A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (32 page)

Jacob was silhouetted in the doorway. His shirt fluttered at the tail and she felt a breeze. Rain. She thought of the children and the ABC books. A crack of thunder brought them running in. She seized the cloth to her chest, remembering Henry. They must not see him. “Stop!” she said. Jacob strode into the room and took the books from Abike. Emma was surprised to see a dimple in the girl’s cheek. She had never noticed.

“Wait outside in the kitchen,” Jacob told the handmaid.

Wole came and squatted beside Emma, chalk all over his forearms, white streaks across his forehead.

“A boy like you,” she said to him, still clutching the cloth, thinking of long-ago Uncle Eli. What might Uncle Eli’s true name have been?

“Mah?” Wole said.

“A boy like you should become someone big,” she said. “A boy with big brains like yours. Should become something.”

She dusted his forehead.

Over and over, Emma checked Henry’s breathing. He was only mildly warm. She checked the burlap strips across his chest to see that they were tight enough but not painfully so. She and Jacob had circled his wrists and bound them together over his chest, and it worried her that he would not be able to attend to some personal need if he should wake in distress.

She ate dinner alone in the parlor. She thought it quite possible she might die in the night. The baby would be born and she would die. Someone must know her miracle of Uncle Eli, how he was Yoruba.

Jacob came to ask how she wished to rest for the night.

“Would you come in?” she said. “I want to tell you something.” The air was cool and she pulled her shawl around her shoulders. Sitting at the table, she found herself trembling with expectation. She had a story, fragile and immense. Later, she knew, she would record what had happened today. It would go into her writing box.
I discovered a most unusual coincidence.
Not coincidence.
Today I discovered that God ordained I should come to Uncle Eli’s very home. He laid the path.
No. That would sound like the old slave laid the path.
God laid the path.
But before she wrote it, she must tell it, and in telling this particular man, she would be linked with him in an unbreakable, sacred bond.

She took a breath. “There was a man on my father’s plantation,” she said, “an African slave. He took care of me when I was very small. You see this pattern, here”—she held up the cloth she had recently pulled from the trunk—“I saw it this afternoon in the Babalawo’s compound, but I saw it long ago, this very pattern, in cloth and wood in my American home. It came from the old slave’s hand. He must have been from your country. He must have been Yoruba.”

Jacob looked at her with his smile and turned something in his hands, a stick, a twig he’d picked up. His head was cocked to one side; she sensed that somehow he had long seen from a beginning and into a future she had just now glimpsed.

“You never told me your father has owned slaves,” he said.

It startled her. It wasn’t what she imagined he would say. “No, I never told you.” Slavery wasn’t what she meant to communicate. She wanted to tell the story of the design she had seen and Uncle Eli. She wanted to ask him to think with her. What clues might tell them where the old man had come from, how close by?

“Ah,” he said. “Why haven’t you told me?”

“I thought it would make things difficult, between us. The old man, Uncle Eli, was cut, his foot was maimed, on purpose. My father ordered it as a punishment.”

“Ah,” he said, low, as though
she
had been guilty.

She was toppled. Such an ecstasy of knowing and she had no one who understood how powerfully she had been affected, how she had divined this deep connection in her life that must, after all, be the key to her life. It was like some grand design in a magnificent stained-glass window in a German cathedral, hidden for centuries, but waiting to be discerned by a person who had readied herself to receive it.

And then it was not like that at all. She felt the deep scandal of her life that she had not told because it was a scandal:
My father owned slaves; he crippled them.
She was her father’s daughter, the daughter of this scandal.

Jacob stood and very carefully pushed the chair up to the table and left her.

She touched Henry’s forehead, and the creases across it seemed to deepen. A line of drool escaped his half-opened lips and formed a pink spot on the sheet. She wet her handkerchief in the wash bowl and dabbed at Henry’s lips and cleaned the spot. Her stomach was enormous. Her back ached. When she sat, she wished to let her legs splay apart. In her makeshift bed in the parlor she could find no comfort.

In the morning Jacob called at the back door. He looked bereaved but she did not believe it was on her behalf. “Have you eaten?” she said.

“Small,” he said.

“You must eat,” she said.

“I will try,” he said.

“After you’ve eaten, go and get the Babalawo. There must be something we can do.”

