The Poisonwood Bible (42 page)

The whole world would change then, and nothing would ever be all right again. Not for our family. All the other people in the whole wide world might go on about their business, but for us it would never be normal again.

I couldn’t move. None of us could. We looked at each other because we knew someone should go but I tthink we all had the same strange idea that if we stood there without moving forever and ever, we could keep our family the way itt was. We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it wais someone’s real life, and for once that someone wasn’t just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was one life, the only one we were going to have. The only Ruth May.

Until that moment I’d always believed I could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened. The misery, the hunt, the ants, the embarrassments of all we saw and endured—those were just stories I would tell someday with a laugh and a toss of my hair, when Africa was faraway and make-believe like the people in history books. The tragedies that happened to Africans were not mine. We were different, not just because we were white and had our vaccinations, but because we were simply a much, much luckier kind of person. I would get back home to Bethlehem, Georgia, and be exactly the same Rachel as before. I’d grow up to be a carefree American wife, with nice things and a sensible way of life and three grown sisters to share my ideals and talk to on the phone from time to time. This is what I believed. I’d never planned on being someone different. Never imagined I would be a girl they’d duck their eyes from and whisper about as tragic, for having suffered such a loss.

I think Leah and Adah also believed these things, in their own different ways, and that is why none of us moved. We thought we could freeze time for just one more minute, and one more after that. That if none of us confessed it, we could hold back the curse that was going to be our history.

Leah

MOTHER DID NOT RANT or tear her hair. She behaved as if someone else had already told her, before we got there.

Silently she dressed, tied back her hair, and set herself to a succession of chores, beginning with tearing down the mosquito netting from all of our beds. We were afraid to ask what she was doing. We didn’t know whether she wanted us all to get malaria now, for punishment, or if she had simply lost her mind. So we stood out of her way and watched. All of us, even Father. For once he had no words to instruct our minds and improve our souls, no parable that would turn Ruth May’s death by snakebite into a lesson on the Glory of God. My Father, whose strong hands always seized whatever came along and molded it to his will, seemed unable to grasp what had happened.

“She wasn’t baptized yet,” he said.              

I looked up when he said this, startled by such a pathetically inadequate observation. Was that really what mattered to him right now—the condition of Ruth May’s soul? Mother ignored him, but I studied his face in the bright morning light. His blue eyes with their left-sided squint, weakened by the war, had a vacant look. His large reddish ears repelled me. My father was a simple, ugly man.

It’s true that she wasn’t baptized. If any one of us had cared about that, we could lay the blame on Father. He’d maintained that Ruth May was still too young to take the responsibility of accepting Christ, but in truth I think he was holding her back for the sake of pageantry. He was going to baptize his own child along with all of Kilanga’s, on that great day down at the river when his dream finally came true. It would lend an appearance of sincerity to the occasion. Now he seemed narrow-witted and without particular dreams. I couldn’t stand to look at him standing in the doorway, his body hanging from its frame with nothing but its own useless hands for company. And all he could think to say to his wife was “This can’t be.”

It couldn’t be, but it was, and Mother alone among us seemed to realize that. With a dark scarf over her hair and the sleeves of her stained white blouse rolled up, she did her work as deliberately as the sun or moon, a heavenly body tracking its course through our house. Her tasks moved her continually away from us—her senseless shadows, a husband and living daughters. With determined efficiency she gathered up everything she would need from one room before she moved to the next, in the way I remember her doing when we were all much younger and needed her more.

She went out to the kitchen house, fired the stove, warmed a pan of water, then carried it back into the house and set it on the big dining table where Nelson had laid the body on a bedsheet. Mother bathed Ruth May with a washcloth as if she were a baby. I stood with my back to the wall, remembering too much of another time, as I watched her rub carefully under the chin and in the folds at the backs of the elbows and knees. In our house in Bethlehem I used to stand outside the bathroom door, where I could see the two of them in the mirror. Mother singing soft questions and kissing her answers into the tiny, outstretched palms. Adah and I were nine then, too old to be jealous of a baby, but still I had to wonder if she had ever loved me that much. With twins, she could only have loved each of us by half. And Adah was the one who required more of her.

A honey creeper sang from the bushes outside the window. It seemed impossible that an ordinary, bright day should be proceeding outside our house. Mother spread a small, soft hand onto hers and washed the fingers one at a time. She cradled and lifted the head to rinse it, taking care not to get the soapy water in Ruth May’s eyes. As she dried the limp blond hair with a towel, she leaned in close, inhaling the scent of my sister’s scalp. I felt invisible. By the force of my mother’s desire to conduct this ritual in private, she had caused me to disappear. Still, I couldn’t leave the room. After she dried and wrapped her baby in a towel she hummed quietly while combing out the tangles and plaiting the damp hair. Then she began to cut our mosquito netting into long sheets and stitch the layers together. At last we understood. She was making a shroud.

“Leah, help me move this table outside,” she said when she was finished. It was the first time she’d spoken in more than half a day, to anyone, and I jumped to do as I was told. She moved Ruth May to her own bed while we moved the big, heavy table out into the center of the front yard. We had to turn it on end to get it out the door. When we set it down, the legs settled soundly into the dust so it did not wobble, as it had always done inside the house. Mother went back inside and returned with the shrouded body in her arms. Gently she laid Ruth May out on the table, spending a long time arranging her arms and legs within the sheer cloth. The shade of the mango stretched all the way across the yard, and I realized it must be afternoon, a fact that surprised me. I looked at several familiar things, one at a time: a striped green mango lying in the grass; my own hand; our dining table. All these things seemed like objects I hadn’t seen before. I looked at the table and forced my mind to accept the words “This is my dead sister.” But Ruth May was shrouded in so many misty layers of mosquito netting I could barely make out any semblance of a dead child inside. She looked more like a billowy cloud that could rise right up through the trees, whenever Mother finally let her go.

