The Poisonwood Bible (65 page)

My colleagues in medical school accused me of cynicism but they had no idea. I am a babe in the woods, abandoned at the foot of a tree. On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature’s jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck? That oath never felt safe to me, hanging around my neck with the stethoscope, not for a minute. I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

The loss of a life: unwelcome. Immoral? I don’t know. Depends perhaps on where you are, and what sort of death. Hereabouts, where we sit among such piles of leftover protein we press it into cakes for the pets, who usefully guard our empty chairs; here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight, then yes, for a child to die from hunger is immoral. But this is just one place. I’m afraid I have seen a world.

In the world, the carrying capacity for humans is limited. History holds all things in the balance, including large hopes and short lives. When Albert Schweitzer walked into the jungle, bless his heart, he carried antibacterials and a potent, altogether new conviction that no one should die young. He meant to save every child, thinking Africa would then learn how to have fewer children. But when families have spent a million years making nine in the hope of saving one, they cannot stop making nine. Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past. When the strap lets go, what flies forward will not be family planning, it will be the small, hard head of a child. Overpopulation has deforested three-quarters of Africa, yielding drought, famine, and the probable extinction of all animals most beloved by children and zoos.The competition for resources intensifies, and burgeoning tribes itch to kill each other. For every life saved by vaccination or food relief, one is lost to starvation or war. Poor Africa. No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill. Out of sympathy for the Devil and Africa, I left the healing profession. I became a witch doctor. My church is the Great Rift Valley that lies along the eastern boundary of Congo. I do not go there. I merely study the congregation.

This is the story I believe in: When God was a child, the Rift Valley cradled a caldron of bare necessities, and out of it walked the first humans upright on two legs. With their hands free, they took up tools and beat from the bush their own food and shelter and their own fine business of right and wrong. They made voodoo, the earth’s oldest religion. They engaged a powerful affinity with their habitat and their food chain. They worshiped everything living and everything dead, for voodoo embraces death as its company, not its enemy. It honors the balance between loss and salvation. This is what Nelson tried to explain to me once, while we scraped manure from the chicken coop. I could not understand how muntu could refer to a living person or a dead one with equal precision, but Nelson just shrugged.”All that is being here.”

God is everything, then. God is a virus. Believe that, when you get a cold. God is an ant. Believe that, too, for driver ants are possessed, collectively, of the size and influence of a Biblical plague. They pass through forest and valley in columns a hundred meters across and many miles long, eating their way across Africa. Animal an000000d vegetable they take, mineral they leave behind. This is what we learned in Kilanga: move out of the way and praise God for the housecleaning. In a few days the dark brigade will have passed on through—those ants can’t stop moving. You return to find your houses combed spotless of spoiled crumbs, your bedding free of lice, your woodlots cleansed of night soil, your hen coops rid of chicken mites. If by chance a baby was left behind in a crib, or a leopard in a cage, it would be a skeleton without marrow, clean as a whistle. But for those prepared to move aside for a larger passage, it works. Loss and salvation.

Africa has a thousand ways of cleansing itself. Driver ants, Ebola virus, acquired immune deficiency syndrome: all these are brooms devised by nature to sweep a small clearing very well. Not one of them can cross a river by itself. And none can survive past the death of its host. A parasite of humans that extinguished us altogether, you see, would quickly be laid to rest in human graves. So the race between predator and prey remains exquisitely neck and neck.

As a teenager reading African parasitology books in the medical library, I was boggled by the array of creatures equipped to take root upon a human body. I’m boggled still, but with a finer appreciation for the partnership. Back then I was still a bit appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies. We and our vermin all blossomed together out of the same humid soil in the Great Rift Valley, and so far no one is really winning. Five million years is a long partnership. If you could for a moment rise up out of your own beloved skin and appraise ant, human, and virus as equally resourceful beings, you might admire the accord they have all struck in Africa.

Back in your skin, of course, you’ll shriek for a cure. But remember: air travel, roads, cities, prostitution, the congregation of people for efficient commerce—these are gifts of godspeed to the virus. Gifts of the foreign magi, brought from afar. In the service of saving Africa’s babies and extracting its mineral soul, the West has built a path to its own door and thrown it wide for the plague.

