The Poisonwood Bible (10 page)

We finished off Susanna by singing “Amazing Grace” at the speed of a dirge. The ragtag congregation chimed in with every sort of word and tune. Oh, we were a regular Tower of Babel here at the First Baptist Church of Kilanga, so no one noticed that I mouthed my own words to the proper tune:

Evil, all... its sin... is still... alive!

Do go... Tata... to God!

Sugar don’t... No, drag us drawn onward,

A, he rose ... ye eyesore, ha!

When church was over Mama Tataba took us back to the house, while the clever Reverend and his wife stayed behind to smile and shake hands and bask in the general holiness. Mama Tataba stomped down the path ahead of my sisters and me. Bringing up the rear, I concentrated
 
on
 
trying to pass up
 
the
 
dawdling Rachel, who walked with her hands held out slightly from her thighs as if she had once again, as usual, been crowned Miss America. “Hold your hands like you’ve just dropped a marble,” she instructs us generally as she fashion-models her way through the house. In spite of all that stateliness, I could not catch up. So I watched an orange-and-white butterfly that hovered over her and finally lit on her white head. The butterfly poked its tiny proboscis down into her hair, probing for nurture, then flew away unsatisfied. Mama Tataba saw none of these events. She was in a bad mood and shouted at us confidentially, “Reverant Price he better be give that up!” Flesh eating and blood drinking, did she mean? The sermon had meandered from the pious Susanna to Rahab, the harlot of Jericho. So many Biblical names sound backward, like Rahab, I wonder sometimes if the whole thing was written by a mental freak like me. But in the end he got around to emphasizing baptism, as always. This was likely what disturbed Mama Tataba. Our Father could not seem to accept what seemed clear enough even to a child: when he showered the idea of baptism—batiza—on people here, it shrunk them away like water on a witch.

Later on at the dinner table he was still animated, though, which is the status quo on Sundays. Once he gets wound up in the pulpit he seems unwilling to give up center stage.

“Do you know,” he asked us, tall and bright-headed like a candle in his chair, “last year some men drove here all the way from Leopoldville in a truck with a broken fan belt? A Mercedes truck.” Ah, me. One of his Socratic moods. This was not dangerous, for he rarely actually struck us at the table, but it was designed to show us all up as dull-witted, bovine females. He always ended these interrogations with an exasperated, loud private conversation with God concerning our hopelessness.

Methuselah was definitely in the girls’ camp. He made a habit of prattling at the top of his lungs through Sunday dinners at our house. Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise. Our mother sometimes threw a tablecloth over his cage in frustration. “Mbote! Mbote!” he screamed now, which in Kikongo means hello and good-bye, both. This symmetry appeals to me. Many Kikongo words resemble English words backward and have antithetical meanings: Syebo is a horrible, destructive rain, that just exactly does not do what it says backward.

We listened vaguely to Our Father’s tale of the putative Mercedes truck. Our only material goods from the outside world of late were comic books, which my sisters cherished like Marco Polo’s spices from China, and powdered eggs and milk, to which we felt indifferent. All brought by Eeben Axelroot. As for this truck-and-fanbelt story, the Reverend loved to speak in parables, and we could surely spot one coming.

“That road,” said our mother, bemused, gesturing with a lazy bent wrist out the window. “Why, I can’t imagine.” She shook her head, possibly not believing. Can she allow herself not to believe him? I have never known.

“It was at the end of a dry season, Orleanna,” he snapped. “When it’s hot enough the puddles dry up.” You brainless nitwit, he did not need to add.

“But how on earth did they run it without a fanbelt?” our mother asked, understanding by
 
the
 
Reverend’s irritation
 
that
 
she
 
was expected to return to the subject at hand. She leaned forward to offer him biscuits from the bone-china platter, which she sometimes, secretly, cradled like a baby after the washing and drying. Today she gave its rim a gentle stroke before folding her hands in submission to Father’s will. She was wearing a jaunty shirtwaist, white with small red and blue semaphore flags. It had been her outermost dress when we came over. Its frantic little banners seemed to be signaling distress now, on account of MamaTataba’s vigorous washings in the river.

