The Poisonwood Bible (27 page)

“Don’t worry about Mr. Khrushchev. When Lumumba says he might get help from Russia, it is, what do you call this?   trompe son monde, like the hen who puffs up her feathers like so, very big, to show the snake she is too big to eat.”

“A bluff,” I said, delighted. “Lumumba’s bluffing.”

 “A bluff, exactly. I think Lumumba wants to be neutral, more than anything. More than he loves his very own life. He doesn’t want to give away our wealth, but he most especially does not want your country for an enemy.”

 “He has a hard job,” I said.

“I can think of no person in all the world right now with a harder job.”

“Mr. Axelroot doesn’t think much of him,” I confessed. “He says Patrice Lumumba is trouble in a borrowed suit.”

Anatole leaned close to my ear. “Do you want to know a secret? I think Mr. Axelroot is trouble in his own stinking hat.” Oh, I laughed to hear that.

We stood awhile longer watching Mama Mwanza argue good-naturedly with her lazy son and take several broad swipes at him with her big cooking spoon. He jumped back, making exaggerated shouts. His sisters scolded him, too, laughing. I realized that Mama Mwanza had an extraordinarily pretty face, with wide-set eyes, a solemn mouth, and a high, rounded forehead under her kerchief. Her husband had taken no other wife, even after her terrible accident and the loss of their two youngest children. Their family had seen so much of hardship, yet it still seemed easy for them to laugh with each other. I envied them with an intensity near to love, and near to rage.

I told Anatole: “I saw Patrice Lumumba. Did you know that? In Leopoldville my father and I got to watch him give his inaugural speech.”

“Did you?” Anatole seemed impressed. “Well, then, you can make up your own mind. What did you think of our Prime Minister?”

It took me a moment’s pause to discover what I thought. Finally I said, “I didn’t understand everything. But he made me want to believe in every word. Even the ones I wasn’t sure of.”

  “You understood well enough, then.”

“Anatole, is Katanga close to here?”  He flipped his finger against my cheek. “Don’t worry, Beene. No one will be shooting at you. Go and cook your rabbit. I’ll come back when I can smell umvundla stew from my desk in the school-house. Sala mbote!”

“Wenda mbote!” I clasped my forearm and shook his hand.  I called to his back as he walked away, “Thank you, Anatole.” I wasn’t just thanking him for the rabbit but also for telling me things. For the way he said, “Not you, Beene,” and “You understood well enough.”

He turned and walked backwards for a few bouncing steps. “Don’t forget to tell your father: Katanga has seceded.”   

“I won’t possibly forget.”

I returned to Ruth May’s braids, but was very conscious of Anatole s broad shoulders and narrow waist, the triangle of white shirt moving away from us as he walked purposefully down the dirt road back to the village. I wish the people back home reading magazine stories about dancing cannibals could see something as ordinary as Anatole s clean white shirt and kind eyes, or Mama Mwanza with her children. If the word “Congo” makes people think of that big-lipped cannibal man in the cartoon, why, they’re just wrong about everything here from top to bottom. But how could you ever set them right? Since the day we arrived, Mother has nagged us to write letters home to our classmates at Bethlehem High, and not one of us has done it yet. We re still wondering, Where do you start? “This morning I got up...” I’d begin, but no, “This morning I pulled back the mosquito netting that’s tucked in tight around our beds because mosquitoes here give you malaria, a disease that runs in your blood which nearly everyone has anyway but they don’t go to the doctor for it because there are worse things like sleeping sickness or the kakakaka or that someone has put a kibaazu on them, and anyway there’s really no doctor nor money to pay one, so people just hope for the good luck of getting old because then they’ll be treasured, and meanwhile they go on with their business because they have children they love and songs to sing while they work, and...”

And you wouldn’t even get as far as breakfast before running out of paper. You’d have to explain the words, and then the words for the words.

