A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (9 page)

Fewer people stopped by. Emma spent more time with her cook. His build was average, his head so fine and neat from the back you would mistake him for a younger man. But his face showed maturity, creases across the forehead, a few gray hairs at his temple, and one front tooth missing. His hands were his best feature, well proportioned with neat nails. He was delicate in his work. Emma loved the smell of frying cassava flour, or
gari
, that he prepared for himself. She was grateful he did not seem to bear her a grudge for hitting the woman. Perhaps he felt they were now equals, and she didn’t mind sitting at the outdoor kitchen with him, making hoecakes. Henry had told her the cook had lost three wives to illness. His numerous children were grown and living in the village with his mother, where they kept up the family farm.

“I wish I had an orange,” she said one afternoon, sitting with him. The next morning, Duro was gone out and he did not return until afternoon. He was holding a single green orange.

“The only one I can find mah,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, deeply touched.

Henry came in as Emma was taking down her hair, her bodice already loose at the neck. He put his hands on the curve of her hips. “I was too hard on you,” he said. “I only wish for us to do well.”

“I used to dream about your hand on the letters you wrote to me.”

“Let me trace a word here.”

In her heart, even in the intimate act, Emma knew she
would
seek to love as Jesus loved, whose clothes were stripped from him and who wore a crown of thorns and was whipped and cursed and spat upon and nailed to a cross and yet he blessed them.

Days later she went to market with Duro, and when she returned she saw Henry erecting a bamboo-and-thatch enclosure in the yard. It was a private drying line for her private things. She said nothing and neither did he, but her heart was full as a river in rains. She took up her writing box and made a record in her journal:
a trial survived; happiness returns.
Placing the red book back in the box, she saw Uncle Eli’s letter opener.
I wonder how he fares
, she thought, and then closed the lid because she did not wish to disturb her happiness.

* * *

A
FTER IT HAPPENED,
Emma made a careful record in her journal.

I sketch this incident for its illumination of native custom and my own learning:

“She is here mah, the woman you are calling on.” That was Duro, our cook.

I hardly recognized the woman I had so lightly tapped. She wore a fine dress of blue fabric and an ivory-colored headdress fringed in cowries.

I must have said something under my breath. “Lands sakes!” I invited her in.

“Ko si nkan kan,”
she said, meaning “You are welcome.”

“
E se
,” I said, meaning “Thank you,” but taken aback. Would not I be the one welcoming her?

She gave me her name, Tela. I had not remembered her being so robust and then I saw it was the large headdress she was wearing. Her skin was a smooth brown, her eyes bright, and her smile revealed the most beautiful teeth.

I hurried my apology in my best Yoruba. “I’m sorry I hurt you.” I asked Duro to be certain she understood. “Tell her I beg she not be angry,” I said.

Tela proceeded to gather my hands and shake them gently, waving them as she talked at some length. According to Duro, the proclamation all came down to “It is fine.”

“
Joko
,” I said to her, “Have a seat.” I instructed Duro to bring punch. We sat for some while looking through the front window, she reaching out at intervals to claim my hand again. As a parting gift, I gave Tela a small collapsible fan. Watching as she walked off, I saw she had already put it to use.

She won me over and I thought it would take God’s doing to turn my heart toward the women. How strange a world I have entered.

On days when Emma did not have time to make a record in the journal, she nevertheless opened the writing box and drew in its scent of oil and lemon. The organization of the box, with a place for everything, the cool serenity of the glazed ink pot: These were elements mysterious and comprehensible, a reassurance of her being, like a prayer. And then she closed the lid and carried the box back to its resting place.

* * *

O
NE MORNING IN
June
,
Emma took up scissors to cut fabric for a new dress and experienced a rush of nausea. Not again, she thought, remembering her illness at sea. She was queasy all morning but with neither chills nor fever. Still she lay down and closed her eyes. Over and again, the thin pink light cast on the ship’s wall came to mind, and she thought she would be very sick if she kept returning to it. There was drumming and she focused on that.

