The Poisonwood Bible (48 page)

“The Reverend Mother would wash your mouth with disinfectant.”

“The Reverend Mother has more pressing needs for her disinfectant.” And nowhere near enough, either, I thought. In the privacy of my little room I’ve damned many men to hell, President Eisen-hower, King Leopold, and my own father included. I damn them for throwing me into a war in which white skin comes down on the wrong side, pure and simple.

“If God is really taking a hand in things”, informed Therese, “he is bitterly mocking the hope of brotherly love. He is making sure that color will matter forever.” With no more to say between a devout farm girl and a mine sweeper, we folded our sheets and our different-colored habits.

The Simbas would shoot me on sight, it’s true. They’re an army of pure desperation and hate. Young Stanleyville boys and old village men, anyone who can find a gun or a machete, all banded together. They tie nkisis of leaves around their wrists and declare themselves impermeable to bullets, immune to death. And so they are, Anatole says, “For how can you kill what is already dead?” We’ve heard how they sharpened their teeth and stormed the invaders in northeastern Congo, feeding on nothing but rage.

Thirty whites killed in Stanley, two Americans among them—we heard that over the shortwave radio and knew what it meant. By nightfall the United Nations would launch their answer, an air and land attack. The Combined Forces, they’re calling this invading army: the U.S.,Belgium, and hired soldiers left over from the Bay of Pigs. Over the next weeks we heard a hundred more times about the whites killed by Simbas in Stanleyville. In three languages: Radio France, the BBC, and Mobutu’s Lingala newscasts from Leopoldville, the news was all one. Those thirty white people, rest their souls, have purchased an all-out invasion against the pro-Independents. How many Congolese were killed by the Belgians and labor and starvation, by the special police, and now by the UN soldiers, we will never know. They’ll go uncounted. Or count for nothing, if that is possible.

The night the helicopters came in, the vibrations pummeled us out of our beds. I thought the old stone convent was falling down. We ran outside with the wind from the blades tearing down on us from just above the trees, whipping our plain white nightgowns into a froth. The sisters registered their dismay, crossed themselves, and hurried back to bed. I couldn’t. I sat on the ground, hugging my knees, and started to cry, for the first time since time began, it seems. Crying with my mouth open, howling for Ruth May and the useless waste of our mistakes and all that’s going to happen now, everyone already dead and not yet dead, known or unknown to me, every Congolese child with no hope. I felt myself falling apart— that by morning I might be just bones melting into the moldy soil of the sisters’ vegetable garden. A pile of eggless, unmothering bones, nothing more: the future I once foretold.

To hold myself together I tried to cry for something more manageable. I settled on Anatole. Kneeling before our little statue of the Virgin with an eroded face I endeavored to pray for my future husband. For a chance. For happiness and love and, if you can’t pray for sex outright, the possibility of children. I found I could hardly remember Anatole s face, and couldn’t picture God at all. He just ended up looking like my father. I tried to imagine Jesus, then, in the body of Brother Fowles.Tata Bidibidi, with his kind, pretty wife and their precarious boat dispensing milk powder and quinine and love to children along the river. Attend to Creation, was his advice. Well, the palm trees in our courtyard were ripped and flattened from the wind of the helicopters, and looked far too defeated by war to accept my prayers. So I focused on the sturdy walls of the compound and prayed straight to the black stones. I implored them, “Please let there be sturdy walls like these around Anatole. Please let them hold up a roof that will keep this awful sky from falling on him.” I prayed to old black African stones unearthed from the old dark ground that has been here all along. One solid thing to believe in.

Rachel Axelroot

JOHANNESBURG 1964

IF I’D KNOWN WHAT MARRIAGE was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

It isn’t living here in South Africa that I mind. It hardly even seems like a foreign country here. You can get absolutely anything you need in the stores: Breck Special Formulated Shampoo, Phillips’ milk of magnesia, Campbell’s tomato soup, honestly you name it! And the scenery is beautiful, especially taking the train down to the beach. My girlfriends and I love to pack up a picnic basket with champagne and Tobler biscuits (which actually are cookies, not biscuits—imagine my surprise when I bought some aiming to serve them with gravy!), and then we just head out to the countryside for a view of the green rolling hills. Of course you have to look the other way when the train goes by the townships, because those people don’t have any perspective of what good scenery is, that’s for sure. They will make their houses out of a piece of rusted tin or the side of a crate—and leave the writing part on the outside for all to see! But you just have to try and understand, they don’t have the same ethics as us.That is one part of living here. Being understanding of the differences.

