A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (31 page)

· 46 ·

In the Shed

W
HEN SHE CAME
out of her dressing closet, her husband was no longer in bed. Emma found Abike sitting on the piazza.

“Have you seen Rev. Bowman?”

“He has gone to the shed mah.” Her tone sounded flat, but Emma could not worry about the girl’s feelings now.

Be careful you don’t trip and hurt the baby
, she told herself.

In the shed she found her husband clutching the horsewhip.

When his eyes met hers, they seemed the color of the sea.

“Emma, you must leave me alone. It worked before. It drove out the devil when nothing else would. I cannot go over that precipice again. I may not come back.”

“Where did you find that thing? I thought it was gone,” she said.

“Duro had it in his kitchen, among his pots.”

She remembered how Henry had spoken of finding the bolus of medicine; he had looked for the whip earlier then. How horrible that her husband had gone snooping about like a thief. “No,” she said, “you must not do this. I will not allow it.” She meant everything: destroy their station, destroy himself, Jacob, Wole. “You must not do it. It did
not
work.”

“Have you heard the voices in my head?”

She said nothing.

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “Jacob will help me.”

“No. You cannot ask a native man to whip you. It’s the most dreadful notion I’ve ever heard.”

“Yesterday, I nearly hit a woman. It was sickness coming on to madness. How many unholy visions do you wish me to suffer? A shock to the system may drive them out. Otherwise I fear I’ll do something worse.”

“Pray to God.”

“Do you think I have not already prayed?”

“Our Lord never ordained beating as a means of healing.”

“Our Lord was crucified.”

“What will it mean to the babe in my womb if you do this? It’s not right. You cannot.” She raised her hands to frame her face. She thought her head might split.

There was the soft rhythm of someone approaching. It was Jacob at the shed door. “Duro is serving breakfast,” he said, his face dark toward ruin.

Henry leaned against a sawhorse. “Emma, leave us.”

“No. You must not.”

“Leave us or I will continue with you here.”

At the house, she called Duro. “Bring Abike. Bring Wole. We must pray for Rev. Bowman and Jacob. Come into the parlor. You have to trust me,” she said. “Whatever you hear, whatever happens, God is with us. Remember.” Abike was making the hiccupping sound that was her cry. “Stop that, please. Hold my hand.” She would not have heard a scream if there had been one because of the walkers on the road and the drums, constant as life itself, and Abike, and the thrumming in her head like hummingbirds’ wings.

· 47·

On My Father’s Plantation

E
MMA COULD SEE
that the single lash hadn’t even broken skin. But Henry had collapsed and fallen against the sawhorse. He seemed oddly vigilant as she bent to him. “Splint it and bind my chest and make a trundle before you move me,” he said. “I might have broken a rib in the fall.”

Jacob’s jaw kept flexing, and there was a sheen of tears in his eyes. Certainly he would have struck Henry only at his insistence.

Once they got him to the house and into bed, Henry fell asleep. In the afternoon, he jerked in his sleep and a look of intensity came to his face. Emma thought surely he would wake, but he did not. She pressed his hair out of his face and washed his forehead. Later she found the sewn cut on his leg. “My dear poor husband,” she said. All that she had dreamed of, all she had suffered; what would happen now? Her back ached. She could not care for anything: dinner, her schoolchildren, her hair. How ridiculous she had been, imagining herself strong without her husband and in this remote place where no one could rescue her. If she were in Lagos, she could board a ship or someone could come to her. But here—how long through the forest, rivers, feuding villages, angry kings, beasts of prey, before she came to someone who could help her. The route to the stars seemed clearer than the route to Georgia. She was shut off.
God, God. Help me
, she prayed.

In the night, Henry thundered awake. “How dare you!” he cried.

Emma pressed away from him, felt how near she was to falling from the bed, then turned, holding her belly, and slid down to the floor. For a moment, she crouched, then crawled on her hands and knees toward the doorway. Moonlight cast Henry’s figure up against the wall, and she shrank from it.

“Husband!” she called. “You dreamed. I am here.”

“It was a painful dream,” he said, and sank down.

At daybreak, she left the room, hoping her husband had exhausted himself. At the back door she called for Jacob. “Take Wole and cut green palm fronds and stand them in the soil—around the church site—as a sign of peace.” She rubbed her forehead. “That’s good, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he said. He looked not to have slept in days. “How is Pastor?”

“He woke with nightmares,” she said.

“Ah,” he said.

“I need you to move the trunk into the parlor. The baby clothes are in it. Leave the rifle where it is. When the time comes . . .”

Later Jacob called at the back door. He reminded her of the story of the good Samaritan.

“And what has that got to do with my husband, pray?”

“The one who nursed the Jew on the road was not of his nation.”

He meant, she supposed, a
babalawo
, a witch doctor. “What can a native doctor possibly do for us? He practices rubbish, throwing bones and beads.” She remembered Uncle Eli’s bundles.

