The Poisonwood Bible (14 page)

If I settle down on a stump somewhere at the edge of the village square, they’ll forget about me sooner or later, I’ve found. I like to sit there and keep an eye out for the woman with the great big white purse, exactly like what Mamie Eisenhower might take shopping, which she carries proudly through the village on her head. And I love to watch the boys climb up palm trees to cut down the oil nuts. Way high up there with the sunlight falling reddish-brown on the palm trunks and the boys’ narrow limbs, they look beautiful. They seem touched by the Lord’s grace. In any event, they never fall.The palm fronds wave around their heads like ostrich plumes.

Twice I’ve seen the honey man who comes out of the forest carrying a block of honeycomb dripping with honey—sometimes bees and all!—in his bare hands. A smoking roll of leaves juts from his mouth like a giant cigar. He sings softly to the bees as he walks through the village, and the children all run after him, mesmerized by the prospect of honey, their eagerness for a sweet causing them to vibrate and hum like the bees.

On the rare days when Eeben Axelroot is in his shack at the end of the airplane field, I’ve been known to go down there and spy on him, too. Sometimes Adah comes, although she generally prefers her own company to anyone else’s. But Mr. Axelroot provides a grave temptation, as he is such an abominable curiosity. We hide amongst the banana trees that have sprung up all around his latrine, even while it gives us the creeps knowing all this lush growth is fertilized by such a disgusting man’s night soil. The big banana-tree leaves grow right up against the shack’s filthy back window, leaving narrow gaps perfect for spying. Mr. Axelroot himself is boring to watch; on a typical day he sleeps till noon, then takes a nap. You can just tell he isn’t saved. But his clutter is fascinating: guns, tools, army clothes, even a radio of some kind, which he keeps in an army foot-locker. We can hear the faint static emanating from the trunk, and the spooky, distant voices speaking French and English. My parents told us there was not a radio within a hundred miles of our whole village (they wanted to get one for safety’s sake, but neither the Mission League nor the Lord has so far provided). So they aren’t aware of Mr. Axelroot’s radio, and since I only learned of it through spying, I can’t tell them about it.

My parents shun him completely. Our mother is so sure none of us would want to go near his house she hasn’t bothered to forbid it. That’s good luck for me. If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn’t technically hold it against me. The Hardy Boys did spying for the cause of good, and I have always felt mine is in this same vein.

It was midway through September when Ruth May made her inroads. I came back from my spying foray one afternoon to find her playing “Mother May I?” with half the village’s children. I was flabbergasted. There stood my own little sister in the center of our yard, the focal point of a gleaming black arc of children strung from here to there, silently sucking their sugarcane sticks, not even daring to blink. Their faces concentrated on Ruth May the way a lens concentrates sunlight. I half expected her to go up in flames.

“You, that one.” Ruth May pointed and held up four fingers. “Take four scissors steps.”

The chosen child opened his mouth wide and sang a rising four-note song: “Ma-da-meh-yi?”

“Yes, you may,” Ruth May replied benevolently. The little boy crossed his legs at the knees, leaned back, and minced forward twice plus twice more, exactly like a crab that could count.

I watched for a long while, astonished to see what Ruth May had accomplished behind my back. Every one of these children could execute giant steps, baby steps, scissors steps, and a few other absurd locomotions invented by Ruth May. She grudgingly let us join the game, and grudgingly we did. For several afternoons under the gathering clouds, all of us—including the generally above-it-all Rachel—played “Mother May I?” I tried to picture myself in a missionary role, gathering the little children unto me, as it was embarrassing to be playing this babyish game with children waist-high to me. But we were so tired of ourselves and each other by then the company was irresistible.

We soon lost interest, though, for there was no suspense at all: the Congolese children always passed us right by on their march to victory. In our efforts to eke the most mileage out of a scissors step or whatever, my sisters and I sometimes forgot to ask (or Adah to mouth) “Mother May I?” Whereas the other children never, ever forgot. For them, shouting “Ma-da-me-yi” was one rote step in a memorized chain of steps, not a courtesy to be used or dropped the way “yes, ma’am” and “thank you” are for us. The Congolese children’s understanding of the game didn’t even take courtesy or rudeness into account, if you think about it, any more than Methuselah did when he railed us with hell and damnation. This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.

