The Poisonwood Bible (61 page)

Into something rich and strange.

This is no mortal business.The man occupied us all in life and is still holding on to his claim. Now we will have to carry away his sea-changed parts rich and strange to our different quarters. Estranged, disarranged, we spend our darkest hours staring at those pearls, those coral bones. Is this the stuff I came from? How many of his sins belong also to me? How much of his punishment?

Rachel seems incapable of remorse, but she is not. She wears those pale white eyes around her neck so she can look in every direction and ward off the attack. Leah took it all—bones, teeth, scalp—and knitted herself something like a hair shirt. Mother’s fabrication is so elaborate I can hardly describe it. It occupies so much space in her house she must step carefully around it in the dark.

Having served enough time in Atlanta with her volunteer work, Mother has moved to the Georgia coast, to a hamlet of hoary little brick houses on Sanderling Island. But she carried the sunken treasure along to her little place by the shore. She stays outdoors a lot, I think to escape it. When I go to visit I always find her out in her walled garden with her hands sunk into the mulch, kneading the roots of her camellias. If she isn’t home, I walk down to the end of the historic cobbled street and find her standing on the sea wall in her raincoat and no shoes, glaring at the ocean. Orleanna and Africa at a standoff. The kids flying by on bicycles steer clear of this barefoot old woman in her plastic babushka, but I can tell you she is not deranged. My mother’s sanest position is to wear only the necessary parts of the outfit and leave off the rest. Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one. “My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.”

Personally I have stolen an arm and a leg. I am still Adah but you would hardly know me now, without my slant. I walk without any noticeable limp. Oddly enough, it has taken me years to accept my new position. I find I no longer have Ada, the mystery of coming and going. Along with my split-body drag I lost my ability to read in the old way. When I open a book, the words sort themselves into narrow-minded single file on the page; the mirror-image poems erase themselves half-formed in my mind. I miss those poems. Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking. Like Jekyll I crave that particular darkness curled up within me. Sometimes it almost comes. The books on the shelf rise up in solid lines of singing color, the world drops out, and its hidden shapes snap forward to meet my eyes. But it never lasts. By morning light, the books are all hunched together again with their spines turned out, fossilized, inanimate.

No one else misses Ada. Not even Mother. She seems thoroughly pleased to see the crumpled bird she delivered finally straighten up and fly right.

“But I liked how I was,” I tell her.

“Oh, Adah. I loved you too. I never thought less of you, but I wanted better for you.”

Don’t we have a cheerful, simple morality here in Western Civilization: expect perfection, and revile the missed mark! Adah the Poor Thing, hemiplegious egregious besiege us. Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one’s fault, but one still ought to show the good manners to act ashamed. When Jesus cured those crippled beggars, didn’t they always get up and dance off stage, jabbing their canes sideways and waggling their top hats? Hooray, all better now, hooray!

If you are whole, you will argue: Why wouldn’t they rejoice? Don’t the poor miserable buggers all want to be like me?

Not necessarily, no. The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you, or get The Verse. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.

How can I explain that my two unmatched halves used to add up to more than one whole? In Congo I was one-half benduka the crooked walker, and one-half benduka, the sleek bird that dipped in and out of the banks with a crazy ungrace that took your breath. We both had our good points. Here there is no good name for my gift, so it died without a proper ceremony. I am now the good Dr. Price, seeing straight. Conceding to be in my right mind.

And how can I invent my version of the story, without my crooked vision? How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets. Mother keeps wanting to wash herself clean, but she clings to her clay and her dust. Mother is still ruthless. She claims I am her youngest now but she still is clutching her baby. She will put down that burden, I believe, on the day she hears forgiveness from Ruth May herself.

As soon as I came back, I drove down to see her.We sat together on her bony couch -with my photographs of Africa, picking through and laying them out, making a tidepool of shiny color among the seashells on her coffee table.

“Lean’s thin,” I reported, “but she still walks too fast.”

“How is Rachel holding up?”

That is a good question. “In spite of remarkable intervening circumstances,” I said, “if Rachel ever gets back to Bethlehem for a high school reunion she will win the prize for ‘Changed the Least.’“

Mother handled the photos with mostly casual interest, except for the ones that showed my sisters. Over these she paused, for an extremely long time, as if she were listening to small, silent confessions.

Finally I made mine. I told her he had died. She was strangely uncurious about the details, but I gave her most of them anyway.

She sat looking puzzled. “I have some pansies I need to set out,” she said then, and let the screen door bang as she walked out to the back porch. I followed, and found her in her old straw gardening hat, a trowel already in one hand and the flat of pansies balanced in the other. She ducked under the tangled honeysuckle toward the garden path, using her trowel like a machete to hack through some overgrown vines that crowded her jungly little porch. We marched purposefully down her little path to the lettuce bed by the gate, where she knelt in the leaf mold and began punching holes in the ground. I squatted nearby, watching. Her hat had a wide straw brim and a crown completely blown out, as if whatever was in her head had exploded many times.

“Leah says he would have wanted to go that way,” I said. “A blaze of glory.”

“I don’t give a damn what he would have wanted.”

“Oh,” I said. The damp ground soaked the knees of her jeans in large dark patches that spread like bloodstains as she worked.

“Are you sorry he’s dead?”

“Adah, what can it possibly mean to me now?”
  

Then what are you sorry about?