Otherwise this country is much like you’d find anywhere. Even the weather is very typical. I have always felt that people in other countries just don’t have any idea that Africa could be this normal. The only bad thing is that with the equator being above us the change of seasons conies backwards, which does take some getting used to. But do I complain? Heck, no, I just slap up our Christmas tree in the middle of summer and sing “Deck the Halls” and have a martini on the patio and don’t give it another thought anymore. I am a very adaptable kind of person. I don’t even mind speaking Afrikaans to the maid, which is practically the same thing as English once you get the hang of it. As long as you’re just giving orders, anyway, which are more or less about the same in any language. And if you hear the word “Nuus” on the radio, for example, why, any fool can figure out that means “News.” So you just get up and switch over to the English station!

I have a good life, as far as the overall surroundings. I have put the past behind me and don’t even think about it. Do I have a family? I sometimes have to stop and ask myself. Do I have a mother, father, and sisters? Did I even come from anywhere? Because it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like I’m just right here and always was. I have a little tiny picture of my sisters and me cut out in a heart shape, which I happened to be wearing in a gold locket when I left our unfortunate circumstances in the Congo. Sometimes I get it out and stare at those teeny little sad white faces, trying to make out where I am in that picture. That’s the only time I ever think about Ruth May being dead. Which I’ve said was all because of Leah, but really, mainly, it’s probably Father’s fault because the rest of us just had to go along with whatever he said. If it was up to me, I would never have stepped foot in that snake-infected place. I would have sat home and let other people go be missionaries if they wanted to, bully for them! But the picture is so small I have to hold it practically at the end of my nose to make out who is who. It hurts my eyes to focus on it, so mostly it stays in the drawer.

Like I said, I am content with my present circumstances for the most part. My misery comes from a different concern: my marriage. There is just no word bad enough for Eeben Axelroot. Who has still

not made an honest woman out of me, I might add! He just treats me like his slave-girlfriend-housemaid, having a roll in the hay when he feels like it and then running off doing God knows what for months at a time, leaving me alone in my prime of life. But if I threaten to leave him, he calls me the poor little rich girl (which, if we actually were rich, would be a whole different story) and says I can’t leave him because no man we know around here could afford the upkeep! That is completely unfair. Everyone we know has a nicer house than us. He received a large sum for his service in the Congo, a decent nest egg you might say, but have I seen it? No, sir, and believe you me I looked under the mattress, because that is the kind of person he is. Actually, there’s a gun under there. He says he invested the money. He claims he’s gotten back involved with the diamond business in the Congo and has many foreign partners, but you still have to remind him to take a bath on any given day. So if he has foreign partners, I don’t think they are of a very high class. I told him so, too. Well, he raised up his head from his beer bottle just long enough to have a good laugh at my expense. He said, “Baby, your intellectual capacity is out of this world!” Meaning the vacuum of outer space, ha, ha. His favorite joke. He said my brain was such a blank slate he could tell me every state secret he knows and then march me straight down to the Damnistry International and not have a thing to worry about. He said the government should hire me to work for the other side. This is not lovey-dovey quarreling, mind you. He says these things and laughs in my face! Oh, I have cried till I threatened to ruin my own complexion, let me tell you.

But not anymore. I have abided my time and kept my eyes open, while in the meantime telling him off good in the bathroom mirror whenever I’m all alone and he’s not there, just like I used to do to Father. “You just wait,” I tell him. “I’ll show you whose mind is a blank slate!”

And now Rachel Price is about to have her day. I have a trick up my sleeve which I haven’t told a soul about, even though it’s the God’s honest truth and I know it: I have a good shot at the Ambassador. 

