The Poisonwood Bible (41 page)

Well, any two straight things can make a shadow of an X is what Mother told him, which is true, especially with a wild imagination coming into play. Probably some clown is just trying to scare him and needs a good poke in the puss. But Nelson said this was not just ordinary shadows. He said it was the dreaming of snakes.

Father announced this was the unfortunate effect of believing in false idols and he washed his hands of the affair. He was washing his hands left and right that evening. Mother didn’t necessarily agree with him, but I could see she didn’t want us going anywhere near that chicken house to investigate. Father quoted a Bible verse about the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. He told Mother if she let Nelson sleep in our house that night she’d be playing directly into the hands of the idol worshipers, and if she wanted to count herself as one of them she could take her children and go seek shelter among them. Then he turned to us and declared it was high time for us to go to bed and put the light out on laughable Congolese superstitions.

But Nelson slunk out of the house in such a terrified state we couldn’t find anything to laugh about, that is for sure. Even Anatole had been telling us to be extra careful right now, and Anatole, I must admit, has his head firmly attached to his shoulders. We tried to get ready for bed, but all we could hear was Nelson outside whimpering to be allowed to come in, and we became scared out of our minds. Even Leah did. We did not believe in voodoo spirits, and informed each other of that fact till we were blue in the face. But still there was some dark thing out there watching us from the forest and coiling up under people’s beds at night, and whether you call it fear or the dreaming of snakes or false idolatry or what—it’s still something. It doesn’t care what prayers we say at bedtime, or whether we admit we believe in it. Does it believe in us, that’s the question.

We lay in our beds listening to Nelson’s steady, high-pitched begging. Sticky-toed lizards ran sideways along the walls. The moon made shadows on our mosquito netting. Nelson pleaded, “Bdkala mputu Nelson, bakala mputu” over and over like a poor starving dog that’s been whining so long it doesn’t know how to stop. We heard Father’s bedsprings groan suddenly, then Father at the window yelling for him to shut up. Leah rolled over and put her pillow on her head. I felt sick to my stomach. We all did. Father’s hatefulness and Mother’s silent fright were infecting our minds.

“This is wrong,” Leah said finally. “I’m going to help him. Who has the guts to come with me?”

The thought of going out there gave me the willies. But if the others went, I wasn’t going to stay in here with the shadows and lizards, either. I think our house gave me the worst willies of all. That house was the whole problem, because it had our family in it. I was long past the point of feeling safe huddling under my parents’ wings. Maybe when we first came to Congo I did, because we were all just hardly more than children then. But now everything has changed; being American doesn’t matter and nobody gives us any special credit. Now we’re all in this stewpot together, black or white regardless. And certainly we’re not children. Leah says in Congo there’s only two ages of people: babies that have to be carried, and people that stand up and fend for themselves. No in-between phase. No such thing as childhood. Sometimes I think she’s right.

After a while she said again, “I’m going out there to help Nelson, and Father can go straight to hell.”

Whether we said so or not, the rest of us certainly agreed upon where Father could go straight to.

Surprisingly, Adah sat up and started to pull on her jeans. That was her way of saying, “I’m in.” So I felt around on the floor for my penny loafers. Leah pulled Ruth May’s shirt on over her head and

stuck her tennis shoes on her feet. As quiet as mice, we crept outside through the window.

What we decided to do was to set a trap, like Daniel in the temple. This was Leah’s inspiration. Nelson raked a pan of cold ashes out of the stove, and together we strewed them all around the hard-pan-dirt yard outside the chicken house. Inside it, too. We worked by candlelight. Nelson kept a lookout to make sure no one saw us. But Ruth May was careless, and the rest of us were also, to some extent, and made tracks over each other’s tracks. Then our two chickens got disturbed by our lights, since they’d come from a different way of life over at Mama Mwanza’s and weren’t used to living in our chicken house yet, so they ran around making chicken tracks on top of everything. We had to sweep it all up and start over. The second time we were much more careful. We made Ruth May stand in one spot, and chased the chickens back into the nest box to roost. They looked down at us with their stupid little eyes and made soft noises into their feathers to calm themselves down.

