A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (35 page)

· 52 ·

Moving in Light

E
VEN MEN OF
God who are not godly experience miracles.

The Sabbath came like butterfly wings, light and airy. Henry preached before his flock in the partially built church.

“
Bi’le aiye ba wu e koo gbe, dede ni, sugbon bio ba si fe gbe lodo olorun, dede na ni pelu
,” he said. “If you prefer to live in this world, then you are welcome, but if you prefer to live above in heaven, then you are equally welcome.” The congregation voiced an approving hum.
Maybe the horse is in heaven
, Henry thought. He felt that morning neither old nor young but rather as if he were floating in some region in which there was no age. He moved his legs without effort, or, more to the point, it did not seem he who moved them. In like way, he opened his mouth but some other power spoke.

The road to God is the only true road.

He could not tell if others felt as he did, but
he
believed and that in itself was a miracle, a transcendence, the words so close to him, they were his breathing. Acts 17, beginning with verse 24.

The God who created the world and everything in it, and who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by men.

Henry thought it odd that he had never heard the poetry in the verse, the balance of the phrases. He considered for a moment God’s desire to be
in
the world, indwelling, and he was mildly comforted as he had been in certain stages of illness when the pain was not great but his energy was entirely suppressed and he was aware that life was passing and could not be held. At the moment Henry knew that all of his illnesses were caused by grandiosity even if they were also predicated by the sting of an insect or a drink of foul water. It seemed likely he would suffer more, but it didn’t matter anymore. God was in him.

It is not because He lacks anything that He accepts service at men’s hands, for He is Himself the universal giver of life and breath and all else.

When a wind came from behind and slipped up the back of his jacket, he thought he might be lifted sideways into the air.

He created every race of men of one stock to inhabit the whole earth’s surface.

Did Jacob stand up then, or had he been standing through the entire service? Maybe he was dreaming. Henry smiled to think he might be required to wake and preach the sermon again.

He fixed the epochs in their history and the limits of their territory.

For one beat of time, he felt a skirmish in his chest; he thought of a maimed thing, and an idea of struggle entered faintly into his consciousness before it was carried away.

They were to seek God, and it might be, to touch and find Him.

How odd the idea of touching God seemed, though one might imagine touching Jesus as the disciples had. What a rapturous possibility. A thrill ran through him and he paused. What had Jesus’ hands looked like? Were they flat and rough or were the fingers tapered? That was what the verse meant, of course, Jesus. Unless it meant something like his sensation this morning of moving in light, without fear or effort. That could be touching God.

Though indeed He is not far from each one of us, for in Him we live and move, in Him we exist; as some of your own poets have said, “We are also His offspring.”

He meant to expound, but the scripture seemed sufficient. Hours had passed, or no time at all had passed. He led a final prayer and then spoke in a detached and intimate manner with the men while his wife greeted women and children. The men’s hands were like supple bark, and they clasped his hands between their own. Henry could not tell whether they agreed with him, but they were kind.

If he dreamed the sermon, he did not remember waking. Perhaps the vision, if it was one, was a trace of heaven.

Part
Five

REMEMBER ME

· 53 ·

Hold the Light

The first thing I knew for certain—as certain as my backbone—was the break in human beings, our bondage to error. Cast out of Eden, we harm one another. But we retain a memory of God. What is the resurrection but the possibility of return?

—EMMA, LETTER FRAGMENT NEVER SENT

E
MMA TURNED THE
page in her journal for the new month,
July 1855
. Two years in this country.
We have harvested our first squash
, she wrote.
Madeline can turn herself over. Wole claims her as a sister.
At intervals, Emma paged through the red diary from its inception. One afternoon while Henry was out strolling with the baby, she washed her hair and left it down to dry. Her spirit seemed to expand in her aloneness, and her feelings moved in every direction. “My heart is still an open book,” she said aloud to herself. She had drawn a veil over her time with Jacob, over Henry’s illness, the rifle, her desire to be free. But some days it was a thin veil. Now, her hair still damp, she picked up the journal and walked into the yard. She sat in the shade. Rather than open her diary, she pressed it to her chest. The simple act opened something in her, a secret well, a spring. She remembered how Henry had come to her young in his age, almost a boy in his claim of her, and she thought how she had been young and tender and aflame and she considered how they clung to each other in the night and in the day and how they must always be so, matched hands meeting and folding, how all hardship was a means to love, all darkness an avenue to day. She wept with relief that the spring was still there.

One night she woke from a dream in which she was flying.

