A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (33 page)

“Yes,” he said.

“Why was my husband untied?”

“He was in pain.”

“You untied him?”

“Yes.”

Let all of my crimes be counted. I will not leave my husband to be cared for by someone else. We will die with him if we have to
, Emma thought. She asked Duro and Abike to move her things and the baby’s cradle back to the bedroom where Henry lay. Her husband opened his eyes occasionally. Once he said, “It burns.” The moon rose early. Henry was calm and she moved her pillows to sleep with him and the baby between. When she nursed Madeline, moonlight fell upon her naked breasts.

Two days later, the bedroom door was open and Uncle Eli’s carving lay on the threshold, pale yellow and gleaming like polished bone. She had taken to carrying it in her pocket most days. How had it slipped out? But then she understood as well as she had ever known anything: Uncle Eli’s carving meant to be just where it was—at the entrance to this room. Something powerful stirred in the air.

She lifted Madeline and placed her in the shoulder hammock Henry had made for Sarah, and she watched the letter opener the whole time. “God,” she said, as she lifted her skirts to step over it and out of the room. She looked back at her sleeping husband once and then moved through the house to the back door, her shoulders bent around the child. On the piazza, she had to squint against the sudden light. No one was about, so she walked in circles with the baby in the yard. She thought about the carving inside and her ailing husband. She was sheared in two, part of her flying back to her father’s farm and Uncle Eli’s toes and Mittie Ann’s naked head and her mother in prayer, the other part flying over Africa, surveying Henry as he pressed his spleen and Sarah’s hair over her cheek in death and Jacob’s smile and Wole’s brilliant head. Two worlds, one world too many. Finally she thought she must go back to Henry. “I’m leaving the door open,” she said aloud, and propped it with a stool. She took a breath, held Madeline tight to her chest, and moved into the parlor. It was lovely and quiet as a chapel. She snuggled the child safely against the back of the good chair.

Standing at their bedroom door, she stared hard at Henry and saw the slight rise and fall of his shoulder as he breathed. She let out a deep sigh. The yellow carving lay quiet as a house lizard on the threshold. She leaned to pick it up, blood rushing to her head, and she stopped in her motion, not knowing what she could trust in her mind.

She would wait. The chair she chose allowed her to look down the hall and out the door to the backyard and through the bedroom door to the bed and Henry. It was midday, the quiet hour, and she heard only the shift and tremble of the house rafters under the hot sun. It calmed her, such a familiar sound. “God is with us,” she said. “God with us. God is.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she thought she heard, a comfort, another voice. Her shoulders relaxed.

Just like that she felt him. “It’s you, Uncle Eli.”

He could have been standing behind his cabin looking out at the hills, his hands at his sides, the worn trousers, the calm bearing of him. Only he was here, in the room, watching her and in an attitude of sprightliness, as if he meant to tease her as he had long ago, as if any minute he might say,
Was a snake just now where you sitting
, and watch with glee while she sprang up. She almost laughed.

“You shouldn’t sneak up on me,” she said and felt herself smile, like she was waiting for the biggest piece of lemon cake. The sweetness of it almost knocked her over and she thought,
This is how angels come
.

And then she was rushed with guilt and purpose. There was something she was supposed to do. What was it? She almost leapt from the chair, claiming the slip of wood for her hand. Power shot through her like the flame of God.
Breathe myself into it. Find a place.

She pushed the letter opener into her pocket, scooped up the child, and got to the back door just as Abike and Wole were coming into the yard. The child started to cry, and Emma patted her back and walked with her until she quieted. Then Wole wanted to hold Madeline, and Emma had him sit on the piazza and make a cradle of his legs and she placed the baby there and the boy took the baby’s hands and brought them together as he sang a song in Yoruba he seemed to invent on the spot. “Abike, please watch Madeline,” she said, and the girl came over and sat beside Wole, her arm draped over his shoulder.

She lit a candle in the parlor. “What do you want me to do?” she said. But no answer came from God or Uncle Eli or anyone. Emma thought on the great stories of the Bible: Mary visited by the angel, the shepherds watching their fields by night, experience beyond reckoning.