He leaned forward to give us the full effect of his red eyebrows and prominent jaw. “Elephant grass,” he pronounced triumphantly.

We sat frozen, the food in our mouths momentarily unchewed.

“A dozen little boys rode on the back, weaving fan belts out of grass.”

Leah blurted out all in a rush, “So the plain simple grass of God’s creation can be just as strong as, as rubber or whatnot!” She sat ramrod straight as if she were on television, going for the sixty-four-dollar question.

“No,” he said. “Each one wouldn’t last but two or three miles.”

“Oh.” Leah was disconsolate. The remaining nitwits ventured no other guesses.

“But just as soon as it gave out,” he explained, “well, they’d have another one at the ready.”

“Keen,” Rachel said, unconvincingly. She is the most dramatic member of the family, and the worst actress, which in our family is a crucial skill. All of us were giving diligent attention to our powdered potatoes. We were supposed to be reaching an understanding here about the elephant-grass fan belt illustrating God’s vast greatness; nobody wanted to be called on.

“A Mercedes truck!” he said finally. “The pinnacle of German invention, can be kept in business by twelve little African boys and some elephant grass.”

“Sister, shut the door! Wenda mbote!” Methuselah called out. Then he shouted, “Ko ko ko!” which is what people in Kilanga shout in someone’s doorway when they come visiting, since generally there is no door to knock on. This happened often at our house, but we always knew it was Methuselah, since we did have a door and did not, as a rule, have visitors. If anyone actually ever came, usually in the hope of selling us food, they did not knock on the door but merely hung about the yard until we took notice.

“Well, I expect you could keep anything going with enough little boys and enough grass,” our mother said. She did not sound all that pleased about it.

“That’s right. It just takes adaptability.”

“Damn damn damn!” observed Methuselah.

Mother shot the bird a worried glance. “If that creature lives through nine hundred Baptist missions he will have quite a lot to say.”

She stood up then and started stacking the plates. Her Living Curl had long since been pronounced dead, and on the whole she appeared to be adapted to within an inch of her life. She excused herself to go boil the dishwater.

Unable to work either the dishwater or Methuselah’s long memory into a proper ending for his parable, Our Father merely looked at us all and heaved the great sigh of the put-upon male. Oh, such a sigh. It was so deep it could have drawn water from a well, right up from beneath the floor of our nitwit household. He was merely trying, that sigh suggested, to drag us all toward enlightenment through the marrow of our own poor female bones.

We hung our heads, pushed back our chairs, and filed out to help stoke up the firebox in the kitchen house. Cooking meals here requires half the day, and cleaning up takes the other half. We have to boil our water because it comes from the stream, where parasites multiply in teeming throngs. Africa has parasites so particular and diverse as to occupy every niche of the body: intestines small and large, the skin, the bladder, the male and female reproductive tracts, interstitial fluids, even the cornea. In a library book on African public health, before we left home, I found a drawing of a worm as thin as a hair meandering across the front of a man’s startled eyeball. I was struck through with my own wayward brand of reverence: praise be the lord of all plagues and secret afflictions! If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.

Outside I saw Mama Tataba, on her way to the kitchen house, dip in a hand and drink straight out of the bucket. I crossed my fingers for her one good eye. I shuddered to think of that dose of God’s Creation going down, sucking her dry from the inside.

Leah

MY FATHER had been going to the garden alone, every day, to sit and think. It disturbed him that the plants thrived and filled the fenced patch with bloom like a funeral parlor, but would not set fruit. I knew he was praying about it. I sometimes went out to sit with him, even though Mother held it against me, saying he needed his solitude.

