The Poisonwood Bible (4 page)

Congo sprawls on the middle of the world. Sun rises, sun sets, six o’clock exactly. Everything that conies of morning undoes itself before nightfall: rooster -walks back into forest, fires die down, birds coo-coo-coo, sun sinks away, sky bleeds, passes out, goes dark, nothing exists.Ashes to ashes.

Kilanga village runs along the Kwilu River as a long row of little mud houses set after-one-the-other beside a lone red snake of dirt road. Rising up all round us, trees and bamboo. Leah and I as babies had a long, hodgepodge string of unmatched beads for dress-up which would break when we fought over it and fly into a snaking line of odds and ends in the dirt. That is how Kilanga looked from the airplane. Every red mud house squats in the middle of its red dirt yard, for the ground in the village is cleared hairless as a brick.

The better to spy and kill our friends the snakes when they come calling, we are told. So Kilanga is a long low snake break clearing. In a long row the dirt huts all kneel facing east, as if praying for the staved-off collapse—not toward Mecca exactly but east toward the village’s one road and the river and behind all that, the pink sunrise surprise.

The church building, scene of our recent feast, resides at one end of the village. At the other end, our own house. And so when the Price family strolls to church we are able en route to peer straight into each and every villager’s house. Every house has only a single square room and a thatched roof, under which might dwell the likes of Robinson Crusoe. But no one here stays under a roof. It is in the front yards—all the world’s a stage of hard red dirt under bare foot—where tired thin women in every thinkable state of dress and disrepair poke sticks into their little fires and cook. Clumps of children stonethrowing outflowing rush upon terrified small goats, scattering them across the road so that the goats may tiptoe back and be chased again. Men sit on buckets and stare at whatsoever passes by. The usual bypasser is a woman sauntering slowly down the road with bundles upon bundles balanced on her head. These women are pillars of wonder, defying gravity while wearing the ho-hum aspect of perfect tedium. They can sit, stand, talk, shake a stick at a drunk man, reach around their backs to fetch forth a baby to nurse, all without dropping their piled-high bundles upon bundles. They are like ballet dancers entirely unaware they are on stage. I cannot take my eyes from them.

Whenever a woman leaves her wide-open-to-the-world yard to work her field or saunter off on an errand, first she must make herself decent. To do this, even though she is already wearing a wraparound skirt, she will go and get another large square of cloth from the house, which she wraps around her first skirt—covering her legs right down to the instep of her foot—into a long, narrow sarong tied below her bare breasts. The cloths are brightly printed and worn together in jangling mixtures that ring in my ears: pink gingham with orange plaid, for example. Loose-joint breaking-point colors, and whether you find them beautiful or find them appalling, they do make the women seem more festive, and less exhausted.

Backdrop to the Kilanga pageant, rising up behind the houses, a tall wall of elephant grass obscures our view of anything but the distance. The sun suspended above it in the afternoon is a pink, round dot in the distant white haze you may stare at and never go blind. The real earth where the real sun shines seems to be somewhere else, far from here. And to the east of us, behind the river, a rising rumple of dark green hills folded on each other like a great old tablecloth, receding to pale hazy blue. “Looming like the Judgment,” says our mother, pausing to wipe her damp forehead with the back of her hand.

“It’s a place right out of a storybook,” my twin sister, Leah, loves to declare in response, opening her eyes wide and sticking her short hair behind her ears as if to hear and see every little thing oh so much better. “And yet this is our own family, the Prices, living here!”

Next comes this observation from my sister Ruth May: “Nobody here’s got very many teeth.” And finally, from Rachel: “Jeez oh man, wake me up when it’s over.” And so the Price family passes its judgments. All but Adah. Adah unpasses her judgments. I am the one who does not speak.

Our Father speaks for all of us, as far as I can see. And he is at the moment not saying much. His hammer turned out to be a waste of two or three good pounds, because there appear to be no nails in the mud-and-thatch town of Kilanga.The wide-open building that serves as church and school was built of concrete-block pillars holding up a. roof of palm thatch and billowy clouds of scarlet bougainvillea. By now it all seems more or less welded together by its own decay. Our house is also mud, thatch, cement, and flowering vines. Leah in her earnest way helped him scout around for a project, but alas he found nothing worth pounding at, anywhere. This was a great disappointment to Our Father, who likes to repair things between Sundays.

