The Poisonwood Bible (16 page)

WELL, HALLELUJAH and pass the ammunition. Company for dinner! And an eligible bachelor at that, without three wives or even one as far as I know. Anatole, the schoolteacher, is twenty-four years of age, with all his fingers still on, both eyes and both feet, and that is the local idea of a top-throb dreamboat.Well, naturally he is not in my color category, but even if I were a Congolese girl I’m afraid I’d have to say thanks but no thanks on Anatole. He has scars all over his face. Not accident scars, but thin little lines, the type that some of them here get done to them on purpose, like a tattoo. I tried not to stare but you end up thinking, How did somebody get all the cuts to line up so perfect like that? What did they use, a pizza-pie cutter or what? They were fine as a hair and perfectly straight, approximately a blue million of them, running from the middle of his nose to the sides of his face, like the ridges on a black corduroy skirt sewn on the bias, with the seam running right down the middle. It is not the kind of thing you see very much of here in our village, but Anatole is not from here. He is Congolese all right, but he has a different kind of eyes that slant a little bit like a Siamese, only more intellectual. We all had to make every effort not to stare. There he sat at our dinner table with his smooth haircut and a regular yellow button-down shirt and his intelligent brown eyes blinking very normal when he listened to you, but then, all those nerve-jangling scars. It gave him a mysterious air, like a putative from the law. I kept stealing glances at him across a plate of antelope meat and stale Potato Buds, which I guess just goes to show you how unaccustomed to the male species I have become.

Anatole speaks French and English both, and single-handedly runs the school all by himself. Six mornings a week, little noisy dirt-kicking crowds of boys from our village and the next one over come straggling in for their education. It’s only the boys, and not all of them either, since most of the parents don’t approve of learning French or the foreign element in general. But when those lucky few show up every morning, Anatole lines them up, littlest to biggest. If ever you happen to be out and about in our village at the crack of dawn, as I try not to be, you can watch them do it. Each boy stands with his hand on the shoulder of the taller boy ahead, creating a big long slope of arms. Leah drew a picture of them. Granted my sister is mentally disturbed. She titled it “The Inclined Plane of Males.”

After the lineup Anatole marches them into the church and urges them, I guess, to wrestle with their numbers and their French congregations and what not. But they only take it so far, you see. If they haven’t already lost interest by the time they are twelve or so, their education is over and out. It’s more or less something like a law. Imagine: no school allowed after age twelve. (I wouldn’t mind!) Mrs. Underdown told us the Belgians have always had the policy of steering the Congolese boys away from higher education. Girls too, I guess that goes without saying, because the girls around here, why, all they ever do is start having their own babies when they’re about ten, and keep on having them till their boobies go flat as pancakes. Nobody has their eye on that all-important diploma, let me tell you. And yet here Anatole speaks French, English, Kikongo and whatever all he first started out with, plus knowing enough to be the one all-purpose schoolteacher. He must have been busy as a beaver during his fleeting school days.

Anatole was born up around near Stanleyville, but at a tender age with his mother being dead got sent to work on the rubber plantations near Coquilhatville, where more opportunities both good and bad present themselves—that was his way of putting it when he told us his personal life autography at dinner. He also spent some time at the diamond mines down south in Katanga, where he says one-quarter of all the world’s diamonds come from. When he spoke of diamonds I naturally thought of Marilyn Monroe in her long gloves and pursey lips whispering “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” My best friend Dee Dee Baker and I have snuck off to see M.M. and Brigitte Bardot both at the matinee (Father would flat-out kill me if he knew), so you see I know a thing or two about diamonds. But when I looked at Anatole’s wrinkled brown knuckles and pinkish palms, I pictured hands like those digging diamonds out of the Congo dirt and got to thinking, Gee, does Marilyn Monroe even know where they come from? Just picturing her in her satin gown and a Congolese diamond digger in the same universe gave me the weebie jeebies. So I didn’t think about it anymore.