Two weeks later, the Hathaways at last came for a visit. Anna had been ill for weeks and her husband had taken her to Lagos, where they had boarded ship for England. But the freighter was held up in Dakar and in the time they were there, Anna recovered. They had returned to Ibadan. Now they brought news that a new Baptist minister had arrived in Ijaye.

“And we didn’t even know a new missionary was on the way,” Henry said. “I wonder where he’s from? What state?”

Emma pondered the workings of the divine, how her miracle with Uncle Eli had depended on Anna’s illness, the Hathaways’ absence, even, perhaps Henry’s illness. How infinite and complex was the mind of God. In the light of such profound insight, she had to work up her enthusiasm for the impractical pink silk dress her friend had brought as a gift.

Sitting down to dinner, she felt how awkward not to include Abike and Jacob, Wole and Duro, and she called them to come to the table. It took a long time with Duro, who had never dined with an
oyinbo
.

“Please sit beside Rev. Bowman,” Emma said.

“No mah,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “Bring out the
fufu
and soup.”

She ate with her fingers and let Madeline suck on them after each bite.

“The child is an African,” Duro said, and everyone laughed.

They planned Sade’s baptism in August at the Laka River, near the borrowed compound where they had spent their first Ogbomoso months. On a Sabbath morning they walked up the hill, past the old compound. Emma remembered it as a dark place and was surprised when she saw how light and pretty it was on the hill, filled now with the Baale’s brother’s family whose journey to the ancestral home had left the place open for them.
They don’t even know we were there
, she thought, feeling oddly as though she might evaporate. She missed a beat in her step, and Wole pushed her along.

Near the river, the palms were deep green. The land sloped gently and the grass came up to Emma’s shoulders. But there was a natural path made through the regular passing of feet to the edge of the water. She saw the river was deeper now with the rains but even so hardly a river, more a fine stream. Emma had stitched a lace bonnet for Sade, but the woman wore her own scarf until the moment she was called by Henry into the water. She was enormously serious, making her way, saying “ah-ah” over and over as she stepped into the water up to her waist. Henry caught her hand and she clung to her wrap, and when she came up out of the spring she waved her arms like a person winning a race. “Jesus has paid for me,” she cried. “Praise my God!”

It was a beautiful moment, but Henry’s face was a little screwed up and Emma knew there was pain in his side.

That night he rocked Madeline in the cradle, whispering a story about a little girl climbing the pawpaw tree. Later the two of them sat in the parlor. Neither took up a task, for the day seemed complete in itself. Emma was in the bedroom pulling her dress over her head—half on, half off—when Henry said, “I think we ought to go home for a brief furlough, maybe six months.” Emma pulled her dress back down.

“Why? You’re better. Everything is so lovely.” She could hear her voice rising as she spoke.

“We both know I need a rest,” he said. “We’ll go home for the winter in Georgia and miss the dry season here. I’ll do nothing but sit by the house fire, eating ham and grits. We’ll see the baby through her first year. The vocabulary is on hand; we can deliver it together. With Rev. Moore in Ijaye, the new missionary can come up to Ogbomoso. Hathaway told me of a freighter leaving Lagos in early September. It goes up to Monrovia, then straight to Savannah. When we return, we’ll resettle here. I promise.”

Something reared up in Emma like a horse.
Why, no
, she wanted to say,
this will not do. I have waded through the swamp and am on dry land. I have endured forty days in the wilderness and manna has come from heaven. I was blind and now I see. No!
She felt her interior beating as a moth would against silk, trying to get to the light. She realized her mouth was open and she closed it, looking at Henry.

He left the room. Madeline was fretful for once. Emma tried to soothe her. “Of course you don’t want to go. You’ll stay here with me.” She dozed and woke to the image of Henry in the river, the pain on his face. She wandered to the bedside table. Her husband had begun a letter to the mission board.
I shall think about this country by day and dream of it at night
, he had written, the letters scrolled out. He loved this country just as she did, then. It would always call him. For too long she had battered against his ideas and it had not helped. Then she thought of their other daughter, Sarah, buried. If they left as Henry suggested, just briefly, they would avoid the season of that dear child’s death.

The next day, Emma glanced out the window to see Henry with Jacob studying the church. Her husband looked fine to her, his hands resting on his hips, his elbows out. He was the person to whom she had confessed her spiritual limitation.
I am not as advanced in charity as I had thought.
And he had found in her confession something to praise. He was her secret drawer.

“When did you first consider going home?” she said that evening.

“I was thinking it before I was so ill. With the baby coming. I thought we ought to go as soon as the child was old enough. For a season. To keep us safe.”

