The Girl Who Married an Eagle

by Tamar Myers

  It was Buakane’s turn to be thrown to the ground. As they were now outside, she landed on some coarse grass.

  “You are a whore,” the white man shouted. “I have changed my mind. You will have nothing to eat until you confess your sins before my God. Do you hear me?”

  Buakane said nothing aloud, which only made the man angrier. But inside, she said to herself: You are shit! You are nothing but dog shit.

  TWELVE

  Julia felt as if she were going to explode. In front of her was half a moldy grapefruit, a large bowl of oatmeal (which was congealing like concrete in the sun), and a plate bravely bearing two slices of incinerated toast—yet none of the breakfast was available to her. That is, none of it would be available until Reverend Arvin and Nurse Doyer were finished with their interminable prayers. Julia was all for thanking God for one’s food before tucking into it, but she had never seen anything like this before.

  The prebreakfast ritual had started harmlessly enough. Reverend Arvin began by reading aloud a page from a booklet titled The Upper Room. Julia’s family also read from that book every morning. But then Reverend Arvin asked Julia to lead them in a “word of prayer.” Her prayer was actually nine words long—but they were very intense, heartfelt words, so they should have been quite sufficient.

  Oh, if only that were the case! Julia was reaching for her spoon when Nurse Verna began praying in a voice loud enough to call Lazarus forth from the grave. For twenty minutes Nurse Verna laid the problems of Mushihi Station before the Lord—illness, shortages of supplies, infidelities among African teachers, encroachment of Roman Catholic missionaries—but not once did she thank God for the food. She did, however, use the word just seventeen times.

  Reverend Doyer was a bit more formal, He said “thee” and “thou” and “thine” like he’d gotten a bargain deal on them at the five-and-ten store, but when it came to the word just, he trumped his wife by using it eighteen times.

  Julia couldn’t help but roll her eyes. She considered herself to be a good Christian—a real Christian—but she couldn’t for the life of her understand why some folks had to come out with sentences along the likes of “ . . . we just ask that you bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies . . .” What the heck was that supposed to mean, when that same person had already “just asked” the Good Lord for a million other favors?

  “I saw you roll your eyes, girl,” Nurse Verna said.

  Julia stole a look from beneath her right eyelid, which was the only eye she could open independently. How could that grouchy old woman have seen her when the old woman’s eyes were pressed tightly shut. Or had they been? They said that the best defense is a good offense, didn’t they? Okay, so maybe that applied to sports, and not to garrulous, crabby missionaries, but Julia Elaine Newton did not react well to being bossed around.

  She flicked her tongue at her hostess. It was lightning quick, like a lizard catching a fly. Was it an immature thing to do? Absolutely! Was it provocative? No—not if Nurse Verna, her sourpuss hostess, had her eyes closed as she was supposed to. Then it was akin to the proverbial tree falling in the forest when there was no one around; it made no sound. Except that in this case, no one should have seen it.

  “Why, you little heathen!” Nurse Verna screeched.

  Meanwhile her husband, Reverend Arvin Doyer, droned on for yet another “just.” This one was for the true salvation of the new Roman Catholic priest up Basongo way. But as soon as that petition had cleared both his mind and his thin gray lips, the reverend’s eyes flew open, and pushing back his chair, he jumped to his feet.

  “What is the meaning of this, wife? Didst thou hear me say ‘amen’?”

  Nurse Verna’s face turned whiter than the steer skull that Julia’s brother had hanging on his bedroom wall back in Oxford, Ohio. Her lashless eyelids blinked rapidly, a sure sign that she was struggling to hold back tears. Oh boy, was Julia ever in for it now, and all because she’d been stupid and juvenile.

  “Amen!” a hearty male voice boomed from the kitchen door.

  Julia turned, her heart pounding with excitement and relief. “Henry!”

  “You should address him as Reverend Hayes,” Nurse Verna snapped.

  “Or perhaps Uncle Henry,” Reverend Arvin Doyer said. “After all, you are barely more than a child.”