Ruth May remained listless while I explored my thoughts and finished up her braids. I knew I ought to have bathed her and washed her hair before combing it out, but the idea of lugging the big tub out and heating a dozen teakettles of water so she -wouldn’t get chilled—it was more than a day’s work, and now I had mangwansi beans to worry about and the skinning of a rabbit. That is surely childhood’s end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: “Nobody else is going to do this.” So no bath for Ruth May that day. I merely pushed her awhile in the swing as I’d promised, and she did kick her feet a little. Maybe it made her happy, I can’t say. I hope it did. Anatole’s words had pushed things around inside of me. It’s true that sickness and death make children more precious. I used to threaten Ruth May’s life so carelessly just to make her behave. Now I had to face the possibility that we really could lose her, and my heart felt like a soft, damaged place in my chest, like a bruise on a peach.

She flew forward and back and I watclhed her shadow in the white dust under the swing. Each time she: reached the top of her arc beneath the sun, her shadow legs were transformed into the thin, curved legs of an antelope, “with small rounded hooves at the bottom instead of feet. I was transfixed and horrified by the image of my sister with antelope legs. I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

Ruth May

ALL THOSE BLACK FACES in the black night a-looking at me. They want me to come play. But you can’t say the words out loud at night. Mother May I? No you may not! Mama says no. Mama is here breathing. When we’re both asleep I hear her talk and that’s what she says: no no no no. But the lizards run away up the walls with the rest of her words, and I can’t hear.

Sometimes I wake up and: nobody. Outside there’s sunshine so I know it’s broad day, but everybody is gone and I’m sweating too much and can’t talk about it. Other times it is dark, and Mama and Father are saying secrets. Mama begs Father. She says they went after the white girls up in Stanleyville. They went in their houses and took everything they wanted to, the food and the radio batteries and all. And they made the missionaries stand naked on top of the roof without any clothes on, and then they shot two of them. Everybody is talking about it and Mama heard. In Stanleyville is where the doctor put a cast on my arm. Did he have to go on the roof of the hospital without any clothes? I never can stop thinking about the doctor with no clothes on. The lizards run away up the walls and take all the words I want to say. But Father says what the Bible says: The meek shall inherit. He started to pat his hand on Mama and she pushed him away. Hearken therefore unto the supplications of thy servant, that thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day.

Night and day and night and day. Jesus is looking right in the windows no matter what. He can see through the roof. He can see inside our heads, where we think the bad things. I tried not to think of the doctor with no clothes on with all of them up on the roof but he had that yellow hair on his arms. Rachel screamed and thrashed her white hair and sassed back at Father bad: “Who cares who cares who cares! Who is even going to know the difference if we scoot out of here and go back home where it’s safe?”

 Father yelled, “God will know the difference!” And Rachel fell down hard before I even heard the sound of the wall and his hand. “God despises a coward who runs while others stand and suffer. “

Where will we be safe? When Mama raises her eyes up to him they are so cold there isn’t even any Mama home inside there, and she says, “Nathan Price, the meek shall inherit.You wait and see.”

I know the meek shall inherit and the last shall be first, but the Tribes of Ham were last. Now will they be first? I don’t know.

In our family, Mama comes last. Adah is next to last because her one whole side is bad, and then comes Mama last of all, because something in her is even worse hurt than what Adah’s got.

Nelson told me how to find a safe place. One time I woke up and there he was: Nelson.

Oh, is he mad because I tried to see him naked, I don’t know. My mouth couldn’t say any words. But there he was by the bed, and Mama gone from beside me.

He put his hand over my mouth, stooping down and nobody else there. Nobody else. Shhh, he said and put his hand. I thought he was going to hurt me, but instead he was my friend. Shhh, he said, and took his hand off my mouth and gave me a present. A bu, Bandu.Take this!

Bandu is my name. Nommo Bandu! It means the littlest one on the bottom. And it means the reason for everything. Nelson told me that.

What is it? I said, but not any words came out of my mouth. I looked inside my two hands, where he put it, and there was a tiny box like what matches come in. A matchbox. The matchbox had a picture of a lion on the outside and I thought there would be a tiny little lion inside to be my pet, like the mean ones that eat the ants only nicer. Stuart Lion. But no. Nelson opened it up and took out something, I couldn’t tell what. It looked like a piece of chicken bone  with gristle and string all on it and sticky and something black. What was it, something that died? I was scared and started fixing to cry.

