The Poisonwood Bible (39 page)

That evening was the night before the hunt, with Leah still keeping her distance. But her pal Anatole found an evil sign outside his hut. So we were told by Nelson. Mother had sent him over to the school to take Leah some boiled eggs for dinner, and he came running back to tell us Anatole was over there looking like he’d seen a ghost. Nelson wouldn’t say what the evil sign was, just that it was a dreaded kibaazu sign of a bad curse put on Anatole. We kind of thought he might have made the whole thing up. Nelson could be dramatic.

Well, no, sir. Next morning bright and early, Anatole found a green mamba snake curled up by his cot, and it was just by the grace of God he didn’t get bit on the leg and die on the spot. Good luck, or a miracle, one. They said he usually always gets out of bed before daybreak and goes out for his constitutional and would have stepped right on it, but that morning for some reason he woke up too early and decided to light his lamp and read in bed awhile before getting up, and that’s when he saw it. He thought someone had thrown a rope inside his house for another evil sign, but then it moved! No more signs; this was the true evil thing! The story went buzzing around the village quicker even than if we’d had telephones. People were running around because it was the big day and they had to get ready, but this gave them something extra to think about, and boy oh boy, they did. I don’t care if they were followers of God almighty or the things that bump you in the night, they were praying to it now, believe you me. Thanking their lucky stars that what happened to Anatole hadn’t happened to them.

Adah

BETO NKITUTASALA means: What are we doing? Doing, we are what? Alas atuti knot eb. Alas. The night before the hunt there was no sleep at all. Eye on sleep peels no eye! We thought we were looking, but could not see what was before us. Leopards walked upright on the paths and snakes moved quietly from their holes. The S on the floor -was not for sleep.

People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through all those conditions unchanged. The Bantu speak of “self” as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die. The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. It is a ride on the power of nommo, the force of a name to call oneself. Nommo rains from a cloud, rises in the vapor from a human mouth: a song, a scream, a prayer. A drum gives nommo in Congo, where drums have language. A dance gives nommo where bodies are not separate from the will that inhabits them. In that other long-ago place, America, I was a failed combination of too-weak body and overstrong will. But in Congo I am those things perfectly united: Adah.

The night before the hunt, while no one slept, every muntu in Kilanga danced and sang: drums, lips, bodies. In song they named the animals that would become our feast and salvation in the morning. And they named the things they feared: Snake. Hunger. Leopards that walk upright on the paths like men. These are the nommo, they chanted, these bodies living and dancing and joining together with slick, black other bodies, all beating the thing with feathers: beating out the dear, dear hope, a chance to go on living. But muntu did not care if the bodies lived or died on the morrow. Muntu peered out through the eyeholes, watching closely to see what would happen next.

Before first light we all came together at the edge of the village, not down by the river, where Our Father would have gathered us, but away from there, on the side toward the hill, where our salvation lay. We made our march into the field of elephant grass, tramped upon the big hill rising. Grass as tall as living men, and taller, but dry and white as a dead woman’s hair. With sticks the men laid the tall grass down. They beat it in unison as if beating down grass were a dance, grunting softly in a long, low rhythm that ran back to us from the head of the file. Men with bows and arrows, men with spears, even a few with guns were up ahead of us. Their chant was the only sound in the cool morning haze. Children and women followed, carrying the largest baskets their arms were able to circle. Mine hung on a strap over my shoulder because my arms do not circle well. Behind us came the oldest women, carrying smoldering torches, greenheart poles wrapped in palm-oil-soaked rags. High up they held their torches, bruising the air overhead with the smoke of our procession. The sun hung low on the river, seeming reluctant to enter this strange day. Then it rose redly into the purpled sky, resembling a black eye.

At a signal given by Tata Ndu our single file divided and curved outward to either side of the hill. A solemn wishbone of eager, hungry people—that is how we might have appeared to the muntu dead and unborn who watched from above. In half an hour the fronts of the two lines met, and we hungry wishbone people of Kilanga completed our circle around the hill. A shout fluttered up. The fire starters laid down their torches.Younger women opened their pagnes and ran forward, fanning the flames like moths dancing before a candle.

Our circle was so large the shouts we heard from the other side seemed to come from another country. Soon all sound was swallowed by the fire. It did not roar but grumbled, cracked, shushed, sucking the air from our throats and all speech with it. The flame rose and licked the grass and we all moved forward, chasing the line of brightness ahead of us. Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass, leaving nothing of life behind. Nothing but hot, black, bare ground and delicate white filaments of ash, which stirred and crumbled under the trample of bare feet. Now the men rushed ahead with bows cocked, impatient for the circle to shrink toward its center. Smaller and smaller the circle ungrew, with all the former life of a broad grassy plain trapped inside. The animals all caught up in this dance together, mice and men. Men who pushed and pranced, appearing to us as dark stick puppets before the wall of fire. The old people and children came along slowly behind. We were like odd ruined flagpoles, bent double, with our bright clothes flapping. Slow scavengers. We fanned out across the hissing black field, picking up charred insects. Most common were the crisp nguka caterpillars, favorite snack of Anatole’s schoolboys, which resembled small twigs and were impossible to see until I learned to sense their particular gray curve. We picked them up by the basketful until they filled my mind’s eye so completely I knew I would see them in my sleep. Easier to find were the dikonko, edible locusts and crickets, whose plump abdomens were shrunk translucent like balloons half-filled with water. Caterpillars one after another I laid on my tongue, their char crisp bristle taste a sweet momentary salve to a body aching for protein. Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

