A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (27 page)

· 40 ·

Tax Collector

T
HE CHILD WAS
kicking so much that Emma at last rose from bed. Soon she slipped out the back door, stirred up the kitchen fire, and made tea. Back in the parlor, she sat in their one comfortable chair, observing the world emerge into day. The bedroom she and Henry slept in was to her left; an extra room lay to the right. No one had said so, but she imagined it the child’s room. One of the improvements Henry had made over the Ijaye house was a hallway leading from the parlor to the back piazza. To the right off the hall was Henry’s study and to the left a room for Abike and a nice-sized pantry. The layout provided a wonderful breeze all through the house from the front door and parlor windows down the hallway and into the yard. There were two other rooms, accessible only from the piazza. These were for guests as the mission grew, though already Emma anticipated a visit from the Hathaways and Rev. Moore.

Duro came in from the back door. She knew him by his walk. “The tax collector is here,” he said.

“I didn’t know they collected taxes door to door,” she said, turning.

“For the baobab tree mah,” he said.

She called Henry. He came from the bedroom looking disordered, as if he had done battle in his sleep.

“I thought you were going to the Baale,” Emma said, “to settle all of this.”

“When have I had time to go to the Baale to report a tree losing its annual leafage?” he said, running his hands through his hair. To Duro he said, “Where is the man?”

“At the front of the compound.”

“Very well, I’ll speak to him.”

Emma got up and buttoned Henry’s shirt. She swept her hands over his chest to iron out the wrinkles. He was too thin. She must see that he ate more heartily. “Now,” she said, “that’s better.” She kissed his cheek.

“What does he want?” she said when he came back.

“They’re asking for a goat for the tree and twelve kola nuts. The mother appears to need not only a carving of her daughter’s likeness but a new piazza on her house. In her grief, she has seen yours and desires her own. Or more likely, her husband has.” His eyes had their slightly odd look.

“What will we do?”

“Preach and build the church,” he said.

She said nothing, and for once it appeared her silence got through to him.

“I’ll do as I said. I’ll call on the Baale tomorrow. Get this thing sorted out.”

Charcoal-colored clouds hung on the hills all day. Thunder rolled in the distance. A wind came up and grew, and the clouds fell in upon the town like a huge conglomeration of dark snow. Mist flew into the open windows, dampening Emma’s face. She lit a candle though it was midafternoon. Henry came in and they sat through the din of the storm. “We must plant a garden,” she said, raising her voice against the rain. “We can be harvesting squash by May.” She nearly shouted it and they both laughed. After the rain, the light was pink and toads appeared everywhere. Emma pulled her garden design from the writing box and left it on the dining table.

By the time she was dressed in the morning, Henry was starting the job.

“I thought you were going to the Baale,” she said.

“I thought you wanted a garden.” He turned back to his work, whistling.

One more day, what difference can it make
, she thought, and pulled her canvas chair onto the piazza to watch. Jacob had made stakes out of discarded lumber. Henry had string to mark the plots. They were collaborating on measurement, referring now and again to her plan. Jacob took the paper into his hand and insisted on something. Henry appeared to agree. They set in the stakes, tied the string to the first, pulled it taut, circled the next stake, and so on until the entire garden appeared in outline, an L shape. Jacob and Henry dug a shallow trench about the whole to show the design. Then they disassembled the string that they might dig up the soil. Wole pulled out the stakes and stacked them next to Emma. The men made good progress but the sun came out, creating that steamy hot of the tropics Emma found near intolerable. She patted Wole’s hand and concentrated on yellow squash, the curved neck of it, the lovely sleep implied in the fruit’s form. Surely some restitution had been made through their work—larger than Henry and Jacob, larger than their personal lives, something immense that had to do with the crossed stars of Georgia and West Africa.

In the night, she felt a tug and woke up. She turned to Henry.

“What is it?” she said.

“My chest feels like broken glass,” he said. “I’m freezing.”

