The Poisonwood Bible (13 page)

Late in the fall, the milky green bushes surrounding every house and path suddenly revealed themselves as poinsettias.They bloomed their heads off and Christmas rang out in the sticky heat, as surprising as if “Hark the Herald Angels” were to come on your radio in July. Oh, it’s a heavenly paradise in the Congo and sometimes I want to live here forever. I could climb up trees just like the boys to hunt guavas and eat them till the juice runs down and stains my shirt, forever. Only I am fifteen now. Our birthday, in December, caught me off guard. Adah and I were late-bloomers in terms of the bad things, like getting breasts and the monthly visit. Back in Georgia when my classmates started turning up in training brassieres, one after another, like it was a catching disease, I bobbed off my hair and vowed to remain a tomboy. With Adah and me doing college algebra and reading the fattest books we could get our hands on, while the other kids trudged through each task in its order, I guess we’d counted on always being just whatever age we wanted to be. But no more. Now I’m fifteen and must think about maturing into a Christian lady.

To tell the truth, it’s not purely paradise here, either. Perhaps we’ve eaten of the wrong fruits in the Garden, because our family always seems to know too much, and at the same time not enough. Whenever something big happens we’re quite taken aback, but no one else is the least bit surprised. Not by a rainy season come and gone where none was supposed to be, nor by the plain green bushes changing themselves bang into poinsettias. Not by butterflies with wings as clear as little cats-eye glasses; not by the longest or shortest or greenest snake in the road. Even little children here seem to know more than us, just as easily as they speak their own language. I have to admit, that discouraged me at first: hearing the little kids jabbering away in Kikongo. How could little babies smaller than Ruth May speak this whole other language so perfectly? It’s similar to the way Adah will sometimes turn up knowing some entire, difficult thing like French or the square root of pi when I’d been taking for granted I knew everything she did. After we first arrived, the children congregated outside our house each and every morning, which confused us. We thought there must be something peculiar, such as a baboon, on our roof. Then we realized the peculiar thing was ws.They were attracted to our family for the same reason people will pull over to watch a house afire or a car wreck. We didn’t have to do a thing in the world to be fascinating but move around in our house, speak, wear pants, boil our water.

Our life was much less fascinating from my point of view. Mother gave us a few weeks leeway on the schoolbooks, what with all the confusion of our settling in, but then in September she clapped her hands together and declared,”Congo or not, it’s back to school for you girls!” She’s determined to make us scholars—and not just the gifted among us, either. We were all chained together in her game plan. Each morning after breakfast and prayers she sat us down at the table and poked the backs of our heads with her index finger, bending us over our schoolbooks (and Ruth May her coloring), getting us in shape for Purgatory, I’d reckon. Yet all I could concentrate on was the sound of the kids outside, the queer glittery syllables of their words. It sounded like nonsense but carried so much secret purpose. One mysterious phrase called out by an older boy could rout the whole group in shrieks and laughter.

After lunch she’d allow us a few precious hours to run free. The children would scream and bolt in terror when we came out, as if we were poisonous. Then after a minute or two they’d creep forward again, naked and transfixed, thrilled by our regular habits. Before long they’d have reassembled themselves in a semicircle at the fringe of the yard, chewing on their pink sugarcane stalks and staring. A brave one would take a few steps forward, hold out a hand and scream, “Cadeau!!” before running away in horrified giggles. That was the closest thing to fellowship we had achieved so far—a shrieked demand for a gift! And what could we give them? We hadn’t given a single thought to them wanting earthly goods, in our planning ahead. We’d only brought things for ourselves. So I just tried to ignore the whole business as I lay in the hammock with my nose in the same book I’d already read three times. I pretended not to care that they watched me like a zoo creature or potential source of loot. They pointed and talked among themselves, lording it over me that their whole world left me out.

My mother said, “Well, but, sugar, it goes both ways. You know how to speak English and they don’t.”

