The Poisonwood Bible (30 page)

How do you know? But Nelson knows everything about dead people. His mama and father and brothers and baby sister are all dead on the bottom of the river.

I don’t want to disappear, I said.

But he said, Only if you are going to die. He said this way I won’t die, I will just disappear for a second and then I’ll turn up someplace else, where it’s safe. Instead of dead I’ll be safe. But first I have to think of that place every day, so my spirit will know where to run away to, when it’s time. You have to think of your safe place every day. Nelson’s face was bigger than a candle right in my face and I could hear the good way he smelled.That soap he uses for washing up and his clothes. All those smells were so loud in my ears. Nelson is my friend that showed me how to sing to the chickens. Bidumuka is the magic name of a chicken. Nobody else knows that, not even Leah or Father.
          

Nelson said, Don’t forget!

I put the matchbox with the lion picture on it, and the magic burned bones inside, I put it under my pillow. Nkisi. Sometimes I wake up and it is still there. If they come and try to make me go up on the roof naked I will just disappear, and turn up some whole other place. But first I have to think of where I will go. I can feel the box in my hand. My pillow is wet and the tiny little box is soft but I know what is inside. Secret. There is the window, and it’s daytime now and people in the other room talking and they don’t know? I have a secret. But Nelson has gone somewhere and his mama dead; I wonder where and I can’t remember the song we sang to the chickens.

Leah

RUTH MAY’S SICKNESS stayed with her, but Mother began pulling
 
herself together. Seeing the two of them curled in the same bed, one slowly emerging and the other losing ground, put me back onto familiar, unpleasant thoughts of Adah and me in the womb. I have prayed a thousand times for God to tell me: Did I do that to Adah? If I showed her more kindness now, could I be forgiven for making her a cripple? But a debt of that size seems so impossible to pay back it is a dread thing even to start on.

Mother used her own reserves, without stealing the life out of Ruth May or anyone else. She seemed to draw strength right out of the muggy air. Sometimes I saw her sit on the side of the bed for a while before getting up, drawing in deep breaths through thin, pursed lips. She had her good and bad phases, but finally stopped sleepwalking once and for all. It happened rather suddenly one day, after Rachel burned up an egg omelet. She burned two in a row, to be exact—she had the fire in the stove stoked up way too high.The only way to get a slow heat for baking bread or cooking a tender thing like an omelet is to build up a big fire first with good, stout wood and then cook while the coals die slowly down. Rachel could never get the hang of that. She was trying to start the fire and cook all at once, which will never get you anywhere.You can’t keep a new fire low; it must grow or die. Nelson taught me that.

But Nelson had gone to get water before dark so Rachel was trying to cook all alone. It was her day in charge of dinner and she had failed to think ahead. Now I could hear her screaming vile things out there in the kitchen house. I went out to investigate and let her know we were hungry.

“I’ll hungry you,”she yelled, ‘Can’t you see I’ve only got two hands?”

I could. She was using both of them to gouge at the burned skillet with a wooden spatula of Nelson’s making. Her hair had come down from its French knot and stuck all over her face, and her good blouse was smeared with black ash. She looked like Cinderella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among the ashes.

“You’ve built the fire up way too hot,” I told her.

“Go to hell, Leah just go straight, directly to hell.”

“I’m just trying to help. Look, see how the metal’s glowing red hot on top? When it gets like that you just have to wait and let it cool off. Then you can try again.”

Rachel blew out her breath hard. “Oh, whatever would I do without my child-progeny sister to tell me what to do.”

“Prodigy,” I corrected.

“Shut up, damn it! I wish you’d just shut up forever like your Goddamn deaf-mute genius twin!” She whirled around and threw the spatula, not missing my head by all that wide a margin. It banged loudly on the back door of the main house. I was shocked, not so much by her language but by the strength of that pitch. Usually Rachel threw underhanded and was no threat at all.

“Oh, P.S., Leah, there’s no more eggs,” she added with satisfaction. “For your information.”

“Well, we have to eat something. I guess we’ll just eat the burnt ones.”

“This! Oh I’m sure. I’d rather die than have to serve this to Father.” She made a horrible face at the pan and gave it a vicious shake. “This adventure in fine dining looks like it’s been drug through hell backwards.”

Rachel looked up at me and clapped her left hand over her mouth. I turned around. There was Mother in the doorway behind me, holding up the spatula.

“Rachel,” Mother said. “I believe you dropped this.”

We stood frozen before the altar of a red-hot cookstove. Rachel took the spatula without a word.

“Rachel, sugar, let me tell you something. I understand you’re miserable. But I’m afraid this is your penance for sixteen years of putting up your nose at my cooking. I want to see you bring.that mess in here and serve it up to your father and all the rest of us, including yourself. And I want to see you clean your own plate, without one word. Tomorrow I’ll start teaching you how to cook.”

Mother kept her promise. She’d gotten up changed from her month in bed. For one thing, she was now inclined to say whatever was on her mind right in front of God and everybody. Even Father. She didn’t speak to him directly; it was more like she was talking straight to God, or the air, or the lizards who’d paused halfway up the walls, and if Father should overhear her, that was his nickel. She declared she was taking us out of here as soon as she found the way to do it. She had even asked Eeben Axelroot flat out if he would take us. Not at the moment, was his reply, since he’d probably get shot down over Leopoldville with a planeload of white ladies, and he didn’t want to make that kind of headlines. But on another day he came back smiling sideways and confided to Mama that every man has his price. From the looks of Mama, she means to pay it.