A toad can die of light! Death is the common right of toads and men. Why swagger, then? My colleagues accuse me of cynicism, but I am simply a victim of poetry. I have committed to memory the common rights of toads and men. I could not swagger if I tried. I don’t have the legs for it.

My work is to discover the life histories of viruses, and I seem to be very good at it. I don’t think of the viruses as my work, actually. I think of them as my relations. I don’t have cats or children, I have viruses. I visit them daily in their spacious glass dishes, and like any good mother I cajole, I celebrate when they reproduce, and I take special note when they behave oddly. I think about them when I am not with them. I have made important discoveries about the AIDS and Ebola viruses. As a consequence, I must sometimes appear at public functions where I am lauded as a saviour of the public health. This startles me. I am nothing of the kind. Certainly I’m no mad exterminator bent on killing devil microbes; on the contrary, I admire them. That is the secret of my success.

My life is satisfying and ordinary. I work a great deal, and visit my mother on Sanderling Island once a month. I enjoy my time there, which we mostly pass without speaking. Mother lets me be. We take long walks on the beach, where she watches those namesake shore-birds, the sanderlings, leaving no stone unturned. Sometimes in mid-January when she seems restless we’ll take the ferry and drive up the coast highway, passing through the miles of flat, uninhabited palmetto scrub and the occasional stick shack, where old, dark women sit weaving beautiful sweetgrass baskets. Late in the evening we will sometimes pull into the dirt parking lot of a clapboard praise house and listen to old, dark Gullah hymns rising out the windows. We never go inside. We know our place. Mother keeps her head turned the “whole time toward Africa, with her eye on the ocean, as if she expects it might suddenly drain away.
    

But on most of my visits we go nowhere. We sit on her porch, or I watch while she works her small jungle, snapping off dead leaves, forking rotted manure into her camellias, talking under her breath. Her apartment is the ground floor of one of those century-old brick boxes with earthquake bolts, remarkable pieces of giant hardware that run right through the building from east to west, capped off on the outside with iron washers the size of end tables. I think of them as running through Mother too. It would take something on this order, really, to hold her together.

She inhabits her world, waiting for forgiveness, while her children are planted in or upon the four different nations that have claimed us. “Lock, stock, and barrel,” she calls us. Rachel is clearly the one with locks on every possible route to defenestration. And Leah barrels forward, setting everything straight. So I am the one who quietly takes stock, I suppose. Believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth. Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn’t know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.

She still suffers from the effects of several diseases she contracted in the Congo, including schistosomiasis, Guinea worms, and probably tuberculosis. When she sticks out her tongue and allows me to treat her small maladies, I can see that every one of her organs has been compromised in some way. But as the years pass and she bends over more and more, she seems to survive in her narrowing space. She never married again. If anyone asks, she says, “Nathan Price was all the marriage I needed.” I can see this is true. Her body was locked up tight, years ago, by the boundaries of her costly liberty.

I have not married either, for different reasons. The famous upstart neurologist wanted to be my lover, it turned out, and actually won me to his bed for a time. But slowly it dawned upon my love-drunk skull: he had only welcomed me there after devising his program to make me whole! He was the first of several men to suffer the ice storms of Adah, I’m afraid.
       

This is my test: I imagine them back there in the moonlight with the ground all around us boiling with ants. Now, which one, the crooked walker, or the darling perfection? I know how they would choose. Any man who admires my body now is a traitor to the previous Adah. So there you are.

Sometimes I play chess with one of my colleagues, an anchorite like myself, who suffers from post-polio syndrome. We can pass whole evenings without need for any sentence longer than “Checkmate.” Sometimes we go out to a restaurant in the Atlanta Underground, or see a film at a theater that accommodates his wheelchair. But the racket always overwhelms us. Eros is not so much an eyesore, it turns out, as just too much noise. Afterward we always have to drive out of town toward Sandy Springs or the Chattahoochee, anywhere that is flat and blank and we can park the car in a red dirt road between peanut fields and let moonlight and silence reclaim us. Then I go home by myself and write poems at my kitchen table, like William Carlos Williams. I write about lost sisters and the Great Rift Valley and my barefoot mother glaring at the ocean. All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.