The fire moved faster than we did, we the young and elderly shepherdesses of dead insects. Sometimes I stood up straight to let the blood run from my head to the numb slabs of muscle at the backs of my thighs. Mother held on tight to the hand of Ruth May, her chosen child, but also stayed near me. Since the terrible night of the ants, Mother had been creeping her remorse in flat-footed circles around me without ever speaking of it, wearing her guilt like the swollen breasts of a nursing mother. So far I had refused to suckle and give her relief, but I kept close by. I had no choice, since she and Ruth May and I were thrown together by caste, set apart from Leah the Huntress. By choice, we also stayed far from Rachel and Father. Their noisy presences, of two different kinds, embarrassed us in this field of earnest, quiet work. Sometimes I set a hand above my eyes and looked for Leah, but did not see her. Instead I watched Ruth May crunch thoughtfully on a caterpillar. Soiled and subdued, she looked like a small malnourished relative of my previous sister. The faraway look of her eyes must have been the muntu of Ruth May, chained to this briefly belligerent child through forelife, life, and afterlife, peering out through her sockets.

The fire ran ahead at times, and sometimes flagged, as if growing tired like the rest of us. The heat was unspeakable. I imagined the taste of water.

As the ring burned smaller we suddenly caught sight of its other side, the red-orange tongues and black ash closing in. The looming shapes of animals bunched up inside: antelopes, bushbucks, broad-headed warthogs with warthog children running behind them. A troop of baboons ran with arched tails flying as they zigzagged, not yet understanding their entrapment. Thousands of insects beat the air to a pulpy soup of animal panic. Birds hit the wall of fire and lit like bottle rockets. When it seemed there was no more air, no more hope, the animals began to run out through the fire into the open, where spears and arrows waited. The antelopes did not leap gracefully as I imagined they would; they wheeled like spooked horses around the inside of the circle, then suddenly veered out as if by accident or blindness. Seeing their companions shot in the neck with arrows, they heeled in panic, sometimes turning back to the flames but mostly running straight on, straight toward people and death. A small spotted antelope fell down very near me and presented me with the strange, singular gift of its death. I watched its heaving sides slowly come to rest, as if it had finally caught its breath. Dark blood leaked from its delicate black mouth onto the charred ground.

For every animal struck down, there rose an equal and opposite cry of human jubilation. Our hungry wishbone cracked and ran slick with marrow. Women knelt with their knives to skin the meat, even before the hooves stopped beating the ground in panic. Of the large animals who came through the fire—bushbuck, warthog, antelope— few escaped. Others would not come out and so they burned: small flame-feathered birds, the churning insects, and a few female baboons who had managed against all odds to carry their pregnancies through the drought. With their bellies underslung with precious clinging babies, they loped behind the heavy-maned males, who would try to save themselves, but on reaching the curtain of flame where the others passed through, they drew up short. Crouched low. Understanding no choice but to burn with their children.

The curtain of heat divided the will to survive from survival itself. I could have fallen trembling on the ground but stood and watched instead, watched Kilanga’s children shout and dance each time they found the scorched, angular bodies of a mother baboon and baby seared together. On account of these deaths, Kilanga’s gleeful children would live through another season. The bantu who watched from above would have seen a black festival of life and death indistinguishable one from the other against the black-scorched ground.

As that day would turn out, my sister Rachel became (briefly) a vegetarian. My sisters Ruth May and Leah: forager and hunter. I became something else. On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals.The lion kills the baboon; the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love. The hungry antelope’s shadow passes over the startled grass. And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Leah

I KILLED MY FIRST GAME, a beautiful tawny beast with curved horns j and a black diagonal stripe across his flank: a young male impala. He was completely bewildered by the fire, too young to have any good strategy for danger, but old enough to need to put on a show. He ran pell-mell, snorting like a playground bully till he was one of the last of his kind left inside the circle. I knew he’d soon come through.The way his hooves tore at the ground was so desperate, and his family already gone. I crouched near Nelson, watching. Nelson had taken down two bushbucks, one after the other, and signaled to me that he was going to claim his arrows. The impala he was leaving to me. I followed it with my eye as Nelson had taught me to do, looking for the path of its hopes. Suddenly I saw exactly where it would break through the fire. He would come straight toward me and veer to my right, where his mother had gone. Even a playground bully will want his mother in the bitter end. I held my breath to stop my arms from trembling. I had the hunger and thirst of a famine all to myself, smoke in my burning eyes, and no strength left. I prayed to Jesus to help me, then to any other god who would listen. Help me keep my left arm straight and my right pulled back and my arrow tight against the gutstring ready to sing and fly. One, he came and dodged... two, he came closer... three, he broke his gait, paused... four!

He leaped sideways away from me, all four legs drawn together in midair for half a second, and then he ran on. Only when I saw the spray of brown blood did I understand I’d hit him. My own heart plunged and burst against my ears. I have killed an animal larger than myself!

 I screamed as if struck by an arrow myself. Before I realized my legs had moved me I was chasing the impala down the path of his hopes—the forest he could see at the end of the long, charred valley, where he would find his mother and safety. But he crumpled, slowed and fell down. I stood over him, breathing fast. It took me a minute to understand what I saw: two arrows in his flank. Neither one of them fletched red, as my arrows were. And Tata Ndu’s oldest son Gbenye shouting at me to get away, go on away, “A, baki!” Meaning that I was a thief.

But then Nelson was beside me, waving my arrow. “This arrow killed that impala” he shouted at Gbenye. “It passed through the neck. Look at yours.Two little pricks in his flank. He never even felt them before he died.”

Gbenye’s lip curled. “How would a woman’s arrow kill a yearling impala?”