The Witch Doctor's Wife (11 page)

A
manda smiled to herself. The tea with Senhora Nunez had gone remarkably well. The woman was obviously in need of friends, and although she was by no means a perfect fit, it was nice to know she was there. Also, the soul-saving challenge the Portuguese woman had used was as good an excuse as any to visit the club.

In fact, the woman had a point. Just because the club served alcohol was no reason to stay away. How could she share her faith with the European population if she had virtually no contact with them? Although saving souls was not her official assignment in Belle Vue, it had been Amanda’s personal reason for going to the Congo in the first place.

Amanda’s soul had almost been lost for eternity, the night of her high-school prom. At that point in her life, although she was forced to attend both church and Sunday School on a regular basis, the teenager had not yet given her heart to Jesus. In the wee hours of the morning she snuck out of bed and rendezvoused, first with some girlfriends, and then some male friends. Soon there were three cars full of teenagers headed for Gaffney, South Carolina, where, it was rumored, a bar existed that served alcohol to minors. Plus, it had a dynamite rhythm-and-blues band.

The stretch of State Route 5 between York and Gaffney has more ups and downs than the ridges on a dragon’s back, and as many twisting turns as a dragon’s tail. A road like that is best experienced by driving fearlessly, turning the challenges into adrenaline-filled moments. And what better way to do that than to play “automobile leapfrog,” a game in which drivers constantly try to zoom around each other?

Because of the late hour and the fact that the road wound through forest for most of its length, no one expected a car of “civilians” to be traveling the other way. But that is exactly what Mr. and Mrs. Homer Johnson were doing. Homer and Loretta had married late in life, and when they finally tied the knot, they both decided to quit their jobs and take a motor trip across the country. Rather than follow a map, they thought it would be more fun to follow the back roads, choosing their destinations on a whim. They’d begun the trip in their home state of Vermont, driving only during the day to avoid hitting deer. Why they decided to drive after dark this one fateful night will probably never be known. But it is doubtful that they even saw the car full of teenagers long enough for the image to register, because there was no sign that Homer, who was driving, had tried to avoid the crash.

Homer was impaled on the steering column, dying instantly. Loretta was not so lucky. She sailed through the windshield, land
ing in the piney woods several yards from the car, where she bled to death from internal injuries. All six of the teenagers in that car that smashed head-on into the Johnsons’ car were killed. The car immediately behind them ran off the road to avoid a pileup and hit a tree, killing three of the occupants. Trapped inside with the bodies, only Amanda survived. The third car slowed only enough to turn around before heading back home at the speed of light.

The accident was not discovered until approximately six in the morning, when a logging truck appeared on the scene. Amanda was unconscious when she was discovered, more from shock than from bodily injury; apart from a broken arm and some facial contusions, she was remarkably uninjured.

Physically, she recovered quickly, but emotional recovery took the rest of the summer. In September a traveling evangelist came to town, setting up a large white tent on the dusty county fairgrounds. Amanda attended three nights in a row and on the third night heeded the altar call. To the soft strains of “Just as I Am,” she turned her life over to the Lord. The fourth night the preacher talked about venturing to the far corners of the earth to spread the Gospel, and that’s when Amanda first felt that the Holy Spirit was directing her to go to Africa.

Now here she was, stuck managing a retreat for exhausted missionaries and dealing with an arrogant housekeeper, instead of being in the trenches winning souls for Christ. Then out of the blue this Catholic woman calls upon her and practically forces her into a den of iniquity, where souls were ripe for the plucking. If that wasn’t the Holy Spirit moving in her life, well—well, then nothing. It was indeed just that. Amanda could feel it in her bones.

“Mamu Ugly Eyes.”

Amanda jumped. “Yes?”

“I did not mean to scare you.”

“I am fine.”

“Certainly.
Mamu
, may I have your permission to return to my village?”

“Now? But there still many chores to be done.”

“Forgive me,
mamu
, but do you not still employ the angry one?”

“Who? Oh yes, but that is not your concern.” She lowered her voice. “The truth is you were hired to replace him. How can you replace him if you don’t take over his duties?”

“I will,
mamu
, I promise. It is just this one night that I must leave early.”

“And why is that?”

“Because my sister wife is having a baby and I must catch the child as it is born.”

“Isn’t there a midwife?”

“So there is. But the midwife has a terrible temper, even worse than that of Repugnant Navel. She does not—”

“Protruding.”

