A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (5 page)

As she brought her horse up to the front of the house, she saw Rev. Bowman on the porch. Her mother was framed by the doorway as if perhaps she were barring the entrance. Her visitor came into the yard to help her dismount.

“I thought you said tomorrow,” she said, hoping her exercise would account for the flush in her face. She kicked her left foot free of the stirrup iron, and as she pushed back from the horse, he caught her right at the waist.

“Excuse me, I thought you might fall again,” he said. “Well, you didn’t fall—the other night, I mean. Or now.”

Emma wondered if her mother had observed the minister’s quickness with his hands, but when she read his eyes she did not care. They told her he had not come to speak of women’s circles. “I haven’t fallen since I was eight,” she said, feeling her power.

“No, I suspect not, the way you ride, Miss Davis,” he said.

Emma unhitched her pouch from the saddle horn, and her journal slipped to the ground.

The reverend retrieved her book and dusted it off. “Do you write as well as you manage that horse?”

“Why shouldn’t I ride so?” She hoped her eyes flashed.

“There’s no biblical injunction I know against it,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “I don’t know how well I write. It’s for myself.”

“I’m early,” he said, as if she had not observed the same already. Neither of them could quite get the conversation moving. But he pushed ahead, determined. “I have to leave tomorrow for Richmond. I wanted to see you.”

“Won’t you invite your guest into the parlor?” her mother called from the porch.

Emma looked from Rev. Bowman to the house. “Yes, but I expect we may enjoy a stroll first. We’ll walk down to the creek and back.” She had noticed a small nick in her caller’s left ear, and it stirred her immensely to think of him as strong and vulnerable.

“You have an independent streak,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

A few minutes later, Rev. Bowman held a branch of the chinaberry tree and they bent together to pass beneath it. He pressed a hand to his abdomen. Their eyes met.

“My liver and spleen were first attacked by the ague in Texas. It may be that the African malaria has worsened my case. Occasionally the organs act up.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “How horrible it must have been to suffer far from home.”

“Yes. In fact, it was sometimes horrible. But I have survived.”

“Yes,” she said. She felt she was already seeing into him, and this was in his favor.

“I mean to do better when I return. A more deliberate work schedule.”

He had regained his posture and looked perfectly stable, even robust. He seemed the very essence of a man.

“In any case,” he went on, “my difficulties deepen my commitment, not the other way around. Africa must not be lost.” He paused as if to weigh the effect of his last sentence. He took his hat off and stroked his hair and returned his hat.

Emma was dazzled. “No, Africa must not be lost,” she said, thinking how this man must not be lost, how she would lay claim to that nick on his ear, how his brilliance would deepen her.

“A bullet from a messmate’s fire,” he said, a half grin. “An inch or two to the right and it would have hit a jugular.”

Theirs was a fine long walk, their strides well matched.

Rev. Bowman wrote weekly. Letters came from Atlanta, Richmond, Washington, even New York. Emma and her correspondent tackled all manner of things. He asked if she had studied languages, and she was happy to report that she had. He had trained himself as a linguist and was working on a vocabulary of the African language native to the area of his mission, Yoruba. He described a land unequaled in all the globe, full of creeks, open woodland, deep forest. “Great granite boulders appear out of nowhere and sit in solitude on the plains like prophets in the desert,” he wrote. “Yet fear of slavery still grips the land, though the trade has been outlawed.”

Emma awaited each letter in a storm of anticipation, and when it arrived she pressed the pages against her face.

“What of their religion?” she ventured in her next letter, happy to be his pupil.

“They are monotheistic,” Rev. Bowman answered. “It’s all the spirits that get in their way. These
orishas
must be appeased every time the people turn around. There’s one in the tree and another at the crossroads and another at the creek. The poor folks spend half their lives making sacrifices to them, or to their dead ancestors.”

Ten days passed without an epistle. Emma’s hands felt cold when the next one arrived. “I’m closing in on forty years of age,” her suitor wrote. “I believe you are yet to turn twenty-one.” She considered her next letter carefully. “Age is a matter of mind and heart, don’t you think? Some people are old when they are born, others are young all their lives. I am glad I shall continue to hear from you, as you promised.” In the next letter he said nothing of age. “My mission is in Ijaye,” he wrote, “pronounced
Ee-jie-ee
,
all syllables equally stressed. The town is thirty thousand strong.”