  Henry stepped through the doorway and squared his shoulders. “She is a full-fledged adult, and a college graduate to boot. I insist that she calls me Henry—or even Hank. Would either of you prefer to call me Hank as well?”

  “Most certainly not,” Reverend Doyer and his wife said in unison.

  “Well, then,” Henry said, smiling as usual, “now that you are through with your morning devotions, you don’t mind if I steal the young one, do you? I want to get her settled in her accommodations before she begins this auspicious day.”

  “There is nothing suspicious about today,” Reverend Doyer said, “except perhaps the idea of you, a handsome widower, and a not unattractive young maiden paying a visit, without a chaperone, to a house on the other side of the station. Besides, she has not eaten her breakfast.”

  Julia thought she saw Henry wink. “Miss Newton,” he said, in the most fatherly of tones, “if you’re anything like I was when I was your age, you’re probably too excited to eat. Am I right?”

  Although she thought that she knew where he was coming from, Julia was furious at Henry. Couldn’t he have simply ordered her to accompany him, rather than emphasize their age difference? She’d been led to understand that once a person reached the age of majority, age was no longer an issue. Her mother, for instance, had friends from many different age groups. The way that Henry had just put things made it sound like he was a grown-up and she was a child. Dang him! Dang him all to pieces!

  But Julia was nothing if not pragmatic. “You’re absolutely right,” she said, bounding to her feet.

  “Nurse Verna has patient rounds to make,” Reverend Doyer said, “so I will accompany the two of you.”

  “No,” Henry said. “We will be fine; I know the way.” He chuckled perfunctorily. “I built that house. Remember?”

  “You are tempting the devil,” Reverend Doyer said. Meanwhile, unconsciously to be sure, the tip of Nurse Verna’s tongue flickered from side to side in the space between her teeth, reminding Julia of a snake she’d once seen in the biology department’s terrarium.

  “Thanks for breakfast,” Julia blurted, and then fled from the room—as well as the house—as though she were running from the plague. Oh, what a liar she’d been. Thanks for the breakfast, indeed! Why, she hadn’t even taken a bite.

  Outside, when she dared to stop running, she turned and saw Henry slapping his thighs and guffawing. “Young lady,” he said, as he straightened his broad shoulders and assumed a serious preacher’s voice, “you do know where you’re going now, don’t you?”

  Julia was at a loss for words. Was he kidding? Was he serious? Was Henry about to consign her to hell? Surely not! She couldn’t possibly have misjudged him that badly. But if he was going to be that narrow-minded, then she was out of there. Call her a chicken, a coward, whatever you wish; Julia was not cut out to be the sole defendant of reason, plunked down on some far-flung bastion of fossilized thinkers. This was not her idea of missionary life.

  “How about you tell me where I’m going,” she finally said.

  “To see your new house, of course. Where else did you think?”

  “Uh—well, the way that my morning has been going so far, I thought maybe you were going to consign me to that other place that starts with H.”

  “Ah, that place!” Then he began singing a ditty that Julia had learned in grade school, but one that her pastor had actually made a point of condemning from the pulpit as being sacrilegious.

  He told her he loved her, oh how he lied,

  Oh, how he lied, oh, how he lied,

  They were to be married, he up and died,

  He up and died, he up and died,

 
He went down below her, sizzle he fried,

  Sizzle he fried, sizzle he fried,

  She went up above him, flip-flop she flied,

  Flip-flop she flied, flip-flop she flied,

  Now this is the moral, don’t ever lie,

  Don’t ever lie, don’t ever lie,

  Now this is the moral, don’t ever lie,

  Don’t ever lie!

  Julia couldn’t help herself; she just had to join in. In fact, it was so much fun that they sang the song twice, the second time in harmony. Julia, who had some musical training, was a competent soprano. Henry, on the other hand, would later claim to never having had a lesson, but he was a natural at singing parts. His tenor voice so enthralled Julia that she couldn’t wait to hear him sing hymns. She was about to asked him to sing her favorite hymn—“The Old Rugged Cross”—when he stopped abruptly and pointed to the short lawn grass on the right.