“
Eyo, mamu
. The baby protrudes, even as we speak.”

“No, I mean that your coworker’s name is
Protruding
Navel, not Repugnant Navel.”

“Must we quibble over details, mamu, while my sister wife screams?”

“Screams?”

After closing her eyes and clenching her fists, Cripple let loose with a scream that would surely have brought the cops running in South Carolina. “Like that,
mamu
. Unfortunately the midwife does not tolerate such noise. She would beat my sister wife at the slightest sound, as already she dislikes my family. So you see, there is no plan to use her services.”

Surely Amanda had heard wrong. “
Beat
her? You mean, the midwife would hit her?”

“Oh yes.” Cripple’s eyes shone as she mimicked striking the nearest chair. “Aiyee! Aiyee!”

“But that’s terrible!”

“Indeed it is,
mamu
. Would you care to see me demonstrate the beating again?”

“No, thank you. Tell me, Cripple, has your sister wife gone into labor already? And if so, who’s attending her now?”

“
Mamu
, I do not know how it is in your country, but here the women choose the hour when they give birth. They say, ‘I will give birth at such and such a time,’ and then they do it. My sister wife has chosen this hour.”

Amanda had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. The clever little woman was trying to pull the wool over her eyes.

“Go,” she said. “But tell her that next time she needs to check with me first.”

“Yes,
mamu
.”

Instead of returning to the village, Cripple crossed the bridge that led to the European sector of Belle Vue. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d made the trip alone since becoming an adult, and all were to deliver some urgent message to Husband at his place of work. The falls terrified her and the sight of so many white women and children, with skins the color of water lily petals, repulsed her.

She was not the only African that day, by any means, walking along the main arteries of the town, although most of them were men. Still, there were nannies pushing devices that held babies—a bizarre way to transport an infant when you thought about it—and vendors carrying bunches of bananas on their heads, or enamel basins filled with delectable things to eat, like palm nuts, dried caterpillars, salted fish, and chili peppers. The banana sellers were hoping to unload their wares on Belgian housewives, while the rest had in mind the servants and their families who lived in small brick houses behind the mansions.

This afternoon Cripple headed in the opposite direction, away from the post office. She walked resolutely along the edge of Boulevard des Allies, which had been named after the recent tribal war in Europe. As long as she kept out of the way of bicycles and the very occasional automobile, she was essentially invisible. Once a snarling dog lunged at her, but a thick chain prevented it from getting close enough to do harm. Had it gotten any closer Cripple would have been forced to whack it with her walking stick, just as she had mimed beating the
mamu
’s chair.

As Cripple approached the airport the large mango trees that lined the dirt boulevard gave way to spindly acacias, and finally just elephant grass. The road ended in front of a cement-block building that sheltered the ticket agent and his passengers on days that planes were scheduled. At the moment there was no sign of life except for a herd of black pigs, sprawled on the runway like so many breathing boulders.

Cripple had heard about a footpath that skirted the landing strip, and much to her relief she found it easily. At this hour of the day, when the sun was low in the sky but still in full view, the only animals that one needed to watch for were the omnipresent snakes. Cripple, believing she could lesson the threat by making noise, thrashed at the elephant grass that bordered the left side of the path. This made the walking slow, but kept her anxiety level at a reasonable level.

Finally, there it was, what remained of it. Cripple had been hoping to see enough of the airplane to enable her to imagine what it must be like to be inside one. She had read a little about these marvelous machines, and seen them fly low over the village, but had never had the privilege of talking to someone who had actually been in one. Therefore she couldn’t quite picture how it was the people managed to fit inside. And how did they position themselves once they got in? Did they lie on their stomachs—perhaps one above the other—or did they squat on their haunches?

How very disappointing to find nothing but small pieces of twisted metal and scattered cinders. Husband had described it as thus, but Cripple had needed to take it in with her own eyes. Perhaps if she’d been able to get to the wreckage the day it happened, there might have been more to see. Anything that could be put to use had surely been carried off: large metal scraps for roofing; smaller scraps for blades, knife blades, even false teeth; rubber for sandals and slingshot strings.

Cripple had already concluded that the trip had been a waste of time—and much-needed energy—when she found a piece of molten glass that looked very much like the diamond Husband had hidden in the banana grove. For surely the oddly-shaped stone was a diamond; she’d lived in a diamond-mining village long enough to know that the gems did not pop out of the earth faceted and polished.