Emma felt a gentle shift in the current of her will. Wouldn’t it be lovely to arrive on her front porch with Madeline in her arms. Henry’s plan to go home and recuperate was not his usual pressing. It was releasing. Already she was on her way to imagining their next return to Ogbomoso.

In the night, Henry wound her hair with his fingers. He stroked her forehead. His features were fuller now that he was gaining strength, and in the dim light of the moon she traced his eyebrows. He was smoke and rain, as familiar and permanent as her face in the mirror.

The September evening before their departure, the air was unusually cool. Emma awakened some time in the night, pulled on her shawl, lit a lantern, and stepped out the back door onto the piazza. From there, she could see compound fires burning low across the town’s hills. Jacob lifted the curtain of his room and stepped out. He still gave the slight ritual bow.

“I think you don’t need to do that now,” Emma said.

“Is everything fine?”

“Yes. Everything is fine. I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.”

He sat on a bench near her.

“I’m going to miss this place—even for a few months,” she said.

“My heart is heavy,” he said.

“Yes. Mine too. But we must praise God for such ties as bind us in faith and cause us to”—she faltered—“to love one another.”

He put his hand to the back of his neck, his head lowered. Then he looked up and stretched his legs out in front of him.

“I have learned from you,” he said.

“What’s that?” she said.

“You cannot be defeated,” he said.

She felt a flower open in her chest and she laughed.

“Nor can you,” she said.

They sat for some minutes.

“I can build up the fire,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

They sat close to the flame. She prodded it with a stick. “You will have a good wife,” she said. “The new reverend will soon come up from Ijaye. You and Duro have employment. I know how important that is for your life. I have not learned nothing.” She smiled with her head lowered at her double negative, how she had learned to speak sometimes like Duro. “You have little Wole.” She watched as he lifted his arms, linked his fingers, and placed them behind his head, and her heart leaned toward him for his goodness. “We will be back in just six months,” she said. “After we have had time to mend, and spread the news about the mission. My husband has promised we will stay here. We’ll make a whole village.” She turned to him with a smile on her face, but he seemed engrossed. Emma felt that all she had said was wrong. It wasn’t sufficient. “You’ve been a friend to my husband.”

“Please, as we are living, you and your husband will return,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

The next morning, Emma said good-bye to Duro. “Thank you,” she said, extending her hand. “You kept me alive. Stay well in God.”

“Ah,” he said. “I am pained.”

She kissed him on both cheeks.

She hugged each child in her school. She was leaving the books for Jacob to teach until the new missionary arrived. The Iyalode took Emma into the wing of her arm and said too many things for Emma to capture. All through the good-byes, Emma felt a pear lodged in her throat. Any moment she would weep a river. Sade started singing her own version of “We’re Marching to Zion,” continuing even as Emma kissed her cheek, turned, and entered the hammock. The seat across from her was now fitted with a baby carriage for Madeline. Standing beside Duro, Abike wore a native dress, looking like a girl back from a sojourn. “Oh,” Emma said. She had forgotten to say good-bye to her handmaid. She stepped back down from the hammock. “I have left a wedding gift for you,” she said. “Jacob is holding it.” She kissed her hands. “Travel to see your mother. I’ll be back soon.”

“If you make a book,” Abike said, “place me in it.”

“How could I not?” Emma said.

Just as she was ascending again into the hammock, Emma felt certain they were forgetting something. “My writing box?” she called to Henry.

“We have it, wife,” he said. “Everything.”

Wole and Jacob went with them for two days, as far as the Oba River. The journey was perfectly calm. The ferrymen were there just as they had been a year ago. The one who had pushed Emma across recognized her.

“
Iya
,” he called. “I am here to carry you.” And he swam over with his raft, making certain he didn’t miss his chance.

Henry and Emma talked a good while about who should carry the baby.

Finally the ferryman made a suggestion. “Put her for your back,
iya
,” he said. They pulled cloth from a basket and tied the child tight.

“Snug as a clam,” Henry said.

There was Wole still. She hadn’t paid enough attention to him since the baby came. Fishing in her writing box, she pulled out the prism. It looked like sapphire, color of heaven. Emma surveyed her surroundings: the palms and the sandy soil and the river grass and a red flower flown high in a tree. She looked at the boy. “This is the light for you to hold until I come back,” she said. Just as she placed it in his palm, she thought,
I may never see any of this again
, and she was shot through with wonder and loss. “Remember me,” she said, determined to catch the boy’s eye.

“Yes mah,” he said, looking back at her, nodding his head in seriousness, his brilliant bold head.

She looked to Jacob. There was something more she wished to say to him. But before she knew what was happening, Henry and the ferryman were steering her into the water.