“How do you release a spirit?” she said to Jacob, across from him at the dining table.

“I don’t understand.”

“If someone of your country has died, how will the people prepare for burial?”

“Ah,” he said. “Pastor?” His chest heaved.

“No!” she said. “No, no. He is as he was. I mean one of your people.”

“Ah,” he said.

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” she said, and waited for him.

“A diviner may be called.” He paused for breath. “The body is cleansed and the house as well. Then the women are mourning while the men feast. Lamentation may go on for a long time until the spirit is sent on its way.”

“But what about the body?”

“It can be wrapped in cloth and a grave made in the yard. Sometimes the roof is removed from the room where the person died.”

Emma thought of the wads of burning thatch torn from the king’s house the night of the fire and how the rooms had lain desolate and black the next day.

“I believe I have an obligation,” she said, pulling Uncle Eli’s carving from her pocket. The letter opener had been between them like a butter dish or a lantern for months now. There was nothing new to point to. “What can you tell me about this?”

“It is peculiar mah. You have brought it from Ijaye, I believe.”

“I brought it from America.”

“Ah!” he said. “Someone in America has made it?”

“The old slave I told you about.”

“Is it true?” he said, as though she must be confused, and he reached for the slip of wood, turning it over and even smelling it.

“What is it for?” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “It resembles the staff of some divinity. But this one is thin, made for the
oyinbo
to open letters.”

“Perhaps he needed it to be useful to me,” she said, and studied Jacob’s face. “But I think the carving is of himself.”

He didn’t blink. “It can happen that way. A powerful townsman may carry a walking stick with carving like this, to show his head, blessed by the women. He will want to be buried with it.”

“The old women who turn into crows.”

“Any powerful woman.”

Emma seesawed on the brink of two worlds, her chest cool but her head hot. “Well, whatever it is, Uncle Eli meant for me to carry it here, to bury it, as if his soul were in it.”

“If this is the case, you are holding the man’s effigy,” Jacob said. “It is very serious.”

Emma studied Jacob’s face. “Do you believe that? Or do you mock me? You’ll betray me because you’re angry with me.”

“Why do you say so?”

“Say what?”

“I am angry.”

“Aren’t you, for my father’s slaves, for my own father?” For a moment she saw Jacob shackled, and her head buzzed.

Jacob tucked his chin. “It is better to close the mouth,” he said.

“I’ve got a newborn infant and a husband teetering somewhere on the edge of the world. We’ve had the Babalawo in, which is right upside down, missionaries appealing to witch doctors. I almost shot my husband. You and I have been”—she hesitated—“in close proximity. This is the time to open the mouth, Jacob.”

“Ah,” he said, and turned to look out the back door as if he might escape. Then he turned to face her. “Mah. You are proud. You speak of God as if you are the only child. Ah!”

He’d better have something to say to soften it
, she thought.

“Go on,” she said.

“You talk of suffering, but you have not been pierced,” he said.

She was afire. “I have suffered a good deal,” she said, furious, her face hot hot hot. “I buried a child! I gave a child for this country. Do you hear me?” She thrust the flat of her hand forward and hit his arm.

He put his hand on hers and would not release it, and he spoke slowly. “I have lost a village mah. Can you comprehend? I have been a slave. I am sorry for you but even with your loss, you have not been pierced. You believe you are better than I am, than all of us. We are children to you. Ah! You keep the truth from me. You never tell me of your house in America. Slavery in your yard. You pretend in secret. You think I will not learn.”

“That’s not true,” she said. He must take it back. She loved him. She loved Africa.

He released her hand.

She looked out the window, her eyes blurred with tears.

Jacob broke the silence. “Would you approach a white man as you came to me? What do you think it will cost me?”

“I didn’t think of that.”

He made a sound like a person makes who is hit.

“Forgive me,” she said.

He looked at her and what was in his eyes was his country.

“The carving may have afflicted your husband because you have not taken care of it.”

“I’m trying to do what’s right,” she said.