I inspected Anatole’s special kind of face scarring instead. It is evidently considered beautifying in that region, or one of the places he’s lived at any rate. Around here the people seem content to settle for whatever scars life whangs them with as a decoration. That plus the splectacular hairdos on the women, which, man alive, don’t even get me started.

But Anatole not being from here, that explains why he doesn’t have his mother and father and fourteen hundred cousins living with him like everybody else does. We’d already heard part of the story, that he was an orphan. The Underdowns took him on as a project because his family all got killed in some horrible way they love to hint at but never exactly tell. Back when they used to live here, they heard about Anatole from some other missionaries and saved him from the famous diamond mines and taught him to love Jesus and how to read and write. Then they installed him as the schoolteacher. Father says Anatole is “our only ally in all this,” which is as clear as mud to me, but apparently Father’s say-so was a good enough reason to invite him to dinner. At least it gave us something to look forward to besides these wonderful dead animals we get to eat. And it provided Mother something to get all franticky about. She declared she was at her wits’ end to come up with a presentable meal. She’d cooked up some antelope meat and tried to make fried plantains that turned into something like black horse-hoof glue in the pan. She tried to make up for the food by using the white tablecloth and serving those pitiful black plantains in the bone-china platter with the forget-me-nots that she was so proud of—her one pretty thing in this big old mess we have to live in. And I will say she did her best to be the graceful hostess. Anyways Anatole gave her compliments right and left, which tells you right there he was either a polite young man or mentally cracked.

The small talk and compliments went on so long I was fixing to croak. My sisters gawked at the fascinating stranger and hung on his every syllabus of English, but as far as I was concerned it was just exactly like dinner with Father’s prissy Bible-study groups back in Georgia, only with more repulsive food.

Then all of a sudden the fire hit the pan.

Anatole leaned forward and announced, “Our chief,Tata Ndu, is concerned about the moral decline of his village.”

Father said, “Indeed he should be, because so few villagers are going to church.”

“No, Reverend. Because so many villagers are going to church.”

Well, that stupefied us all for a special moment in time. But Father leaned forward, fixing to rise to the challenge. Whenever he sees an argument coming, man oh man, does he get jazzed up.

“Brother Anatole, I fail to see how the church can mean anything but joy, for the few here who choose Christianity over ignorance and darknessl”

Anatole sighed. “I understand your difficulty, Reverend.Tata Ndu has asked me to explain this. His concern is with the important gods and ancestors of this village, who have always been honored in certain sacred ways. Tata Ndu worries that the people who go to your church are neglecting their duties.”

“Neglecting their duties to false idolatry, you mean to say.”

Anatole sighed again. “This may be difficult for you to understand. The people of your congregation are mostly what we call in Kikongo the lenzuka. People who have shamed themselves or had very bad luck or something like that. Tata Boanda, for example. He has had terrible luck with his wives. The first one can’t get any proper children, and the second one has a baby now who keeps dying before birth and coming back into her womb, over and over. No one can help this family anymore. The Boandas were very careful to worship their personal gods at home, making the proper sacrifices of food and doing everything in order. But still their gods have abandoned them for some reason. This is what they feel. Their luck could not get any more bad, you see? So they are interested to try making sacrifices to your Jesus.”

Father looked like he was choking on a bone. I thought: Is there a doctor in the house? But Anatole went right on merrily ahead, apparently unaware he was fixing to kill my father of a heart attack. “Tata Ndu is happy for you to draw the bad-luck people away,” he said. “So the village’s spirit protectors will not notice them so much. But he worries you are trying to lure too many of the others into following corrupt ways. He fears a disaster will come if we anger the gods.”

“Corrupt, did you say,” Father stated, rather than asked, after locating where the cat had put his tongue.

 
“Yes, Reverend Price.”

“Corrupt ways. Tata Ndu feels that bringing the Christian word to these people is leading them to corrupt ways’’

“That is the best way I can think of to translate the message. Actually he said you are leading our villagers down into a hole, where they may fail to see the proper sun and become trapped like bugs on a rotten carcass.”