I still love to read, of course. I read differently now that I am in my right mind, but I return to old friends. No Snickidy Lime: “This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me—” What more satisfying lines for a brooding adolescent? But I only saw half, and ignored the other side of the poem: “The simple News that Nature told—With tender Majesty.”At Mother’s house I recently found my dusty Complete Emily Dickinson with its margins littered shockingly by my old palindromes: Evil deed live! croaked that other Adah, and I wonder, Which evil was it, exactly?

Such childhood energy I spent on feeling betrayed. By the world in general, Leah in particular. Betrayal bent me in one direction while guilt bent her the other way. We constructed our lives around a misunderstanding, and if ever I tried to pull it out and fix it now I would fall down flat. Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.They are what we call civilization.

Lately I’ve started collecting old books that are famous for their misprints. There’s a world of irony in it. Bibles, in particular. I’ve never actually seen any of these in original editions, but back in the days when print was scarce, only one printing of the Bible was widespread at any given time, and people knew it by heart. Its mistakes became celebrated. In 1823 when the Old Testament appeared with the verse “And Rebekah arose with her camels”—instead of damsels—it was known as the Camel’s Bible. In 1804, the Lions Bible had sons coming forth from lions instead of loins, and in the Murderers’ Bible of 1801, the complainers in Jude 16 did not murmur, they murdered. In the Standing Fishes Bible, the fishermen must have looked on in such surprise when “the fish stood on the shore all the way from Engedi to Eneglaim.” There are dozens of these: the Treacle Bible, the Bear Bible, the Bug Bible, the Vinegar Bible. In the Sin-On Bible, John 5:14 exhorted the believers not to “sin no more,” but to “sin on more!” Evol’s dog! Dog ho!

I can’t resist these precious Gospels. They lead me to wonder what Bible my father wrote in Africa. We came in stamped with such errors we can never know which ones made a lasting impression. I wonder if they still think of him standing tall before his congregation shouting,”Tata Jesus is bangala!”

I do. I think of him exactly that way. We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions. He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

THE EYES IN THE TREES

THE GLIDE OF BELLY ON BRANCH. The mouth thrown open wide, sky blue. I am all that is here. The eyes in the trees never blink. You plead with me your daughter sister sister for release, but I am no little beast and have no reason to judge. No teeth and no reason. If you feel a gnawing at your bones, that is only yourself, hungry.

I am muntu Africa, muntu one child and a million all lost on the same day. I am your bad child now gone good, for when children die they were only good. That is our gain in the great long run, and your loss. A mother cries for what she remembers, but she remembers the precious infant harvested already by time, and death is not to blame. She sees innocence, the untouched kingdom the great leader slain the great empty hole shaped like the child growing large and becoming grand. But this is not what we are. The child might have grown to be wicked or goodness itself but almost surely ordinary. Would have made mistakes caused you pain eaten the world in one bite. But you send us to the kingdom of somewhere else, where we move untouched through the forest and no trees fall to the ax and everything is as it could never be.

Yes, you are all accomplices to the fall, and yes, we are gone forever. Gone to a ruin so strange it must be called by another name. Call it muntu: all that is here.

Mother, be still, listen. I can see you leading your children to the water, and you call it a story of ruin. Here is what I see: First, the forest. Trees like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Vines strangling their kin in the wrestle for sunlight. The glide of snake belly on branch. A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest’s conscience, but remember the forest eats itself and lives forever.

Away down below single file on the path comes a woman with four girls, the pale doomed blossoms. The mother leads them on, blue-eyed, waving a hand in front of her to part the curtain of spiders’ webs. She appears to be conducting a symphony. Behind her back the smallest child pauses to break off the tip of every branch she can reach. She likes the stinging green scent released by the broken leaves. As she reaches to snatch a leaf she spies a plump, orange-bodied spider that has been knocked to the ground.The spider is on its back and fatly vulnerable, struggling to find its pointed feet and scurry back into the air. The child delicately reaches out her toe and squashes the spider. Its dark blood squirts sideways, alarmingly. The child runs to catch up.