I knew she was right, but I took no consolation from that. Speaking English was nothing. It wasn’t a skill like being able to name all the capitals and principal products of South America or recite Scripture or walk on top of a fence. I had no memory of ever having had to work hard for my native tongue. For a time I did work hard to learn French, but then Adah ran away with that prize so I dropped the effort. She could know French for the both of us, as far as I was concerned. Though I do have to say it seems an odd talent for someone who just on general principles refuses to talk. Back home, the idea of French had seemed like a parlor game anyhow. After we got here, it still did. These children have nothing to do with je suis, vous etes. They speak a language that burgles and rains from their mouths like water through a pipe. And from day one I have coveted it bitterly. I wanted to get up from my hammock and shout something that would flush them up like a flock of scared ducks. I tried to invent or imagine such a stout, snappy phrase. “Bukabuka!” I imagined myself shouting. “We like Ike!” Or, from a spaceship movie I had seen once:”Klatu barada nikto!”

I wanted them to play with me.

I suppose everyone in our family wanted the same, in one way or another. To play, to bargain reasonably, to offer the Word, to stretch a hand across the dead space that pillowed around us. Ruth May was the first one among us to get her way. That should have been no surprise, as Ruth May appears to be capable of leaping tall buildings with the force of her will. But who’d have thought a five-year-old could establish communications with the Congolese? Why, she wasn’t even allowed out of our yard! It was my job to keep her there, usually, with one eye always on the lookout for her to fall out of a tree and crack her head wide open. That really is the kind of thing Ruth May would do, just for the attention. She was bound and determined to run off, and sometimes I had to threaten her with catastrophe just to keep her in check. Oh, I said awful things. That a snake might bite her, or that one of those fellows walking by and swinging his machete might just cut her gizzard out. Afterward I always felt guilty and recited the Repentance Psalm: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies.” But really, with all those multitudes of tender mercies, He has got to understand sometimes you need to scare a person a little for her own good. With Ruth May it’s all or nothing.

As soon as I had her good and terrified I’d slip away. I’d go hunt for the Pygmies, who are supposed to be dwelling right under our noses in the forest, or for monkeys (easier to spot). Or I’d cut up fruit for Methuselah, still hanging around begging, and catch grasshoppers for Leon, the chameleon we keep in a wooden crate. Mother lets us keep him on the condition -we never bring him in the house.Which is funny, because I found him inside the house. His bulging eye sockets swivel whichever way they please, and we love to get his eyes going so one looks up and the other down. He catches the grasshoppers we throw in his box by whipping out his tongue like a slingshot.

I could also try to talk Father into letting me tag along with him. There was always that possibility. Father spends his days making rounds through the village, trying to strike up chats with the idle old men, or venturing farther afield to inspect the state of grace in the neighboring villages.There are several little settlements within a day’s walk, but I’m sorry to report they all fall under the jurisdiction of our same godless chief, Tata Ndu.

Father never lets me go that far, but I beg him anyhow. I try to avoid the drudgery of housekeeping chores, which is more up Rachel’s alley if she can stoop to being helpful on a given day. My view of the home is, it is always better to be outside. So I loiter at the edge of the village, waiting for Father’s return. There, where the dirt road makes a deep red cut between high yellow walls of grass, you never know what might be coming toward you on dusty feet. Women, usually, carrying the world on their heads: a huge glass demijohn full of palm wine, with a calabash bowl perched on top like an upside-down hat; or a bundle of firewood tied up with elephant grass, topped off with a big enamel tub full of greens. The Congolese sense of balance is spectacular.

Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you’ll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they’ve already seen most of what there is. Married eyes. And the younger girls—if they are too young to be married and too old to be strapped on someone’s back (which is not a wide margin)—why, they come striding along swinging their woven bags over their shoulders and scowl at you, as if to say, Out of my road, can’t you see I’m busy! They may only be little girls tagging after their mothers, but believe you me, with them it’s all business.The girls are usually just about bald, like the boys. (Mother says it’s from not getting their proteins.) But you can tell the girls by their stained, frilly dresses, castoffs
 
from some
 
distant land. It took
 
me aback
 
for months that they look so much like little boys in ruffly dresses. No girl or woman wears pants, ever.We are the odd birds here. Apparently they think we’re boys, except maybe Rachel, and can’t tell a one of us apart from the other. They call us all Beelezi, which means

Belgians! I mean to tell you, they call us that right to our faces. It’s how they greet us: “Mbote, Beelezil” !