* * *

JACOB ENTERED THE
parlor first and the Babalawo after him. Emma hurried through the Yoruba greetings, then offered the native doctor a seat, but he had brought a mat and sat on the floor. She felt awkward looking down at him.

“
Oko mi nsare
,” she said. “My husband is ill.”

“
Mo mo
,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“You came to my compound. Now you have sent for me. Is it not?”

She felt reluctant again. But she had to press on; otherwise, in an hour she would be exactly where she was this morning: no plan, no idea, no relief, a husband bound to his bed.

“My husband,” she said, “falls into deep sleep from which he awakens to alarm. His fever is not great. Yet I am concerned for his life.” Already she was relieved to say it, just like that. “I can offer you this.” Emma pulled the Portuguese coin from her purse and put it on the table between them. The B
abalawo studied it and put it between his teeth and then set it on his mat. He pulled out a bag. She knew it was his oracle. “I don’t want that,” she said.

“All the same,” he said. “I can speak without it.” He pulled on his little goatee. “I have watched your husband in the marketplace. He speaks well-well about your
orisha
. Jesus must be a peaceable god. But your husband is too hot. His skin is now white, now red like fire. He is tempestuous.”

Emma was shocked by the man’s frankness. She thought he had worked up his answer in advance—using such a word as
tempestuous
in Yoruba. But his depiction of Henry was as likely a one as she would have given herself.

“Your description is not entirely wrong,” she said.

“Someone may wonder if your own husband believes in his own Jesus,” the man said.

“My husband’s faith is absolute,” Emma said. “He has only lost his temper when fever was overtaking him. You are wrong to cast aspersions on him.”

The man moved to rise, bringing his bony knees back toward his chest.

“Wait,” she said. “You’ve given me nothing. You must tell us something that we can do to help my husband. He has sometimes spoken of useful herbs. I don’t know what. Something to restore his balance.”

“Ah,” he said. “Your husband has gone into a journey. He has traveled a long time. Is it not? Have patience.”

Emma wished she were alone with Jacob, to ask what he thought. She imagined the Babalawo had heard about Henry’s explorations, his trip to Ilorin. He knew nothing about her husband’s early life or his calling or any of the doubts and fears that plagued him. He was just making things up from the little he did know. Then she wondered if the Iyalode had gone into town and gossiped about Henry.

“We’ve
been
waiting. Your riddles cannot help me.”

The man opened a beaded satchel and pulled out some dried leaves. “This bitter leaf, pawpaw leaf, mango bark. Boil in water. Give to your husband. It will cool him. Also I give you quinine. Beyond medicine, your husband must help himself.” She watched as the native doctor reached back into his bag and pulled out three tablets in a bit of dirty paper.

The man began to pack up, and at first Emma thought he spoke to someone else.

“You have overtaken him,” the Babalawo said.

“Do you speak to me?” she said.

“Yes mah. You have overtaken your husband. A woman such as yourself”—he pointed to her middle—“is very powerful. He is not so powerful.”

“We don’t have that belief,” she said. “The child belongs to both of us.”

“There is something else you wish to know,” he said. The Babalawo had stopped his packing and looked at her, his eyes hazy and full, as if he had become old.

Emma felt a slip in time, lightning fast, as if she had seen her whole life.

“Yes,” she said, rushing. “The pattern I saw on the wall in your compound, four petals in a square. I’ve seen it elsewhere, even in my home in America. An old African man used to carve it in wood. His name was Uncle Eli. I don’t know how to say
uncle
in Yoruba. How do you say it, Jacob?”

“
Uncle
is brother of the father or mother,” Jacob said.

“Tell him that,” Emma said. “Tell him Uncle Eli’s daughter stitched the pattern into a cover. Ask him what it means.”

Jacob translated.

The Babalawo turned his hands flat up against the air as if there were a wall. “It is not a meaning,” he said. “It shows completeness. Four. Whole. It is the base number for Ifa divination.”

The light shifted and Emma got a better look at the medicine man, his mouth half opened, his graying hair, long, lanky limbs covered in dust, the poor, awkward cloth of his shirt.
Strange
, she thought;
he is poor as a beggar
.

He moved his head to look up at her. “Your uncle,” he said, “your mother’s brother?”

“You misconstrue. He wasn’t my uncle. He was my father’s”—she stumbled—“slave; we only called him Uncle Eli because he was old and we had known him.”

“Why do you say the man is your mother’s brother and now you deny it? Is it possible in your religion to deny your own family?”