I was shocked and frightened to see her flout Father’s authority, but truthfully, I could feel something similar moving around in my own heart. For the first time in my life I doubted his judgment. He’d made us stay here, when everybody from Nelson to the King of Belgium was saying white missionaries ought to go home. For us to be here now, each day, was Father’s decision and his alone. Yet he wasn’t providing for us, but only lashing out at us more and more. He wasn’t able to protect Mother and Ruth May from getting sick. If it’s all up to him to decide our fate, shouldn’t protection be part of the bargain?

I wanted to believe in him. We had much more of the Lord’s work to do here, that was plain. And ‘what better time to do it, Father had told me reasonably on the plane coming back from Leopoldville, than in the festive atmosphere of Independence, when all Congolese are free to learn from us and make their own choices? Father believes they will choose the Lord’s infinite love, and us, of course, as we are God’s special delegation to Kilanga. He says “we’re being brave and righteous. Bravery and righteousness—those are two things that cannot go unrewarded in the sight of the Lord. Father never doubts it, and I can see that for him it’s true. He’s lived all his days by the laws of Christ, standing up tall and starting to preach in tent revivals when he was hardly older than I am now, and for all that time people flocked to his word and his wisdom. He was brave in the war, I’m sure, for he won a Purple Heart. For Father, the Kingdom of the Lord is an uncomplicated place, where tall, handsome boys fight on the side that always wins. I suppose it resembles Killdeer, Mississippi, where Father grew up, and played the position of quarterback in high school. In that kind of a place it is even all right for people to knock into each other hard every once in a while, in a sportsmanlike way, leaving a few bruises in the service of the final score.

But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don’t quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl’s bravery and righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? Just try being the smartest and most Christian seventh-grade girl in Bethlehem, Georgia. Your classmates will smirk and call you a square. Call you worse, if you’re Adah.

All my life I’ve tried to set my shoes squarely into his footprints, believing if only I stayed close enough to him those same clean, simple laws would rule my life as well. That the Lord would see my goodness and fill me with light. Yet with each passing day I find myself farther away. There’s a great holy war going on in my father’s mind, in which we’re meant to duck and run and obey orders and fight for all the right things, but I can’t always make out the orders or even tell which side I am on exactly. I’m not even allowed to carry a gun. I’m a girl. He has no inkling.

If his decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn’t right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.

Rachel

I WAS IN THE KITCHEN HOUSE slaving over a hot stove when everybody came running by. All the raggedy little children with the mothers right behind them, all hollering “Tata Bidibidi! Tata Bidibidi!” That means Mr. Bird, according to Leah, who ran right out to join them. If Mr. Bird—whosoever that might be—was going to put in an appearance, Leah sure wasn’t going to miss it. They were saying he’d come up the river in some kind of old boat and was down there unloading his family and what not.

Being the new Chef Boy-ar-dee of the Price family, I had no time for fun and games.The only way I’d ever find out what was up in Kilanga, nowadays, was if it passed by the door of our kitchen house.

Well, turns out I didn’t have to wait long, for they made straight for our doorstep! What to our wondering eyes should appear out there on the porch but a white man, very old and skinny, wearing a denim shirt so old you could practically see through it and a little wooden cross hanging on a leather string around his neck, the way the Congolese wear their evil-eye fetishes. He had a white beard and twinkly blue eyes, and all in all gave the impression of what Santa Claus would look like if he’d converted to Christian and gone without a good meal since last Christmas. When I got out to the porch he was already shaking hands with Mother and introducing his wife, a tall Congolese woman, and their children, who were variable in age and color but mostly were hiding behind the long colorful skirts of Mrs. Bird. Mother was confused, but she always has the good manners to be hospitalizing even to perfect strangers, so she asked them in and told me to run squeeze some orange juice. So back to the kitchen for Rachel the slave!

By the time I got back with a big dripping jar of orange juice and flopped down in a chair to rest, I’d already missed everything. I couldn’t say what or who they were, but yet here was Mother yakking it up with them like old home week. They sat in our living-room chairs asking about people in the village like they knew their way around. “Mama Mwanza, och, how is she? Mama Lo is still doing coiffure and pressing palm oil? Bless her heart, she must be a hundred and ten, and she never married at all—that just goes to show you. Now Mama Tataba, where is she? Ah, but Anatole! We had better go see him at once.” That kind of thing. Reverend Santa seemed like a kindly old man. The way he talked sounded part Yankee, part foreign, like one of those friendly Irish policemen in the old movies: “Och, mind you!”

Ruth May, who’d been up out of bed for a few days and seemed to be on the mend, was so enraptured with him she sat with her head practically leaning up against his worn-out trousers. The old man rested a hand on Ruth May’s head and listened very closely to everything Mother said, nodding thoughtfully in a way that was quite complimentary. His wife was approximately a hundred years younger than him and attractive in her own way, and was mostly quiet. But she could speak English perfectly. They asked how things -were going down at the church. Father was out somewhere looking for trouble as usual, and we hardly knew how to answer that question ourselves. Mother said, “Well, it’s difficult. Nathan’s very frustrated. It’s all so clear to him that the words of Jesus will bring grace to their lives. But people here have such different priorities from what we’re used to.”

“They are very religious people, you know,” the old man said. “For all that.”

“How do you mean?” Mother asked.
         

“Everything they do is with one eye to the spirit. When they plant their yams and manioc, they’re praying. When they harvest, they’re praying. Even when they conceive their children, I think they’re praying.”

Mother seemed very interested. But Leah crossed her arms and asked, “Do you mean praying to their own pagan gods?”

Reverend Santa smiled at Leah. “What do you imagine our God thinks of this little corner of His creation: the flowering trees in the forest, the birds, the drenching downpours, the heat of the sun—do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Oh, yes,” Leah said, straight-A pupil as always.