Just why it was that Husband had chosen to lie to her with his silence, she did not know. But she would soon enough. After a while, like children, men invariably felt the need to confess. In the meantime, it would serve him right if he thought he’d made a mistake, or better yet, realized someone was onto him.

Ah, there was another suitable glass “diamond.” And another. And yet another. Cripple gathered five in all, and tucked them for safekeeping under her turban, where they lodged securely in her densely coiled hair. They were not perfect, by any means, but they would be adequate for the job. She could not help but smile. The spirits had played a cruel joke on her parents, giving them a daughter with limbs twisted like liana vines. But these same spirits had been so occupied with distorting her body that they’d left a perfectly sound mind alone.

It did not even the score, as far as Cripple was concerned, but it did give her a reason to live. She would live well. As would Husband. That was not too much to ask, although it would mean a lifetime of outsmarting the spirits. And therein lay a conundrum;
a logical mind could not believe in unseen things like spirits—and this is why Cripple could not accept the Christian god either—but on a visceral level, she knew that to ignore their power was to court disaster.

In the far distance, where the elephant grass met the setting sun, a hyena laughed. Cripple gripped her walking stick tighter.

T
he OP, by rights, should be living in Belle Vue’s largest house, but that damn Portuguese, Nunez, had finagled his way into it, and until his lease was up, there was nothing the OP could do. But, if one kept things in perspective, what the OP did have wasn’t half bad. No, it was a lot better than that. He’d lived in a two-bedroom apartment back in Brussels. Here he had four bedrooms that were twice as large as those.

There was a lot to be said for colonial living—well, as long as you were white, and preferably Belgian. Labor was cheap and so were house servants. A comparable villa in the South of France would cost fifty times as much, and as for the servants—well, if
they were French servants, forget it. The French had attitudes. They looked upon the French-speaking Walloons, not as cousins, but as imposters. No doubt the Dutch felt the same way about the Flemings.

“Screw the French,” the OP said aloud, and tossed back what remained of his gin and tonic. “Screw the Dutch too.”

Heilewid, who’d been sitting back in her chair, as quiet as a corpse, stirred.

“What did you say?”

“I said we should be going in soon. It’s getting chilly.”

“Claudia says it might actually frost tonight. Do you think that’s possible?”

The OP nearly dropped his glass. His wife hadn’t said that many words since the day she’d lost her twin. Even more astounding was the fact that these words were arranged into an intelligible sentence.

“Uh—frost? I don’t think so. Not at this latitude. Although we are up a thousand meters. I heard on the shortwave this morning that Elizabethville had a frost—their first in recorded history.”

“It makes me think of Belgium. This cool weather, I mean.”

The OP stared at his wife, whose face was half in silhouette. They’d taken their dinner of roast guinea hen, buttered new potatoes, and haricots verts on the verandah, as they usually did unless there was wind-driven rain. They’d eaten in silence, the only conversation between him and the table boy, who’d asked if he could have the bones when they were through with their meal. The lad had concocted some story about using the bones as bait to catch a particular species of forest rat that was said to be delectable, but the OP knew better.

“I understand there is another whole guinea back in the kitchen,” he’d said.

“
Oui, monsieur
.”

“Take it instead. Maybe your forest rat prefers meat.”

“
Merci, monsieur, merci
.”

The OP had dismissed the boy before he’d gotten maudlin. The OP had meant to be kind, not softhearted. There was a difference.

“I can’t believe you’re talking about the weather,” he said now to his wife. “What happened? Did I miss anything?”

“Probably not. I haven’t changed my mind, if that’s what you’re thinking. I still hate it here. I still hate you. But for a minute, when you spoke to the table boy, I caught a glimpse of the man I married. I was speaking to him.”

“Am I so terrible now?”

“You’re obsessed with your work.”

“Can you blame me? I feel like I’ve been living in an empty house. Besides, after the—uh, the accident, I offered to send you back to Belgium.”

“That would have been the end of your career. You know that. The OP has to have a wife, who has to entertain, keep the other wives busy—you know how it goes. If you’ve forgotten, just give yourself the same speech you gave my father when you asked for my hand in marriage.”

“I was beyond nervous then. I had to come up with reasons why I would want to drag his daughter off to the colony. And anyway, what entertaining have you done since the fire?”