“It was a term of endearment; he was not my actual family.”

“Ah!” he said, and turned his head to look behind him. “Mah, something troubles this place; it is feeding your husband’s illness.” He rose from his mat, but not before nipping up the Portuguese coin. In a moment, he was gone.

“Do you think my husband is dying?” she said, turning to Jacob.

He had the mysterious smile she loved, and he looked away out the window. “My life depends on Pastor,” he said, turning back to look on her. “I pray not.”

The baby kicked again, and she felt her water break. The child was not going to wait. She looked hard into his eyes. “The baby is coming.”

· 48 ·

In Africa as It Is in Heaven

“B
RING
A
BIKE’S MATTRESS
and a tarpaulin to cover it,” Emma said, speaking to her cook.

“Yes mah,” Duro said. “Have no fear.”

In moments, the birthing bed was laid in one of the rooms that opened onto the piazza. Duro went to boil water, and Jacob left for the Iyalode. Emma saw him take to a run, his shirt flying behind him, and remembered that day on the road when Wole was lost. Abike slipped into the room. “I need two sheets,” she said, “all the pillows you can find, and a gown.” The girl didn’t move. “Yes, you must go into the master’s bedroom for the gown. Mr. Bowman is asleep. Nothing will happen to you. Go straight to the wardrobe.”

“Why is master tied?” Abike said when she returned.

“For his safety,” Emma said.

“I don’t like it,” Abike said.

“Listen here,” Emma said. “You’re mature enough now for me to rely on you. Look after Wole. Please get the bell.”

Emma was not yet in urgency. She only felt a kind of warm glow, a hastening and engorging, almost a joy. She took off everything but her cotton undershirt. Then she pulled the gown over her head. She held the windowsill and began to squat, her knees full-angled apart, belly lowering between them. Finally she managed to roll back onto the birthing bed. When she settled, she saw two geckos near the ceiling. They remained just as they were when Abike knocked on the door and entered. “Go for Sade,” Emma said. “The Iyalode may be slow. Hurry!”

She hugged a pillow and watched the ceiling. She thought she smelled potatoes frying, but of course not. She wished for berries in sugar water.

“You’re coming,” she said to her belly, “out of a house and into a house. Don’t be afraid.” She thought of the fragile plants in the garden, redolent with life. Her hands were on her center. Her knees fell open. Out the window she could see the top of a hill and a sliver of day moon. She wondered if anyone else in the town saw it, or if not, who did see it in some other part of the globe. A bird winged by and a broad cloud passed; Emma thought she might sleep.

Then a cramp in her abdomen pulled her to sitting. “How far,” she said to herself. Somewhere a sheep brayed. She rang the bell furiously. Her hair was knotted up, but it was already falling around her neck and a sweat broke over her. She rang again and subsided back onto the mattress.

“Abike,” she said, as soon as she heard her funny step.

“Yes mah.”

“I need a drink.”

She rocked with the next one, backward and forward, her hands on her knees.

“Find Rev. Bowman’s medicine kit and bring it,” she said.

They laid out a white cloth and scissors and a wooden spoon. She felt sick and turned to her side and heaved.

“We need a basin,” she said to the girl.

The next pain made her think of a huge crab clawing at her insides. Her back ached as if it would split. She groaned, deep and hard. “Where is the Iyalode?” she said. Her hair was slick against her face. “Abike, cut my hair.”

“No mah.”

“Yes.” Emma reached for the scissors, but Abike seized them.

A ripping pain turned her inside out. Emma tried to swim; it seemed the only way to get out of her body, pulling and pulling into the air.

At last, Sade appeared, squatting before Emma, her hands on Emma’s spread knees.

“I have to push. Help me,” she said.

“Not yet mah. Not yet,” the woman said, throwing one hand out in front of Emma’s face over and over as a way of emphasizing her
No
.

“Where is the Iyalode?”

“Soon mah. She will be here soon.” Another pain roared up Emma’s back.

“Now,” she screamed.

“No mah. Hold.”

When it passed, she lay down and tried to turn over. She thought she would die if it came again.

“I thought you were my friend,” Emma said when she saw the Iyalode. “Where were you? I’m going to die.”

“What are you saying? Am I here?” The woman looked around the room as if to confirm her bearings.

“I hope I will die. Jesus forgive me.”

