A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (20 page)

“We’ll salute the king and take our leave,” Henry said.

“Thank you,” Emma said. She reached for Henry’s arm. The king straightened a bit as they approached.

“Ah. Baba Bowman. I hope you have enjoyed your visit,” he said.

“You are a magnanimous king,” Henry said.

“We are ready for you to stay in Ogbomoso.” This was all ceremonial, Emma knew. She wished the Baale would stop it.

“We remain as God wills,” Henry said.

The king looked off somewhere. “In our own thinking,” he said, “God directs the people through the king.” As he spoke he lifted his hands to the heavens and then tapped his chest.

Emma saw Henry’s blue eyes go funny. “We believe God speaks directly to His disciples,” Henry said. “Good day, sir,” he finished, and bowed only slightly. Emma stumbled backward, unsure of what had just happened. Some of the attending chiefs started a twitter, and the king laughed deeply out of his belly. Emma caught sight of a man looking on them with what seemed absolute contempt, a priest perhaps.

She was surprised when Henry didn’t turn Caesar into the compound but headed out the city gate. A brief shower came up and they rode right into it. Emma could smell the earth.
My husband is as disgusted as I was
, she thought,
and needed a breath of fresh air
. They came to a large flat rock, and the horse’s hooves sounded prettily on it. Henry pulled Caesar up and dismounted, took his hat off, and ran his hand through his hair.

“Did you hear him?” he said.

“What do you mean?” She had thought Henry would say something sympathetic toward her. She put her hand on her newly round belly.

“The Baale announcing in public that I’m his prisoner!”

“Did he say that?”

“He claimed divine right to direct my movement.”

“That was more or less the case in Ijaye,” she said.

“He announced it to the town. If I submit, I might as well agree that the Baale is more powerful than the Christian God.”

“He was making traditional conversation,” she said. Why did Henry continue so prideful? Couldn’t he come in love toward her pain, sharing the heart and mind of Christ against the heathenism of this country? She needed him.

“I’ll leave any time I’m ready,” Henry said. He pulled out his flask and drank fiercely from it, then wandered for a bit on the rock before coming back to mount the horse behind her. In Emma flowed the tide of sorrow women feel when husbands tout their power but expose only weakness.

· 24 ·

Souvenir

H
ENRY BROUGHT
E
MMA
sliced bananas on a plate. She took it to mean he was sorry for losing his temper after the Baale’s birthday. She and Duro prepared omelets, using onions and tomatoes from the market. Emma didn’t know how tomatoes could grow in the dry season, but they did. While the children helped Duro with morning chores, she finished off one of her patchwork pillows. She held it at arm’s length for a final study. A square of native silk in the center and around that swatches from an old print dress. The work was good. She might save it for Anna Hathaway. Before going out for her school day, she checked on Henry. She found him in the parlor studying his maps of West and North Africa. He had marked out the line of stations. At the moment, his eyes appeared to hover over Ilorin, and her husband seemed hardly to notice her presence. He had often shown her how, from Ilorin, he could reach Zaria, then Kano; beyond Kano, the vast Saharan trade route opened up: Agades, Ghat, Murzuk, and finally Tripoli and the Mediterranean.

“Why are you studying that map?” she said, knowing full well why. She felt dropped from a cliff; look how he had just lulled her into thinking he would be kind and fair. Her anger grew like a storm.

“Why shouldn’t I study it?” Henry said. “It’s the country we live in. There’s not another man out here thinking on how to develop the mission. Who else is going to do it?”

“But we aren’t going anywhere soon,” she said, determined to halt him. Her mind was a muscle of argument: the baby, its needs, her needs, Henry’s own need for recuperation, their marriage! She would not speak to him if he was going to plan their destruction so willfully. She left the room, her head buzzing with fear. She wished for her mother or Catherine, someone who would bring a bit of fruitcake and a large dose of sympathy. She longed even for Henry but a different Henry, the one who had said so tenderly, “Hold your hat so it doesn’t fall off.”

For days she and her husband were like wandering pilgrims who have lost each other in the mist and will only by some fantastic happenstance find each other again. They did not pray together. She was hurt and withdrawn; he acted as if she were indulging a mood and he would not help her out of it.
Our work is not so trying as are our relations
, Emma wrote one evening.
A gift given and retracted. These hardships might lead to despair. Where is our remedy?
She was afraid to express herself more directly, lest she cover pages of her journal with complaint against Henry. She turned her affections to Wole and Abike. The boy came often wishing to look into her “oracle.” She could not get him to stop calling the writing box by that name, just as she had not yet talked him out of the blue beads around his waist. She had shown him how to hold the prism to his eye, to see a spectrum of light.

“Is it God?” he said.

“A reflection of God,” she said, somehow believing he would understand. She had great faith in his brilliance.

At last a minor crisis offered respite to Emma’s marriage. On the last day of October, Duro reported that death was chasing his mother. He came to them wearing his native
agbada
,
asking for leave to visit her. He looked quite distinguished in the traditional man’s dress.

