The Poisonwood Bible (34 page)

“You have an unusual family.”

    “And how!” I said.”That is about the politest way you could put it.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said.”What happened to your sister?” “Which one? As far as I can tell they all three got dropped on their heads when they were babies.”

He laughed. “The one that limps,” he said. “Adah.” .   “Oh, her. Hemiplegia. Half her brain got wrecked some way before she was born so the other half had to take over, and it makes her do certain things backwards.” I am used to having to give the scientific explanation for Adah.

“I see,” he said. “Are you aware that she spies on me?”

“She spies  on everybody. Don’t take it personally. Staring at somebody without making a peep is her idea of a conversation.”

We strolled past Mama Mwanza’s and a bunch of other houses where mostly old men were sitting on buckets without a single tooth in their heads.We were also graced by the presence of little children running around totally naked except for a string of beads around their bellies. I ask you, why bother? They all ran out to the road to see how close they could get to us before they had to scream and run away. That is the favorite game. The women were all down at the manioc fields because it was still the end of the morning.

Axelroot took out a pack of Lucky Strikes from his shirt pocket and shook it sideways toward me. I laughed and started to remind him that I’m not old enough, but then realized, my gosh, I was seventeen years old. I could smoke if I wanted to—why ever not? Even some Baptists smoke on appropriate occasions. I took one.

“Thanks. You know I turned seventeen yesterday,” I told him, resting the cigarette lightly on my lips and pausing in the shade of a palm tree so he could light it for me.              

“Congratulations,” he said, muffled through the cigarette he put in his own mouth. “I’d have taken you for older.”

That made me tingle, but not half as much as what happened next. Right there in the middle of the road he took the cigarette out of my mouth and put it in his, then struck a match on his thumbnail and lit the two of them together, exactly like Humphrey Bogart. Then, ever so gently, he put the lit cigarette back in my lips. It seemed almost like we had kissed. Chills ran down my back, but I couldn’t tell for sure if it was thrill chills or the creeps. Sometimes it is very hard to know the difference. I tried out holding the filter tip between my two fingers like the girls in magazine ads. So far so good with smoking, I thought. Then I drew in a breath, puckered my lips and puffed it out, and almost instantly I felt dizzy. I coughed a time or two, and Axelroot laughed.

“I haven’t smoked for a  while,” I said.” You know. It’s hard for us to get things now.”

“I can get you all the American cigarettes you want. Just say the word.”

“Well, I wouldn’t actually say anything about it to my parents. They’re not big smokers.” But it dawned on me to wonder, How in the world would he get American cigarettes in a country where you can’t even buy toilet paper? “You know a lot of men in high places, don’t you?”

He laughed. “Princess, you don’t know the half of it.”

“I’m sure I don’t,” I said.

A bunch of the younger men were up on top of the church-schoolhouse patching the roof with palm leaves. Father must have organized this barnstorming party, I thought, and then I panicked: Oh Lordy! Here I was right out in broad daylight refreshing my taste with a Lucky Strike. But a quick glance around told me Father was nowhere to he seen, thank goodness. Just a bunch of men singing and blabbing in the Congo language and fixing a roof, that’s all it  was.

Why fix the roof now? That was a good question. Last year around the time of my birthday it was pouring down rain every single afternoon, come heck or high river, but this summer, not a drop yet. Just the bugs screeching in the crackly dry grass and the air getting heavier and heavier on these muggy waiting-for-it days. The mugginess just made everybody itch for something, I think.

Just then a large group of women passed us coming back from their manioc field. Huge bundles of giant brown roots tied together with rope were balanced on their heads. The women moved slowly and gracefully putting one foot ahead of the other, and with their thin bodies all draped in colorful pagnes and their heads held so straight and high—honestly, though it is strange to say, they looked like fashion models. Maybe it has just been too long since I’ve seen a fashion magazine. But some of them here I guess are very pretty in their way. Axelroot seemed to think so. He gave them a little salute to the tip of his hat, which he probably forgot he wasn’t wearing. “Mbote a-akento akwa Kilanga. Benzika kooko.”

Every single one of them looked away from us, toward the ground. It was very strange.

“What in the world did you say to them?” I asked after they’d passed by.