“Don’t you know?” Henry said, finding her in bed.

“Know what?”

“A child.”

She looked hard out the window beyond him. True, her last bleeding had been a trickle. She had attributed the small show to strain. But then, musing back through May to April, she felt with a certainty her husband was right. She was aghast. Certainly, she had meant to do something first, establish herself in her work. It seemed a betrayal of her body to be so vulnerable. Emma believed she was ready to enter the African world fully. Why, she might eat with her bare hands, as Henry did, rolling
fufu
balls to dip into soup. Her idea of her stately self was suddenly replaced with Catherine’s navel stuck out in the last month before birth.

“The child is only the briefest mite,” Henry said, sitting beside her. “Hardly two months. You’ll be over the sickness soon.” His eyes shone with something she had never seen before.

“I hadn’t known,” she said. “Had you?”

“I suspected,” he said, “but was afraid to hope. I never thought”—his voice gave, and he waited for his composure—“to be a father,” he finished.

She pulled herself up and leaned into his chest, claiming his shirt around her face as she breathed him in.

“I might die,” she said, suddenly pushing away from him, searching his face.

“You won’t die,” he said, smoothing her hair. Then he made her a plate of hominy and sat in bed with her as she ate.

The rains continued with the early pregnancy, thunder sounding in the distance, then a broad fan of wind, clouds gathering in huge gray billows, the sound of the deluge coming over the hills, and then in an instant it hit like a waterfall, rain descending in curtains, the sound now a solid roar. Emma was ill with the fever once and knew that Henry feared losing the baby, but she came through and set about letting her dresses out. Two weeks later, Henry took a bad cold. It went into fever so that he pitched in the bed and had to call Duro to hold him. Henry complained of his spleen, what he called his “old ailment,” and took tinctures of laudanum to calm his system. “It’s the damp oppressive weather,” he said, explaining why the illness was worse than on ship. “It’s more than just malaria.” When he could sit for a stretch in bed, he worked on his sermons and wrote letters. Emma considered a letter to her family, but there were too many demands, and she feared telling them about a child she might lose before its birth. Then Henry was well enough to recommence preaching in the yard. He called it
declaiming
. Emma thanked God that they took turns in illness so one could tend the other, and she prayed Henry would be well when her time came.

She loved to hear her husband preach. He looked so fine in his trousers and white shirt, the sleeves turned up, his Bible open.
Jesus tells us there are two commandments: Love God and love one another.
Of course, no Yoruba disagreed with this, as they all believed in God and they all loved their brothers.
But mind you
, Henry continued,
loving one another includes your enemy
. This was where the declaiming came in. For loving an enemy was not so natural a concept. The more the men contested the point with him, the more fervently Henry argued the other side.
We must slay our enemy
, he would say finally,
but only with the sword of the Spirit which is Love
. Victory was his, for the men loved more than anything a good turn of phrase.

As weeks passed and her new shape emerged, folks exclaimed their greeting to Emma. “Ah, Mama,” they said, “we salute you.” She thought perhaps it was better to be with child in Africa than in Georgia. There was a greatness in it. Then she wished mightily for her mother and sister, Catherine. How dear it would be to share tea, to talk, to plan the infant’s clothes. In the cooler month of August, she calculated she was midway and selected two dresses to enlarge with extra fabric at the seams.

Emma walked into the bedroom just in time to see a large snake wending its way across the bed. In an instant, she fled, calling the cook.

Moments later the dead cobra was laid out on the veranda, the gunmetal gray body eight feet if it was an inch. “Thank you, Duro,” she said, still shaking, examining the snake’s slick head neatly chopped from the body, the body smashed in places where Duro had hit it with a stick. “What would I do without you?”

“A spitting snake,” Duro said, “hitting the eye.”

“You must be able to protect yourself,” Henry said when he saw it. It seemed he meant against more than snakes, though she couldn’t imagine anything worse. “We’ll go shooting. I should have taught you before.” He seemed humbled. With Duro’s help, he spent the rest of the day searching out any break in the house by which the serpent might have entered. Emma didn’t believe she would ever sleep again and insisted Henry investigate every inch of the room for several nights before she would enter.