“Her right leg is swelling,” he said.

When Henry asked how long this had been the case, the man thought briefly before answering.

“Several months.”

“And not the left leg?”

“Not so bad,” he said.

Emma thought of the woman she had seen in Ijaye who suffered the swelling disease. It seemed too hard that poor Duro must find his mother in that condition.

“Let me discuss it with my wife,” Henry said.

The phrase
my wife
sent a sprout of happiness into Emma’s heart. She was immediately refreshed. They left the courtyard and moved to the parlor. “The mother isn’t far,” Henry said. “I doubt she’s seriously ill. A true swelling disease would have carried her off. She wants her son to visit. But who can cook for us?”

“I’ve seen a woman from the caravan,” Emma said. “We ate some of her food on the trek. It wasn’t bad.”

“That won’t do. She’d be run off. A man wants the job.”

“But surely Abike could learn. She already works for us,” Emma said.

“What about Jacob?” Henry said. “You can teach him.”

The memory of their confrontation surfaced in Emma’s mind. No, she thought, he would be too much of a challenge. But before she could object, Henry went out of the room, found Duro, and brought him back, along with the medicine kit. She stood as they entered.

“Mrs. Bowman and I have talked; you may have leave of four market weeks. Take these bandages. Soak them in cool water and loosely bind your mother’s legs.” He took in a breath. “You must tell your mother again about the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, our only hope for everlasting life.”

“Yes sah. Thank you sah,” Duro said.

Emma looked at her cook, his brow creased. She took his hands. “We will pray for you and your mother and your safe return. I will miss you.”

“Yes mah.” He tipped his head down and then looked back into her face.

Emma watched him leave through the passageway. “I hope he’s safe on the road,” she said. “But why go to so much trouble if you think the woman is not even ill?”

“It’s possible she is. And if she is, you can be sure they’ll seek a native remedy. What I gave him won’t cure her, but it won’t hurt. She’ll enjoy her son’s attention. We can’t repeat the story of salvation often enough. I sometimes wonder about Duro.”

“Why do you say so?”

“I found a bolus of native witchery stored in the kitchen. He had put it back in one of his clay pots, expecting, I’m sure, we wouldn’t find it.”

“Oh,” she said, vaguely remembering the cook’s report of an idiot who wished to leave him a charm. Yet she was sure of Duro’s faithfulness. “I’ll speak to him when he returns,” she said. “Let’s work for an hour on the vocabulary.” So with her husband, the tension was eased, and she didn’t think to ask him why he was looking in the kitchen among the pots.

The next day, Emma tried to consider some relation of her life that might prepare her to train Jacob as her cook. The last thing she wanted was to let herself get vexed. But it was hard to find a parallel. If Jacob was Henry’s assistant, he was also his only friend here. He was a brother in Christ. Yet he often performed as a servant. She gave up and prayed for wisdom.

They began with the finer points of simple tasks. “Eggs,” she said, “are not set upon the fire to cook indefinitely in an open pot. They are only brought to boiling and then moved to a stone with a dish laid over top until they cool.” She demonstrated by cooking one for an hour and another in the proper way, and then they compared the texture. Jacob described the overcooked egg as having come from a very old chicken, and she felt a bit tipsy in her delight with him. Each morning she reminded herself that she stood in a relation of respectful authority over the man, but his cleverness made it difficult to keep aloof. By the end of the week, he had worked up a wonderful chowder of peas and local greens. By the end of the second week, she was certain Jacob could be a friend to her. If, for example, Henry was ever away and they were in the night market, and she felt she might stumble in the dark—in such a case, she might reach out for this man to steady herself.

Emma was showing him how to peel tomatoes so that he did not lose half of the fruit in the preparation when she nearly sliced off the end of her thumb. At first she thought it wasn’t so bad. A bloody fringe appeared in a semicircle, and she looked at it with curiosity before the burn hit. She pressed the injured hand with the other, the lid of skin popped open like a flap on a tent, and blood gushed from the wound. She grabbed a towel to stanch it. “Henry,” she cried.

“He is out,” Jacob said.

“What will I do?” Emma waved her hands up and down. When she let go for a moment, the bleeding seemed to ease, but then it started again, oozing between her fingers and over her wedding band.

“I will fetch a bandage,” Jacob said. “Sit down.”

“Quickly,” she said, beginning to rock forward and back in her seat. Then she stopped rocking and stared flatly at the ground, until she saw white dots and closed her eyes.

“Give me your hand,” Jacob said.

“Oh,” she murmured, and opened her eyes, looking up to him.