* * *

H
ENRY FELT
E
MMA
unbutton his sleeping smock and remove it, and she was terribly slow. He was grateful when she pressed him back down into the mattress. He turned and pulled into himself, and he felt the weight of blankets. When he woke it seemed morning. He leaned over the bed and was nauseated over a bucket and felt a minor joy when it was over. He thought he heard someone come into the room and take out the bucket. A smell of sulfur wafted in from somewhere. Then he started shaking, something inside him loose and sharp.

He slept and it seemed someone snuggled up in front of him and held his hands close, and he thought it was Emma but then it seemed someone alien and he feared. Later someone sat on the end of the bed, on his feet, and again he thought it was Emma. But then he considered,
No, it is someone else
. At last he woke. His head was hot but he could not tell what the rest of him felt. The shutters were closed and he didn’t know the time. He needed to use the chamber pot and he called Emma. She helped him and that was over. He wanted to tell her about his sensations, but she said, “It’s the fever, rest.” She placed a cloth on his head and took away the blankets and he was too tired to resist.

He slept and woke sweating. A candle was lit in the room and he saw a gecko on the wall and envied the animal its cool fluid life. He wanted to turn over, to relieve his spleen, but it was too difficult. He plowed against his helplessness but only became more exhausted. “Jesus,” he cried, but there was no remedy. Someone came into the room, but the sound was far away like an echo from a distant valley. Water was on his lips and he was suddenly furious with thirst and gulped.
More
, he wanted to say. He tried very hard to open his eyes, to get out of his head, but he could not and he sank in sadness at his distress. Time and again, he fought to press through to waking. He saw a crack in the earth and he didn’t want to be alone with it and he said to himself,
Just turn around
, and it seemed easy now. He was better. He was completely well. The prairie was clear and green. He heard a gunshot.

He woke and opened his eyes.
What are they doing now
, he wondered. It was day. The shutters were open. The dead girl, the one stampeded by the cows, stood in the middle of the room. He raised himself onto an elbow. How had she gotten past his wife, past Jacob? It confused him that he knew her, since he had never seen her living or dead. But she seemed pleased to have found him. Her hair was fuller than he expected, and he remembered that hair continues to grow after death. She bent to curtsy, keeping her black eyes on him. He saw the edge of the wounds where the animals’ hooves had pierced her, but the stuffings seemed neatly put back as if a mother had picked up the pieces and gently refigured her insides. Her lips were burgundy and her smile grew.

“What are you doing here? What do you want?” His voice broke out like a knife through a membrane. Finally he was free. He felt a great relief. He would call for help. But the girl opened her mouth. Maggots fell out. She slipped her right hand into the upper portion of her chest as if she were holding her heart in place. “Get out of my house. Get out of my room, witch.” He put a hand to his heart.

“Master.” It was Jacob, standing right there at the window, looking in on him.

“Tell her to leave before I shoot her.”

“Who, master?”

“The girl,” he said, and he pointed at her but the man didn’t see. That was how tricky she was.

* * *

W
HAT DOES THE
master see in his eyes? What has he said?
Jacob felt something had hit him from behind. He had to reach out for the window ledge to catch himself. There was the wife whose eyes were now a bottomless lake, the rest of her face blank, standing in the doorway.

· 41 ·

The Country of Her Mind

S
HE SAW FROM
the doorway Jacob observing Henry, who had wakened in delusion.
Oh God of heaven, see Your poor servant, my dear husband. Oh God, see Your poor servant, my dear husband. God.

Her eyes met Jacob’s and searched them and said
quiet
.
Henry turned to her.

“You want some water,” she said. She poured it for him, and when he was finished she made him lie down and put her hand to his forehead and rubbed his temples until he slept.

“You have to be strong,” she whispered to herself, leaving the room, and she slapped her cheeks twice on each side. Her dresses were out as far as she could let them. Just beyond the doorway, she almost ran into Jacob.

