The Poisonwood Bible (15 page)

We went and found the chameleon all on our own. Leah mostly found that one on her bed. Most animals are whatever color God made them and have to stay that way, but Leon is whatever dern color he wants to be. We take him in the house when Mama and Father are still at church and one time we put him on Mama’s dress for an experiment and he turned flowered. If he gets out and runs away in the house, oh boy Jeez old man. Then we can’t find him. Wenda mbote— good-bye, fare ye well, and amen! So we keep him outside in a box that the comic books came in. If you poke him with a stick he turns black with sparkles and makes a noise.We do that to show him who’s boss.

When I broke my arm it was the day Mr. Axelroot was supposed to come. Father said that was good timing by the grace a God. But when Mr. Axelroot found out we had to go to Stanleyville he turned around and took right off again up the river or something, nobody knew, and he’d be back tomorrow. Mama said, “That man.” Father said, “What were you doing shimmying up that tree in the first place, Ruth May?” I said Leah was suppose to be watching me so it wasn’t my fault. I said I was hiding from the Jimmy Crow boys.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Mama said. “What were you doing out there at all when I told you to run inside whenever you see them coming?” She was afraid to tell Father because he might whip me, busted arm and all. She told him I was a lamb of God and it was a pure accident, so he didn’t whip me. Not yet. Maybe when I’m all fixed, he will.

That arm hurt bad. I didn’t cry, but I held it right still over my chest. Mama made me a sling out of the same bolt of cloth she brought over to make the bed sheets and baptizing dresses for the African girls. We haven’t baptized any yet. Dunking them in the river, they won’t have it, no sir, nothing doing. Crocodiles.

Mr. Axelroot did come back next day at noontime and smelled like when the fruit goes bad on you. Mama said it could wait one more day if we wanted to get there in one piece. She said, “Lucky it was just a broken bone and not a snakebite.”

While we were waiting for Mr. Axelroot to sit in his airplane and get to feeling better, the Congolese ladies came on down to the airplane field with great big old bags of manioc on their heads and he gave them money. The ladies cried and yelled when he gave them the money. Father said that was because it was two cents on the dollar, but they don’t even have regular dollars here.They use that pink money. Some of the ladies yelled hard at Mr. Axelroot and went away without giving him their stuff. Then we got in the plane and flew to Stanleyville: Mr. Axelroot, Father, and my broken arm. I was the first one of my sisters ever to break any bone but a toe. Mama wanted to go instead of him because I was a waste of Father’s time. If she went I’d get to ride on her lap, so I said that to him, too, I was going to waste his time. But, no, then he decided after all he wanted to go walk on a city street in Stanleyville, so he went and Mama stayed. The back of the airplane was so full of bags I had to sit on them. Big scratchy brown bags with manioc and bananas and little cloth bags of something hard. I looked inside some of them: rocks. Sparkly things and dirty rocks. Mr. Axelroot told Father that food goes for the price a gold in Stanleyville, but it wasn’t gold in the little cloth bags. No, sir, it was diamonds. I found that out and I can’t tell how. Even Father doesn’t know we rode in a airplane with diamonds. Mr. Axelroot said if I told, why then God would make Mama get sick and die. So I can’t.

After I went to sleep and woke up again in the airplane Mr. Axelroot told us what all we could see from up there looking down: Hippos in the river. Elephants running around in the jungle, a whole bunch of them. A lion down by the water, eating. Its head moved up and down like our kitty in Atlanta. He told us there’s little tiny Pygmy people down there too but we never saw any. Maybe too little.

I said to him, “Where is all the green mamba snakes?”

I know they live up in a tree so they can drop on you and kill you, and I wanted to see some. Mr. Axelroot said, “There’s not a thing in this world hides as good as a green mamba snake. They’re just the same color as what they lay up against,” he said, “and they don’t move a muscle.You could be right by one and not know it.”

We landed nice as you please on the grass. It was bumpier up in the sky than down on the grass. The big huge house right there was the hospital and they had a lot of white people inside, and some other ones in white dresses. There were so many white people I forgot to count. I hadn’t seen any but just us for a coon’s age.

The doctor said,”What was a nice preacher’s girl doing up a tree?” The doctor had yellow hair on his arms and a big face and sounded foreign. But he didn’t give me a shot so I liked him all right.

Father said, “That is just what her mother and I wanted to know.”

I said I didn’t want anybody a-throwing me in a big pot and eating me, so I had to hide. The doctor smiled. Then I told him for real I was hiding from the Jimmy Crow, and the doctor didn’t smile, he just looked at Father. Then he said to me, “Climbing trees is for boys and monkeys.”

“We don’t have boys in our family,” I told him.

He laughed at that. He said, “Nor monkeys either, I should not think!”

He and Father talked about man things.The doctor was surprised about the Jimmy Crow boys being in our village. He didn’t talk plain English like us; he said , “ can not instead of I can’t, and they are and did not and such. They have heard, is what he asked Father. “They have heard of our Patrice Lumumba all the way down to Kilanga now?”

Father said, “Oh, we don’t see too much of them. We hear rifle practice on occasion.”
              

“Lord help us,” said the doctor.

Father told him, “Why, the Lord will help us! We’ll receive His divine mercy as his servants who bring succor.”

The doctor frowned then. He said to forgive him but he did not agree. He called my father Reverend. He said, “Reverend, missionary work is a great bargain for Belgium but it is a hell of a way to deliver the social services.”

He said that word: hell. I sucked in my breath and listened with my ears.

Father said: “Why, doctor, I am no civil servant. Some of us follow careers and some of us get called out. My work is to bring salvation into the darkness.”

“Salvation my foot!” is what that doctor said. I do believe that man was a sinner, the way he sassed back at Father. We watched him mix up the white plaster and lay out strips. I hoped he and my father wouldn’t get in a fight. Or, if they did, I hoped I could watch. I saw Father hit a man one time, who did not praise the Lord.