But “Mother May I?” broke the ice. When the other children got wise to Ruth May’s bossy ways and drifted off, one boy stayed. His name was Pascal, or something near it, and he captivated us with frantic sign language. Pascal was my nkundi: my first real friend in the Congo. He was about two-thirds my size, though much stronger, and fortunately for us both he owned a pair of khaki shorts. Two frayed holes in the back gave a generous view of his buttocks, but that was all right. I rarely had to be directly behind him except when we climbed trees. The effect was still far less embarrassing to me than pure nakedness. I think I would have found it impossible to be friends with a purely naked boy.

“Beto nki tutasala?” he would ask me by way of greeting. “What are we doing?” It was a good question. Our companionship consisted mainly of Pascal telling me the names for everything we saw and some things I hadn’t thought to look for. Bangala, for example, the poisonwood tree that was plaguing us all half to death. Finally I learned to see and avoid its smooth, shiny leaves. And he told me about ngondi, the kinds of weather: mawalala is rain far off in the distance that doesn’t ever come. When it booms thunder and beats down the grass, that is nuni ndolo, and the gentler kind is nkazi ndolo. These he called “boy rain” and “girl rain,” pointing right to his private parts and mine without appearing to think a thing in the world was wrong with that. There were other boy and girl words, such as right and left: the man hand and the woman hand. These discussions came several ‘weeks into our friendship, after Pascal had learned I was not, actually, a boy, but something previously unheard of: a girl in pants.The news surprised him greatly, and I don’t like to dwell on how it came about. It had to do with peeing in the bushes. But Pascal quickly forgave me, and it’s a good thing, since friends of my own age and gender were not available, the girls of Kilanga all being too busy hauling around firewood, water, or babies. It did cross my mind to wonder why Pascal had a freedom to play and roam that his sisters didn’t. While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country.

But Pascal made a fine companion. As we squatted face to face, I studied his wide-set eyes and tried to teach him English words— palm tree, house, run, walk, lizard, snake. Pascal could say these words back to me all right, but he evidently didn’t care to remember them. He only paid attention if it was something he’d never seen before, such as Rachel’s Timex watch with the sweep second hand. He also wanted to know the name of Rachel’s hair. Hen, herr, he repeated over and over, as if this were the name of some food he wanted to make sure he never got hold of by mistake. It only dawned on me later, I should have told him “blonde.”

Once we’d made friends, Pascal borrowed a machete and cut sugarcane for me to chew on. With hard, frightening whacks he cut the cane into popsicle lengths before replacing the machete beside his father’s hammock. The cane-sucking habit in Kilanga was no doubt connected to the black stumps of teeth most everyone showed off when they smiled at us, and Mother never lost an opportunity to remark upon that connection. But Pascal had a fine set of strong white teeth, so I decided to take my chances.

I invited Pascal into our kitchen house when Mother wasn’t there. We skulked about in the banana-smelling darkness, examining the wall over the plank counter where Mother tacks up pictures she tears out of magazines. They are company for her, I suppose, these housewives, children, and handsome men from cigarette ads, of which Father would disapprove if the Lord’s path ever chanced to lead him through the kitchen, which isn’t likely. Mother even has a photo of President Eisenhower in there. In the dimness the President’s pale, bulbous head shines out like a lightbulb. Our substitute for electricity! But Pascal is always more interested in poking through the flour sacks, and he sometimes takes small handfuls of Carnation milk powder. I find that substance revolting, yet he eats it eagerly, as if it were candy.

In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird’s nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them in his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.