Well, that did it! Father was going to keel plumb over. Call the ambulance. And yet, here was Anatole looking back at Father with his eyebrows raised very high, like “Do you understand plain English?” Not to mention my younger sisters, who were staring at Anatole like he was the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Two-Headed Calf. “Tata Ndu asked you to relay all that, did he?”

 
“Yes, he did.”

“And do you agree that I am leading your fellow villagers to partake of the meat of a rotten corpse?”

Anatole paused.You could see him trying out different words in his head. Finally he said, “Reverend Price, do I not stand beside you in your church every Sunday, translating the words of the Bible and your sermons?”

My Father did not exactly say yes or no to that, though of course it was true. But that’s Father, to a tee. He won’t usually answer a question straight. He always acts like there’s a trap somewhere and he’s not about to get caught in it. Instead he asked, “And, Anatole, do you not now sit at my table, translating the words of Tata Ndu’s bible of false idolatry and his sermon aimed at me in particular.”

“Yes, sir, that is what I am doing.”
             

Father laid his knife and fork crossways on his plate and took a breath, satisfied he’d gained the upper hand. Father specializes in the upper hand. “Brother Anatole, I pray every day for understanding and patience in leading Brother Ndu to our church,” he said. “Perhaps I should pray for you as well.”

This was Big Chief Ndu they were talking about, or “Mister Undo” as Ruth May calls him. And I don’t mind saying he is a piece of work. It is hard to muster up the proper respect for a chief who wears glasses with no glass in them (he seems to think they raise his intelligence quotient), and the fur of a small animal clasped around his neck, a fashion trademark he shares with the elderly churchgoing ladies of Georgia, charmed I’m sure.

“If you are counting your enemies, you should not count me among them, sir,” Anatole said. “And if you fear the rivals of your church, you should know there is another nganga here, another minister. People also put their trust in him.”

Father loosened his tie and the collar of his short-sleeved Sunday shirt. “First of all, young man, I do not fear any man in Kilanga. I am a messenger of God’s great good news for all mankind, and He has bestowed upon me a greater strength than the brute ox or the most stalwart among the heathen.”

Anatole calmly blinked at that. I reckon he was wondering which one Father had him pegged for, brute ox or stalwart heathen.

“Second,” Father went on, “I’ll point out what you clearly must know, which is that Brother Ndu is not a minister of any kind. His business concerns the governing of human relations, not matters of the spirit. But you are quite right, there is another preacher aside from myself guiding my own right hand. The Lord is our Shepherd’’ Naturally Father had to give the impression he knew who, or what, Anatole was talking about, even if he didn’t. What with him being the Father Knows Best of all times.

“Yes, yes, of course, the Lord is our Shepherd,” Anatole said quickly, like he didn’t believe it all that much and was just getting it out of the way.”But I am speaking of the ngangaTatu Kuvudundu.”

We all stared at the middle of the table like something dead with feet had just turned up there. Why, we knew Tata Kuvudundu. We’d seen him babbling and walking cockeyed down the road, leaning over so far you keep thinking he’ll plumb fall over. He has six toes on one of his feet, and that’s not even half the battle. Some days he sells aspirins in the market, all dignified like Dr. Kildare, yet other days he’ll turn up with his body painted top to bottom (and I do mean bottom) in some kind of whitewash. We’ve also seen him squatting in his front yard surrounded by other old men, every one of them falling over from drinking palm wine. Father told us Tata Kuvudundu conducts the sin of false prophecy. Supposedly he and his grown-up sons tell fortunes by throwing chicken bones into a calabash bowl.

“Anatole, what do you mean by calling him a preacher?” Mother asked. “We kind of thought Tata Kuvudundu was the town drunk.”

“No Mama Price, he is not. He is a respected nganga, a priest of the traditions, you might say. He is quite a good advisor to Tata Ndu.”