The Poisonwood Bible (38 page)

It’s true, that was what we believed: the majority rules. How could we argue? I looked down at my fist, which still clutched my pebble. I hadn’t voted, nor Mother either. How could we, with Father staring right at us? The only one of us who’d had the nerve was Ruth May, who marched right up and voted for Jesus so hard her pebble struck the cross and bounced. But I guess we all made our choices, one way or the other.           

Tata Ndu turned to Father and spoke almost kindly. ‘Jesus is a white man, so he will understand the law of la majorite, Tata Price. Wenda mbote.”

Jesus Christ lost, eleven to fifty-six.

Rachel

MAYBE I SHOULDN’T SAY so but it’s true: Leah is the cause of all our problems. It goes back to when she and Father commenced World War Three at our house. What a crazy mixed-up scene. Leah would rare up and talk back to Father straight to his face, and then, boy oh boy. The rest of us would duck and cover like you have to do whenever they drop the A-bomb. Leah always had the uppermost respect for Father, but after the hullabaloo in church where they voted Father out, she just plumb stopped being polite.

How it started was her declaring she was going hunting with her little bow and arrow. My sister, little Miss The-Lord-Is-My-Shepherd, now thinks she is Robin Hood. I am surprised she hasn’t tried to shoot an apple off my head, if we had an apple that is. There is not a speck of food anywhere. The ants ate everything people had stored up, which was not much to begin -with because of the drought. It clouds up every morning and gets muggy for an hour, but then the sun beats down and dries up everything. Market day looks like you just came out of your fallout shelter after the bomb attack: nobody there but a few old guys with car parts and knives and cookpots, hoping to trade for food. Lots of luck, Charlie! We’re only still scraping by with what Mrs. Fowles gave us off their boat, plus some eggs, because thank goodness Mama Mwanza brought us over two laying hens after the ants ate up ours. She lets her chickens just run here, there, and everywhere, so they escaped their fateful death by flapping up into the treetops. I happen to think Axelroot could get us some food too, if he tried, but he has been making himself scarce for months now, supposedly because he’s on some top-secret mission. It’s enough to drive you crazy. He said he’d bring me cigarettes and Hershey’s chocolate when he came back, and I was very thrilled at the time, I’m sure, but, jeez, oh man. Right now I’d settle for a good old-fashioned loaf of Wonder Bread.

Well, the next thing we knew, Tata Ndu announced the whole village has to go on a big hunt, and that will save us. All of us together! It is quite involved. The plan, as Nelson explained it, is they start a fire in a huge circle around the big hill behind the village. That hill is mostly tall dead grass, not jungle, so it would burn up in a flash. The women are supposed to wave palm leaves and chase the flames in toward the middle until all the trapped animals inside get completely nerve-racked and jump out through the fire. That is the cue for the men to shoot them. Kids and old folks get the wonderful j ob of walking along behind and picking up all of God’s creatures that got burnt to a crisp. Nelson says every person in the village is to be there, required precipitation.

Well, fine, I can go walk through a burnt field and get covered with soot from head to toe. I gave up long ago trying to pass the white-glove test. But Lean’s little plan is to go with the men right up front and shoot things with her bow and arrow. Her new best friend, Anatole, seems to encourage it. When they held the meeting about it, he kept remarking how she is a very good shot, and if we’re dying of hunger why should we care who shoots the antelope as long as it gets killed? And Nelson jumped right in to agree with Anatole, saying we should be glad for every arrow that shoots straight, even if it comes from a girl. Honestly. Nelson is just proud of being the one that taught her to shoot. And Leah is just primarily a show-off.     

Tata Ndu and the older men were all against, at the meeting. Tata Kuvudundu especially. He sat with his lips pursed until whenever it came around again for his turn to talk. Then he’d stand up in his white wraparound robe and tell whole entire stories about horrid things that happened in the olden days: poison water coming out of the ground, elephants going berserk, exetera, whenever people

didn’t listen to him and insisted on doing things not the normal way. Then they’d all say, “Oh, yeah, I remember.” The old men all nodded a lot, sitting up straight with their elbows close to their sides, hands on their laps, and feet flat on the ground a little bit pigeon-toed. The younger men leaned back on their stools with their knees wide apart, taking up all the room they needed, and were quick to yell out what was on their minds. Mostly it was in French and such, but Adah took things down in English in her notebook and held it where I could read it. So for once she made herself useful as well as a bump on a log.