At the river they eat their picnic lunch, then move downstream to shriek in the cool water. The noise they make frightens away a young okapi. He had just lately begun to inhabit this territory on the edge of the village. If the children had not come today, the okapi would have chosen this as his place. He would have remained until the second month of the dry season, and then a hunter would have killed him. But instead he is startled today by the picnic, and his cautious instincts drive him deeper into the jungle, where he finds a mate and lives through the year. All because. If the mother and her children had not come down the path on this day, the pinched tree branches would have grown larger and the fat-bodied spider would have lived. Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could.

Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though.You could say the view is larger.

On another day the same woman leads her children through a market. Now she has white hair and only three daughters. None of them walks with a limp.They do not stay in line, as they did before. One of the daughters often strays away to handle bolts of fabric and talk with the merchants in their own language. One of the daughters touches nothing, and clutches her money to her breast. And

one daughter keeps her hand on the mother’s arm, guiding her away from dusty craters in the pavement. The mother is bent and betrays the pain in her limbs. They are all surprised to be here, surprised at themselves and each other. These four have not been together in one place since the death of the other. They have come here to say good-bye to Ruth May or so they claim. They wish to find her grave. But in truth they are saying goodbye to their mother. They love her inordinately.

The market around them is crowded with sellers and buyers. Women from the villages have walked for days to narrow their eyes at this city market. They stack their oranges into careful pyramids, then squat on thin legs, resting their angular wrists between their knees. And the city women, who wrap their skirts only a little differently, come to bargain on feeding their families. Hoping to lower the price they scatter insults over their sisters’ wares, like irritating handfuls of harmless gravel. What horrible oranges, I paid half as much for better last week. The orange vendor deflects this nonsense with a yawn. She knows that, in the end, every need finds purchase.

The mother and daughters move like oil through the clear dark fluid of this crowd, mingling and then coming back to itself. Foreign visitors are rare here but not unknown. Narrowed eyes follow them, summing possibilities. Little boys chase with hands extended. One daughter opens her purse and finds coins, another daughter clutches her purse more tightly. Older boys with colorful stacks of T-shirts collect and follow in a swarm like bottleflies. They leap in front of each other to attract attention to their goods, but the visitors ignore them, stooping instead to examine ordinary wood carvings and beaded jewelry. The boys are baffled and shove each other more noisily.

Drowning out all other noise is the music that blares from many sidewalk shops of the cassette vendors. This music is so familiar it does not seem foreign. The little boys, the visitors, the village women all move their heads to the tightly strung voices of three different singers, popular ones from America, whose wrecked ancestors, captive and weeping, were clamped in iron bracelets in the

hold of a ship at a seaport very close by. Their music has made a remarkable, circular trip. That fact is lost on everyone present. This ruin must be called by another name. What would have been is this

instead.

The woman and her daughters are looking for something they will not find. Their plan was to find a way back to Kilanga and finally to the sister’s grave. It is the mother’s special wish to put a grave marker there. But they are stalled. It’s impossible to cross the border. In the six months since they began to plan their trip, the Congo has been swept by “war. A terrible war that everyone believes will soon have been worth the price. A good boil, they say here, a good boil purifies the rotten meat. After thirty-five years the man Mobutu has run away in the night. Thirty-five years of sleep like death, and now the murdered land draws a breath, moves its fingers, takes up life through its rivers and forests.The eyes in the trees are watching.The animals open their mouths and utter joyful, astonishing words. The enslaved parrot Methuselah, whose flesh has been devoured now by many generations of predators, is forcing his declaration of independence through the mouths of leopards and civet cats.

On this same day at this hour of early morning the man Mobutu lies in bed in his hiding place.The shades are drawn. His breath is so shallow the sheet drawn across his chest does not rise or fall: no sign of life. The cancer has softened his bones.The flesh of his hands is so deeply sunken the bones of his fingers are perfectly revealed. They have assumed the shape of everything he stole. All he was told to do, and more, he has done. Now in his darkened room, Mobutu s right hand falls.This hand, which has stolen more than any other hand in the history of the world, hangs limp over the side of the bed. The heavy gold rings slide forward to the knuckles, hesitate, then fall off one at a time.They strike the floor with five separate tones: a miraculous, brief song in an ancient pentatonic scale. A woman in white hurries to the door, believing against all reason that she has just heard the ailing President playing a song on the fealimfea.When she sees him, she covers her mouth with her hand.