“What can be done mah?”

She leaned forward and her stomach touched him and she let herself rest a moment in that touch.
One two three four.
She pulled herself back.

“Where is the rifle?” she said. “We must hide it. We’ll stow it in the rafters of one of the extra rooms.”

He hesitated.

“Get it,” she said.

That night she prepared to sleep in the rocking chair next to Henry.
Even now
, she thought,
I must seek and expect God
. At dawn she found her writing box, lit a lamp, and committed an entry to the page.

I fear but how can I fear? All this living. Do I not know how to die? But it is not my death. I could step through that gate as if passing into a room. That is a lie. I love life too much. My own life. I fear the spectacle of death. Henry’s. Being left. Ogbomoso, March 1855.

I will mark through that later
, she thought.

It stormed again. In the morning when she went out she saw that a gully had formed in the front yard, a swath of detritus: chicken feathers and sow gunk and wadded leaves stained with palm oil and fruit shavings, all manner of foulness. The smell was just beginning to ripen.

Henry stirred only to turn and sleep.

Emma had no way to know if Moore had returned to Ijaye. She must get word to the Hathaways. Someone must come to them. Alone she could not manage the baby and her husband and the palaver with the chief over the dead girl; one of those, maybe, but not all. If the rains weren’t too bad, a runner could get to Ibadan and Rev. Hathaway might be in Ogbomoso by the end of the week.

How unfortunate that Henry had not gotten to the Baale to work out an agreement with the chief. Now what would she do? Go to the king and report on her husband’s illness? A Yoruba sovereign wanted a white man to bring good luck, not go crazy in his backyard. Her mind ran wild. If Henry died, she would be husbandless. What would keep a powerful chief from entering her house or the Baale from throwing her out of town? She could be made to do anything. If it were only herself, she could take her own life, but not with the baby.

* * *

S
HE OBSERVED
J
ACOB
sending Abike and Wole to the market with Duro. She watched him set up his work near her back door as she had asked, a new pulpit for Henry’s church. She went back and forth from the back door to the bedroom, checking on her husband. He was feverish but not in chills. At midday, she slipped outside and took a seat on the piazza. A man with a monkey passed by on the road. Drums sounded. For several minutes she said nothing.

“Mr. Bowman is ill,” she said finally, as if addressing the trees.

“Yes mah,” Jacob said, resting in his work but not looking at her.

“My husband is ill in a different way,” she went on, gazing at the trees, her speech sounding in her ears like a part she was rehearsing in a play. “I don’t know what way, really. He told me in America that sometimes before”—she waved her hand—“when he was here the first time, he sometimes had nervous seizures.” She looked now at Jacob, and he was watching her. She thought he frowned and wondered if he didn’t understand what a seizure was. “He sometimes had spells when he could not control his limbs. The fever would cause him to go out of his head.” There, she’d said it. She wanted to repeat the part about the fever. “The fever made him go out of his head. Temporarily. He might thrash about on the bed until he fell from it and woke up bruised.”

“Ah,” Jacob said. “I am sorry.”

A wave of compassion swept over her.

“Perhaps Duro has already told you.”

“Small-small,” he said.

She was surprised to feel her pride wounded—the staff talked of them. “Lesser men have left the mission rather than endure such agony,” she said in her husband’s defense. Two women had stopped on the path running alongside the house. “Would you mind coming closer? This is a private matter.”

Jacob stood beside her, and she was reminded of the first time they met and she had felt this force in his presence. Now she and Henry were in his hands. She looked back to the trees. “He appears to see things that aren’t there.” That was it, the thing she needed to say. Jacob already knew. Immediately she was fearful. “It’s the illness, not his true nature.” She sought Jacob’s face. He was looking steadfastly at her.

“Pastor is ill,” he said, as if committing something to memory. “He is not at fault.”