  “Look,” he whispered. “There. And there!”

  At first Julia didn’t know what to look for. Was it snakes she should be watching for? A bunch of snakes, heaven forfend! What? But then with a sigh of relief and a sense of awe and wonder, she realized that Henry wanted her to appreciate the strange little bird that was flying only a few feet above the ground.

  Perhaps flying wasn’t quite the right word. This little black, brown, and white bird appeared to jerk from location to location, hampered as it was by a tail that was nearly twice the length of its body.

  “That’s a male pin-tailed whydah,” Henry said. “It grows that tail only during mating season. When Clementine was about four—maybe five, I told her that if she could sprinkle salt on the tail of one of those birds, then she could catch it. For days she ran all over the yard with our saltshaker. Tuckered her out so much that she always slept like a log.”

  “How do logs sleep?” Julia asked.

  Henry chuckled. “Lying down.”

  “Good one!”

  “Listen,” he said, his voice suddenly grave, “feel free to run all over the grass, but always keep a watchful eye out when you’re on the path. Snakes like to sun themselves out in the open—on second thought, be careful when you’re on the grass as well. That’s where the snakes hide when they’re not sunning themselves. And bathrooms; toads will always manage to get inside your bathroom, and the pit vipers will follow.”

  “Pit vipers?” Julia was trying desperately to walk in Henry’s exact footsteps, the better to avoid stepping on anything that might be skilled at blending into the path.

  “A pit viper—in this case a Gaboon viper—is related to a rattlesnake, except that it is more deadly. Plus, we don’t have any antivenom.”

  “Oh, Cracker Jacks!” Julia said.

  “You’ll be all right,” Henry said. “I’ve put a kerosene lamp in your bathroom and another one by your bed. Turn the wicks down before you go to sleep, but don’t let them go out. If you get up during the night, either carry the lamp with you or use a flashlight. Also, I built a wardrobe for you in the bedroom and put a machete inside it, just in case something four-legged finds its way inside your house.”

  “Jiminy Cricket!” Julia cried, and lunged at Henry, grabbing his shirt with both hands. It was a wonder that they didn’t both fall.

  “You don’t have to get so dramatic,” Henry said calmly. “I was just trying to prepare you for every possible scenario, given that your house is on the far end of the station. Kind of isolated, so to speak. Every missionary family owns a machete. At the very least, they are good for cracking open coconuts.”

  It was, of course, too late for Julia to turn back now, but she realized that she had bitten off more than she could comfortably chew. She was mildly afraid of the dark—and that was under conditions in which there was a constant supply of electricity and a working light switch. But slaying poisonous snakes in the bathroom by lantern light? Now that was straying into the territory of nervous breakdowns and rubber-padded rooms.

  They walked in silence while the long-tailed whydahs twittered and the cheerful sun shone deceptively down on Julia’s arms and hair. Had she not been expected to spend the night alone in an “isolated” house, with headhunters and hyenas as neighbors, and possibly vipers as roommates, Julia would have viewed this as an adventure, one with a very handsome man leading the way. Oh, hush that thought! She wasn’t supposed to have thoughts like that about a fellow missionary—especially not about one who was so recently widowed.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Henry said, just when she’d allowed the devil to lead her thoughts as far astray as one can possibly imagine.

  “They’re not worth even that much,” Julia said. “Trust me on that score. But I do have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “The Doyers don’t have running water—well, not really. They have a couple of barrels outside up on a platform, which two native women keep filled. The women carry water up from a spring in the canyon below. Nurse Verna said that they carry it in large gourds placed in six-foot-long baskets, which the women balance on their heads. She said it puts a terrible strain on their necks. Anyway, the water in the bathroom sink comes from those barrels, and then it is caught in a slop bucket, which is then used to flush the toilet. Is that how it will be in my house?”

  Henry stopped, causing Julia to run smack-dab into him. “Whoa,” he said as he gently pushed her away from his chest and made sure she was standing on her own two feet before letting go. “Are you all right?”