Outside, the animals sigh.
              

Soon the news will reach every city and lodge like a breath or a bullet in all the different breasts. The flesh of General Eisenhower consumed by generations of predators will speak aloud. The flesh of Lumumba, also consumed, will speak aloud. For a time the howl will drown out everything. But right now the world is caught in that small blank space in which no one has yet heard the news. Lives proceed for one last moment unchanged. In the marketplace they buy and sell and dance.

The mother and her daughters are stopped short by the sight of a woman they seem to recognize. It is not the woman herself they know, but her style of dress and something else. Her benevolence. They cross the street to where she sits on the sidewalk with her back to a cool north wall. Spread out around her on a bright cloth are hundreds of tiny animals carved from wood: elephants, leopards, giraffes. An okapi.A host of tiny animals in a forest of invisible trees. The mother and daughters stare, overtaken by beauty.

The woman is about the age of the daughters, but twice as large. Her yellow pagne is double-wrapped and her ornate bodice cut low on her large bosom. Her head is bound in sky blue. She opens her mouth, smiles broadly. Achetez un cadeau pour votre fils, she orders them sweetly. There is not a trace of pleading in her voice. She cups her hand as if it were full of water or grain as she points to the small, perfect giraffes and elephants. Having used up her single French phrase, she speaks Kikongo unabashedly, as though there were no other language on earth. This city is far from the region where that language is spoken, but when one of the daughters answers her in Kikongo, she does not seem surprised. They chat about their children. Too old for toys, all of them, a bit. Grandchildren, then, the woman insists, and so after more deliberation they pick out three ebony elephants for the children of the children. It is the great-grandmother, Orleanna, who buys the elephants. She studies her handful of unfamiliar coins, then holds all of them out to the vendor. The woman deftly plucks out the few she needs, and then presses into Orleanna’s hand a gift: the tiny wooden okapi, perfectly carved. Pour vous, madamc, she says. Un cadeau.

Orleanna pockets her small miracle, as she has done for the whole of her life. The others stand half-turned but unwilling to go. They wish the woman good luck and ask if she comes from the Congo. Of course, she says, A bu, and to come here with her carvings to sell she must walk all the way, more than two hundred kilometers. Sometimes if she is lucky she can buy a ride on a truck. But lately without the black market not so many commercants cross the border and it will be difficult. It may take her a month to get back to her family in Bulungu.

Bulungu!

Ee, mono imwesi Bulungu.

On the Kwilu River?

Ee——of course.

Have you heard any news lately from Kilanga?

The woman frowns pleasantly, unable to recall any such place.

They insist: But surely. It is Leah who does the talking now, in Kikongo, and she explains again. Maybe the name was changed during the authenticate, though it’s hard to imagine why. The next village down the river, only two days’ walk on the road that goes through there. The village of Kilanga! Years ago, there was an American mission there.

But no, the woman says. There is no such village. The road doesn’t go past Bulungu. There is only a very thick jungle there, where the men go to make charcoal. She is quite sure. There has never been any village on the road past Bulungu.

Having said all that needs to be said, the woman closes her eyes to rest. The others understand they must walk away.Walk away from this woman and the force of her will, but remember her as they move on toward other places. They will recall how she held out her hand as if it were already full. Sitting on the ground with her cloth spread out, she was a shopkeeper a mother a lover a wilderness to herself. Much more than a shopkeeper, then. But nothing less.

Ahead of them, a small boy hunched with a radio to his ear is dancing down the street. He is the size of Ruth May when last seen alive. Orleanna watches the backs of his knees bending in the way of little children, and she begins once more—how many times must a mother do this?—begins to work out how old I would be now.

But this time will be the last. This time, before your mind can calculate the answer it will wander away down the street with the child, dancing to the African music that has gone away and come home changed. The wooden animal in your pocket will soothe your fingers, which are simply looking for something to touch. Mother, you can still hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live I forgive you, Mother. I shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. The teeth at your bones are your own, the hunger is yours, forgiveness is yours. The sins of the fathers belong to you and to the forest and even to the ones in iron bracelets, and here you stand, remembering their songs. Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.