It sounded wooden. She wanted more from him. And then she wanted Henry to rise up and provide her with what she needed so she would not be here, tumbling into this man’s eyes. She pulled herself up, meaning to make her face unconquerable. She proffered a letter. “Find the most reliable runner you can,” she said. “I’m asking Rev. Hathaway to come to us.” She imagined the epistle as a slender white string that must stretch over a vast distance. She felt Jacob claim the letter.

“Will you help me?” She had to look at him.

“How can I help you?” he said.

She could not tell if he was asking what he could do or telling her there was nothing he could do.

“We will erect a temporary church. Build a pulpit.” This thought came out of her like the red scarf a magician might pull from his mouth. “But go slowly. Tell the workers Rev. Bowman is tired from building the house and has an
oyinbo
fever. Tell them we are expecting Rev. Hathaway from Ibadan, tell them”—it was a lie and Jacob would know it—“tell them Pastor has a deadline for the Yoruba book. They should be pleased with that.”

The man hesitated and Emma believed she had gone too far, should not have spoken about the Yoruba book, should have stuck with the fever. Why had she let herself go on?

“Can we trust Duro?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “But it is better if he does not find the reverend speaking.”

“Speaking to no one.”

“Yes mah.”

So this was what she had: the elegant man beside her, a cook whose eyes must be spared her husband’s hallucinations, a girl, and a boy. She put her hand to her mouth and tapped her lips.

“Very well, tell Duro I am also sick but not so severely. Pastor prefers you to deliver food. It will hurt his feelings, but it can’t be helped. Tell Wole he mustn’t come by because he may catch the illness. Ask Abike to look after him.”

By the following afternoon Emma felt so tight she thought she would scream. Henry remained stuporous, moving only to relieve himself, and she helped him because she would not allow anyone else to see him in such need.

“You look clever,” he said once, and it seemed malicious. It stabbed her heart. Then he slept again. Twice she had gone to the pantry and counted the cowries. There were enough perhaps if Henry was well and could travel or if they heard soon from the board or if someone from Ijaye or Ibadan came up with gifts of food.

On the third day Henry’s fever broke and Emma gave him a bed bath. The cool, rough cloth seemed to revive him.

“It must have been too much sun,” he said. “I saw it happen to a man in Texas, knocked clear out from the heat.”

“Are you sure?” Emma said. She had not thought of such an ordinary cause and felt a tide of relief. She helped Henry into sitting and fed him a cup of mutton broth. She had neglected herself, but now she took her own bath and rewove her hair. Soon she was tidying up. She was about to tell Henry about the pulpit Jacob was building when she saw he was about to doze off. “You’re truly better,” she said, almost a question.

“I’ll be up before you know it,” he said, turning to sleep.

The afternoon was quiet. From the back door she observed several nice planes of mahogany, but she didn’t see any of the household. In a moment she saw Jacob emerge from the kitchen. He wore a native tunic over loose trousers, and the tunic fluttered in the wind. She was captured by how he had grown slenderer, yet broader in the shoulders. There was such a natural manliness in the flow of his movement, as if his being in the world were completely in accord with the world, his head tilted slightly upward, his pace set according to the very pulse of the universe. She opened the door and stepped onto the piazza. As he came close, she saw his face was marked by concern.

She stepped from the piazza into the yard, feeling herself drawn. “Rev. Bowman has wakened,” she said when they met. “He’s much better.”

Jacob put his hands to his face, then released them. “Praise God,” he said. He tilted his head farther back and when he lowered it, there was the look of his hidden smile. She thought there might be something in his eyes for her, and she wasn’t sure what to do next.