“Hey there, ladies of Kilanga. Why don’t you cut me some slack for a change. That’s more or less what I said.” “Well, sir, they sure didn’t, did they?”

He laughed. “They just don’t want any trouble with jealous husbands.”

This is what I mean about Axelroot: you can’t for one minute let yourself forget he is a creep. Right there in front of me, his supposed fiancee, flirting with the entire female contribution of Kilanga. And the bit about jealous husbands, I’m sure. As far as we could see nobody in Kilanga liked Axelroot one iota—man or woman. Mother and Father had commented on this.The women seemed to despise him especially. Whenever he tried to make deals with them to fly their manioc and bananas to Stanleyville, I had personally seen them spit on his shoes.

“No great loss, believe me,” he said. “I prefer a-akento akwa Elisabethville.”

“And what is so special about women from Elisabethville?”

He tipped back his head, smiled, and blew smoke into the muggy sky. Today it really looked like it might rain at last, and felt like it too. The air felt like somebody’s hot breath all over your body, even under your clothes.

“Experience,” he said.

Well, I knew I had better change the train of this conversation. I took a nonchalant puff on my cigarette without breathing in very much. I still felt dizzy. “Where is Elisabethville, anyway?”

“Down south, Katanga Province. The new nation of Katanga, I should say. Did you know Katanga has seceded from the Congo?”

I sighed, feeling light-headed. “I’m just happy to know somebody has succeeded in something. Is that where you go on your trips?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “From now on, more than sometimes.”

“Oh, really.You have new orders from the commando, I suppose.”

“You have no idea,” he said again. I was getting a little tired of hearing how I had no idea. Honestly, did he think I was a child?

“I’m sure I don’t,” I said. We’d gotten to the edge of the village, past the chief’s house, where we were supposed to make a point of Tata Ndu seeing us together, which we both forgot about. Now we were out where there were no more huts and the tall elephant grass started to get tangled up with the edge of the jungle. I’d sworn I wouldn’t go past the end of the village, but it’s a woman’s provocative to change her mind. Axelroot just kept walking, and suddenly I didn’t care what happened next. I kept walking too. Maybe it was the cigarettes: I felt very rash. I would get him to fly us out of here by hook or by crook, is what I was thinking deep in my heart. It was cooler in the forest anyway, and very quiet. When you listened there were only bird sounds with silence in between, and those two sounds put together somehow seemed even quieter than no sound at all. It was very shadowy and nearly dark, even though it was the middle of the day. Axelroot stopped and put out his cigarette with his boot. He took mine from me, cupped rny chin in his hand, and started to kiss me. Oh, lordy! My first kiss, and I didn’t even get a chance to get ready for it. I didn’t and I did want him to do it.

Mostly I did. He tasted like tobacco and salt and the whole experience was very wet. Finally I pushed him away.

“That’s enough of that,” I said. “If we do anything, we should do it where people will see us, you know.”

“Well, well.” He was smiling, and ran the back of his hand along the side of my face. “I’d expect more modesty from a preacher’s daughter.”

“I’ll show you preacher’s daughter. Go to hell, Axelroot!” I turned around and started walking fast back toward the village. He caught up to me and put his arm on my shoulder to slow me back down to a stroll.

“Mustn’t let Tata Ndu see us having a lovers’ quarrel,” he said, leaning down into my face. I tossed my head so my hair flew right in his nosy mug. We were still in the forest anyways, nowhere near Tata Ndu’s house or anybody else’s.

“Come on,” he coaxed. “Give me a smile. One pretty smile and I’ll tell you the biggest damn secret in Africa.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. But I was curious. I glanced at him. “So what’s the secret? Does my family get to go home?”

He laughed. “You still think you’re the epicenter of a continent, don’t you, Princess?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. I would have to ask Leah if an episender sent out good things or bad. If a man you are supposedly engaged to calls you one, you ought to know.

He’d slowed me down till we were walking at an absolute snail’s pace. It made me nervous. But he was going to tell me his secret if I just waited. I could tell he was itching to, so I didn’t ask. I know a thing or two about men. Finally, here it came.”Somebody’s going to die,” he announced.