Naturally Father had his own addenda for the meeting. When he got his one chance to speak, he tried to turn the whole hunt around into a kind of new, improved prayer meeting with animal shooting at the end. Which nobody listened to, because they were all jazzed up about a girl wanting to hunt with the men. I’m sure Father resented his own daughter being such a distraction. It’s just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.

In the end it came down to Tata Ndu, Tata Kuvudundu, and Anatole doing the talking. Tata Ndu in his orange-and-white-striped cloth wrapped across his chest. He gave the impression, “I am the chief and don’t you forget it,” and of course Tata Kuvudundu is the voodoo witch doctor and you don’t forget that either, what with him having six toes and going cross-eyed in the middle of a sentence just for the scary effect. But Anatole is the schoolteacher, after all, and a lot of the boys that now at the ripe age of nineteen or so have wives and families formerly learned their two-plus-two from him in the first place. They still call him Monsieur Anatole, instead of the usual “Tata,” because he was their schoolmaster. So it got to be divided down the lines of young against old, with Anatole persuading a lot of the younger men. And in our village, believe you me, people die for the slightest provocation so there are not that many old people still hanging around.

Leah had to sit in the front of the room all night long without saying a peep. She kept looking at Anatole, but after a while you couldn’t tell really if he was on her side. He stopped mentioning

what a good shot she was and moved on to the subject of whether you should kill a rat for its skin or kill a rat for being a rat. Whatever that may mean. Tata Ndu said if it runs in a rat’s skin it is a rat. Then they all got to yelling about foreigners, the army takeover, and somebody thrown in prison which if you ask me is at least a more favorable subject than rats.      

At the end it got turned into another showdown: were we going to keep talking about this all night, or have a vote? Anatole was very against the voting. He said this was a matter to be discussed and agreed on properly, because even if Kilanga ran one white family out of town, there were a million more whites in the world and if you couldn’t learn to tell a good rat from a bad one, you’d soon be living with both in your house. And, he said, don’t be surprised when your own daughter or wife wants to shoot a bow and arrow behind your back. Well, everybody laughed at that, but I failed to see the humor. Was he calling us rats?

Tata Ndu had had just about enough. He marched up and plunked down two big clay voting bowls in front of Leah. It kind of made people mad when he did it.You could see them siding with Anatole, that it needed more talk. But, no, time’s up. As for Leah, she looked like a chicken fixing to get thrown in the stewpot. But was I supposed to feel sorry for her? She asked for it! With all her attention-getting mechanisms. Some of the men still seemed to think the whole thing was funny, so maybe they thought she’d shoot an arrow through her foot, for all I know. But when it came time to walk up and cast their votes, fifty-one stones went in the bowl with Leah’s bow-and-arrow by it. Forty-five for the one with the cookpot.

Man alive, Tata Kuvudundu was not one bit happy then. He stood up and hollered that we’d turned over the natural way of things and boy, would we be sorry. He made a very big point of looking at Anatole when he said that, but he also seemed put out with Tata Ndu for the voting activity, which got backfired on him. Tata Ndu didn’t say much, but he frowned so hard his big bald forehead wrinkled up like the bread dough when you punch it down. He held his big muscle-man arms across his chest, and even though he was an elderly man of fifty or so, he looked like he could still beat the pants off anybody in the room.

“The animals are listening to us tonight!” Tata Kuvudundu yelled out and kind of started singing with his eyes closed. Then he stopped. It got real quiet and he looked very slowly around the room. “The leopards will walk upright like men on our paths. The snakes will come out of the ground and seek our houses instead of hiding in their own. Bwe?You did this.You decided the old ways are no good. Don’t blame the animals, it was your decision.You want to change everything, and now, kuleka? Do you expect to sleep?”

Nobody said a word, they just looked scared. Tata Ndu sat with his head thrown back and his eyes just little slits, watching.

“No one will sleep!”Tata Kuvudundu suddenly shrieked, leaping up and waving his arms in the air.