Nelson said, Don’t be scared. He said, this has been in the magic fire.You call this nkisi. He made me touch it and it didn’t burn me. Look, he said. He held it right up to my eye. There was a tiny hole in the side and a tiny peg that fit in the hole, tied with string. Put your spirit inside here, he said, here quick, blow in this hole. He opened up the peg and I blew in the little hole and quick he said my name Nommo Bandu Nommo Bandu Nommo Bandu! and shut up the hole -with the little peg and Now you are safe. He said now if anything happens to me, if I start fixing to die or something, hold on to this tight and bambula! Ruth May will disappear.

How do you know? But Nelson knows everything about dead people. His mama and father and brothers and baby sister are all dead on the bottom of the river.

I don’t want to disappear, I said.

But he said, Only if you are going to die. He said this way I won’t die, I will just disappear for a second and then I’ll turn up someplace else, where it’s safe. Instead of dead I’ll be safe. But first I have to think of that place every day, so my spirit will know where to run away to, when it’s time. You have to think of your safe place every day. Nelson’s face was bigger than a candle right in my face and I could hear the good way he smelled.That soap he uses for washing up and his clothes. All those smells were so loud in my ears. Nelson is my friend that showed me how to sing to the chickens. Bidumuka is the magic name of a chicken. Nobody else knows that, not even Leah or Father.          

Nelson said, Don’t forget!

I put the matchbox with the lion picture on it, and the magic burned bones inside, I put it under my pillow. Nkisi. Sometimes I wake up and it is still there. If they come and try to make me go up on the roof naked I will just disappear, and turn up some whole other place. But first I have to think of where I will go. I can feel the box in my hand. My pillow is wet and the tiny little box is soft but I know what is inside. Secret. There is the window, and it’s daytime now and people in the other room talking and they don’t know? I have a secret. But Nelson has gone somewhere and his mama dead; I wonder where and I can’t remember the song we sang to the chickens.

Leah

RUTH MAY’S SICKNESS stayed with her, but Mother began pulling  herself together. Seeing the two of them curled in the same bed, one slowly emerging and the other losing ground, put me back onto familiar, unpleasant thoughts of Adah and me in the womb. I have prayed a thousand times for God to tell me: Did I do that to Adah? If I showed her more kindness now, could I be forgiven for making her a cripple? But a debt of that size seems so impossible to pay back it is a dread thing even to start on.

Mother used her own reserves, without stealing the life out of Ruth May or anyone else. She seemed to draw strength right out of the muggy air. Sometimes I saw her sit on the side of the bed for a while before getting up, drawing in deep breaths through thin, pursed lips. She had her good and bad phases, but finally stopped sleepwalking once and for all. It happened rather suddenly one day, after Rachel burned up an egg omelet. She burned two in a row, to be exact—she had the fire in the stove stoked up way too high.The only way to get a slow heat for baking bread or cooking a tender thing like an omelet is to build up a big fire first with good, stout wood and then cook while the coals die slowly down. Rachel could never get the hang of that. She was trying to start the fire and cook all at once, which will never get you anywhere.You can’t keep a new fire low; it must grow or die. Nelson taught me that.

But Nelson had gone to get water before dark so Rachel was trying to cook all alone. It was her day in charge of dinner and she had failed to think ahead. Now I could hear her screaming vile things out there in the kitchen house. I went out to investigate and let her know we were hungry.

“I’ll hungry you,”she yelled, ‘Can’t you see I’ve only got two hands?”

I could. She was using both of them to gouge at the burned skillet with a wooden spatula of Nelson’s making. Her hair had come down from its French knot and stuck all over her face, and her good blouse was smeared with black ash. She looked like Cinderella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among the ashes.

“You’ve built the fire up way too hot,” I told her.

“Go to hell, Leah just go straight, directly to hell.”

“I’m just trying to help. Look, see how the metal’s glowing red hot on top? When it gets like that you just have to wait and let it cool off. Then you can try again.”

Rachel blew out her breath hard. “Oh, whatever would I do without my child-progeny sister to tell me what to do.”