A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (12 page)

· 11 ·

Thrown Off by a Storm

A
N UNSEASONABLE RAIN
interrupted Emma’s school one February morning, the children running out to bathe themselves. She gave up trying to gather them back to the piazza, relieved Tela of Sarah, and sent everyone home. Two weeks later, Sarah was fussy at midday. By dinner, she seemed in a chill. In the night, she developed a fever. Emma and Henry made a pallet on the dining table, wrapped the little girl in wet cloth, and kept vigil. Henry sang,
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird.
His fine, melodious voice.

After the fever broke, they took turns holding Sarah and they prayed without ceasing. Finally, the child looked at Emma and held her gaze. “One two three four remember,” she said, and kissed the infant’s nose. In her journal, Emma wrote,
Let me remember my Creator with praise.

At ten weeks, Sarah grasped and shook her African rattle in spasms of delight, sometimes hitting her own forehead. She squealed with happiness more than she cried. One Saturday Emma dressed the baby in a blue frock with white smocking and presented her to Henry, and they all together went into town under the umbrella. Several men wanted him to stop and drink palm wine, but happily for Emma, he declined.

“She’ll have the smell of Yoruba land in her brain like we know pine sap,” Henry said.

They returned home to find Duro roasting two
aparo
, a local game bird, for their dinner.
He must be grateful too
, Emma thought,
that we are all well
.

Later Emma believed her daughter might have started coughing Sunday, but they were greatly pressed with their congregation and a thanksgiving for the early rains. So it was only when Sarah stopped nursing on Monday that she noticed something wrong. The child’s breathing became almost a drowning. By Tuesday, her stools were watery. The child was too small a thing for the tinctures they had. Moore suggested a remedy of honey with three drops of whiskey to help her breathing. Henry packed Emma’s engorged breasts with green banana leaves and she held Sarah in the curve of her lap, her chest throbbing. She thought of the woman of Canaan who begged Jesus for help with a sick daughter.
Give us crumbs
, she prayed. The next morning, the dysentery stopped and Sarah searched Emma’s chest. After the feeding, Emma lay her daughter in the cradle, going to attend her toilet. When she came back, she noticed the baby’s dark hair across her cheek. She thought to brush it aside but stopped, holding her arms straight before her like a person beginning a dive.

“No,” she said, severely. “You come back.” She said it again, her taut arms beginning to tremble. “Now you come back.” She pulled her hands in and squeezed them tight, not yet touching Sarah, whose lips were losing their color. “You come.” Emma’s knees went weak, and she had to think hard to keep from falling. “Come.” She released her hands and lifted the baby. Sarah’s head fell back strangely before Emma caught and straightened it. She trembled, lifting and jostling the infant. “Now you come back,” she whispered.

She did not call Henry but sat and rocked Sarah. The muscle of her heart grew sore like her breasts, and then it became so heavy and large it seemed an independent thing, a rare and growing organism that would break her rib cage.

Within an hour of Henry’s finding her so, women of the town arrived. They swept Emma’s arms with their hands. “
E pele o
,” they said over and over,
sorry
. It seemed they carried a general grief for all women, and their collective presence gave Emma a distance from her pain. She forgot about Henry as various women took her hands, caressing them. Baskets of food mounted at the door; gifts were laid in her lap. At some point Emma knew Henry must be preparing the baby for burial. She stood and oranges scattered across the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” Henry said. Emma clutched his coat and they held each other. He had Sarah in a white dress.

“Why?” Emma said.

“You did nothing wrong,” he said.

Emma felt her shoulders lift and fall, but she could not cry. When she pushed away from him at last, Henry’s eyes had that funny look.

“What?” she said.

“It’s my fault,” he said.

“No. No. It’s no one’s fault. We must comfort one another,” she said.

“I should have learned more about treating a child,” he said.

“We have been with her together. You cannot blame yourself.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said again.

Perhaps, Emma imagined, if they never moved, if they only stood just so, holding each other, they might all three of them turn to stone and she would never have to feel again. But then a terrible thought obliterated everything. “She wasn’t baptized,” she cried, feeling her voice red in her throat. She pushed away from Henry and pounded her fists against his shoulders. “She wasn’t baptized!”

He forced her arms down and pulled her back to him. “Shh,” he said, “she’s an angel now.”

Emma felt herself turn liquid with terrible relief. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Yes. Her heart was in yours and yours is in God.” He held her close, and she felt how bony his chest was. “I’ll go to the man who carves veranda posts for the king,” he said into her hair.