“Mistress Bowman. Wake up. I command you. The baby is coming. You must help us.”

As soon as Emma lifted her shoulders, Sade called. “Here is the head. I am telling you mah, push.” It burned there and her bones seemed to split.

“Again!”

She cried until she could no longer hear herself, until she heard the baby. It was a girl. She knew before she saw her. The little flesh was shocking red, slippery, long bodied, fat cheeked. The Iyalode wiped the child’s head. Faint blond hair. “Now where did that hair come from?” Emma said. “We shan’t cut your hair. No we shan’t.”

In the night, thunder came and then it rained a storm. The Iyalode and Sade took turns in the room and Emma woke to nurse and the baby she kept with her, cradled in the nest of her arms, and she talked with her often. “You star, you beat of the world, you mango girl, lily rose, tadpole, name of mine, Madeline.”

The next morning, she wrote in the red journal:
April 15, 1865. Baby girl, healthy. Henry yet ill.

As soon as she had dressed, she asked Abike to call Jacob. “My husband?” she said.

“He has not changed. The king has sent two heads of cowries for the baby.”

“But my husband is not worse,” she said. It seemed ages ago she had cared about money or gifts or dresses.

“No mah. Not worse.”

Good,” she said, with something like victory in her mouth, though she thought she would cry. Couldn’t Jacob be a brother to her? Then she thought Henry must wake up. He must know about Madeline for the birth to be real.

“Have you been giving him medicine?”

“Some mah.”

“We must keep trying,” she said. “I’m taking the child to see him, her father,” she said. “Now.”

In the yard, wispy fog still hovered below the trees. She saw Wole at the kitchen. “Come say hello,” she said, and he came to her, touching the child’s hand. “I mean it; say hello.”

“
Ago
,” he said, sounding it out,
ah go
.

“Say ‘Hello, Madeline.’”

“
Ago
Madeline.”

The baby held his finger. Wole looked at Emma with something like hope. “Is it your baby?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“It is not so ugly,” he said.

Henry lay on his back, his breathing like short winds through his nostrils. Jacob or Duro had bolstered his elbows so that his hands rested comfortably on his chest. They were still handsome. “Come home,” she said to him.

In a while, she took the baby and placed her in the crook of Henry’s arm and sat herself on the edge of the bed. “Papa. Madeline,” she said. A deeper crease came into Henry’s forehead. He was cool though his hair was wet, and he had a look of concentration on his face as if he were tracking progress or remembering a long recitation and was afraid he would forget his place in it.

Later in the day, women of all sorts came to pay their respects to the baby. Sade brought a huge pot of yam. None of the women appeared surprised that the father was not in attendance, seeming in their manner to convey that men do other things; women are for children.

In the afternoon, Emma carried Madeline in a basket and went to pray at the church site. The palm fronds were still there, bent by the rains. Two doves bobbed their heads and walked sideways as she entered. Emma sat on a bench near a little white flag where the cornerstone would be laid—when Henry was better, the next dry season.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come, Thy sweetness done
—Madeline scrunched her nose and yawned—
in Africa as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily remember and forgive us our trespasses as we rekindle those who love us. And lead us not into pride but deliver us from sorrow. For Thine is the kingdom and the birdsong and the blue day, forever. Amen.
The baby snuggled on her belly, monked in light cotton. Emma prayed again.
Henry Henry Henry God God God Henry I beg you. God forgive us. Have mercy have mercy. He loves you. Love.

Love endureth all things. I have endured. Bring me something. I beg.

Minutes passed.

Emma examined Madeline’s feet, rounded at the bottom—still unwalked on the earth. The little blond hairs of her head blew up at the slightest wind. She seemed more complacent than Sarah, who was ever demanding to nurse. This child woke to look around with her big blue eyes. “Where dost thy temper come from?” Emma said. She wondered if Henry had been a boy of curly blond hair.

In the afternoon she sat on the front piazza. A cart passed down the road, a rare sight. Wole ran to watch it, and Emma saw how tall he had grown, his legs so long and brown. She held Madeline tight and rocked her in her arms, singing a song about
lavender’s blue, dilly dilly
. She glimpsed a white egret flying to the top of a young palm, the tree bright with life. “I know who you will be,” she whispered into the child’s face. “You will be a brilliant artist.”

Duro came running out the front door.

“What?” Emma said.