Everybody else kind of jumped at that, but Leah sat stock-still. Like I said, showing off. She didn’t even blink. Then we all got up and left and she followed us out, and no one in our family said boo to each other all the way home. When we got to the door Father stopped, blocking the way. Oh, brother. We were going to have to stand out there on the porch and hear the moral of the story. “Leah,” he said, “who is the master of this house?” She stood with her chin down, not answering.

Finally she said, “You are,” in a voice as little as an ant.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you?” “You are!” she screamed at him.

Mother and I jumped, but Father merely replied in a normal voice, “What occurred this evening may be of some consequence to the village, but it’s of no consequence to you. God has ordained that you honor thy father and submit thyself to the rules of his house.”

Leah didn’t even move. Her chin was still tilted down, but her eyes were straight on him like nobody’s business. “So,” she said quietly, “you agree with Tata Ndu and the witch doctor.”

Father sucked in his breath. “They agree with me. It’s nonsense for you to hunt with the men. You’re only causing trouble, and I forbid it.”

Leah slung her bow over her shoulder. “I’m going with the men and that’s final.” Marched off the porch, right out into the dead of night, where supposedly the animals were wide awake and walking around like human beings. Mother and Adah and I stood there with our traps hanging open. You could have knocked us over with a feather.

Father went crazy. We’d always wondered what would happen if we flat-out disobeyed him. Now we were fixing to see. He lit out after her with his wide leather belt already coming out of his pants as he stomped through the dirt. But by the time he got to the edge of the yard she was gone. She’d vamoosed into the tall grass, and off she was headed for the jungle, where it was plain to see he’d never find her. Leah can climb trees like a chimpanzee, when nobody’s even chasing her.

Instead of coming back, he acted like he’d just decided to stroll out there for the sake of thrashing the trees with his belt, and man alive, he did.We heard him for an hour.We peeked out the window and saw he’d cut down a whole stand of sugar cane by lashing it with his belt. We started to get scared about what he’d do when he finally came in, for there was really no telling. Our doors didn’t lock, but Mother came in our room with us and helped us push the beds around so the door was blocked. We went to bed early, with metal pot lids and knives and things from the kitchen to protect ourselves with, because we couldn’t think of anything else. It was like the armor they had in the nights of old. Ruth May put an aluminum saucepan on her head and slid two comic books down the seat of her jeans in case of a whipping. Mother slept in Leah’s bed. Or lay there quiet, rather, for really none of us slept a wink. Leah came in the window before dawn and whispered to Mother awhile, but I don’t think she slept either.

Half the village was in the same boat with us, even though I guess for different reasons. After the way Tata Kuvudundu carried on at the meeting and gave off the evil eye, nobody could sleep. According to Nelson that was the one and only topic of conversation.They said their animals were looking at them. People killed the last few they had—goats, chickens, or dogs. You could smell the blood everywhere. They put the animals’ heads in front of their houses in calabash bowls, to keep away the kibaazu, they said.

Well, why were they dumb enough to vote for Leah anyway, is what I asked Nelson. If they knew it was going to get Tata Kuvudundu so riled up?

Nelson said some of them that voted for her were put out with Tata Ndu, and some were put out with Father, so everybody ended up getting what they didn’t want, and now had to go along with it. Nobody even cares that much one way or another about Leah, is what Nelson said.

 Oh, well, I told him.That is what we call Democracy.

Strange to say, at our house the next morning it was suddenly peace on earth. Father acted like nothing much had happened. He had cuts and poisonwood boils on his arms from all his thrashing in the bushes, but yet he just drank his tea at breakfast without a word and then put some poultice on his arms and went out on the porch to read his Bible. We wondered: Is he looking for the world’s longest The Verse to give Leah on the subject of impudence? Is he looking up what Jesus might have to say about preachers that murder their own daughters? Or maybe he’d decided he couldn’t win this fight, so he was going to pretend it never happened and Leah was beneath his notice. With Father, life’s just one surprise after another.

Leah did at least have the brains to make herself scarce. She stayed either at Anatole’s school or out in the woods having a bow-and-arrow contest with Nelson to see who could shoot a bug off a branch. That was the kind of thing she usually did. But there was plenty of nervous tension left in our household, believe you me. Ruth May peed in her pants just because Father coughed out on the porch. And guess who had to be the one to get her cleaned up: me. I did not appreciate what we were being put through, all because of Leah.