“It has taken you a long time.”

“I didn’t understand.”

“Because you do not listen.”

“I’ve learned your language,” she whispered.

“But you could not hear an old man’s plea. Isn’t it so in your religion, to bear another’s burden?”

“What do you mean my religion? You mean
our
religion.”

“But we are talking of you. Why can’t God use you to relieve an old person? Because he is black? Why is it difficult to believe Pastor is ill for a black man’s pain?”

“But there must have been more. We can’t have come here just to relieve an old slave.”

“What of me?” he said.

“You,” she said. “You?” And thought:
I would have come for you.
And yet she had meant to come for multitudes. The husk of her life—reason and calculation and the ferocity of her own will and even her demanding faith, all that had armored her since college—fell away. If she had entered the kingdom of God, it took a shattering.

“I have been in agony for your husband,” Jacob said. “He is my support. Do you not see with your eyes? Do you not see my feet where I stand?”

* * *

“I
AM TRUSTING
you,”
she said to Jacob when she was ready. “But I will do it myself, in memory of Uncle Eli, and I will read the Bible. And you must pray for Rev. Bowman.”

“Yes,” he said, “I will pray for you.”

“Tell me what to do,” she said.

In any other place at any other time under any other circumstance, with Henry well or in sight of another white person or within the sanctity of a brick church or not nursing a child or without Jacob’s knowledge of her family’s past, Emma would not have stepped across the threshold into the spiritual world of Africa. But none of those things was, and she did.

She remembered the camwood-painted wall in the Babalawo’s compound, the energy moving into her. “This is himself,” she said. “He prepared. It was what he could do. He made it and gave it to me. This is the least I can do.” The broad world of Africa filled her mind, warm and living, and stamped, like Jacob, with a memory of iron. She had tasted it as a girl, cooked air, and she tasted it now. She thought of the day she had seen Uncle Eli as a buffalo. He had called her the white bird. And then she considered how Henry had tried to throw the carving away, and she half wondered what powers Uncle Eli exercised even now. The idea wafted about the room like a downy feather kept aloft by wind.

She did what she could think of to follow Jacob’s instructions. The ceremony required little: her Testament, the carving, a bowl of water, the last bit of cinnamon she owned, and Tela’s beautiful blue cloth close by. “He prayed; he gave it to me to carry. He knew all of my life I would do it; he sent me,” she said. Madeline lay in her cradle, her big eyes seeming to watch her mother. Emma sprinkled cinnamon into the water and dipped her fingers into the bowl, then flicked her fingers in the four corners of the room as a cleansing. A few drops hit the baby, who looked perplexed and turned her head. Emma laid the carving entire into the bowl and opened her sacred text. But she knew the words she wanted without depending on the page.
Do not let your heart be troubled. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.
Now Uncle Eli would find a room with God. “You find a good place,” he had said, and meant,
for me
. Emma cried in the glory of the hard miracle that the lame man will leap and the poor enter first. “Jesus help us,” she whispered. Then she folded the carving into the cloth and just as she closed it tight with string, she knew.
This is the African key, the golden key to eternal life. What’s so wrong with joining the ancestors
, she thought.
How different are they from saints and angels?
If Jesus walks and talks with us, why not our own beautiful departed?
No wonder Jacob smiled.

She looked out the window, saw the garden pushing up green and warm, and heard a goat bray; their clothes dried on the line; she heard her daughter cry.

Emma picked Madeline up along with the bundled remnant of Uncle Eli’s life. She went into the yard and there was Jacob. He waited near the young sapling she had let stand when the land was cleared because that corner of the lot was otherwise barren and she thought it would grow, reach for the sun, and offer them shade.

“Here,” he said.

She watched as he dug. He went three feet at least. Then he stopped. He squatted and she handed him the bundle.

After he piled the dirt over Uncle Eli’s effigy, Jacob packed it down, tapped it, and caressed it with his hands. She had never seen anything more loving, and it touched her deeply.

“Lay a stone there,” she said. “A large one.”

“I will do it,” he said. “The old man is my father.”