The OP wished he could have another gin and tonic without ringing for a servant. But the liquor was inside, and if he left the verandah now, he might return to find that it had been all a dream. Gin and tonics were as British as steak and kidney pie, but they were a habit he’d picked up while on safari to Kenya during his first year in Africa.

“Heilewid,” he said softly, “what happened that day was not my fault, any more than it was yours. So why do you hate me?”

“That’s just the thing; I don’t hate you any more than I hate myself. Neither of us should have allowed Geete to leave the group.”

He couldn’t stand to hear her say that, although he knew it was true. She’d been killing herself with sun, booze, and cigarettes just as surely as if she’d held a gun to her sunburned head and pulled the trigger.

“You could go back now. Everyone expected you to do so after the funeral. The brass would have understood. I’m sure they still will.”

“Geete is dead. What do I have back in Belgium to go home to? A father whose chief pleasure in life is controlling everyone around him? Girlfriends who cry when they chip their fingernails? Eight months of rain and cold? No, thank you. I plan to stay here, where I can sit out on the patio on the coldest night of the year and speculate about the likelihood of a frost—which, of course, will never happen—and then tomorrow I’ll lie out by the pool again. Oh and by the way, should we throw a party soon?”

If it wasn’t for the hollowness in her voice, the OP would have been overjoyed by what he heard. He felt instead like the keeper of a small wild animal that had been caught in a trap and must be nursed to full vigor. Heilewid had done that once with an antelope fawn—or she’d tried to. A hunter from the village had brought in this shivering little thing, hardly bigger than a Chihuahua. His wife had fed it with a bottle, and at night would put it to bed in a cardboard box, in which she placed a hot water bottle wrapped inside a towel. The tenderness she exhibited toward this frail, exotic creature was heartbreaking to watch, knowing, as he did, that she could never have children.

The antelope fawn lived for almost a week, and seemed to be thriving, possibly even growing, and then one morning Heilewid woke up to find her tiny charge cold and stiff, its large brown
eyes glazed over. That was the first time that the OP observed his wife retreat into a shell of protective silence, one that lasted about a month.

There had been one previous episode of silence, or so he’d been told by her father. When Heilewid was twelve, her mother had drowned herself in one of the many canals that crisscross the Low Country that is Flanders. But by the time the OP met Heilewid, she seemed to have recovered to the point that she could play the part of Ophelia in a community production of
Hamlet
.

The night song of a jackal brought the OP back to the present and he shivered, suddenly finding himself too cold to stay outside any longer. He stood, his glass in hand.

“You coming in soon?”

“Soon. I want to enjoy what it feels like not to be hot. October will get here before we know it. And you still haven’t answered my question about having a party.”

The OP was at a loss for words. Working on the party might be therapeutic for her, but what if, when the event actually came to pass, she snapped? On the other hand, everyone already knew she’d had a nervous breakdown. What was there to lose? If only by default, Heilewid was still the alpha female of the pack—those socially starved, and sometimes bewildered, European housewives who suddenly found themselves living in the middle of nowhere. To the best of the OP’s knowledge, as of yet none of the company wives were jockeying for that position—well, except for Branca Nunez. But Branca didn’t really count; she was Portuguese and her husband was not directly connected with the mine. She was, however, a real looker. A spitfire too, but strictly off-limits.

“
Well?
What about the party?”

“Sure,” he said. “A party would be great.”

“Thank you.”

A second jackal began to serenade the moon. Soon there would be choir of them. Their high, plaintive yips, followed by extended
howls, were alarming to newcomers to Africa. For old hands like the OP, it was music to sleep soundly by.

“When they stop,” he said to Heilewid, “come inside.”

“Yes, I know. Because then it’s hyena time.”

The Nigerian had heard of the ancient men, the ones who’d lived in caves before the time of the forefathers. The missionaries had rebutted these legends with their own stories from the Bible. Yet men of science—including the dead, pompous Englishman—said there was truth in the tales of the ancient ones.

Of course it didn’t matter now who was right or wrong; what mattered was that there were the remains of a campfire.
Somebody’s
campfire. And there was flint. And logs that had been washed deep into the cave during a flood and that were now as dry as the bone in his hand.

That evening the Nigerian ate cooked fish, and that night he was warm and comfortable. At daybreak he would search for a way to climb up the opposing side of the gorge. Perhaps he would fashion a ladder of some sort. This time nothing, and no one, was going to stop him from completing his mission.