be puzzling, though she would still be a deer. He knew now why Pastor had chosen her.

His worry for Pastor was great. He missed their outings, the camaraderie, everything he learned from the man. He also missed teaching. Pastor never ran out of questions. In his childhood, Jacob had missed his own father, who had taken a younger wife and moved away from his mother, into a new house on the compound. Jacob wanted to return to those nights when the reverend walked about the compound communing with himself and the wife awoke in the morning and tended to Wole and did not let her eyes wander so much. All of those small motions were one large motion which was the turning of a wheel which was the day which was his life, the life he was making.

Abike was a melody. She would know how to be a traditional wife and a new one, reading and writing. She could help him get ahead. But he needed Pastor, a salary, a house. He needed an anchor.

Sometimes he felt grief overtaking him, battering his chest, and in those times it seemed he would never find home again.

He called on the Iyalode, not about Abike, about Pastor’s wife.

“No native charm,” he said. “Just help her through.”

The woman clucked her tongue. “What of the husband?” she said.

“He has sometimes been ill,” he said, thinking how the man must improve.

The Iyalode clapped her hands. “The woman is doing well,” she finished, as if to imply that Mrs. Bowman would not need a charm.

Then she arrived at Sunday service and he worried she would relay to Mrs. Bowman the purpose of his recent visit, but she only came to show off her wealth. In the meantime, Mrs. Bowman had turned Abike into a new shape. It was very surprising and he could not make up his mind about the effect.

Tunji showed up with his dog and an extra leaf of
fufu
, red with palm oil.

“You have a new trick,” he said to Jacob when they had finished eating.

“What is that?”

“Looking out of your eyes in two directions, like your master.”

“What are you saying?” Jacob said.

“One is going to Abike, the other to your master’s wife.”

· 43 ·

Heal Thyself

H
ENRY THOUGHT HE
could remember now: the morning when he slept and Emma went into town and called on the Baale. His mouth had tasted of laudanum when he woke later in the day, but at the time he had suspected nothing as he took it often. Later, seeing how his wife eyed him and observing her new independence, it occurred to him that Emma might have put something in his food to get him out from underfoot. It was an African man’s way of thinking,
and for good reason
, he considered. But the medicine kit offered no evidence.

He looked for Emma’s journal in the writing box, thinking she might have made a record—she was sometimes that silly, writing down her crimes—but before he could get to the red volume, he found a series of notes. His wife was writing to his assistant behind his back. Her impudence burned him. Jacob was
his
man. She had Duro and Abike and the boy, three to one on her side. Why couldn’t she let him have something? Later he looked for the rifle and it was missing. Emma was still holding school. He went outside the compound to buy native food from a nearby stall. In Africa, it was an insult to your wife to eat from the market, and that was exactly what he meant.

Later he looked up to see Emma at the door to his study.

“What were you doing, hiding the gun?” he said. “Did you think I would shoot myself? And I know about your correspondence with Jacob. You can stop that foolishness, tempting him to duplicity. I guess you think it’s warranted. You consider I haven’t been much of a husband lately. Do you believe I’m bettered by a wife who overreaches me with the staff?”

He thought she looked a bit afraid now, and that was better.

“I have always honored your name,” she said, fiddling with her collar. “You have been in a poor state of mind of late.”

He could not argue with that point. “There is more than my name you might honor,” he said.

She came forward and unbuttoned the top of her dress. She took his hand and placed it there. He felt her warmth. “My heart hurts,” she said. She turned and walked away, her skirts like a fallen cloud, her throat still exposed, her hair down her back.

Henry found pretext for sending the household out, every last one of them.

He must regain himself. A young wife in Africa: What did he expect? She was a girl practically, susceptible to every whim of her own as well as the atmosphere of her surroundings. He had heard of a woman, a British official’s wife, who had let herself go native, abandoning an ill husband for an African man and worshipping a river goddess.

He had a church to start, reports to write, a book to finish.

Henry gathered what he needed in the bedroom. Bloodletting was quieter than whipping. Whatever ill went into the body had to come out—or it would go, as it already had, to his head. Afterward, he would eat well and pray.

He washed the clasp knife in one bowl and set it on top of a napkin on a bedside table. Then he threaded a needle and knotted it and put it with the knife and beside that a glass of whiskey. He took off his trousers and sat on a chair nearest the window. He washed his left leg and then looked out the window for a time. A boy across the way had found a large seed pod and was using it as a weapon against an invisible enemy. Henry’s upper chest had the cool tight feeling of birds flying against a glass dome, and the lower part of his belly was thick, swamped pressure. He observed his spleen, protruding from his rib cage. He pushed it, and it stayed back for a moment but reasserted itself. He tried it twice again with the same result. He felt with his fingers along the inside of his mouth and touched the sore there, a blister, some sort of eruption.