“Well, big surprise,” I said. “Somebody dies around here about every ten and a half seconds.” But of course I wondered: Who? I felt a little scared but still didn’t ask. We kept walking, step by step. I had to. He still had his arm around me. “Somebody that matters,” he said.

 “Everybody matters,” I informed him. “In the eyes of our Lord Jesus Christ they do. Even the sparrows that fall out of their little nest and what not.”

He positively snorted at that. “Princess, you have much to learn. Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.”

I was sick of his guessing game. “All right then, who?”

He put his mouth so close to my ear I could feel his lips on my hair. He whispered,”Lumumba”

“Patrice Lumumba, the President?” I asked out loud, startled. “Or whatever he is? The one they elected?”

“As good as dead,” he said in a quiet, so-what voice that chilled my blood.

“Do you mean to tell me he’s sick or something?”

“I mean his number is up. He’s going to get it.”

“And how would you happen to know that?”

“I would happen to know that,” he said, mocking me, “because I’m in a position to know. Take my word for it, sister.Yesterday Big Shot sent a cable to Devil One with orders to replace the new Congolese government by force. I intercepted the news in code on my radio. My own orders will be coming before the end of the week, I guarantee you.”

Now that was so much bunk I am sure, because nobody in our village has a radio. But I let him go on talking in his little riddles if that was what buttered his toast. He said Devil One was supposed to get his so-called operatives to convince the army men to go against Lumumba. Supposedly this Devil One person was going to get one million dollars from the United States to pay soldiers to do that, go against the very person they all just elected. A million dollars! When we couldn’t even get fifty measly greenbacks a month for our bread and board. That was a likely story. I almost felt sorry for Axelroot, wanting so bad to impress me into kissing him again that he’d make up ridiculous stories. I may be a preacher’s daughter, but I know a thing or two. And one of them is, when men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that’s going to change the whole wide world.       

Adah

PRESENTIMENT—is that long Shadow—on the Lawn— Indicative that Suns go down— The Notice to the startled Grass That Darkness—is about to pass— Pity the poor dumb startled grass, I do. Ssap ot tuoba. I am fond of Miss Emily Dickinson: No snikddy lime, a contrary name with a delicious sourgreen taste. Reading her secrets and polite small cruelties of her heart, I believe she enjoyed taking the dumb grass by surprise, in her poem. Cumbered in her body, dressed in black, hunched over her secret notebook with window blinds shut against the happy careless people outside, she makes small scratching sounds with her pen, covering with nightfall all creatures that really should know what to expect by now, but don’t. She liked herself best in darkness, as do I.

In darkness when all cats are equally black, I move as gracefully as anyone. Benduka is the bent-sideways girl who walks slowly, but ben-duka is also the name of a fast-flying bird, the swallow with curved wings who darts crookedly quick through trees near the river. This bird I can follow. I am the smooth, elegant black cat who slips from the house as a liquid shadow after dark. Night is the time for seeing without being seen. With my own narrow shadow for a boat I navigate the streams of moonlight that run between shadow islands in the date-palm grove. Bats pierce the night with bell voices like knives. Bats stab! And owls call out to the bikinda, spirits of the dead. The owls, only hungry like everyone else, looking for souls to eat.

In the long perishing of children from kakakaka I saw the air change color: it was blue with bildla, the wailing for the dead. It came inside our house, where our mother stopped up her ears and her mouth. Bi la ye bandu! Bi la ye bandulWhy why why, they sang, the mothers -who staggered down our road behind small tightly wrapped corpses, mothers crazy-walking on their knees, with mouths open wide like a hole ripped in mosquito netting. That mouth hole! Jagged torn place in their spirits that lets the small flying agonies pass in and out. Mothers with eyes squeezed shut, dark cheek muscles tied in knots, heads thrashing from side to side as they passed. All this we saw from our windows. Two times I saw more. The Reverend forbade us to observe any ritual over which he was not asked to preside, but twice, at night, I slipped out to spy on the funerals. Inside a grove of trees the mothers threw themselves on mounds of dirt that covered their children. Crawled on their hands and knees, tried to eat the dirt from the graves. Other women had to pull them away. The owls croon and croon, and the air must be thick with the spirits of children dead.