Nelson was weaving together palm fronds to make a funeral arch of leaves and flowers to set over the table. It looked something like an altar. I thought perhaps I ought to help him, but I couldn’t think how. Several women from the village had already come. Mama Mwanza arrived first, with her daughters. A few at a time, the others followed. They fell down at the edge of our yard when they came, and walked on their knees to the table. All of them had lost children before, it dawned on me through my shock. Our suffering now was no greater than theirs had been, no more real or tragic. No

different. They all knelt around the table silently for quite a while, and I knew I should join them, but I felt unaccountably afraid to get close to the table. I stayed at the back of the group.

Suddenly one woman shrieked, and I felt my skull would split open. All the others immediately joined in with the quivering, high bildla. I felt blood rushing through all the narrow parts of my body: the wrists, the throat, the backs of my knees. Adah was white-faced beside me, and looked into my eyes as if she were drowning. We’d heard this strange mourning song many times before, back during the heavy rains when so many children got sick. It had tricked us at first, more than once, sending us running to the windows to see what beautiful, exotic birds made such a strange call. Now, of course, we couldn’t think of birds. The trilling of our neighbors’ tongues set loose knives that cut the flesh from our bones and made us fall down with our shame and our love and our anger. We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope, for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

In our family, the last was first. I would like to believe she got what she wanted. I ground my knees in the dust and shook and sobbed and opened my mouth to cry out loud. I crossed my arms over my chest and held on to my own shoulders, thinking of Ruth May’s sharp, skinny shoulder blades under her little white shirt. Thinking of ant lions and “Mother May I.” Recalling her strange, transfigured shadow the last time I pushed her in the swing. The sounds of our voices rose up through the tree branches into the sky, but Ruth May did not.

When the wailing finally stopped, we were wrapped in silence and the buzzing of locusts. The air was thick and ponderous with humidity. It felt like a wet wool blanket you could not take off.

Mother had begun moving all of our furniture into the yard. First the chairs. Then our beds and my father’s roll-top desk. These heavy things she dragged by herself, even though I know for a fact that two months ago she couldn’t have moved them. I continued to watch without any particular expectation as she emerged, next, with our clothes and books. Then our cooking pots. She stacked these things on the chairs and desk. The women watched closely, as my sisters and I did, but no one moved. Mother stood looking at us all, waiting. Finally she took the good skillet we’d brought from home and pressed it into Mama Mwanza’s hands. She offered our blouses and dresses to Mama Mwanza’s children. They accepted them in both hands, thanked her, and left. Mama Mwanza balanced the skillet on her head, since she needed her hands for walking, and solemnly led her family away from our funeral. Tentatively the other women touched our things. Their initial reluctance gave way to excited chatter as they began to sort through the piles of our possessions, unabashedly holding our clothes up to their children’s chests, scrutinizing such oddities as a hairbrush and fingernail clippers, thumping on the enamel pans with their knuckles to test their worth. Eventually they took what they needed, and left.

But the children soon came back, unable to resist the scene of such a spectacle. Just as they used to do when we first arrived here, they materialized one by one out of the moist air and the bamboo thickets until they’d formed a silent, watchful circle around the periphery of our yard. I suppose they were as astonished as we were that a member of our family was capable of death. Gradually they crept forward, closing their circle around the table, and there they remained for a very long time, staring at Ruth May.

Mother had gone back in the house, where we could hear her strange, tireless industry moving upon the empty rooms. Our father seemed to be nowhere. My sisters and I stayed outside with the children because they seemed to embrace our presence. Out of habit we knelt on the ground and prayed the dumb prayers of our childhood: “Our Father which art in heaven,” and “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” I could not remotely believe any Shepherd was leading me through this dreadful valley, but the familiar words stuffed my mouth like cotton, and it was some relief to know, at least, that one sentence would follow upon another. It was my only way of knowing what to do.

Whenever I stopped praying, the buzz of the locusts grew horrible in my ears. So I didn’t stop. Sometimes Rachel prayed with me, and sometimes the Congolese children also prayed in whatever words they knew. I recited the 23rd Psalm, the 121st Psalm, the l00th and 137th and16th and 66th Psalms, the 21st chapter of Revelation, Genesis one, Luke 22, First Corinthians, and finally John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Then I stopped. It was very late in the afternoon, and I could think of no more prayers. I’d come to the end of all I knew. I listened to the world around me, but all other sound had ceased entirely. Not a single bird called. I felt terrified. The air seemed charged and dangerous but I couldn’t pray anymore, and I couldn’t get up and do anything else. To go back inside our empty house, where Mother was, especially, I couldn’t make myself do. Not for anything. It seemed impossible. So I stayed where I was, kneeling beside my sisters with our heads bowed low beneath the crackling air.   

The sky groaned and cracked, and suddenly the shrill, cold needles of rain pierced our hands and the backs of our necks. A thunderstorm broke open, and with a strength as mighty as the thirst of crops and animals, the rain poured down on our heads. It lashed us hard, answering months of prayers. Some of the smaller children rushed to break off elephant-ear leaves for umbrellas, but most of us simply stayed where we were, receiving the downpour. Lightning sang and hissed around our shoulders, and the thunder bellowed.

Our father came out of the house and stood looking at the sky, holding out his hands. It seemed to take him a long time to believe in the rain.

“The Lord spoke to the common people gathered at the well,” he said at last, in his old booming voice that allowed no corner for doubt. He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the downpour. “And the Lord told them, Whosoever drinks of this ordinary water will be thirsty again, but the water I will give unto him will quench his thirst forever. It will become a spring within him, bubbling up for eternal life.”