She lifted seedlings out of the flat, untangling their nets of tender white roots. Her bare hands worked them into the ground, prodding and gentling, as if putting to bed an endless supply of small children. She wiped the tears off both sides of her face with the back of her left hand, leaving dark lines of soil along her cheekbones. To live is to be marked, she said without speaking. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths. I am a mother.You aren’t, he wasn’t.

“Do you want to forget?”

She paused her work, resting her trowel on her knee, and looked at me. “Are we allowed to remember?”

“Who’s to say we can’t?”
   
.

“Not one woman in Bethlehem ever asked me how Ruth May died. Did you know that?”

“I guess.”

“And all those people I worked with in Atlanta, on civil rights and African relief. We never once spoke of my having a crazy evangelist husband still in the Congo somewhere. People knew. But it was embarrassing to them. I guess they thought it was some awful reflection on me.”

“The sins of the father,” I said.

“The sins of the father are not discussed. That’s how it is.” She returned to her business of stabbing the earth.

I know she is right. Even the Congo has tried to slip out of her old flesh, to pretend it isn’t scarred. Congo was a woman in shadows, dark-hearted, moving to a drumbeat. Zaire is a tall young man tossing salt over his shoulder. All the old injuries have been renamed: Kinshasa, Kisangani.There was never a King Leopold, no brash Stanley, bury them, forget.You have nothing to lose but your chains.

But I don’t happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You’ll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you’ll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

“I’ll discuss it,” I said. “I despised him. He was a despicable man.”

“Well, Adah.You could always call a spade a spade.”

“Do you know when I hated him the most? When he used to make fun of my books. My writing and reading. And when he hit any of us. You especially. I imagined getting the kerosene and burning him up in his bed. I only didn’t because you were in it too.”

She looked up at me from under her hat brim. Her eyes were a wide, hard, granite blue.

“It’s true,” I said. I pictured it clearly. I could smell the cold kerosene and feel it soaking the sheets. I still can.

Then why didn’t you? Both of us together.You might as well have.

Because then you would be free too. And I didn’t want that. I wanted you to remember what he did to us.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

Leah Price Ngemba

KIMVULA DISTRICT, ZAIRE 1986

I HAVE FOUR SONS, all named for men we lost to war: Pascal, Patrice, Martin-Lothaire, and Nataniel.

‘Taniel is our miracle. He was born last year, a month early, after his long, bumpy upside-down ride in the Land Rover that moved our family from Kinshasa to the farm in Kimvula District. We were still ten kilometers from the village when my chronic backache spread to a deep, rock-hard contraction across my lower belly, and I understood with horror that I was in labor. I got out and walked very slowly behind the truck, to subdue my panic. Anatole must have been worried sick by my bizarre conduct, but it’s no use arguing with a woman in labor, so he got out and walked with me while the boys bickered over who would drive the truck. I can vaguely recall its twin red taillights ahead of us on the dark jungle road, bumping along tediously, and the false starts of an afternoon thundershower. After a while, without saying anything, I went to the side of the road and lay down on a pile of damp leaves between the tall, buttressed roots of a kapok tree. Anatole knelt next to my head and stroked my hair.

“You should get up. It’s dark and damp here, and our clever sons have gone off and left us.”

I raised my head and looked for the truck, which was indeed gone. There was something I needed to explain to Anatole, but I couldn’t be bothered with it at the peak of a contraction. Straight overhead was the tree, with its circle of limbs radiating out from the great, pale trunk. I counted my way around that circle of branches like numbers on the face of a clock, slowly, one deep breath for each number. Seventeen. A very long minute, maybe an hour. The contraction subsided.

“Anatole,” I said. “I mean to have this baby right here and now.” “Oh, Beene.You have never had any patience at all.” The boys drove on for some time before stopping and backing up, by the grace of God and Martin-Lothaire. He’d lost the argument about driving and was pouting out the back window when it dawned on him to shout for his brother to stop: “Wait, wait, Mama must be having the baby!”

Anatole threw things around madly in the truck before finding an elephant-grass mat and some shirts (at least we had with us everything we owned, and it was clean). He made me sit up so he could tuck these things under me. I don’t remember it. I only remember my thighs tensing and my pelvis arching forward with that sudden thunderous urge that is so much more powerful than any other human craving—the need to push. I heard a roar, which I suppose was me, and then Nataniel was here with us, bloodying a clean white shirt of Anatole’s and an old, soft pagne printed with yellow birds.

Anatole did a laughing, backward-hopping dance of congratulation. It wasn’t yet quite a year since his release from Camp Hardy, and he was sympathetic to his son’s eager escape from solitary confinement. But the baby was weak. Anatole immediately settled down to driving us anxiously through the dark while I curled around our suckling boy in the backseat, alarmed to see he wasn’t even that—he couldn’t nurse. By the time we arrived in Kimvula he felt feverish. From there he wasted very quickly to a lethargic little bundle of skin-covered bones and a gaunt, skin-covered skull. He didn’t even cry. The next many days and nights ran together for me because I was terrified to put him down at all, or even to fall asleep holding him, for fear he’d slip away. Anatole and I took turns rocking his limp little body, talking to him, trying to coax him into the world of the living. Martin insisted on taking his turn, too, rocking and whispering boy secrets into the little printed blanket. But Nataniel was hard to convince. Twice he stopped breathing altogether. Anatole blew into his mouth and massaged his chest until he gasped faintly and came back.