She sounded the town’s name and it sounded like a song. Emma had never corresponded with a man whose mind ran so deep or who expected hers to be as agile as his. Certainly she had never known such heat emanating from paper. Twice her mother made allusion to Rev. Bowman’s age, and her father asked again how a missionary sets his store against the future, but their concerns only increased the reverend’s power. She did wonder about falling ill. Once she was playing Bach’s Prelude in C Major when a sudden sense of loss came to her, and she paused, listening for the sound an illness would make in Africa. It would not be Bach. For the rest of the afternoon, she swung between fright and self-chastisement.

After the evening meal, she wandered into the yard. Uncle Eli was in his usual spot. His eyesight was failing and he didn’t whittle much anymore. She felt sad that she had not spent more time with him in his old age.

She drew off her gloves and touched his shoulder. “How are you, Uncle Eli?”

“Me, I’m doing fine,” he said. “Have a seat.”

She did.

“How you been?” he said.

“My folks are a little worried about me,” she said. “What if I told you I might travel to Africa, as a missionary, as a missionary’s wife?”

“I already heard. Mittie Ann tell me.” He rocked a little. “See,” he said, “that what I mean. You remember that day you wade in the creek in that nice dress? You was getting ready then.”

She thought he might be making up things.

Somehow it didn’t matter.

Two days later, Henry Bowman sent a note from town, and in an hour he was at her door. The afternoon was warm and they sat on the front porch. Mittie Ann served fresh apple cider. After all of the conversation in letters, Emma felt curiously shy and she thought her suitor did as well as they cradled their cups, looking out over the street. At last, he reached for her hand, and in a moment, he pulled her with him to standing, turning her as a gentleman would a lady in a dance step. He looked nobler than she remembered. “I’m not effusive,” he said. “You’ll find that out if you say yes. I’d like you to marry me.”

Emma looked at his hands, not his eyes.

“I told you about the African fever when we first met. I’m telling you now—I was out of my head for a spell.” He dusted his hat. “Does that frighten you?”

“Yes. A little,” she said, looking at his chest now.

“I mean to live frugally,” he said.

She wanted to back up the conversation, to ask a bit more about the fever.

“There’s one more thing I must tell.” He paused and took a deep breath, letting it out like a whistle. “I was a wicked young man on the Texas prairie. Do you understand what I mean?”

She took this to mean more than killing Mexicans; he meant he had known women. The confession rushed through her and she quivered. In a gauzy way, she knew his early waywardness was part of his power; it was almost thrilling, certainly dangerous to think about. Being courted by such a man put Emma in a new relation to herself. She was now attractive. And wasn’t the man before her like the apostle Paul, a wicked man who had seen the light?

Emma looked down the road she had been studying for two decades, feeling deeply drawn. She pinched one of the big curls on the side of her head, making sure it was tight. This was the time to ask about the illness.

“Fair enough. I’ll understand if you decline me,” Rev. Bowman said.

“I haven’t declined you,” she said, looking back at him, raising her shoulders.

A neighbor’s wagon came up the road.
This is what is happening
, she thought;
this is where I am going. What puny faith if I would not die for it or care for a man who has already risked his life for the gospel.

“Yes,” she said, like jumping from a cliff. She would do something to make the world better. And in the mix she would live largely and passionately with this man.

“Good,” he said. The wagon passed.

Emma was hushed by what had just happened. Her eyes misted. What a great mystery, that God might be at work redeeming the world through her. Henry pressed a finger on the soft place at her neck. Then he put his whole hand up under her chin and held it. She felt his other hand at her waist, pressing, and she surged forward until he kissed her. She thought she was conquered, and her will trembled in her.

Now he studied her hand as he talked. “There’s a house waiting,” he said. “I made it myself: six rooms with verandas all around.” Already she was in a different country. They left the parlor for another walk in the orchard—the minister without his frock coat—and when Emma saw the way his trousers fell across his backside, she knew what is meant by desire.