Yet here we are to stay. The bush plane that dropped down into the field to leave us here went right away again, and there will be no more coming-going until that same plane returns again. We asked about the dirt road through the village and were told it stretched all the way to Leopoldville. I doubt it. A short way on either side of our village the road falls into a frenzy of hard dirt ruts that look like ocean waves frozen solid in the middle of a tempest.

 Our Father says in the great beyond nearby there are probably swamps you could sink a battleship in, not to mention a mere automobile. We do see vestigial signs of automobiles in our village, but they resemble the signs of life you would dig up in a graveyard if you were inclined to that pastime. Which is to say: parts dead and rusted, scattered around and used not for transportation but for anything but. On a walk one day with Our Father he pointed out for his daughters’ edification a carburetor air-filter lid boiling a family’s dinner over a cookfire, and a Jeep muffler being put to use by six boys at once, as a drum.

The Kwilu River is the throughway here: Kwilu, a word without a single rhyme. Nearly a prelude, but not quite. Kwilu. It troubles me, this dubious escape route. It sits unanswered like a half-phrase of music on my ear.

Our Father claims the Kwilu is navigable downstream from here all the way to where it joins the Congo River; upstream, one may go only as far as the high, scenic cataracts that thunder just to the south of us. In other words, we have arrived very nearly at the end of the earth. We sometimes do see the odd boat passing by, but only carrying people from nearby villages exactly like this one. For news or mail or evidence of what Rachel calls The Pale Which We Are Way Beyond, we wait for the rough-and-ready airplane pilot, Mr. Eeben Axelroot. He is reliable in the following way: if they say he is coming on Monday, it will be Thursday, Friday, or not at all.

Like the village road and the river, nothing here really continues to its end. The Congo is only a long path that takes you from one hidden place to another. Palm trees stand alongside of it looking down at you in shock, like too-tall, frightened women with upright hair. Nevertheless, I am determined I will walk that path, even though I do not walk fast or well. My right side drags. I was born with half my brain dried up like a prune, deprived of blood by an unfortunate fetal mishap. My twin sister, Leah, and I are identical in theory, just as in theory we are all made in God’s image. Leah and Adah began our life as images mirror perfect. We have the same eyes dark and chestnut hair. But I am a lame gallimaufry and she remains perfect.

Oh, I can easily imagine the fetal mishap: we were inside the womb together dum-de-dum when Leah suddenly turned and declared, Adah you are just too slow. I am taking all the nourishment here and going on ahead. She grew strong as I grew weak. (Yes! Jesus loves me!) And so it came to pass, in the Eden of our mother’s womb, I was cannibalized by my sister.

Officially my condition is called hemiplegia. Hemi is half, hemisphere, hemmed-in, hemlock, hem and haw. Plegia is the cessation of motion. After our complicated birth, physicians in Atlanta pronounced many diagnoses on my asymmetrical brain, including Wernicke’s and Broca’s aphasia, and sent my parents home over the icy roads on Christmas Eve with one-half a set of perfect twins and the prediction that I might possibly someday learn to read but would never speak a word. My parents seem to have taken this well in stride. I am sure the Reverend explained to his exhausted wife that it was the will of God, who could plainly see—with these two additional girls so close after the first one—our house had enough females in it now to fill it up with blabber. They did not even have Ruth May yet, but did have a female dog that howled, Our Father still likes to say, Like One Too Many Sopranos in Church. The Dog that Broke The Camel’s Back, he also calls it. Our Father probably interpreted Broca’s aphasia as God’s Christmas bonus to one of His worthier employees.

I am prone to let the doctors’ prophecy rest and keep my thoughts to myself. Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations. Only occasionally do I find I have to break my peace: shout or be lost in the shuffle. But mostly am lost in the shuffle. I write and draw in my notebook and read anything I please.

It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. 