“One man here has some science.”

“Something besides dead chickens?”

“He spent time in Abeokuta, conversing with Europeans. He has used quinine; one missionary hired him for cupping.”

“That’s very interesting. But we are not in the swamps. My husband doubts that quinine works here. I think he already tried bleeding.”

“He has used an herb with a European to pull him back to life,” he said.

“You mean to keep him from madness?”

They came to no agreement.
Husband very ill
, Emma wrote in the red journal. He seemed in a stupor, and she spent another horrible night, waiting for Henry to erupt again. But blessedly he slept. In the morning it rained. Taking tea on the piazza, Emma watched Wole catch toads and release them. Once he asked for the prism. “It won’t work in the rain,” she said, and he looked at her, perplexed.

“Who will help when the baby comes?” she said when Jacob called her for dinner.

“The Iyalode,” he said.

“What if there is trouble?”

“She can do it.”

“If you have to decide,” she said, “save the baby.”

He didn’t seem to take long enough to agree.

Once Henry called her “mother,” and Emma didn’t know if he meant his mother or herself, the child’s mother. She prayed at his bedside, on her knees:
My Lord, have mercy.
If only she could lay her head on her husband’s chest while he stroked her hair and told her he would take care of her. “I’m so fond of you, Emma.” She would move to Ilorin. She would go anywhere.

At the window she sang the nursery rhyme she had sung so long ago.

The maid was in the garden,

Hanging out the clothes . . .

She longed for a lake, a shore against which she could push and by pushing reach the other side. She wondered if the thought was an intimation of death and if so, whose? Then she could not decide whether to lie down with Henry. If she did, could she pull him back? It seemed they had known everything together.

* * *

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
was sultry. Emma prepared a bed bath for her husband.

“I’ve seen you,” he said when she pulled up a chair. His eyes were still closed, and he chuckled.

“I didn’t know you were awake,” she said, pulling back. “Are you better?”

“Crack my head, lady, you tell me,” he said, his eyes suddenly open.

She shrank from him.

“I have nothing to tell,” she said, “excepting that you have been ill. You made Jacob whip you. You believed it would better you. It has not. It has driven you to greater delusion. Now hear me.”

“Send Jacob,” he said, “or Abraham.”

A shadow passed over her husband’s face.

Whom did he mean—Abraham? “Yes,” she said. She moved as swiftly as she could through the house. From the piazza, she called for Jacob. When he didn’t come, she walked into the yard. There was Wole. “Dear child,” she said, “where is your brother?” He pointed. There he was, coming up the lane.

Jacob reached the room before she did. Emma entered to find Henry standing on the bed, holding on to his hair. “Rascal,” he said. “Rascals all. They’ve caught me out here in the night; one of them is going to scalp me.”

Emma moved to him.

“I’ll shoot,” he said, convulsed, and fell onto the bed.

“We have to tie him down,” she said. “He’ll harm himself. We must give him laudanum and tie him and get help from the Babalawo.” They used strips of burlap. She dared not look at Jacob as they did it.

“Now we must tell Duro because he will need to watch over my husband, to spell us,” she said.

In the evening, Emma lit native oil lamps and placed them in the windowsill. She sang the song of sixpence again, and between stanzas she counted the number of times she had lied or been untrue to Henry. The number kept shifting because some things seemed so necessary and others so innocent and others not innocent at all, as when she told him she had been true. Her husband scarcely moved except in his breathing, almost as if some part of him were secretly relieved at being held down. Near dawn, she rehearsed a future drama in which, at some dinner or get-together with the Hathaways, she would tell about her fright, her decision to visit the Babalawo, the native doctor’s prescription, how Henry had revived and how they had laughed together over it and explained to their household staff that the search for African remedies might be a means for spreading the gospel. Relieved, she slept for two hours, only to be started awake when the baby moved. She had dreamed of the hammock ride, but the carriers had left her at a stream bank and walked off into the woods. She saw snakes in the water, hundreds of them. Then she saw the king and the archway into his compound, but she was getting swallowed up in the crowd.
I have to have help. I am nearly there
, she thought.

Oh God, where is Thy mercy?

She looked at the house of her belly. “Stay,” she said to the infant at her door.

They left Duro in charge. The man was very grave. Sade was given firm instructions to take charge of the children outdoors. Emma carried her satin purse with the Portuguese coin. As she put on her gloves, she directed Wole and Abike to prepare for the other children who would come for school. “The two of you will lead a lesson,” she said. “Take the chalk and board and practice the alphabet. You may use the
Yoruba ABC
.
Take turns reading the stories.” She had never before let them use the primers without her.

The native doctor’s house was closer than the king’s, eastward along a series of shady lanes. Under different circumstances, it would have been a pleasant walk, even in Emma’s condition. Today, she counted it as a small blessing that she was not sweating through her clothes.

