A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (34 page)

She knew how he meant it—in the African way of belonging to the family. It went deeper than calling the old man “Uncle”—the practice of her country. It meant
we are one
.

The egret she had seen about the house flew north toward the Ilorin Gate so that Emma felt the moment was offering itself to God.

“Jacob,” she said. “I was wrong to”—she breathed in and out—“approach you as I did. It was an accident, but I didn’t stop it.” She looked at her hands and then she looked at him, in the shade of the tree.

“Why have you done it?” he said.

“Because I am inclined to you. Because I needed help.” She took a pin out of her hair and replaced it. “I felt drawn to you. Do you see?”

“Yes,” he said. “But, even so, you cannot do it.”

“But you have also felt something for me.”

“Yes,” he said. “You are like a deer.”

“A deer?” Her heart expanded and then it contracted.
He sees me but he cannot come near me.

“We cannot be close,” she said.

“No.”

“But if I went away you would miss me.”

“Ah,” he said, looking down. “It is true.”

“Yes,” she said, watching his profile, hearing the drums in town. The day was brilliant, the air clear and breezy. She remembered how Uncle Eli had befriended her against all likelihood. She saw the path they were to follow.

“If you would be my friend,” she said.

“I am willing,” he said, and looked at her.

She felt humbled, already nostalgic for him.

“One more thing,” Emma said, “please take the rifle and bury it in the bush.”

* * *

IN AN ODD WAY
, it was a beneficence that a festival day came. The town’s attention was elsewhere, in stilt walking and masquerades and women’s dancing and throwing food into the river as a sacrifice. Emma had been given a revelation from God. But she also had a husband lingering toward death or madness.
I must live today in the sufficiency of God
, she told herself,
only the normal things and a bath
. So she held devotionals with the household, kept her school, cut pawpaw for dinner, played with Wole and the baby in the shade of the compound trees, and in the late afternoon asked Duro to bring water. She washed her hair. Combing it out, she let it dangle in front of the baby, whose clear blue eyes followed the curls. Emma thought it likely the little girl would be a beauty, with Henry’s chiseled features, not her round ones. In the early evening she instructed Duro to bring lanterns to the piazza. “We’ll eat outdoors,” she said. Later she called everyone together in the dark and they sang hymns. Jacob played an African melody she recognized.

In the morning, she changed Madeline’s diaper on the piazza and pumped the child up and down in her arms. Emma was stiff from little exercise and her mind felt cold and blank. There must be some relief. After breakfast she walked into the bedroom out of habit. Henry had pulled himself to half sitting. “My Lord!” she said, just as her mother might. She squeezed the child tight to her breast. It seemed she had chanced to find her husband in a field after a war, his hair long, face whiskered, shirt crumpled, and himself dazed and wintered-looking in spite of the tropical heat.

“Look at you,” she said. “Henry.”

Still he did not speak, and she thought: If he
were
in a field, he would turn and take another way, believing he had gone wrong. “Dear you,” she said. “It’s me.”

She took a step toward him, and it seemed to loosen his voice.

“The birds,” he said, “woke me. Or someone singing.” For the first time in some while, his voice was normal and his eyes reflected recognition and something close to joy when he saw her arms full of the baby.

“You’re here, with us. You’re home.” Her throat was full and she started to cry. “We have a daughter,” she said, pressing at the tears with the flat of her hand. She sat in the chair by the window and drew Madeline out of her bundling cloth.

“I got lost,” Henry said. She said nothing while he looked at his hands, and she thought he cried without tears. When he was through, she put the child in his arms and she sat next to him and caressed his hair.

“You must have done something to save me,” he said, still looking at Madeline.

“Yes,” she said, and did not say:
I opened a door for an old man.
Surely it was the mixture of quinine and the Babalawo’s medicine that had worked some miracle. And the spirit of God brooding over them.

· 49 ·

Jesus, the African

J
ACOB LEANED TOWARD
Abike, and he could see now her eyes were for him. He spoke with Tunji about his hopes.

He read to Wole, who was missing his school.

He had considered packing them all, including Duro, and leaving. He might have if it had not been for the master’s baby. Or if it would not have hurt Wole to be uprooted again. Or if it would not seem to Abike a disloyalty, enough to make her wonder if he would turn his back on her if she were ever ill. Or if the gospel had not been the first religion he knew that believed even slaves could come to God, believed their children mattered, believed them worthy of an ancestor and gave them Jesus. Or if it were not for the woman who exposed her heart.

“Tunji,” he said. “I need you in the church.”

“Ah,” the man said, engrossed in the labor of peeling an orange. “I am your friend. But I won’t allow any
oyinbo
to drown me for Jesus’ sake.”

“Jesus is not so far from us,” Jacob said.

“What do you mean?”

“He is not so far from our country. You know he has lived in Africa as a boy. He is closer to us than to America.

“Is he an
oyinbo
?”

“He is not an
oyinbo
.” Jacob looked around for some color that might explain. “He is the color of earth,” he concluded.