When it was all done, we made Nelson promise to hide out the night at Anatole’s and corne back before daybreak. Leah ran halfway there with him, because he was scared, and came back by herself. We all tiptoed inside to our beds, leaving the ashes perfect behind us like newly fallen snow. If anyone or anything set foot in our chicken house—if it had feet, that is—we would catch the culprit red-handed.

Adah

THERE ARE SEVEN WAYS for a foot to touch the ground, each with its own particular power. Did he know how it would come to us in the end? Should I have known? For I had watched him, long before. Watched him dancing, foot to ground, watched him throw the bones. In the clearing behind our house is where he made his trouble. With his machete he cut off the heads of two small living dogs and pressed their noses to the ground, reciting promises. Against him, quietly, I unlocked my voice and sang in the forest. I sang against him my most perfect backward-forward hymns, because I have no other powers of my own.

Lived a tune, rare nut, a devil,

Lived a devil!

Lived a devil!   

Wets dab noses on bad stew,                

Evil deed live!

Evil deed live! Sun! opus! rat! See stars upon us,       

Eye, level eye!     

Eye, level eye! Warn rotten Ada, net torn raw.    

Eye did peep did eye.

On the morning after we spread the ashes, we woke before sunrise. Wondering “what we might have caught in our trap, we lay still and -wide-eyed in our beds until Nelson’s face appeared at our open

window. Then, while our parents still slept, we tiptoed out of the house. Nelson with a pole twice as tall as himself waited for us. In the company of nothing but our fear itself, we went to the chicken house.

Strange to say, if you do not stamp yourself with the words exhilarated or terrified, those two things feel exactly the same in a body. Creeping past our parents’ bedroom and out the door, our bodies felt as they did on Christmas Past and all the Easter mornings of the world, when Christ is risen and our mother has hidden a tribe of sugared marshmallow bunnies in the startled grass oi a parsonage lawn in Bethlehem, Georgia. Ruth May marvel-eyed with a hand cupped over her mouth, I have willed myself to forget, forget, forget, and not forget, for those eyes will see through anything, even my dreams. Ruth May with the eyes of an Easter morning.

As Nelson knew it would be, it was there inside the chicken house. He stopped us in the doorway, and we froze behind his outstretched arm until we saw it too in the far corner, in the nest box, curled tightly around our two precious hens and all their eggs. Two poor, ruffle-feathered mothers without a breath between them, bound to their stillborn future. Nest, eggs, and hens were all one package, wrapped in a vivid, slender twine of brilliant green. It was so pretty, so elaborately basket-woven among hen and egg, we did not at first understand what we saw. A tisket, a tasket, a gift. Nelson raised his long pole and shoved hard, hitting the wall above the nest so dust rained down on the dark, quiet hens.The green vine shifted suddenly, every part at once moving up, down, or sideways. Stopped, then moved forward one more inch through the path of its knot. A small blunt head emerged and swiveled to face us. Very slowly it split itself wide, showing the bright blue inside of its mouth, two bare fangs. A tongue, delicately licking the air.

Suddenly it flew at the pole, striking twice, then flung itself from the nest box and shot past us out the door into the bright morning, gone.

Without breathing we stared at the place where the snake had been until our eyes caught up and we could all witness our memory of what had passed before us. Green mamba, mistress of camouflage, agility, aggressiveness, and speed. L’ingeniosite diabolique de la nature a atteint avec ce serpent le plus haut degre de perfection, the experts claim in the library book of snakes: In this serpent the diabolic genius of nature has attained the highest degree of perfection. What had passed before us was a basket of death, exploded. A gift meant for Nelson. Three of us, then, breathed. Together. Dropped our eyes to the white-ash floor.