He had not put on his shoes, and the floor was pleasant under his feet. He looked out the window again. In his mind he wandered up a hill in the distance. He thought on the green-turning world, roots reaching for water, leaf for light, the most minute life form. “God gives the desolate a home to dwell in; He leads out the prisoners to prosperity; but the rebellious dwell in a parched land.” He spoke the verse to himself, thinking how the rains had begun but still no letters from home, no payment from the board. His wife would deliver any day and he had little means to support them. “You have to let go your demand,” he said to himself. “Have faith.” But it was hard to stifle his calculations. Again the house had cost too much. Yet what choice had he had? To keep Emma in a mud room to bear the child? And what if the infant died from the damp and chill? His wife and the mission would be ruined. No. The new house was a necessity. But so were food and transport, payment for Jacob and the others. If Moore were in Ijaye, he might appeal to him. But he would not lean toward the Hathaways, who were, to him, like figures in a painting in a museum, always looking down on him. Well, he might yet be required to kneel that low. He ran his fingers through his hair and prayed that God would help his rebellious nature and bring him to His divine will. All of his worry availed him nothing. Even his toenail was worse. He would release his temper with the blood.

Then he thought he might do better if he sat on the floor. There was a prominent vein on the inside of his left calf. He brought it up in a squeeze of skin and set the second bowl beneath the leg, held the knife, and looked up through the window. Then he dropped his gaze quickly, set his sights, and cut. The achievement was not great enough, and he went back over the shallow slit. It pained like fire, bringing blood in a bright spurt. The burn gained sharpness like a stab, and he rocked onto his side, trying to keep the wound above the basin. His eyes met the angle of the wall abutting the floor, and it pleased him how tight and sound it was. He remembered that he must locate the rifle, but he would not lower himself to asking his wife as to its whereabouts. Or Jacob. The cut throbbed and he found himself counting like Emma. At fifty counts, he managed to push himself up. He figured he had a liter and that seemed about right. If he let too much he could kill himself. Henry grabbed the napkin to stanch the wound. The cloth soaked through and he reached for one of Emma’s ornamental pillows. He held it to the cut and sat. After a bit, he took the whiskey, pouring half on the wound and leaving the rest to drink when he was through. The cut bubbled and burned again and he pressed the skin together, edges out. He tried a stitch with a quick jab and the sting was not too bad. He came back and took another. The second stitch was worse, like a hard, primitive ache. He put the knife between his teeth and bit down and took the other four straight, without stopping. He knotted off the end, cut the thread with the knife, and lay back onto the floor. Before he wanted to, he lifted himself up, rinsed the knife and then his hands again, and then he rinsed his chest and sopped up the floor with Emma’s pillow. He had made a bandage from three handkerchiefs knotted together and he fitted it tight against his calf. He got back to the chair and drank the last of the whiskey. Then he slipped the needle into a groove in the windowsill. He wiped and closed the knife, poured the contents of both bowls into a slop jar, and pulled on his trousers. When he went out back, the sun felt hot and good on his head. The wound was tight but not too painful, and he thought it was nice work. Walking crosswise over the yard, he emptied the slop jar in the privy and threw the pillow after it. He washed the cup and bowls and jar and left them out to dry.

Waiting for his household to return, he felt drowsy and lay on a mat on the back piazza. In his dream, he rode a horse on a rise above a river and he knew he was nearing a falls, huge and magnificent. Descending, he felt the temperature cool and suddenly he saw he was not wearing a coat or even his boots, and his trousers were torn. But he knew Jacob would be at the falls waiting for him; he would have the boots. In another moment, he thought of Emma and her hair and how he would stroke it as he told her of the discovery. He would make a sketch of the falls and it would go into another book he would write, this one about his African adventures. But then he remembered he could not approach the falls on horseback. He had to get into a canoe. Jacob would have the canoe. He came into an open plain and rumbling seemed to shake the earth. In the distance Henry saw men. As his horse approached them, he recognized Jacob and called to him, but his assistant would not look up. He was talking with another white man. They were eating together and laughing. Henry called again, but Jacob refused to look in his direction.
Any moment
, he thought,
Jacob will hear me and jump up in joy and lead me to the canoe and the other man will vanish
. But when Jacob looked up, he took no notice of Henry and rather turned back to the other white man. Finally, they looked in Henry’s direction.

“We know you are here, but we are not allowed to talk with you,” Jacob said.

When Henry looked up he saw his horse was going over the falls, the poor animal’s legs up and over and then nothing. When he looked upon his own body, his trousers were entirely gone and his private parts wept like candle wax between his legs.