  “As right as Seattle rain,” she said.

  “Seattle? Why Seattle?”

  “I don’t know; isn’t it supposed to rain there a lot?”

  “Hmm,” he said. “I wouldn’t know. But back to your water. You can brush your teeth and wash with your bathroom water, but don’t drink it. Your kitchen is a separate building altogether, connected by a breezeway. There is a smaller, galvanized barrel in there, which is covered with a white cloth. The ladies will keep that barrel filled with water as well. You must see to it that Cripple, or whomever else you hire, takes only that water and gets it boiling. It must be boiled for no less than five minutes, and then strained again into the three galvanized buckets that I put inside the kitchen. Only then will you have water that is safe to cook with, or to drink.”

  Julia thought her head was going to burst with the responsibility of keeping track of all these lifesaving instructions. “Cripple? Uh—where will she live?”

  Henry caught Julia’s wrists, which wasn’t easy, given that her arms were flailing around like a seal’s flippers. That is, if that seal were ever to conduct an orchestra.

  “Hey,” he said, “like I told you, everything’s going to be fine. The kitchen building has an attached room for servants. All missionary homes are built with accommodations for servants. Even if the rooms are not used for that, they can always be used for storage.”

  “You mean I won’t be living out there defenseless, and all alone?”

  “That’s right, and neither will Cripple, because she’ll be getting her own machete.”

  “Fabulous. You’re putting a lethal weapon in the hands of a woman who hates me?”

  Henry, who was holding both her hands now, let them drop. “She doesn’t hate you; she just doesn’t know what to make of you yet. Cripple is a Muluba, and to her, the Bashilele are every bit as enigmatic and heathen as they are to you. I guess the one big difference is that you see them as worthy of redemption. Cripple does not.”

  “But she’s a native—like them! And she’s a heathen! It’s not the same thing.”

  “Forgive me, Julia, but now you’re starting to sound like your run-of-the-mill colonialist. Tell me, honestly, if I could peer into your innermost heart, would I see the heart of a racist?”

  “What?” Julia was furious. What a horrible question to have asked her. Reverend Paul Henry Hayes (aka His Holiness, from now on) obviously thought that she was a racist or else he wouldn’t have brought up such a sensitive question—not now, not with what was happening back home in the
States. What His Holiness didn’t know was that Julia had marched shoulder to shoulder with her Negro coeds to protest the “all white after dark rule” of many small towns surrounding Oxford.

  Take Trenton, Ohio, just twenty minutes from Oxford, where Julia grew up. It was a bedroom community right across the Miami River from Middletown. While a sizable number of Negroes lived in Middletown and worked in at Armco Steel Mill, there was not a single Negro living in Trenton. That’s because Trenton, like many other small towns in the northern states, abided by the “all white after dark rule.” Oh, this was an unwritten rule, to be sure. And Negroes were quite welcome to drive over to Trenton during daylight hours to work as domestic servants—although because the town was solidly middle class, there were few who could afford such a luxury.

  At any rate, Julia was most certainly not a racist. She had even stayed up all night once, arguing with her roommate over the issue of receiving a blood transfusion from a Negro donor. When she couldn’t persuade her roommate, Claire, to change her mind and accept the fact that human blood was just that: human blood, Julia put in for a transfer of rooms.

  So there, Reverend Know-It-All Hayes, Julia thought. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it! Of course, Julia being who she was—at least she realized this—the polish had been taken off the rest of the day. No matter what she did or no matter whom she saw, no matter what happened, it just wouldn’t be the same now. And it was all because Henry had jumped to conclusions about her character. Her character, for crying out loud.

  “Julia,” the guilty man said, “we need to take it down a notch; we have an audience.” He pointed with his chin to where a group of children—maybe seven or eight—were literally rolling on the ground while pointing at her and laughing. She was obviously being mocked, and for what reason? For being a stranger? Now this really took the cake!

  The children were only about thirty yards away. Where had they come from? As angry as she was, she posed this question to Henry.