 
The women smile, but then cover their mouths, embarrassed.The little babies take one look and burst out crying. It’s enough to give you a complex. But I don’t care, I’m too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.

Right smack in the middle of the village is a huge kapok tree, which is where they get together and have their market every fifth day. Oh, that’s something to see! All the ladies come to sell and bicker. They might have green bananas, pink bananas, mounds of rice and other whitish things piled on paper, onions or carrots or even peanuts if it’s our lucky day, or bowls of little red tomatoes, misshapen things but highly prized. You might even see bottles of bright orange soda pop that someone walked here all the way from Leopoldville, I guess, and will walk a long way more before they’re all sold. There’s a lady that sells cubes of caramel-colored soap that look good to eat. (Ruth May snitched one and took a bite, then cried hard, not so much from the bad taste as the disappointment, I imagine. There’s so little here for a child in the way of sweets.) Also sometimes we’ll see a witch doctor with aspirins, pink pills, yellow pills, and animal pieces all laid out in neat rows on a black velvet cloth. He listens to your ailments, then tells you whether you need to buy a pill, a good-luck charm, or just go home and forget about it. That’s a market day for you. So far we’ve only purchased things from around the edges; we can’t get up the nerve to walk in there whole hog and do our shopping. But it’s fascinating to look down the rows and see all those long-legged women in their colorful pagnes, bent over almost double to inspect things laid out on the ground. And women pulling their lips up to their noses when they reach out to take your money.You watch all that noise and business, then look past them to the rolling green hills in the distance, with antelopes grazing under flat-topped trees, and it doesn’t fit together. It’s like two strange movies running at the same time.

On the other days when there’s no market, people just congregate in the main square for one thing and another: hairdos, shoe repair, or just gossiping in the shade. There’s a tailor who sets up his foot-pedal sewing machine under the tree and takes their orders, simple as that. Hairdos are another matter, surprisingly complicated, given that the women have no real hair to speak of. They get it divided into rows of long parts in very intricate patterns so their heads end up looking like balls of dark wool made of a hundred pieces, very fancily stitched together. If they’ve got an inch or two to work with, the hairdresser will wrap sprigs of it in black thread so it stands up in little spikes, like Mama Boanda Number Two’s. The hairdo business always draws an audience. The motto seems to be, If you can’t grow your own, supervise somebody else’s. The elderly women and men look on, working their gums, dressed in clothes exactly the same color as their skin, from all the many ground-in years of wash and wear. From a distance you can’t tell they have on anything at all, but just the faintest shadow of snow-white hair as if Jack Frost lightly touched down on their heads. They look as old as the world. Any colorful thing they might hold in their hands, like a plastic bucket, stands out strangely. Their appearance doesn’t sit square with the modern world.

 
Mama Lo is the main hairdresser. She also runs a palm-oil business on the side, getting little boys to squash it out of the little red oil-palm nuts in her homemade press and selling it to the other villagers just a little each day, for frying their greens and what not. Mama Lo doesn’t have any husband, though she’s as industrious as the day is long. With the way they do here, it seems like some fellow would snap her up as a valuable add-on to his family. She isn’t a whole lot to look at, I’ll grant you, with her sad little eyes and wrinkled mouth she keeps shut, morning till night, while she does everybody’s hair. The state of her own hair is a mystery, since she always wraps her head in a dazzling cloth printed with peacock feathers.Those lively feathers don’t really match her personality, but like Tata Boanda in his ladies’-wear sweater, she seems unaware that her outfit is ironic.