The Poisonwood Bible (33 page)

At first we were simply flattered and astonished: Udn Atat walking right through the front door of our very house, standing a moment before the shrine of Rachel’s hand mirror-mirror on the

wall, then settling himself into our single good chair with arms. Enthroned there under his hat, he observed our household through his un-glasses and swished the animal-tail fly swatter that denoted his station in life. Whenever he took off his strange peaked hat, he revealed himself as a large, powerful man. His dark half-dome forehead aind gravely receding hairline emphasized a broad face, broad chest and shoulders, and enormously muscular arms. He pulled his colorful drape up under his armpits and crossed his arms over the front of his chest as a man only does when proud of his physique. Our Mother was not impressed. But she mustered manners enough to make orange juice, of which the chief was fond.

Our Father, who now made a point of being home to receive Tata Ndu, would pull up one of the other chairs, sit backward with his arms draped over the back, and talk Scripture. Tata Ndu would attempt to sway the conversation back around to village talk, or to the vague gossip we had all been hearing about the riots in Matadi and Stanleyville. But mainly he regaled Our Father with flattering observations, such as: “Tata Price, you have trap de jolies filles—too many pretty daughters,” or less pleasant but more truthful remarks such as: “You have much need of food, n’est-ce pas?” For his esoteric amusement he commanded the jolies filles (and we obliged) to line up in front of him in order of height. The tallest being Rachel, at five feet six inches and the full benefit of Miss America posture; the shortest being myself, two inches lesser than my twin on account of crookedness. (Ruth May, being delirious and prone, was exempt from the lineup.) Tata Ndu clucked his tongue and said we were all very thin. This caused Rachel to quiver with pride and stroll about the house preceded by her pelvis in the manner of a high-fashion model.. She tended to show off excessively during these visits, rushing to help Mother out in ways she would not have dreamed of without an audience.

“Tata Ndu,” Mother hinted, “our youngest is burning up with fever. You’re a man of such importance I hope by coming here you aren’t exposing yourself to some dreadful contagion.” This was the nearest she could come to asking outright for help.

Tata Ndu’s attention then lapsed for a number of days, during which time we went to church, swallowed our weekly malaria pill, killed another hen from our dwindling flock, and stole turns sneaking into our parents’ bedroom to examinine the small carved woman’s genitalia.Then, after two Sundays had passed, he returned. This time his gifts were more personal: a pagne of beautifully dyed cloth, a carved wooden bracelet, and a small jar of a smelly waxy substance, whose purpose we declined to speculate on or discuss with Tata Ndu. Mother accepted these gifts with both hands, as is the custom here, and put them away without a word.

Nelson, as usual, was the one who finally took pity upon our benighted stupidity and told us what was up: kukwela. Tata Ndu wanted a wife.

“A wife” Mother said, staring at Nelson in the kitchen house exactly as I had seen her stare at the cobra that once turned up in there. I wondered whether she might actually grab a stick and whack Nelson behind the head, as she’d done to the snake.

“Yes, Mama Price,” he said tiredly, without a trace of apology. Nelson was used to our overreactions to what he felt were ordinary things, such as cobras in the kitchen. But his voice had a particularly authoritative ring when he said it, for he had his head stuck in the oven. Mother knelt beside him, helping to steady the heavy ash can while Nelson cleaned the ashes out of the cookstove. They both had their backs to the door, and did not know I was there.

“One of the girls, you mean,” Mother said. She pulled on the nape of Nelson’s T-shirt, extracting him from the stove so she might speak to him face to face. “You’re saying Tata Ndu wants to marry one of my daughters.”

“But, Nelson, he already has six or seven wives! Good Lord.” “Yes. Tata Ndu is very rich. He heard about Tata Price having no money now for food. He can see your children are thin and sick. But he knows it is not the way of Tata Price to take help from the Congolese. So he can bargain man to man. He can help your family by paying Tata Price some ivory and five or six goats and maybe a

little bit of cash to take the Mvula out of his house. Tata Ndu is a good chief, Mama Price.”
   