They went out on a Friday, the two older boys from her school and Duro, and, of course, a crowd of neighbors, including Tela and two of her women friends, Henry bearing the rifle, though many offered to lend him a hand. Emma thought it might be good for the women to see how she could try something that only men were thought to do. Native melons were set all in a row on a stretch of abandoned wall. Henry demonstrated first. He missed the first pawpaw but ripped the second. There was huge clapping from the crowd, and a few more folks arrived for the show.

“Now I’ll teach you to load,” Henry said.

“I’m nervous,” she whispered, “with all these people.”

“Pay attention to me,” her husband said. “Take those gloves off.” He had the rifle, barrel up, and handed it to her. “You can rest the stock on the ground. Keep your face clear of the muzzle.”

She took the barrel in her fist.

“Take the powder horn,” he said. “When you push the measure, it releases just the right amount.”

This precision of instruments Emma found rather delightful.

“Now,” Henry said, taking the horn from her, “the patch. It’s already greased. Ram it in with the tamper. It holds the powder in place. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” she said, looking up into his eyes.

“If you’re in a great hurry, you don’t have to use the patch. It’s an extra step. But it keeps the barrel clean and you always pack it in if you’re going to travel with your weapon loaded.”

“Yes,” she said, breaking from his eyes, looking at the barrel in her fist, taking up the patch, and running it in.

“Now,” he said, “you’re ready for the ball. It fits snug and you have to ram it.”

She took the ball from his palm. Emma thought she would soon manage this quite well.

“Last is the cap,” Henry said. “You want to station the firearm on this hip like so, to hold it steady.”

She did.

“Pull back the hammer with your thumb. The cap fits right here over the nipple.”

Emma stared hard at the rifle. Henry had used that word but not like this. She let out a deep breath. Then she did just as he had demonstrated.

“You can lay the hammer down easy and travel with a rifle that way,” Henry said, “or keep it in the house, just so. Then you’re ready. But if you drop your firearm, it’s liable to go off.”

Emma held the rifle alternately with one hand, then the other, drying her damp palms against her skirt.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Yes,” Henry said. “Now raise the rifle and place the butt plate against your shoulder; lean your head in.”

Emma gazed at Henry. He moved around behind her and encircled her arms with his, pressing her head gently with his own.

“Now close one eye and use that bead at the end of the barrel to sight your target. Never pull back the hammer until you’re ready to shoot. Then pull the trigger.”

He stepped away from her.

Emma could have sworn she saw the side of the pawpaw fly before she heard the rifle’s report. The women brought their skirts to their mouths to hold a laugh, and the boys and men clapped and cried out. Emma’s ears buzzed.

“Oh,” she said. “Henry! Mr. Bowman!” Her hands thrummed; the vibration went all through her. She was thrilled with her success. “Let me try again,” she said.

This time she managed the steps with no assistance. The people’s talk was no matter. She was completely absorbed.

“Here I go,” she announced.

But she missed the second melon.

“Never mind,” she said. “I want to try again.” She didn’t look at Henry but proceeded to load again. She had not experienced such physical capacity since Georgia. Her third and fourth shots found their mark. She meant to continue, but she caught Henry’s eye. An odd half smile crossed his face, his brows were furrowed, and he had one hand over his midsection.

“Are you all right?” she rushed, a sudden wild thought that she had shot him.

“Not as right as you,” he said.

“You take another turn, husband,” she said, feeling an enormous joy in their rightness together.

The boys set up more melons, taking time to stuff blown bits into their mouths. Tela took Emma’s hand and held it with both of hers and swung it as if half the gain was hers. Henry found a greater distance this time, missing the first shot and then hitting three melons in a row. The assembly was enjoying itself now. A man broke a kola nut and shared it around with the men. Emma thought Henry hesitated when she reached again for the rifle. But she wanted more practice. She made the first, missed twice, and made the last.