On another afternoon Pascal showed me how to build a six-inch-tall house. Crouched in the shade of our guava, he planted upright twigs in the dirt. Then he built the twigs into walls with a sturdy basket -weave of shredded bark all the way around. He spat in the dirt to make red mud, then patted this onto the walls until they were covered. Finally he used his teeth to square off the ends of palm fronds in a businesslike manner, for the roof. Finally he squatted back on his heels and looked over his work with an earnest, furrowed forehead. This small house of Pascal’s, I realized, was identical in material and design to the house in which he lived. It only differed in size.

It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games—”Mother May I?,” “Hide and Seek”—and his: “Find Food,” “Recognize Poisonwood,” “Build a House.” And here he was a boy no older than eight or nine. He had a younger sister who carried the family’s baby everywhere she went and hacked weeds with her mother in the manioc field. I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress. For the first time ever I felt a stirring of anger against my father for making me a white preacher’s child from Georgia. This wasn’t my fault. I bit my lip and labored on my own small house under the guava tree, but beside the perfect talents of Pascal, my own hands lumbered like pale flippers on a walrus out of its element. My embarrassment ran scarlet and deep, hidden under my clothes.

Ruth May Price

THE VERY DAY MAMA SAID, You’re going to crack your head wide open, but no sir. I broke my arm instead.

How I did it was spying on the African Communist Boy Scouts. Way up there in the tree I could see them but they couldn’t see me. The tree had green alligator pears that taste like nothing much. Not a one of us but Mama will eat them, and the only reason is she can remember how they tasted back home from the Piggly Wiggly with salt and Hellman’s mayonnaise. “Mayonnaise,” I asked her. “What color was the jar?” But she didn’t cry. Sometimes when I can’t remember things from Georgia, she’ll cry.

They looked like regular Congo Boy Scouts to me, marching, except they didn’t have any shoes. The Belgium Army men all have shoes and guns and they come marching right straight through here sometimes, on their way to somewhere. Father said they are showing everybody Congolese, like Tata Undo, that Belgium is still calling the shots. But the other army is just boys that live around here. You can tell the difference. There aren’t any white ones in charge, and they don’t have all the same clothes. They’ve just got their shorts and barefooted or whatever they’ve got. One has got him a red Frenchie hat. Boy, I like that hat. The others have red hankies tied around their necks. Mama said they are not Boy Scouts, they are Jeune Mou-Pro. She says, “Ruth May, sugar, you don’t have a speck of business with the Jeune Mou-Pro, so when you see them, why, you run on into the house.” Mama does let us play with little children and boys, even if they are mostly naked, but not those ones in the red hankies. Mbote fe-That means no good. That is how I come to climb up the alligator pear tree when I saw them. For a long time I thought Mama was saying they were the Jimmy Crow, a name I knew from home.

In the morning we can’t spy. My sisters have to sit and have their school, and I have to color and learn my letters. I don’t like having school. Father says a girl can’t go to college because they’ll pour water in your shoes. Sometimes I can play with my pets instead of coloring, if I’m quiet. Here are my pets: Leon and the mongoose. Also the parrot. My father let the parrot go because we accidentally taught it to say bad words, but it didn’t go plumb away. It goes and then it comes back because its wings aren’t any count; it got too tamed and forgot how to fly away and eat by itself. I feed it sour limes from the dima tree to make it sneeze and wipe its bill off, one side and then the other side. Mbote ve! Dima, dimba, dimbama. I like to say all those words because they come out of your mouth and laugh. My sisters feel sorry for the parrot but I don’t. I would have me a snake too if I could, because I’m not scared of them.

Nobody ever even gave me the mongoose. It came to the yard and looked at me. Every day it got closer and closer. One day the mongoose came in the house and then every day after that. It likes me the best. It won’t tolerate anybody else. Leah said we had to name it Ricky Ticky Tabby but no sir, it’s mine and I’m a-calling it Stuart Little. That is a mouse in a book. I don’t have a snake because a mongoose wants to kill a snake. Stuart Little killed the one by the kitchen house and that was a good business, so now Mama lets it come on in the house. Dimba means listen! You listen here, Buster Brown! The snake by the kitchen house was a cobra that spits in your eyes. You go blind, and then it can just rare back and bite you any old time it feels like it.