“He wants Rachel!”

“The Termite is the one he wants to buy, Mama Price. All those goats, and you won’t have to feed her anymore.”

“Oh, Nelson. Can you even imagine?”

Nelson squatted on his heels, his ashy eyelids blinking earnestly as he inspected Mother’s face.

Surprisingly, she started to laugh. Then, more surprisingly, Nelson began to laugh, too. He threw open his near-toothless mouth and howled alongside Mother, both of them with their hands on their thighs. I expect they were picturing Rachel wrapped in a. pagne trying to pound manioc.

Mother wiped her eyes. “Why on earth do you suppose he’d pick Rachel?” From her voice I could tell she was not smiling, even after all that laughter.

“He says the Mvula’s, strange color would cheer up his other wives.”

“What?”

“Her color.” He rubbed at his own black forearm and then held up two ashy fingers, as if demonstrating how the ink in Rachel’s sad case had all come off. “She doesn’t have any proper skin, you know,” Nelson said, as if this were something anyone could say of a woman’s daughter without offending her. Then he leaned forward and ducked his head and shoulders far back into the stove for the rest of the ashes. He did not speak again until he emerged from the depths.

“People say maybe she was born too soon, before she got finished cooking. Is that true?” He looked at Mother’s belly inquiringly.

She just stared at him. “What do you mean, her color would cheer up his other wives?”

He looked at Mother in patient wonder, waiting for more of a question.

“Well, I just don’t understand. You make it sound like she’s an accessory he needs to go with his outfit.”

Nelson paused for a long time to wipe the ash from his face and puzzle over the metaphor of accessories and outfits. I stepped into the kitchen house to get a banana, knowing there would likely be nothing more to overhear. My mother and Nelson had reached the limits of mutual understanding.

Leah

HERE WAS OUR PROBLEM: Tata Ndu would be very offended if Father turned down his generous offer to marry Rachel. And it wasn’t just Tata Ndu involved. Whatever we might think of this imposing man in his pointed hat, he is a figurehead who represents the will of Kilanga. I believe this is why Brother Fowles said we should respect him, or at least pay attention, no matter how out-of-whack the chief might seem. He’s not just speaking for himself. Every few weeks Tata Ndu has meetings with his sous-chiefs, who have their own meetings with all the families. So by the time Tata Ndu gets around to saying something, you can be pretty sure the whole village is talking to you. Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election—that was Belgium’s idea of fair play, but to people here it was peculiar.To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that’s left halfway unhappy you haven’t heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.

The way it seems to work here is that you need one hundred percent. It takes a good while to get there.They talk and make deals and argue until they are pretty much all in agreement on what ought to be done, and then Tata Ndu makes sure it happens that way. If he does a good job, one of his sons will be chief after he dies.

If he does a bad job, the women will chase Tata Ndu out of town with big sticks and Kilanga will try out a new chief. So Tata Ndu is the voice of the people. And that voice was now telling us we’d be less of a burden to ourselves and others if we let him buy Rachel off our hands for some goats. It kind of put us on the spot.

Rachel went into a frenzy, and for once in my life I couldn’t blame her. I was very glad he hadn’t picked me. Mother crossed her heart to Rachel that we weren’t going to sell her, but reassurances of this kind are not the words you’re prepared to hear coming out of your mother’s mouth.The very thought of being married to Tata Ndu seemed to contaminate Rachel’s frame of mind, so that every ten minutes or so she’d stop whatever she was doing and scream with disgust. She demanded to Father’s face that we go home this instant before she had to bear one more day of humiliation. Father disciplined her with The Verse that ends on honoring thy father and mother, and no sooner had she finished it than Father smote her with it again! We’d run out of blank paper so she had to write out the hundred verses in a very tiny hand on the backs of old letters and envelopes left from when we were still getting mail. Adah and I took pity and secretly helped her some. We didn’t even charge her ten cents a verse, as we used to back home. For if we did, how would she pay?