As Emma waited, women came and lay down in the yard and turned themselves in the dirt until their blue cloth shone copper. They cried with the high sharp sounds that birds might make if thrown off course by a storm. The yeasty smell of
gari
cooking on a nearby fire filled the air, and Emma thought that Africans knew better than anyone how to weep with those who weep. She wished she could lie with the women and roll in the dirt.

Henry came home with a small box, like a cabinet, adorned on the lid with a bas-relief of doves. Rev. Moore was with him. He had only just come back to town and heard the news. Emma felt strangely aloof seeing the small coffin and receiving her neighbor. Even when Sarah was composed in the interior, Emma thought she was more doll than daughter.

They buried Sarah in the chapel yard, making her the first occupant of the cemetery. Henry made the homily.
We do not grieve as those who have no hope, and yet we cannot help but grieve.

Two days later Emma returned to her students. She knew they knew. Like their mothers, they caressed her arms and hands and even her cheeks, and finally she cried. She cried for four weeks. She believed she would die from her grief. Rev. Moore was less of a solace than she might have hoped, not that he didn’t try. But Emma was no longer interested in books or music or having tea. When she and her husband held each other, it seemed they were lost people. Her only relief came in the mornings, sitting with Duro in the kitchen before full light as he prepared breakfast. Neither he nor she spoke, but Emma found his actions whole and rounded, the sounds and smells of cooking comforting. She thought of how Uncle Eli and Mittie Ann had discovered moments of life within their control as a way to bear their losses. Mittie Ann respooling her yarn. Uncle Eli’s small carvings—they were his own, not made for any reason but to bring him ease. She carried the letter opener in her pocket for several days. In her journal, she made a brief record:
Our dearest earthly possession has taken flight. Sadness in the house.

A month later, Emma believed she was strong enough to pack up the baby things. She stooped to place them in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. But when she closed the drawer and looked up, the room and the world beyond the window made no sense to her. All was phantom. Her skin crawled. She lay back on the floor and rocked.
My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?
“How have I sinned?” she cried. And in her innermost heart she wondered if there was a God.

“I’m sending you to visit the Hathaways in Ibadan,” Henry insisted. “Moore is going down.” Whether the journey was difficult or easy, Emma could hardly have said, but she knew it was a relief to her that the couple’s marriage—lovely as it was—did not include children. From the Hathaways’ front porch, Emma pondered the African women passing by. It might be that most of them had lost a child. But did they feel it as terribly as she did? Then she remembered how the women of Ijaye had mourned with her and was ashamed for her calculation. One night, Emma woke in a fright. She had dreamed of Sarah, but the baby was a growing girl. They were together at the stream down from the house in Ijaye. They were waiting for Henry—only Henry wasn’t going to come. Everything was confused. Sarah held the silver cup from Moore and she kept filling it and letting the water go. A man appeared. He picked up Sarah and carried her away. Emma wakened herself with her own scream. Anna came running, and Emma told her the dream. “What do you suppose it means?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“It was just as if she was stolen,” Emma said.

In the morning she dressed and ate breakfast, then lay on a divan on the Hathaways’ porch. Her heart was an open wound, her legs like lead.

Several days later Emma woke to the smell. Sweet and woodsy. By midday, they could see the haze on the horizon.

“Firing the land,” Rev. Hathaway said. “The end of the dry season and there’s little left to eat. The blaze drives out small animals. Boys and men with hunting sticks range around, waiting for supper to emerge. It’s quite clever, really. Clears the farm of overgrowth. In a few weeks, they’ll till the soil.”

Sure enough, a few hours later small bands of hunters appeared along the road, nearly every one with some catch or other. Even birds, whose wings had been singed by the billowing blaze so that when they flew, they carried the fire until they fell into the arms of their captors.

There was something like a carnival about it, the way the men came in with their minor yet vital success: a cane-rat, a hare. The panorama, the little homecomings Emma imagined as the men met their wives with a gift of meat—it sent her heart toward Henry. She was ready to go home.

· 12 ·

So Curious

Dear Mother,

This letter will go nowhere but into the fire, you having left this world twenty-six years ago—though it is but a twinkling of an eye in heaven. I wonder less now that you left us so early, remembering all the infants you buried. I do not believe I was much of a comfort to you.

My wife and I have lost our firstborn at three months. She was to me already a complete being—so curious, watching everything, quite amiable. I would never have believed I could love so deeply and for no cause except the child existed.

Emma finds the loss almost unbearable, and watching her grief, I am shattered. I sent her to stay with friends for a week in the hope that a change in atmosphere might improve her spirits. Now it’s myself I worry about. I had thought in her absence to dispel the sadness by preaching, meeting up with the men in town. I have tried. But I seem more ghost than man. I have the heart for nothing. When I think on the child, my head turns cold as ice. I consider my own sinfulness. My abdomen seems torn with knives.