· 50 ·

Small Miracles

O
NCE, WHEN HE
called the newborn Sarah, Emma thought Henry was slipping. But it was only a momentary lapse, a confusion of love.

There were nights of little sleep with Madeline crying, and days of caring for Henry, who wasn’t sure the rib had healed; so he was moved about the house and onto the piazza using a pallet. But there was also the garden growing. Well-wishers stopped by with gifts for the baby and the mother. Sade called often in the afternoon and sat mending and singing under the trees.

When Henry finally walked outside one afternoon, Emma saw how pale he had become. For the second time the old blind man came to call. Henry asked Emma to bring Madeline. They laid her on the mat and let the old man touch her.

“The hair is not right,” the fellow said.

Emma hadn’t seen Henry laugh so for a long time, and when he held his side, she thought it was not from sickness but wellness.

As far as she could tell, Henry did not remember threatening Jacob or remember her threatening him with the rifle. Sometimes she wondered if it had been a dream.

Henry sat in the yard to preach, and his color came back. Nowadays in his preaching, Henry dwelled on children: Jesus calling the children, humble yourself like a child. He lingered with the men as if he had finally put his head under an African umbrella. At night Emma lay with him, the babe in the cradle. They were together in that sweet, ferocious way, and it seemed to Emma like her own cradle. Everything written and beyond writing between them like pages in a book. The courage and loneliness of Henry’s face she had always loved. He seemed to her an entire civilization. Now she began to love her husband’s survival. His voice had changed, as if some great struggle had burned out of him and left a blue lake.

Emma remembered their one trip out into the hills around the town, taken in their early Ogbomoso months when they still lived at the old compound. They had put Wole and Abike on Caesar. Emma had walked with Jacob and Henry. Duro knew the path to an outcrop of rock pocked with large basins that held pools of water. Midway up, Emma had felt fatigued and hot. She had urged the others to go ahead. She would sit beneath a tree and rest before catching up with them. But Henry said no. She had tried again.
Go ahead with the picnic things. Wole can stay with me.
No,
Henry had said.
The rest can go and I will stay.
When at last she and Henry reached the summit and looked out across the hill, they saw the white flag of the tablecloth tied high in a limb. Below them the land spread out green—except for Ogbomoso, brown and ochre, dotted with groves of trees. Most of the pools were shallow enough for Wole to step through. All but the amethyst blue pool, which Duro said was too deep to measure.

“Does it ever dry up?” Emma said.

And Duro said, “No. As God is eternal.”

To Emma’s surprise the Iyalode didn’t leave. She was there like a mounting stone firm in the yard. Every day a child brought her food and she kept her mat stowed under a tree near the kitchen. She made her own fire and didn’t interfere with Duro. She seemed busy, but Emma couldn’t tell that she really worked at anything except retying her wrapper and combing up her hair and fanning her legs.

“What is she doing?” Emma finally said to Jacob.

“She has established herself as your mother. She will not leave for a month.”

“My mother? Is there anything that comes with that, anything she wants?” Emma had about come around to Jacob’s view of the Iyalode as a keen businesswoman, though she felt great affection for her.

“She may wish to give the child a Yoruba name.”

Emma smiled at him, open and full, because of what they knew together and what, she thought, they had agreed never to know of one another. “My goodness,” she said.

Small miracles returned: water in a bucket, an evening smell of roasting corn, wildflowers in a vase. Emma taught the children hopscotch. The Iyalode christened Madeline
Enitan
, meaning “embodiment of a story.” Emma gazed at the woman and then at her child. One was a mystery to her, the other her own mystery.

“Thank you,” she said.

The rainy season bore itself forward into June. Henry grew stronger and worked on the vocabulary. He kept Madeline’s cradle in motion with his naked toe on the rocker. One afternoon he came in with three seedlings in a wood tray.

“What are those?” she said.

“Lemon trees,” he said. “I started them with seed from Ijaye. They’ve been growing behind the shed while I was ill. I suppose it wouldn’t be too great a sin to call this a good omen.” He grinned largely and she went to him with all of her stories of love and disaster, but love gaining.

· 51 ·

Touching God

H
ENRY WATCHED
J
ACOB
direct the building of the temporary church. The idea was to put up scaffolding, a three-foot wall, and a roof for a temporary sanctuary and come back later to fill in, when there was more time and more money. In late afternoons, the two of them circled the perimeter of the compound, Henry using a Yoruba walking stick. One evening they visited the closest market. They began walking regularly to the Ilorin Gate. Sometimes they walked in silence, and Henry once or twice thought he heard the sounds of a harmonium in the air. Probably bells from an
orisha
grove.

Once or twice he wondered at the vividness of a dream in which his wife was threatening him with the rifle. He couldn’t remember if he had had the vision before or after his recovery. He tried to remember why she wanted to shoot him. He could almost remember but not quite, and, the more he tried to remember the more the dream eluded him. Certainly there was no cause for him to think so of her. She was immensely gentle and kind, as if her heart had met its meaning. He was fairly certain he could remember asking Jacob to whip him.