“Wouldn’t you like to come into the house—I have water cooling in the pantry.” Stepping through the door into the hallway, she hesitated, letting her eyes adjust. She had not perceived his coming and turned to be sure. He was right upon her. She felt her mouth open slightly as they met, her abdomen against him, her hands on his arms to brace herself. Her eyes caught the gleam of his collarbone. The man’s nearness pulled every longing of her life into a living mass. She felt an exquisite stream of ardor and laid her forehead against his shoulder, aware of the rough cloth of his shirt. His hand came to rest on her abdomen. She abandoned herself to the shelter of him, believing in his sagacity and power, the pressure of his hand there. His smell was like green stalks burning. She was a flame in his strength. Leaning into him so, she sought the coves where his arms lay against his sides. She breathed and expelled her breath, feeling his pulse, the lightest touch of his other hand cupping her head. It seemed all of her life had been coming to this moment—his arm a root of her life.

He stepped back, breaking from her.

“Excuse,” he said. When he turned sideways he seemed to disappear. But she saw him at the door, his solid neck, the flutter of his shirt, the white blind of sun.

“Please,” she said into the empty space.

He had laid his hand there; the pressure was unmistakable. But he was beyond her.

Emma sat for a long time in the parlor, watching shadows lengthen.

On one of their journeys Henry had told a story. How he had seen a woman’s head impaled on a post. Adultery, he had said. At the time the story didn’t seem for her. It seemed Henry spoke it to God as if thrusting up toward heaven some evidence of the world he occupied, its fickleness. He had seemed sad. The woman still wore gold earrings, he had said. No one took them off. “Why?” she had said. “Fear of contamination, I suppose, as if sin is an illness.” And then he had said, “I suppose it is.” And she had said nothing, unable to formulate any reasonable picture of this story. Her husband observing a head on a pole. “I tried to have it taken down and buried,” he said again, as if speaking to God, as if he needed forgiveness for what he had seen and not been able to help, had been no help against. She had never really believed the story. It seemed now very close but also foreign. Maybe it was a story from Texas. She couldn’t remember.

At some point she began to cry.

Then she felt only a dull misery. What were she and Henry here for? What had she hoped to do? They were ill or they were at odds or she was dreaming madly of a native. More aware of Jacob than the baby, she ran her hand up and down her abdomen. Her mood shifted again. Wouldn’t the man’s gesture mean something different here, an affirmation of her womanly self? As in her world a man would lift a woman’s face to kiss her mouth? She moved into this thought. How the Yoruba imagined the white bird, a woman’s capacity to create life. It was like that, wasn’t it? He had felt the same as she, linked in their essence. Only he feared for her. He was noble. She went to check on her husband. At once, the hard light of midday robbed her of her dream. She had no certainty of Jacob’s feelings. It seemed tragic to her that he could not love her.

In late afternoon she stepped out to the kitchen.

Duro looked up. “Welcome, mama,” he said, using that sweet African address. He was bringing a chair. “I will make you a tea,” he said.
He knows nothing
, she thought, and was slightly comforted.

“Thank you,” she said, remembering to report on the state of her health. “I’m feeling much better.” Her gaze moved over the yard and down to the front of the compound. In a moment, she sighed deeply, and quietly she began to weep again.

“Sorry mah,” Duro said.

“I’m fine,” she said, looking up. “I’m happy my husband is much improved.”

“Ah,” he said. “We are grateful.”

“Where are Abike and Wole?”

“They have gone with Sade to the Iyalode’s compound.”

When the two returned half an hour later, Emma gave each a hug, feeling as she did her bruised heart. At dusk, she saw Jacob come around the far side of the house. He must have seen her by the kitchen because he went to the back door of the house and entered without knocking, and she knew he was going to check on Henry.

Inside she found him sitting on a mat in the bedroom and her husband still asleep. Her hair had fallen in the upheavals of her afternoon, and only now did she think of it.

“Has he spoken?” she said.

“No,” he said, not, “No mah.”

“It was overexposure to the sun,” she said. “I suppose it’s another
oyinbo
illness, but not so frightening as we thought.” She tried repinning her bun, but it didn’t want to stay put. Jacob got up, rolled the mat and rested it against the wall, and left.