Without looking up from my arm, the doctor said, “We Belgians made slaves of them and cut off their hands in the rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own hands. And you, my friend, are stuck with the job of trying to make amens.”

He was wrapping up my arm while he said all that about cutting off hands. He kept on wrapping the cool white strips around and around till it was all finished up and my arm inside like a hot dog in a bun. I was glad nobody wanted to cut off my hands. Because Jesus made me white, I reckon they wouldn’t.

He told me, “That will bother you. We will take it off in six weeks.”

“Okay,” I said to his white coat sleeve. There was blood on it. Somebody else’s.

But Father wasn’t done with the doctor yet. He was hopping from one foot to the other and cried, “Up to me to make amens? I see no amens to make! The Belgians and American business brought civilization to the Congo! American aid will be the Congo’s salvation.You’ll see!”

The doctor held my white broken arm like a big bone in his two hands, feeling how my fingers bent. He raised his yellow eyebrows without looking up at Father, and said, “Now, Reverend, this civilization the Belgians and Americans brought, what would that be?”

Father said,”Why, the roads! Railroads...”

The doctor said, “Oh. I see.”Then he bent down in his big white coat and looked at my face. He asked me, “Did your father bring you here by automobile? Or did you take the passenger railway?”

He was just being a smart aleck and Father and I didn’t answer him. They don’t have any cars in the Congo and he knew it.

He stood up then and clapped the white stuff off his hands, and I could see he was all done with my arm, even if Father wanted to argue till he went blue in the face. The doctor held the door open for us.

“Reverend,” he said.

“Sir?” asked my father.

“I do not like to contradict, but in seventy-five years the only roads the Belgians ever built are the ones they use to haul out diamonds and rubber. Between you and me, Reverend, I do not think the people here are looking for your kind of salvation. I think they are looking for Patrice Lumumba, the new soul of Africa.”

“Africa has a million souls” is what Father told him. And Father ought to know, for he’s out to save them all.

“Well, yes, indeed!” the doctor said. He looked out into the hallway and then closed the door with us still inside. He said in a lower voice, “And about half of them were right here in Stanleyville last week to cheer on their Tata Lumumba.”

Father said, “Tata Lumumba, who from what I hear is a barefoot post office worker who’s never even been to college.”

“That is true, Reverend, but the man has such a way of moving a crowd he does not seem to need shoes. Last week he spoke for an hour on the nonviolent road to independence. The crowd loved it so much they rioted and killed twelve people.”

The doctor turned his back on us then. He washed his hands in a bowl and wiped them on a towel like Mama after the dishes. Then he came back and looked hard at my arm for a minute, and then at Father. He told my father there were only eight Congolese men in all this land who have been to college. Not one single Congolese doctor or military officer, nothing, for the Belgians don’t allow them to get an education. He said, “Reverend, if you are looking for Congo’s new leaders, do not bother looking in a school hall. You might better look in prison—Mr. Lumumba landed himself there after the riots last week. By the time he is out I expect he will have a larger following than Jesus.”

Hoo, boy! My father didn’t like the doctor one bit after that. Saying anything is better than Jesus is a bad sin. Father looked up at the ceiling and out the window and tried not to hit anything until the doctor opened the door and time for us to go. The ceiling light was a clear glass bowl half full of something dark, like a coffee cup, only it was dead bugs. I know why. They like to come up to the light because it is so, so pretty like something they want, and then they get trapped in there.

I know how they would feel if you touched them. Like somebody’s eyelashes right up against your fingers.

When we came home my sisters had to cut up my dinner every day and help me get dressed. It was the best thing that happened. I showed Leah where you could get into the alligator pear tree and she boosted me up. I could still climb just dandy with my other arm. I have to play with Leah the most because the others in my family have got something wrong with them or else they’re too grown-up to play.

We had to wait up there in the tree. I told her, “Mr. Axelroot drinks red whiskey. He has it under the seat of his airplane. I rolled it out with my foot and then put it back.”

I was the youngest, but I had something to tell.

You don’t ever have to wait around for the Belgium Army. They always come at the same time. Right after lunch, when it isn’t raining yet and all the women with their buckets and things have gone down to the river and the fields and the men are home sleeping. It’s quiet. Then the army boys will come a-marching down the road saying a song in French. That white one knows who’s boss and all the others have to yell back because they are the Tribes of Ham. But, boy oh boy, let me tell you, they all have shoes. They walk together hard in the road and then stop so fast the dust comes down on their shoes.

The Jimmy Crow boys are harder to see. They don’t care for the Belgium Army, so they hide out. They come just every now and then and have meetings in a place back behind our chicken house. They squat down to listen to the main one that talks, and their legs and arms are so skinny you can tell just what shape a bone is. And no shoes, either. Just white scabby dust on the tops of their feet, and all of them with those dark black sores and scars. Every scar shows up good. Mama says their skin bears scars different from ours because their skin is a map of all the sorrows in their lives.

We were waiting to spy on them back there behind the chicken house when they came. Leah told me Mama says Mrs. Underdown says don’t even look at them, if they come. They want to take over the whole country and throw out the whites.

I said, “I’d like to have me a red hat like that.”

“Shhh, shut up,” Leah said. But then she said, “Well, I would too. That’s a good red hat.” She said that because “Shut up” hurt my feelings.

The boys said, “Patrice Lumumba!”

I told Leah that means the new soul of Africa, and he’s gone to jail and Jesus is real mad about it. I told her all that! I was the youngest one but I knew it. I lay so still against the tree branch I was just the same everything as the tree. I was like a green mamba snake. Poison. I could be right next to you and you wouldn’t ever know it.

Rachel