Why was the child given to us and taken so quickly away? God does not act spitefully but with purpose. Ever and again I seek to understand my fundamental flaw. Is it lust? Have I wanted too much? Do I strike out prematurely or not quickly enough in seeking to do God’s will? The blame cannot lie with my wife, who is sterling to a fault, if that is possible. It must lie in me. I hope it is not a sin for me to ask you to pray for me in heaven.

In eternal love, your son

Henry

· 13 ·

Where Are You?

B
EGINNING WITH LATE-
A
PRIL
rains, Emma and Henry were ill on and off, Henry most severely. His fevers pitched him higher and lower than hers did. After such a bout, he was moody and sorrowful, and Emma wondered if he dwelled too much on Sarah. Certainly she wondered at the multiple names associated with her husband’s condition and the lack of remedy. Sometimes it was called jungle fever, other times swamp fever, other times malaria; then it was the old ailment—his spleen and liver; then he blamed his errant personality, his unwillingness to submit to God. The pages she devoted to Henry’s illness read like a hospital log.

Thursday: Henry hot with fever, refuses food

Friday: Fever abated; complains of aches in his joints

Saturday: Poor husband plunged back into illness, much trouble with his spleen. I took a short walk. Saw a ritual slaughter of a chicken, blood doused upon a stone. Walked farther until I came upon girls washing at the stream. Their friendliness refreshed me.

Emma wondered about the laudanum. “It seems to squander your thought more than it helps in recovery,” she said one evening.

Henry raged. “Don’t I know how I am lessened by these eternal afflictions?” Though they had been preparing for bed, he lit the lamp and declared his intention to work on the vocabulary. “Does anyone know the value of what I do?” She heard him moving papers around in the next room, a chair pulled out, a book slammed. “Heaven help me!”

Emma trembled that he should go on so when more than anything they needed to care for one another. Just over a year ago, she was anticipating her marriage.

A moment later and Henry was back, his face hollowed in the meager light. “What is this?” he said, grasping a sheaf of papers and shaking them toward her.

“What?” she said.

“This?” He shook them again.

Some pages of his vocabulary work appeared eaten by white ants.

“That cook of yours,” he said. “He sits doing nothing half the day. He ought to have been looking into the house, tidying up. He would have discovered the problem before it went so far.”

“Duro has plenty to do; we never hired him to clean,” she said, near weeping that they had lapsed into agonized quarreling.

“You might have looked to it. I built this house and no one can keep it? Why not leave honey for the ants?”

Henry went over it again in the morning with Duro until Emma thought the man would walk off.

“Are you preaching today or are you ill?” she said when he came indoors.

“It’s the house,” he said. “I built too fine a house. I suppose I deserve to be robbed by ants. The Africans will always see us as aliens.” He drew himself up, and she saw how lost his body was in his clothes.

It was useless to talk with him. He seemed deeply engaged somewhere else, in a world beyond her. That evening he remained in the parlor while she prepared for bed. She heard him speak aloud but to no one in particular. “No one knows where the stone fell, and I fear that I shall never find it.” Had he fallen asleep and dreamed? Was it Sarah he meant?

She found him by the lamp, his eyes open but blank. “Where are you, Henry?” she said. He seemed to look through her. She took his hands and placed them on her face and finally he said, “Emma.”

The next week she thought he was better until she found him in the storage room with his shirt off and a horsewhip. She stared at him. Neither moved. For some reason she thought of her father and how perhaps he had been right to be against her marriage, but then she considered:
So be it, but I did marry this man and I will not let this happen.

“You,” she said, “listen to me.” She lifted her arm in a way of expressing her being.

His eyes were on her, but she was unsure if she had affected him one way or the other.

“How else,” he said, “am I to pull out of this nervousness? I’ll go mad.”

“Now we are together,” she said. “You put that down unless you would whip me. This is not God’s will.” She had to say the sentences one more time, and he released the whip. She took a step toward him and waited until he held out his hand. She took him to bed and held him through the night, and the incident was not spoken of. She looked for the whip in the storage room but could not find it. She wondered if Duro had put it away, knowing.

A few days later, walking on a lane, Emma saw an old man stand and turn to face her, and for all the world he looked like Uncle Eli. She started toward him but he moved away, seeming to vanish into the blue hovering smoke of the market.

She recalled her last time with the old man, his hands on the frayed quilt. The thought she wanted to remember was so close. She shook her head to one side as one does when water has stopped an ear. But no memory come to her, and she walked on home with the sense of a treasure lost though she could not even remember the treasure.