Actually Daniel is the First Attache, but the French are all so much of a higher class, regardless of their position. Like I said, we meet the best people through the Templetons, who have divine shindigs. “Come over for drinks and a braai,” meaning a barbecue, is what we always say in Johannesburg. Those parties have a very international flair, what with the scotch whiskey, American LPs, and the embassy gossip. After that one time the Prime Minister got shot in the head, there was a big old crackdown on the blacks, which was absolutely necessary, but resulted in misunderstandings at many of the foreign embassies. The nation of France, especially, has gotten all high-and-mighty about threatening to remove their associations from South Africa. We’ve all been hearing for weeks now that Daniel is going to be reposted to Brazzaville. His little Frenchy wife Robine will never hack it, I can see that as plain as day. She’s well known for just as soon firing her maids as looking at them, and as far as she is concerned, everything that lies outside the civilized boundaries of Johannesburg is Darkest Africa. She and Daniel were already on the verge of a breakup, even if they didn’t know it. So I saw my opportunity, you might say. “She doesn’t know how lucky she is,” I whispered in his ear. “I’ll tell you a little secret. If it was me, I’d go with you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” This was two Saturdays ago, over at the Templetons’ when we were slow-dancing around the pool to “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by the Four Seasons. I happen to remember that was the song. Because just that very morning I’d found out about another one of Axelroot’s little piccadillies, but I’m a big girl so I just put my hair up, marched downtown, and bought me a brand-new siren-red bathing suit with a bare midriff. Keeping up the insurance is how I think of it. Like they say in the magazines, Just wear a smile and a Janzen! And that is exactly what I was doing two Saturdays ago at the Templetons’ party.

“After what all I lived through in the Congo,” I cooed to Daniel, “I could take Brazzaville and keep right on smiling.”

And guess what: that is just what I’m going to do! I might as well get started packing my bags and getting measured for a Dior gown.

After what I know about that man, I can wrap him around my little finger. And what he did to me, boy! A man only does that kind of thing when he has certain feelings. I can tell you with absolute pos-itivity that I am soon going to be Mrs. Daniel Attache-to-the-Ambassador DuPree. Eeben Axelroot will be high and dry with no one but the maid to pick up his socks. And Daniel, bless his heart, will never even know what hit him.

Leah Price Ngemba

BIKOKI STATION JANUARY 17,1965

IT CAN FEEL COLD HERE, in the early-morning haze of the dry season. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe my blood’s gotten thin, a weakness Father used to accuse us of when we complained of the chill winters in north Georgia. Certainly there’s no winter here: the equator just about runs smack-dab through curbed. Anatole tells me I’m passing from the northern to the southern hemisphere whenever I go out to poke up the fire in the kitchen house, so I should consider myself worldly, even though it’s nearly impossible these days to leave the station.

The plain bitter truth is that this day chills me to the bone. I try not to pay attention to the month and date, but the blossoming poinsettias roar at me that it’s coming anyway, and on January 17 I’ll wake up too early, with an ache in my chest. Why did I have to crow, “Who’s brave enough to go out there with me?” Knowing her as I did, that she’d never stand to be called a coward by anyone, least of all her sister.

It’s a bleak anniversary in our household. I killed a snake this morning, just whacked it into pieces with my machete and flung all three of them up in the trees. It was the big black one that’s been hanging around the back door since the end of the rains. Anatole came out and clucked his tongue at my handiwork.

“That snake was not doing us any harm, Beene.”

“I’m sorry, but I woke up this morning craving an eye for an eye.”

“What does this mean?”   

 “It means that snake crossed my path on the wrong day.” “He was eating a lot of rats. Now they will be into your manioc.”

“Black rats or white ones? I’m not sure I can tell the difference.” He looked at me a long time, trying to work me out. Finally he asked, “Why do you think your sadness is so special? Children died every day in Kilanga.They are dying here and now”

“Oh, how could I forget, Anatole. She was just one of a million people who left the world that day, along with the great Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. I’m sure in the long run Ruth May hardly mattered at all.”