The Poisonwood Bible (28 page)

“Well, even wicked bugs have to eat,” I pointed out. “Everything has to eat something.” Even lions, I suppose.

I picked up Ruth May and dusted off her cheek. “Sit in the swing and I’ll comb out your pigtails,” I said. I’d been carrying the comb around in my back pocket for days, meaning to get to Ruth May’s hair. “After I get your braids fixed up I’ll push you awhile in the swing. Okay?”
  

Ruth May didn’t seem to have strong feelings one way or another. I sat her in the swing, which Nelson had helped us hang with a huge, oily rope he found on the riverbank. The seat was an old rectangular palm-oil drum. All the kids in the village used our swing. I beat some dust off the comb and began to tease out the yellow mass of knots her hair had turned into. I could hardly do it without hurting her, yet she hardly whined, which I took as a bad sign.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Anatole half hidden in the cane thicket at the edge of our yard. He wasn’t cutting cane, since he doesn’t chew it—I think he’s a little vain of his strong white teeth with the handsome little gap in the center. But he was standing there watching us anyway, and I flushed red to think he might have seen me feeding the ant lions. It seemed very childish. In the light of day, almost everything we did in Kilanga seemed childish. Even Father’s walking the riverbank talking to himself, and our mother drifting around half dressed. Combing out Ruth May’s hair at least seemed motherly and practical, so I concentrated on that. In spite of myself I pictured a father with shiny black arms pulling fish from the river and a mother with dark, heavy breasts pounding manioc in a wooden trough. Then out of habit I fired off the Repentance Psalm: Have mercy upon me, O God, according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies. But I was unsure which commandment my thoughts had broken—Honor thy father and mother, or not coveting thy neighbor’s parents, or even something more vague about being true to your own race and kind.

Anatole started toward us. I waved and called to him, “Mbote, Anatole!”

“Mbote, Beene-beene,” he said. He has special names for each of my sisters and me, not the hurtful ones other people use, like Termite and Benduka, for Adah, which means Crooked Walker. Anatole wouldn’t tell us what his names meant. He tousled Ruth May’s head and shook my hand in the Congolese way, with his left hand clasping his right forearm. Father said this tradition was to show they aren’t hiding any weapon.

“What’s the news, sir?” I asked Anatole. This is what Father always said to him. In spite of how badly that first dinner had gone, Father relied greatly on Anatole and even looked forward to his visits, somewhat nervously, I think. Anatole always surprised us by knowing important news from the outside world—or from outside Kilanga, at least. We weren’t sure where he got his information, but it generally turned out to be true.

“A lot of news,” he said. “But first I have brought you a pig in a sack.”

I loved hearing Anatole speak English. His pronunciation sounded British and elegant, with “first” corning out as “fest,” and “brought” more like “brrote.” But it sounded Congolese in the way it rolled out with equal weight on every syllable—a pig in a sack—as if no single word wanted to take over the whole sentence.

“A poke,” I said. “Mother says that: Never buy a pig in a poke. I guess a poke is a sack.”

“Well, at any rate it’s not a pig, and you don’t have to buy it. If you guess what it is, then you may have it for your dinner.” On a string slung over his shoulder he had a brown cloth sack, which he handed to me. I closed my eyes and assessed its weight, bouncing it up and down a little. It was the size of a chicken but too heavy to be a bird. I held the bag up and examined the rounded bulge at its bottom. It had little points, possibly elbows.

“Umvundlal” I cried,jumping up and down like a child.This was jungle rabbit. Nelson could make a rabbit stew with mangwansi beans and mangoes that even Rachel couldn’t help eating, it was that good.
   

I’d guessed right: Anatole smiled his thrilling white smile. I can scarcely even remember how he first looked to us, when we were shocked by the scars across his face. Now I could only see Anatole the man, square-shouldered and narrow-hipped in his white shirt and black trousers, Anatole with his ready smile and lively walk. A man who was kind to us. His face has many other interesting features besides the scars, such as almond-shaped eyes and a finely pointed chin. I hadn’t realized how much I liked him.