A foot had marked that floor in all the seven ways of a dance. Footprints fanned out in tight circles. Evil deed live. Not the paws of a leopard walking upright, turned against men by irreverence. Not the belly slither of angry snakes coming up from the sheltered ground of their own accord to punish us. Only a man, one man and no other, who brought the snake in a basket or carried it stunned or charmed like a gift in his own two hands. Only one single dancer with six toes on his left foot.

Leah

I ONLY REMEMBER hearing a gulp and a sob and a scream all at once, the strangest cry, like a baby taking its first breath. We couldn’t tell where it came from, but strangely enough, we all looked up at the treetops. A nervous wind stirred the branches, but nothing more. Only silence fell down.

It’s a very odd thing to recall, that we all looked up. Not one of us looked at Ruth May. I can’t say that Ruth May was even there with us, in that instant. Just for the moment it was as if she’d disappeared, and her voice was thrown into the trees. Then she returned to us, but all that was left of her was an awful silence. The voiceless empty skin of my baby sister sitting quietly on the ground, hugging herself.

“Ruth May, honey, it’s all right,” I said. “The bad snake is gone.” I knelt down beside her, gently taking hold of her shoulder. “Don’t be scared. It’s gone.”

Nelson knelt too, putting his face close to hers. He opened his mouth to speak, to reassure her, I imagine, for he loved Ruth May. I know this. I’ve seen how he sings to her and protects her. But the terrible silence took hold of Nelson, too, and no words came. His eyes grew wide as we all watched her face change to a pale blue mask pulled down from her hairline to her swollen lips. No eyes. What I mean is that no one we recognized was looking out through her eyes.

“Ruth May, what is it? What! What did you see’?” In my panic I shook her hard, and I think I must have screamed those words at her. I can’t change what I did: I shook her too hard, and screamed at her. Maybe that was the last she knew of her sister Leah.

Nelson shoved me away. He’d come to life again suddenly and spoke so fast in Kikongo I couldn’t think how to understand. He tore her blouse open, just ripped it, and put his face against her chest. Then drew back in horror. As we watched in dismay I remember thinking I should pay attention to where the buttons fell, so I could help her sew them back on later. Buttons are so precious here. The strangest things I thought of, so ridiculous. Because I couldn’t look at what was in front of me.

“Midiki!” he screamed at me. I waited for the word to pierce my dumb, thick brain and begin to mean something. “Milk,” he was shouting. “Get milk. Of a goat, a dog, any kind, to draw out the poison. Get Mama Nguza,” he said, “she will know what to do, she saved her son from a green mamba once. Kakakaka, go!”

But I found I couldn’t move. I felt hot and breathless and stung, like an antelope struck with an arrow. I could only stare at Ruth May’s bare left shoulder, where two red puncture wounds stood out like red beads on her flesh. Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.            

Adah

BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR. DEATH—He kindly stopped for me. I was not present at Ruth May’s birth but I have seen it now, because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life. The closing parenthesis, at the end of the palindrome that was Ruth May. Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby’s first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than-life that crowds down around the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen lips clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small. While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed. A lightning that cannot strike twice, our lesson learned in the hateful speed of light. A bite at light at Ruth a truth a sky-blue presentiment and oh how dear we are to ourselves when it comes, it comes, that long, long shadow in the grass.

Rachel

THERE’S A STRANGE MOMENT IN TIME, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true but you haven’t told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet. And I thought: Now we have to go in and tell Mother. That Ruth May is, oh, sweet Jesus. Ruth May is gone. We had to tell our parents, and they were still in bed, asleep.

I didn’t cry at first, and then, I don’t know why, but I fell apart when I thought of Mother in bed sleeping.. Mothers dark hair would be all askew on the pillow and her face, sweet and quiet. Her whole body just not knowing yet. Her body that had carried and given birth to Ruth May last of all. Mother asletep in her nightgown, still believing she had four living daughters. Now we were going to put one foot in front of the other, walk to the back door, go in the house, stand beside our parents’ bed, wake up Mother, say to her the words Ruth May, say the word dead.Tell her, Mother wake up!