· 4 ·

Signs of Grace

H
ENRY’S ROUTE FROM
Greensboro, Georgia, to the Foreign Mission Board headquarters in Richmond should have taken him from Augusta through Columbia, South Carolina, and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, and to the village of Wake Forest, where he would visit the brethren at the Baptist college. But he had an invitation from Rev. Elias Dodson in the town of Hillsborough, North Carolina, west of Raleigh, to come and preach on a Sunday. The fellow was a strong supporter of missions. But what most attracted Henry was that Dodson had bought the old Hillsborough courthouse and rolled it intact to a location where he pleased to set it out for his congregation. Thrift and innovation appealed mightily to Henry. Maybe he could persuade the man to join him in West Africa.

He preached on Sunday, and though Dodson had no inclination for Africa, the congregation raised two hundred dollars. A snow came in the night, and by the second day the accumulation was too great for travel. The hotel proprietor surmised Henry’s need for a greatcoat and lent him one. Midday, Henry set out for a view of the Eno River, two biscuits in his pocket. The water looked smudged and the current slow, but he was attracted to it anyway, following an indention alongshore where he might make progress. At last he came to an enclave of rock jutting into the water. He found his way easily to the largest among them, flat and commodious enough for his picnic. It was always better to sit looking upstream, and this he did.

A dimple in the water made him think of Emma Davis and her funny hairdo—the big coils rolled into buns on each side of her head. He lingered on her neat virgin’s chest and the nice fan of her behind. She might be a room where his masculine heart could rest; it had not found a home in twenty-three years, not since his mother died when he was fifteen. One day she was peeling figs; the next she was ill. A week later, she was spitting blood; it was tuberculosis. She lost so much weight she looked older than his great-aunt. Then one morning she was dead. His father waded into grief like a man walking into the sea to find a ring dropped from a boat, with no hope whatsoever. Henry did not know how his mother had come to be his hearth. What he did know was weightlessness. Now he was not required Sundays to put on shoes and walk two miles to church. No one sewed on his buttons, and his shirts levitated in air, with no hand to moor them. At fifteen, there was no limit to his heart; it roamed out way beyond the land. In the spring, walking behind the mule, he spotted a bone turned up by the blade. His mother’s deadness hit him. He left the mule and in the hayloft rolled and wept until he fell asleep. For weeks he hardly ate, but no one paid any mind and he took his belt in. The paroxysm of grief returned every few days as he felt again that absolute absence and wept until he exhausted himself.

After a while, he thought he would make a religion against God since his mother had loved God and look what had happened. He dedicated himself by stealing whiskey. Once he put his middle finger into a vise until it bled under the nail. He practiced striking lucifers and holding them as long as he could. By midsummer he thought he was well steeled.

One day he noticed a girl at the dry goods store. He knew her from before, at the county school, but he had paid her no mind. Now her chest was high under a tight-fitting frock. Janie became the vessel for his grief, and even then he knew it. In the evenings, after the farm work, Henry and his father shared a cold supper. His pa lit a candle and stared into it for an hour before he went upstairs. Henry must bed down the horses, and he did so carelessly. Janie would slip into the barn, wearing the dress and a black ribbon around her neck. The ribbon was slender and smooth, unlike anything else in his life.

“Do you like it?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then do something,” she said.

Once he did not wait for the loft but pulled her down in the stall with the mare, and when he moved from Janie and looked up, he was spooked by the horse looking at him. He laughed in fright, the sound thin in his ears. What if she made a baby? “Now tidy up,” he said, “and vamoose.” He picked up the ribbon he had untied and threw it at her. Her eyes were puzzled and he grabbed her by the wrists. “I said for you to go.” She had been able to sneak out because her folks were poor and cleaned the dry goods store at night; she was their only child. It wasn’t long before Henry heard she was marrying an old fellow whose first wife had died in childbirth. A deep remorse crept into him at his ruination of the girl. To fight it off he stole a bowie knife from a neighbor, putting himself beyond redemption.