“Did you kill it yourself?”

He held up both hands. “I would like to say yes, so you would think your friend Anatole is a good hunter. But, alas. A new pupil brought it this morning to pay for his schooling.”

I looked in the sack. There it was with its small, furry head curled unnaturally backward due to a broken neck. It had been trapped, not shot. I clasped the sack to my chest and looked up at Anatole sideways. “Would you really have taken it back if I hadn’t guessed right?”

He smiled. “I would have given you a lot of chances to guess right.”

“Well! Is that the kind of leniency you show your boys on their math and French in school? They must never learn anything!”

“Oh, no, miss! I crack their naughty heads with a stick and send them home in disgrace.”We both laughed. I knew better.

“Please come for dinner tonight, Anatole. With this rabbit we’ll have too much to eat.” In fact this lonely rabbit would make a small stew and we would still be hungry while we washed the dishes afterward—a feeling we were trying to get used to. But that was how people said thank you in Kilanga. I’d learned a few manners at least.

“Perhaps I will,” he said.

“We’ll make a stew,” I promised.

“Mangwansi beans are high in the marche,” he pointed out. “Because of the drought. All the gardens are drying up.”

“I happen to know who has some: Mama Nguza. She makes her kids haul water up from the creek to pour on her garden. Haven’t you seen it? It’s sensational.”

“No, I have not seen this sensation. I will have to make better friends with Tata Nguza.”

“I don’t know about him. He sure doesn’t talk to me. Nobody talks to me, Anatole.”
   

“Poor Beene.”

 
“It’s true! I don’t have a single solitary friend here but Nelson and Pascal, two little boys! And you. All the girls my age have their own babies and are too busy. And the men act like I’m a snake fixing to bite them.”

He shook his head, laughing.

“They do so, Anatole.Yesterday I was sitting in the weeds watching Tata Mwanza make fish traps, and when I stood up and asked him to show me how, he ran away and jumped in the water! I swear it!”

“Beene, you were naughty. Tata Mwanza could not be seen talking to a young woman, you know that. It would be a scandal.”

“Hmmph,” I said. Why was it scandalous for me to converse with any man in Kilanga old enough to have a whole seat in his pants, except for Anatole? But I didn’t ask. I didn’t “want to jinx our friendship. “What I do happen to know,” I said, being maybe a tiny bit coy, “is that a civet cat got all of the Nguzas’ hens last Sunday. So Mama Nguza will be in a mood to trade mangwansi beans for eggs, don’t you think?”

Anatole smiled enormously. “Clever girl.”

I smiled, too, but didn’t know what else to say after that. I felt embarrassed and returned to combing out Ruth May’s hair. “She appears to be a very glum little girl today,” Anatole said. “She’s been sick in bed for weeks. Mother has too. Didn’t you notice when you came by the other day how she was standing out on the porch just staring into space? Father says they’ll both be all right, but...” I shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the sleeping sickness, do you think?”

“I think no. Now is not the season for tsetse flies. There is hardly any sleeping sickness at all in Kilanga right now.”

“Well, that’s good, because what I’ve heard about sleeping sickness is you die of it,” I said, still combing, feeling like someone who’s been hypnotized into that one single motion. Sleeping in her braids for sweaty days and nights on end had creased Ruth May’s dark blond hair into shining waves like water. Anatole stared at it as I combed it down her back. His smile got lost somewhere in that quiet minute.
   

“There is news, Beene, since you asked for it. I’m afraid it is not very good. I came to talk to your father.”

“He’s not here. I can tell him whatever it is, though.”

I wondered if Anatole would consider me a sufficient messenger. I’d noticed Congolese men didn’t treat even their own wives and daughters as if they were very sensible or important. Though as far as I could see the wives and daughters did just about all the work.

But Anatole apparently felt I could be spoken to. “Do you know where Katanga Province is?”

“In the south,” I said. “Where all the diamond mines are.” I’d overheard talk of it when Mr. Axelroot flew Father and me back from Leopoldville. Evidently Mr. Axelroot went there often. So I was guessing, but I guessed with my father’s trademark confidence.