He speculated that there was too much shade from the trees. I thought long and hard about this explanation, as I am always eager to expand my understanding of horticulture. It was true, the trees did encroach on our little clearing. We constantly had to break and hack off branches, trying to win back our ground. Why, some of the bean vines had wound themselves all the way into the very treetops, striving for light.

Once he asked me suddenly as we sat mulling over the pumpkins, “Leah, do you know what they spent the last Bible convention in Atlanta arguing about?”

I wasn’t really expected to know, so I waited. I was thrilled by the mere fact of his speaking to me in this gentle, somewhat personal way. He didn’t look at me, of course, for he had much on his mind, as ever. We’d worked so hard for God’s favor, yet it seemed God was still waiting for some extra labor on our part, and it was up to my father to figure out what. With his stronger eye he stared deeply into a pumpkin blossom for the source of his garden’s disease. The flowers would open and close, then the green fruits behind them would shrivel and turn brown. There wasn’t a single exception. In

exchange for our honest sweat we’d so far earned flowers and leaves, but nothing we could actually have for supper.

“The size of heaven,” he finally said.

“I’m sorry?” My heart skipped a beat. Here I’d been trying to second-guess Father, working out the garden business. He is always two steps ahead of me.

“They debated about the size of heaven, at the Bible convention. How many furlongs it is. How many long, how many wide—they set men with adding machines to figuring it out. Chapter twenty-one of Revelation sets it out in reeds, and other books tell it in cubits, and not a one of them quite matches up.” Inexplicably, he sounded put out with the men who brought their adding machines to the Bible convention, and possibly with the Bible itself. I felt extremely uneasy.

“Well, I sure hope there’ll be room enough for everybody,” I said. This was a whole new worry to me. Suddenly I began to think of all the people already up there, mostly old, and not in particularly good shape either. I pictured them elbowing each other as if at a church rummage sale.

“There will always be room for the righteous,” he said.

 
“Amen,” I breathed, on safer ground.

“Many are the afflictions of the righteous, and the Lord delivers him out of them all. But you know, Leah, sometimes He doesn’t deliver us out of our hardships but through them.”

“Heavenly Father, deliver us,” I said, although I didn’t care for this new angle. Father had already bent his will to Africa by remaking his garden in mounds, the way they do here.This was a sure sign to God of his humility and servitude, and it was only fair to expect our reward. So what was this business of being delivered through hardships? Did Father aim to suggest God was not obligated to send us down any beans or squash at all, no matter how we might toil in His name? That He just proposed to sit up there and consign us to hardships one right after another? Certainly it wasn’t my place to scrutinize God’s great plan, but what about the balancing scales of justice?

 
Father said nothing to ease my worries. He just plucked up another bean flower and held it up to the sky, examining it in the African light like a doctor with an X-ray, looking for the secret thing gone wrong.

His first sermon in August waxed great and long on the subject of baptism. Afterward, at home, when Mother asked Mama Tataba to go put the soup on the stove, Mania Tataba turned and walked smack dab out the front door in between the words “soup” and “stove.” She went out and gave my father a good talking to, shaking her finger at him across a row of tomatoless tomato plants. Whatever it was he’d done wrong in her opinion, it was really the last straw. We could hear her voice rising and rising.

Naturally it shocked us half to death to hear somebody caterwauling at Father this way. It shocked us even more to see him standing there red-faced, trying to fit a word in sideways. With all four of us girls lined up at the window with our mouths gaping open, we must have looked like the Lennon Sisters on Lawrence Welk. Mother shooed us from the window, ordering us to go hunt up our schoolbooks and read them. It wasn’t the proper time for school, or even a school day, but we did everything she said now. We’d recently seen her throw a box of Potato Buds across the room. After a quiet eternity of the Trojan War, Mama Tataba burst in and threw her apron on a chair. We all closed our books.

“I won’t be stay here,” she declared. “You send a girl get me at Banga you be need help. I go show you cook eel. They got a big eel downa river yesterday. That fish a good be for children.” That was her final advice for our salvation.