“Give me your hand,” he said again. He forced her fingers open and apart and pushed her hand into the water pot they had set out for stewing tomatoes. The pain subsided for a second and returned, throbbing. Emma tried to pull back but found her hand might as well have been set in stone for the power with which Jacob claimed it. He held her thus with one hand while loosening the bandage with the other. Looking up at him, she had the briefest vision of being his captive. When he decided the thumb had soaked long enough, he raised her hand above her head. She bit her lip. His power was a demand, and with every press of his hand, her blood surged. He brought the thumb to eye level, positioned the slip of skin just so, and pressed the end of the bandage on the wound. Emma felt a thread of pleasure coil around the throb of pain. She observed as Jacob made the first turn of the bandage. He continued weaving around the thumb. Emma’s back arched. A tremendous energy filled the space between them, as if the entire world had been condensed into this moment, and all people and places with it. Surely Jacob felt it as well, this condensed field, the currents of power. “Come,” he said, still holding her bandaged hand. She stood, searching out his face, but she could not tell his thought. She leaned into his shoulder as he led her to a chair on the interior piazza and pressed her to sitting. “Wait,” he said. He returned with a cup and Henry’s whiskey and poured her a drink. “I will go for Pastor,” he said.

“No!” she said. “Don’t leave.” She began to weep.

“I will find him,” he said. In a bit, Emma looked up to see light filtering through the trees. The colors of the world gained greater brightness, as if a film had been drawn away to show their deepest hue. What had happened? It must have been the shock of her wound. But the slightest thought of Jacob and the feeling came back, a dense flame, a flamelike secret. She sought to resist it. Too impossible. An African man. Then she invited the feeling back.

She was dozing when Henry woke her. “Emma,” he said. He squatted in front of her in that position he sometimes took, inspecting the bandaged thumb. “Jacob did a fine job,” he said. Then he kissed the wounded hand. “Take it easy for the rest of the day.” He went to wash up.

Emma began to rehearse what had happened, picturing herself sitting as Jacob pulled hard on her arm. He had pressed her sleeve up to her elbow. She thought of the man’s tunic, broad and fair against his brown arms. Henry came back through the courtyard on his way to the kitchen, and she was flooded with remorse that he was too late.

In the late afternoon she woke to voices and wandered through the passageway. Henry was out in the compound, playing with a group of children, Wole included. Her husband ran about this way and that, letting them catch him. As soon as he was tagged and they all gathered round, he would take off again, zigzagging. The point was to let the
oyinbo
escape and then hunt him down. Each time he was caught, Henry threw his arms up in pretend alarm as though his life were now over, and this created an almost uncontainable joy among the children, who leapt straight in the air. Abike was watching too. She had one arm nestled behind her, across her lower back, and latched on to her other arm at the elbow so that her chest swayed out. Emma’s heart seemed almost sore. For a long time she had nurtured such a romantic vision of her husband, playful and free. But now she felt sad for him.

It was almost dark, rich blue clouds, a rind of light beneath. Emma let her eyes rest among the walkers on the road. As she wandered back into the courtyard, a swarm of yellow weaver birds lifted from the odan tree. Henry came and kissed her bandaged thumb again. His ruffled-up hair was sweet like a memory. “Jacob and I made a corn pudding,” he said. “The man is handy in the kitchen.”

“He must have a natural gift,” Emma said.

* * *

I
N HER DREAM,
Henry’s clothes lie crumpled in the back of a wagon. She and Jacob are in the storeroom; his arm is around her neck to stop the bleeding of her finger; her back is to his chest. Her arms fly open. She wakes in a cry.

“What?” Henry says.

She turns over, sits up, and pulls her legs into her chest.

* * *

THE FOLLOWING DAY,
Jacob was back at the kitchen.

“Good morning mah,” he said, his eyes focused on the eggs he was peeling.

“Good morning, Jacob,” she said. She watched him in profile, but he did not look at her. “Thank you for your help yesterday.”

“Yes mah,” he said, still not turning to her.

Any moment, she thought, he would say something more, but he did not, and his self-control made him more vital and more dangerous. She filled her diary with a page about her husband. She must get Henry into her book: his arms, the flare of his nose, his broad forehead, the fineness of his neck as he concentrated over her. Not that she wrote any of that. She wrote about his preaching, the vocabulary, folks in the yard calling on him to offer a prayer, the swell in the number of people attending church.

If she had a woman to talk with about the dream, such a friend would assure her: a trick of the heat, lingering effects of the malarial fever, her delicate condition. But she had no one.

One morning in late November, Wole came carrying a package. It was an English cake in the most beautiful tin sent from Rev. Moore in Ijaye. And right behind Wole was Duro. Emma’s heart jumped. She had almost forgotten her first cook in the magnetism of Jacob. His mother had survived—indeed she had survived so well she sent him back with two gourds of palm oil.

“
E kaaro
mah,” Duro said.

“Welcome,” she said, truly glad for his return, but sobered too.

Gradually, the old schedule returned. Henry was often out and Jacob with him, and Emma ate alone under the odan tree. She looked at the scar on her thumb as a kind of souvenir. Perhaps her experience with Jacob was meant to wake her to some knowledge of herself, even of God. She could not make herself repent. Only as she recalled how the anniversary of Sarah’s birth had come and gone and she had hardly paused to remember it, had not called Henry to her side to remember the child in mutual love and sorrow, did she feel regret. She rededicated herself to her Savior and prayed over her impure thoughts.