She heard a scuffle. In one curving motion, she stood, handed the child to her cook, and moved into the house.

From the bedroom door she saw Henry still reclined, Jacob leaning over him. They looked almost like father and son, the son, Jacob, bent over the ailing father, Henry.

Then she saw that Henry was no longer bound. He had Jacob by the wrist and in the other hand he held the open clasp knife. His hair was wild, his lips moving in silent speech as if he held audience with ghosts. She remembered his sinewy strength. It had always surprised her because he was not a large man, but she knew if he was enraged, he could be fierce.

Her movement away from the door seemed to take forever, as if she had turned into a dense liquid. But her thinking was swift. She prayed the rifle was in the rafters where she and Jacob had stowed it. On tiptoe, she reached to claim it, but it was gone. In her anger, she shoved against the only piece of furniture in the room, a bookcase Henry had set into the wall. To her amazement, it gave. There must be space behind it. In a fury, she pulled the shelf toward her. Close against one side of the hidden closet was the rifle. In reaching for it she remembered everything: how Henry had shown her.
This is the ball. Ram it in. The percussion cap.
But the gun was already, horribly, loaded.

She strode toward the bedroom, the heavy firearm half hidden in her skirts, pausing briefly outside the door.

“Someone here has betrayed me,” Henry said. She crept close enough to see. The knife seemed serpentine, the way her husband waved it in the air. She wondered if it would break his spell if she shot out the open window. She gripped the rifle, bringing it out from her skirts, remembering, eons ago, what Henry had taught her.
Line up the bead with your target.

“Look here,” she said, stepping into the door frame, the rifle half lifted.

The two men turned to her. “Stop that,” she said.

Henry grinned, as if he could see her secret places, as if he walked in a country where all evil was unveiled. She kept her eyes on him.

“Are you loyal to me?” Henry said, his eyes fixed on her.

Emma breathed deeply. “I have birthed our child,” she said, wishing she could look to Jacob, but she could not. She must keep her eyes on Henry.

“That’s not an answer.”

She had done a fair amount of lying, of telling half-truths, of fooling herself. She could not fool God. What was true? What was true enough? Her arms were tired and she brought the firearm to rest on her hip, meaning still to look prepared.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“And bound me to the bed.”

“For your own good,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” Henry said, tightening his grip on Jacob’s wrist.

“Let go of him,” she said, raising the rifle. “Let go of him now.”

Her head wove and spun though her vision was steady. She thought of Henry’s nicked ear and in her frenzy aimed at a pillow instead.

“You would not,” he said. “You poor girl.”

Her gorge rose and she thought she might back down. Henry would come to reason. He would not, surely, in any state, hurt Jacob. And he would not hurt her in such a way. It was impossible. But her mind veered to a story Henry told her once, late in the night, of killing an Indian boy with a knife.
In a flash
, he had said,
before I knew what I had done. I wished many a time I had killed myself instead.

I’m saving us
, she thought.

Henry became very still. His eyes were disastrously blue.

“You let him go,” she said again, “or I will.” She brought her cheek to the cool wood of the stock, closed her left eye, and took her aim.

Never pull back the hammer unless you’re ready to shoot.
She pulled back the hammer. The sound was cold.

Henry seemed to shift. She sensed he had released something. All at once, Jacob stood in her sights. What was he doing? Without moving, eyes full open, she turned her look to him and saw his breathing under his tunic, his collarbone, the slope of his shoulders. He pushed her arm so the rifle pointed at the wall.

“Give it to me,” Jacob said.

She lowered the weapon and her eyes were suddenly flooded with light. She staggered back against the wall. She heard Jacob leave, and she sank to the floor. In a moment, she heard a brittle thud and knew Henry had dropped the knife. She imagined Wole. What if she had hurt someone, anyone? How would she have explained? She remained curled into herself a good while, remembering Henry’s face, his thin shoulders, his still-beautiful hands. “I would never harm you,” she said to everyone she had ever known, “any of you.”

At last Madeline cried. She pushed herself up and saw Henry turned away from her, the sad burlap rope poured out around him like broken netting. “I’m so sorry,” she said. He said nothing and she tiptoed to his side. He seemed again asleep. She picked up the knife.

“How is Pastor?” Jacob said when she carried Madeline outside.

“He is resting. We must give him the quinine and the Babalawo’s medicine, but not the laudanum. It makes him wild when he comes out.”