“Diamonds, yes,” Anatole said. “Also cobalt and copper and zinc. Everything my country has that your country wants.”

This made me feel edgy. “Did we do something bad?”

“Not you, Beene.”

Not me, not me! My heart rejoiced at that, though I couldn’t say why.

“But, yes, there is a bad business going on,” he said. “Do you know the name Moise Tshombe?”

I might have heard it, but -wasn’t sure. I started to nod, but then admitted, “No.” I decided right then to stop pretending I knew more than I did. I would be myself, Leah Price, eager to learn all there is to know. Watching my father, I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

“Moise Tshombe is leader of the Lunda tribe. For all practical purpose he is leader of Katanga Province. And since a few days ago, leader of his own nation of Katanga. He declared it separate from the Republic of Congo.”

“What? Why?”

“Now he can make his own business with the Belgians and Americans, you see. With all his minerals. Some of your countrymen have given a lot of encouragement to his decision.”

   
“Why can’t they just make their deals with Lumumba? He’s the one that got elected. They ought to know that.”

“They know. But Lumumba is not eager to give away the store. His loyalty is with his countrymen. He believes in a unified Congo for the Congolese, and he knows that every Katanga diamond from the south can pay a teacher’s salary in Leopoldville, or feed a village ofWarega children in the north.”

I felt both embarrassed and confused. “Why would the businessmen take Congo’s diamonds away? And what are Americans doing down there anyhow? I thought the Congo belonged to Belgium. I mean before.”

Anatole frowned. “The Congo is the Congo’s and ever has been.”

“Well, I know that. But—”

“Open your eyes, Beene. Look at your neighbors. Did they ever belong to Belgium?” He pointed across our yard and through the trees toward Mama Mwanza’s house.
          
. ‘

I’d said a stupid thing, and felt terrible. I looked, as he commanded: Mama Mwanza with her disfigured legs and her small, noble head both wrapped in bright yellow calico. In the hard-packed dirt she sat as if planted there, in front of a little fire that licked at her dented cooking can. She leaned back on her hands and raised her face to the sky, shouting her bidding, and a chorus of halfhearted answers came back from her boys inside the mud-thatch house. Near the open doorway, the two older daughters stood pounding manioc in the tall wooden mortar. As one girl raised her pounding club the other girl’s went down into the narrow hole—up and down, a perfect, even rhythm like the pumping of pistons. I’d watched them time and again, attracted so to that dance of straight backs and muscled black arms. I envied these daughters, who worked together in such perfect synchrony. It’s what Adah and I might have felt, if we hadn’t gotten all snared in the ropes of guilt and unfair advantage. Now our whole family was at odds, it seemed: Mother against Father, Rachel against both of them, Adah against the world, Ruth May pulling helplessly at anyone who came near, and me trying my best to stay on Father’s side.

We were tangled in such knots of resentment we hardly understood them.

“Two of her children died in the epidemic,” I said.

“I know.”

Of course he knew. Our village was small, and Anatole knew every child by name. “It’s a terrible shame,” I offered, inadequately. He merely agreed, “E-e.” “Children should never have to die.”

“No. But if they never did, children would not be so precious.” “Anatole! Would you say that if your own children died?” “Of course not. But it is true, nevertheless. Also if everyone lived to be old, then old age would not be such a treasure.” “But everybody wants to live a long time. It’s only fair.” “Fair to want, e-e. But not fair to get. Just think how it would be if all the great-grandparents still were walking around. The village would be crowded with cross old people arguing over who has the most ungrateful sons and aching bones, and always eating up the food before the children could get to the table.”

“It sounds like a church social back in Georgia,” I said. Anatole laughed.

Mama Mwanza shouted again and clapped her hands, bringing a reluctant son out of the house, dragging the flat, pinkish soles of his feet. Then I laughed, too, just because people young and old are more or less the same everywhere. I let myself breathe out, feeling less like one of Anatole’s schoolboys taking a scolding.