The sound of a red-bellied woodpecker pulled Henry back to the present and the Eno River. The bird’s staccato echoed about the woods until finally he saw it, working away on the main stem of an old dogwood. He welcomed the interruption and pulled out the biscuits. The sun emerged and the rock warmed. This was mighty slow water. Henry felt a moment’s disorientation. Had he gauged the current right? He studied the surface again before he bit into the first biscuit. He ate slowly, until the woodpecker flew and then he rolled a cigarette, lighting it with a flint and steel. A deep inhale and his mind followed the woodpecker. Birds had their nests. But as a boy he had lost any comfort at home. His mother dead and his father a ghost, he signed on with a group of volunteers fighting Cherokee resistant to the Removal Act.

One night, his unit circled a village. Henry carried only the knife; it wasn’t much a matter to him if he died. An Indian boy surprised him, jumping out from behind a tree. Being killed was all right, but Henry hadn’t meant to be taken advantage of. Lucky for him, the boy was overexcited and missed with the hatchet. The two came into a hold. Henry was larger but couldn’t get the better of the boy, who was all greased up. They tangled until Henry thought he would fail. At last they rolled into a gully. They lay for a moment in tight embrace until a cry broke over their heads. Henry looked up to see a woman struggling against a man of his company. The way the boy responded, Henry thought she might be his mother. It was just what he needed; the boy relaxed his grip and Henry brought his knee up fast, ramming it into his stomach. The fellow’s head swung up. Henry threw his arm around his neck, finding it slender as a girl’s. He was furious that a youngster had given him so much trouble. And then the child spat in his face. “God damn it. What’d you do that for?” Henry said. “I might have left you.” He ran the boy through with the knife.

It was easier the next time.

In towns he always found a girl. They seemed to think he was prettier than they were. He began to see in the mirror what they saw: a head of dark, wavy hair, prominent eyebrows he learned to tighten, sharp features, blue eyes, and broad lips. His body was lean and well proportioned. Regardless, he woke every morning with a sense of foreboding, as if he had left a child in a field at night. After a while, Henry became accustomed to a clench at his center so that he noticed it only when it wasn’t there. As a boy he had read one book he cared about and that was
Robinson Crusoe
. Occasionally he considered it was only travel he wanted, not fighting. But the weightlessness of his heart drove him every day and he threw in with the others, battling like a wizard. On one occasion he and a fellow volunteer found themselves against a rocky cliff, hemmed in by Indians. Their only escape lay in running the gauntlet. Henry struck out through a shower of bullets, emerging untouched. His companion was less lucky. Henry got promoted.

His cigarette done, Henry looked once more at the Eno. Snow melted from the trees and fell in large clumps to the water but not onto Henry’s sunny rock. He took the coat off and made a pallet and lay on his back with his eyes closed. He considered the valleys between Emma’s fingers. The smell of a close-by fire wafted in his direction.

When he was twenty-three Henry left Georgia for Texas, intending to join the cavalry. The war with Mexico was over, but there were skirmishes aplenty along the boundary. One night he camped with an odd band, including a dwarf in a blue cape who distinguished himself by pulling out a gold-edged volume to read. But a drunken wayfarer snatched it up and threw it into the fire. Henry pulled it out. The book was Mungo Park’s
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
. Henry paid the dwarf and carried the book into Texas, reading into the night. What a world! Larger than Crusoe’s island, a place of glorious kingdoms. The book increased Henry’s wanderlust, but how would he veer from Texas to Africa? When Henry got to Falls County, he signed on with the Texas cavalry. He was a genius at survival. Soon he was a lieutenant, in charge of a company of soldiers who were not geniuses at survival and had no trouble dying. Over and over he vowed to quit, but he saw no easy way. He became a Ranger. When gangrene set in on one of his men, Henry had to saw the leg off. It was time to stop. He was twenty-six years old.

“You’re a fine soldier,” the corporal said, reluctant to accept his resignation.

“No such thing,” Henry said. After three years in Texas, he left off his commission and traded in his land grant for a wallet of money he sewed into the pocket of some tattered trousers no one would bother to steal.