She and Jacob could not rouse anyone at the Babalawo’s compound. “What shall we do? We’ve come all this way. But I don’t like to leave Rev. Bowman very long with Duro,” she said.

“Let us call one more time.” Jacob clapped his hands again. Finally a boy appeared. He opened the gate, turned, and they followed, passing through a gatehouse. Emma had to lift her skirts and step up into the dark space, and then she stepped down into the courtyard. It was the cleanest and prettiest courtyard she had seen in this part of the country. Several trees shaded the interior, and she saw that mats were set here and there. The boy zigzagged around them. When they reached the far side of the yard, they entered another gatehouse. Again Emma stepped up and down, and then, to her amazement, she walked out into a large wooded grove. A man was standing there like a lieutenant.

“Wait,” he said to Jacob in Yoruba.

“He’s with me,” she said in her own Yoruba.

“He waits,” the man said. Emma halted, but the boy was moving ahead and in a moment she stumbled after him. They walked a way on a path, beneath low, verdant trees. Just as she was stepping over a large root, she glanced to her right, catching a glimpse of a door that seemed to open onto another courtyard. When she looked back, she didn’t see the boy.

“
O ku irole
—is anyone here?” she said, but heard only her echo as reply. “Well, he must have gone that way,” she said aloud. It seemed very important to hear someone’s speech. The baby moved, and Emma’s skin rippled furiously. She nearly fell into the next gatehouse. Someone seemed to sigh in the dark, and she quickened her step. Here was a smaller courtyard, filled with large earthenware pots covered with palm fronds.
Someone is watching me
, she thought. A green-and-yellow grasshopper jumped at her feet. Suddenly she felt so fatigued she thought she might faint if she didn’t sit down. She was less afraid now than provoked.
Well, this has been a waste of time
, she considered.
I’m not sitting in here where I can be watched like a bug.
She started back for the doorway she had passed through but could not remember which one it was.
I’ll try the one right in front of me
, she reasoned. As she approached, she saw that something was painted all across the wall, one image over and over, like four split cocoa pods in a square. It seemed familiar, and she pulled off her gloves to touch the mud wall. Red camwood paint came off onto her fingertips. She mashed her hands against the wall until both palms were red with dust. She followed the pattern with her fingertips to discover what she was seeing, but she couldn’t quite tell. The more she felt along the wall, the more she sensed life moving in the brick. Something seemed to leap from it into her. She shuddered and stepped back, seeking to brace herself. A brown lizard scuttled by and as she looked at her skirts, it seemed that the fabric was shedding petals; they fell to the ground like flowers before a coronation. She looked up at the sun. It was red as blood.

When she came to, she was lying in the courtyard with her head on a mat. A turtledove bobbed by. She coughed; the dove flew up to the painted wall, hovered for a moment with its mate, and they flew away. She had dreamed something but she couldn’t remember what. It was almost on her tongue. She sat up and a damp cloth slipped from her head.

“Jacob?” she said. “Jacob!”

“Yes. I am here.” He was just behind her, squatted on the ground. She must have fainted and he found her.

“Who was with us?” she said.

“The boy brought the cloth,” he said.

“We have to get home.” He helped her up, and then she stumbled and nearly fell, and he caught her arm and she leaned into him all the way to the compound.

When they reached the house, she swung open the back door, careless of its slamming, and walked directly to the trunk. The smell of starched cotton seemed otherworldly as she pulled out the blue shoulder cloth from Tela, given just as they were leaving Ijaye in the downpour. It was the same pattern as the painting she had seen on the Babalawo’s wall, the same as the diviner’s board she had seen in the market once near the indigo pots. It was the same design as the faint blue pattern on Uncle Eli’s quilt. She was startled to realize she had seen it elsewhere—in the cornice molding of the fireplace in her family’s Georgia parlor! Four petals or pods. And between each petal a drop like a dogwood berry, the whole design set in a square as if it meant the four corners of the world, or the universe.

When she looked at it she heard Uncle Eli, “You find a good place.”
One two three four remember.
She could see Mittie Ann churning butter, her pitched-up scarf. Emma examined Tela’s cloth as a person might study a page from a book written in a language she did not know until a word here or there seems discernible so that suddenly a light is cast on the page and the reader knows its intent. A shiver ran down her back.

Uncle Eli was Yoruba.

Immediately, she wanted to tell Henry.
The old slave was Yoruba! The man I knew always. He wasn’t just from Africa. He was from here, this very place. This is the old man’s land we came to!
She recalled his best memory: a large brown yard full of brothers and sisters and mothers. How astonishing that she had come so close to him. Everything would be all right if she could tell Henry. She would tell him like writing words on his skin, as they did long before, before dying, before shame. Henry wouldn’t scoff at her. He would say, “Of course; God works in mysterious ways.” Such a miraculous moment would make her life worthwhile.