“I have sought to be true to my calling, to keep the Redeemer before me as my standard,” Henry said one afternoon, returning with his assistant from the blind man’s mat. The day was overcast and almost cool, the palm trees lush in their crowns. Henry inhaled deeply. “Asking you to flog me was a sin.”

A child ran past with a tray of bright red peppers balanced on her head.

Henry stopped. He had to look into Jacob’s face. The man appeared a little shaken, as if some nerve had been touched. “I wasn’t sure if I dreamed it or if it was real, but now looking at you, I see it was real enough. I’m mighty sorry.”

“Ah,” Jacob said. “Now you are well I am happy. Life is difficult; no man can say otherwise.” In a moment, he spoke again. “The sun is always here, even when we sleep.” They walked on. “There is one thing I am asking,” he continued. “I will like to marry.”

Henry looked at his assistant. Of course, why had he not thought as much? “I’m happy for you,” he said.

“I will need your patronage.”

“Yes,” Henry said. “Whatever I can do.” They were out the Ilorin Gate, moving along a path. Henry stopped again. “You’ll need a house,” he said.

* * *

A
T LAST, THEY
had news that Moore had returned, recuperated, to Ijaye. A few days later, they received mail and supplies, the first staples in months: coffee, sugar, flour, paper, hymnbooks, two payments from the board, newspapers from Savannah and Richmond, and two letters for Emma from home.

Henry watched his wife tear open the first one. In a moment she called out. “Look here, look here. Mittie Ann and Carl finally had a baby. I don’t believe it. Look here. A baby girl.” He thought she looked happier than on their wedding day. Over and over, she kept saying it: “Mittie Ann and Carl had a baby.” She kept saying it as if someone had risen from the dead, as if she were Mary Magdalene sent into town to announce the Savior’s resurrection.

* * *

O
NE AFTERNOON,
H
ENRY
and Jacob cut their walk short. He saw Emma watching as they approached the house.
Poor woman
, he thought,
she will always worry about me
. In the parlor, he spoke with her privately.

“Jacob and I have been deliberating on an issue of gravity,” he said. “I wish to know your opinion.” Emma was rocking, holding Madeline before her; the child had begun to focus on faces and spasmodically attempted to find her mouth with her fist.

“Yes, husband.” Emma looked older, but she was more alive than ever.

“Jacob has put away the equivalent of forty dollars; he has even purchased some goats and arranged for land. He’s quite frugal, as you know, never wasting his money as others do on drink or gross indulgences but tithing to the church as regularly as we.” He stopped to draw his breath. Emma was smiling at him as if she were the cause of the man’s good character or bore some relation to him that made the praise shine on her as well. It was hard to know how she would respond. He might as well go ahead. “He wishes to marry Abike,” he said. “Of course the mother will have to agree.” And when Emma said nothing, only seemed to sit up straighter, he added, “I was thinking we might make a gift to him, considering all he has done for us. We are as close to family as any he’s got. He wants our blessing.”

His wife’s look changed significantly; a furrow came into her brow and she stopped rocking the baby, put Madeline into the carry basket, and went to the window to look out. He wondered briefly if she knew some cause why the two should not marry. There had been time enough in his illness for him not to know a great many things. “What are you thinking?” he said.

She turned, and he saw she had him in her sights though there were tears in her eyes.

“I’ve come to know something,” she said.

“Yes?” he said.

“I’ve come to know that I am less advanced in charity than I had thought.”

“Wife, you are too hard on yourself,” he said, running his fingers through his hair, feeling peculiar in regard to her confession. “Think of all you have borne.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I had thought I followed God, that I loved Africa. Yet I am surprised when Africans are more rewarded than we are. Even our own people. I find it hard when they prove better than I am, when they have their own happiness. I have a long way to go, don’t you think, to share the heart of Christ.” She paused as if remembering something.

He had not known she had the courage of such candor. “Look what you have learned, then,” he said, feeling more contrite toward her now than he had ever before when she was haughty and certain. “It’s enough to be born for. I wonder what I missed when I was sleeping.” He tried to smile a bit, and now she looked elegant and brave but also a little sad.

“Abike will make a wonderful wife,” she said at last. “Jacob betrays more tenderness than most men, black or white. It may be a hindrance to him some day.” Henry thought she might have been talking to him about a lack of tenderness and to herself about how its absence had strengthened her.

“You approve?”

“It is you who approve, and I assent,” Emma said, picking up the baby again.

They sat for a moment, their pearl settled to her mother’s breast. Henry touched his ear.
I am not so wicked or they would not be here
, he thought.
Jesus, do not let my head become my antagonist again
, he prayed, a supplication he had learned from a man in Ijaye. Emma gazed out the window.

“Your church will be beautiful, Henry,” his wife said. “The sun on the thatch.”