Heading in the general direction of Georgia, he spent his first night camped alone. The second night he traded cleaning a stable for a room at a crossroads. His horse needed shoeing and he spent two more nights doing repairs to the stable as credit against the cost. The leaves of the Spanish oaks were turning red. By the third night he had earned enough for supper at the bar. There was a woman behind the counter with her face cast down. “What have you got to eat?” he said. When she looked up, he saw she had a widow’s peak.

“Steak and tortillas,” she said. “The steak is good.”

“All right, I’ll have some,” he said.

She served him and waited. He thought she wanted to see from his face that her word was true. He ate deliberately and treated the food with respect. She took his plate and he came back the next night. “My name is Laurie,” she said.

The next day he rode out to a river and did some fishing and filleted the fish and fried them with cornmeal. “Why are you still here; why don’t you move on?” he said to himself.

The next night when he went to the bar he saw the black chips in the blue of her irises.

They met the following day, riding to a place where trees leaned over the water. They swam in their underclothes. “
Dame un beso
,” she said, “give me a kiss,” and she pulled him close. Later, she led him to her place. It seemed to have been bored out of the ground after the hotel was built. He followed her down a set of steps to a room divided by a curtain. As they entered, another woman left. A girl slept on the only bed. Her hair was like something cut out of a night with rain and he knew right away she was part Mexican. They met so for weeks while the daughter slept. Henry worked at the stable and put away spending money. He never asked about the girl.

One night Laurie wasn’t at the bar. When Henry asked for her, the men laughed, as if he were a boy. He walked out.
So I will leave now
, he thought. Then he heard her pleading. At the back of the hotel, a Mexican careened on a horse, the daughter hauled into him. Laurie had caught the reins and leaned against them like someone might a sail on a tilting craft. The horse fretted and pulled, and Henry started toward them, but the Mexican pulled out his pistol; he had another one still holstered. Henry stood motionless and Laurie watched him, then let her arms go limp, releasing the horse before sinking to the ground. The other woman came out of the house and pulled Laurie in to her. Henry did not mean to fight another Mexican, though he regretted it for his own sake, and for hers. He turned away, Laurie’s cry behind him.

He rode out at daybreak, making it clear into Alabama before he stopped to sleep. When he did sleep, he dreamed of the Indian boy. The child was beautiful—his locks long and dark, and he was speared in the side. The following morning Henry mused on the dream. The boy was meant as Jesus. He had helped crucify him.

Drink and women and even killing were so much scrollwork on the frame of a painting compared to the central subject, Henry’s cardinal sin, ignoring his Redeemer. In the quiet of the countryside, he led the horse and moved slowly. At moments, he was filled with remorse so great his heart felt like a millstone, and he stopped to sit in the road and cry, his face to the ground. He shivered in the heat. Then he sweated something terrible. “God forgive me,” he cried. “Give me another chance.” When the chill returned, he wrapped himself in a blanket to ride. It seemed logical he would be ill—sickened with his own sinning.

Late in the day, he came upon an abandoned house. There were some gnarly apples in the fenced-in yard and a well. He watered the horse and left him to graze. Then he sat on the porch, gnawed on his last bit of jerky, and ate the fruit. Before sundown, he made his pallet on the porch and sank into sleep. He woke sick to his stomach and heaved until there was nothing left. He felt his side sore and thought it was his spleen.
I need water
, he considered, and reached for the canteen, but he had not refilled it. He tried to stand but fell into the yard. He turned on his back, rested his hand on his sore abdomen, and slept again. A cramp in his leg woke him. Both legs seized up, the pain like daggers to his calves. He tried again to stand but could not. He cried out in every foul phrase he knew, rocking in agony until finally he called, “God help me.” In a moment the pain subsided. He slept through the day and night. Early in the morning, a sweet wind blew through. Henry looked up to see a fellow sitting on the porch. He wore overalls and a straw hat.

“I knew you would wake before long,” the man said. “You might could use some water.”

Henry saw his canteen beside him. He picked it up to find it full. He drank eagerly.

“Figured you might want something besides apples to eat. I brought fish,” the fellow said. He started toward Henry, carrying a small basket. “Take it easy, not too much at a time.”