We couldn’t refuse visits from the chief, no matter how we felt. But Rachel began to behave very oddly whenever he came to the house. Frankly, she was odd when he didn’t, too. She wore too many clothes at once, covering herself entirely and even wearing her raincoat indoors, as hot and dry as it was. She also did strange things with her hair. With Rachel, that is a deep-seated sign of trouble. There was nervous tension in our household, believe you me.

Ever since Independence we’d heard stories of violence between blacks and whites. Yet if we looked out our own window, here’s what we’d see: Mama Nguza and Mama Mwanza chatting in the road and two little boys stepping sideways trying to pee on each other. Everybody still poor as church mice, yet more or less content. The Independence seemed to have passed over our village, just as

the plague did on that long ago night in Egypt, sparing those who had the right symbol marked over their doorsills. Still, we didn’t know what the symbol was, or how we were spared. We barely knew what was going on in the first place, and now, if things had changed, we didn’t know what to believe or how to act. There was an unspoken feeling of danger, which we couldn’t discuss but felt we should be attending to at all times. Mother had little tolerance for Rachel’s tantrums. She told Rachel to straighten up because right now she had her hands full with Ruth May sick.

Ruth May was now getting rashes all over her back and was hot to the touch. Mother gave her cool sponge baths every hour or so. She spent most nights curled up at the foot of my parents’ iron double bed. Mother decided we should move Ruth May’s cot out into the main room so she could be with us in the daytime, where we could keep a closer eye. Rachel and I helped move it, while Adah rolled up the bedding. Our cots were made of iron pipes welded together, about as heavy as you’d think a bed could be. First we had to pull down all the mosquito netting from the frame. Then with a grand heave-ho we shoved the bed away from the wall. What we saw on the wall behind it made us stare. “What are those?” Rachel asked. “Buttons?” I guessed, for they were perfectly round and white. I

was thinking of our hope-chest projects. Whatever this was, it had

been Ruth May’s project for a very long time.

“Her malaria pills,” Mother said, and she was right. There must have been a hundred of them, all partly melted and stuck in long crooked rows behind where the bed had been.

Mother stood looking at them for a good long while. Then she left, and came back with a table knife. Carefully she pried the pills off the plaster wall, one by one, into her cupped hand. There were

sixty-one. Adah kept count, and wrote that number down. Exactly how many weeks we’d been in the Congo.

Rachel

MAN ALIVE, I am all steamed up with no place to go. When Tata Ndu comes to our house, jeez oh man. I can’t even stand to look at him looking at me. I revert my eyes. Sometimes I do unladylike things like scratch myself and pretend I’m retarded. But I suppose he’d be just as happy to add a retarded wife to his collection; maybe he doesn’t have one yet. Jeepers.The very fact my parents even let him in the door! I refuse to give Father the pleasure of a reply whea he talks to me. Mother either, if I can help it. Ruth May is all she cares about: poor Ruth May this and Ruth May that! Well, jeez, maybe she is sick, but it’s no easy street for me either, being here and taking this guff. My family is thinking of everything but my personal safety.The instant we get back to Georgia I am filing for an adoption.

And if that wasn’t already the living end, now my knight in shining armor has arrived: Mr. Stinkpot Axelroot. He just showed up in the yard one day, right when Tata Ndu was coming up the steps in his stupid hat and his no-glass glasses, and the two of them had a word of exchange. After that Tata Ndu only stayed about ten minutes and then left. I was just getting going on my retarded-daughter presentation. Too bad!

Well, it turns out Father and Mr. Axelroot hatched up a plan to get me out of marrying Tata Ndu without hurting the whole village’s feelings. They’re setting it up to look like I was already promised in marriage to Eeben Axelroot! I about croaked. Mother says don’t let it get me down, it is only for appearance’s sake. But that means now he comes around the house all the time, Coo, and I