Leah

IN THE BEGINNING my sisters bustled indoors, playing the role of mother’s helper with more enthusiasm than they’d ever shown for housework in all their born days. For one reason only: they were scared to set foot outside the house. Ruth May had the bizarre idea that our neighbors desired to eat her. Rachel, who sighted imaginary snakes at the least provocation, said, “Jeez oh man,” rolled her eyes, and announced her plan to pass the next twelve months in bed. If they gave out prizes for being sick, Rachel would win the gold bricks. But soon she got bored and dredged herself up to see what all was going on. She and Adah and Ruth May helped unpack and set up housekeeping. The first task was to pull out all the mosquito netting and stitch it into tents to cover our four identical cots and my parents’ larger one. Malaria is our enemy number one. Every Sunday we swallow quinine tablets so bitter your tongue wants to turn itself inside out like a salted slug. But Mrs. Underdown warned us that,pills or no pills, too many mosquito bites could still overtake the quinine in our blood and spell our doom.

I personally set myself apart from the war on blood parasites. I preferred to help my father work on his garden. I’ve always been the one for outdoor chores anyway, burning the trash and weeding, while my sisters squabbled about the dishes and such. Back home we have the most glorious garden each and every summer, so it’s only natural that my father thought to bring over seeds in his pockets: Kentucky Wonder beans, crookneck and patty-pan squash, Big Boy tomatoes. He planned to make a demonstration garden, from which we’d gather a harvest for our table and also supply food and seeds to the villagers. It was to be our first African miracle: an infinite chain of benevolence rising from these small, crackling seed packets, stretching out from our garden into a circle of other gardens, flowing outward across the Congo like ripples from a rock dropped in a pond. The grace of our good intentions made me feel wise, blessed, and safe from snakes.

But there was no time to waste. About as soon as we’d knelt on our own humble threshold in a prayer of thanks, moved in, and shed our kitchen goods and all but the minimum decent requirement of clothing, Father started clearing a plot of ground out of the jungle’s edge near our house, and pacing off rows. He took big goose steps—giant steps, we’d have called them, if he had first asked, “Mother May I?” But my father needs permission only from the Saviour, who obviously is all in favor of subduing the untamed wilderness for a garden.

He beat down a square of tall grass and wild pink flowers, all without once ever looking at me. Then he bent over and began to rip out long handfuls of grass with quick, energetic jerks as though tearing out the hair of the world. He wore his cuffed, baggy work khakis and a short-sleeved white shirt, and labored at the center of a rising red cloud of dust like a crew-cut genie who’d just appeared there. A fur of red dust gathered on the curly hairs of his forearms, and rivulets of perspiration ran down his temples.The tendon of his jaw was working, so I knew he was preparing a revelation.The education of his family’s souls is never far from my father’s thoughts. He often says he views himself as the captain of a sinking mess of female minds. I know he must find me tiresome, yet still I like spending time with my father very much more than I like doing anything else.

“Leah,” he inquired at last, “why do you think the Lord gave us seeds to grow, instead of having our dinner just spring up out there on the ground like a bunch of field rocks?”

Now that was an arresting picture. While I was considering it, he took up the hoe blade that had crossed the Atlantic in our mother’s purse and shoved it onto a long pole he’d whittled to fit its socket. Why did the Lord give us seeds? Well, they were sure easier to stuff in our pockets than whole vegetables would have been, but I doubted if God took any real interest in travel difficulties. I was exactly fourteen and a half that month, and still getting used to the embarrassment of having the monthly visits. I believe in God with all my might, but have been thinking lately that most of the details seem pretty much beneath His dignity.

I confessed I didn’t know the answer.

He tested the heft and strength of his hoe handle and studied me. He is very imposing, my father, with broad shoulders and unusually large hands. He’s the handsome, sandy-haired type that people presume to be Scottish and energetic, though possibly fiery-tempered.

“Because, Leah, the Lord helps those that help themselves.”

“Oh!” I cried, my heart rushing to my throat, for of course I had known that. If only I could ever bring forth all that I knew quickly enough to suit Father.

“God created a world of work and rewards,” he elaborated, “on a big balanced scale.” He brought his handkerchief out of his pocket to ream the sweat, carefully, out of one eye socket and then the other. He has a scar on his temple and poor vision on the left side, from a war injury he doesn’t ever talk about, not being one to boast. He refolded the handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. Then he handed me the hoe and held his hands out from his sides, palms up, to illustrate the heavenly balancing act. “Small works of goodness over here,” he let his left hand drop slightly, “small rewards over here.” His right hand dropped just a mite with the weight of an almost insignificant reward. “Great sacrifice, great rewards!” he said then, letting both hands fall heavily from the shoulders, and with all my soul I coveted the delicious weight of goodness he cradled in those palms.