by Tamar Myers
“It is precisely in our dreams when we are never alone,” Cripple said. “Have you not heard, Mamu, that it is our dreams which are our doorways to the spirit world? That is the real world, Mamu Whose Name One Cannot Be Bothered to Remember. This world is but an illusion.”
“No!” Julia shouted, for now she was angry at Cripple.
“But it is true, Mamu. It is you Christians who are in need of—”
“Stop it! Stop preaching at me. And stop calling me that terrible name: Mukashiana. I know what it means now. That was very cruel of you, Cripple. Just because you have received much torment in your life, that does not give you the right to torment others. You have undoubtedly heard of Yesu, have you not, Cripple?”
“Eyoa,” she said as she leaned on the fire poker. “This is the son of your God who had no wife and no lubola, because he was a spirit. Yet even without this manly part, he put a young unmarried girl in the family way.”
“Cripple, never has anyone been so wrong and yet so right at the same time. Anyway, our Yesu said that we should treat others the same way that we wished to be treated.”
“Truly, truly?”
“I do not lie.”
Cripple cocked her head to one side, and that’s when Julia became aware that, as usual, she had the baby with her, strapped to her back with a wrap cloth featuring a torrid jungle scene of brilliantly colored parrots, stalking black panthers, and tropical foliage. When the baby saw Julia, she began to scream bloody murder. Without skipping a beat Cripple untied the cloth, took the baby into her arms, and stuffed a nipple into its month. Instantly the baby was soothed.
Julia smiled despite herself. “You came to defend me with a baby strapped to your back?”
“Mamu—you shall get your new name. In the meantime, it will be my pleasure to assure you that at no time was my baby in any harm. Now come, Mamu, we talk too much and supper gets cold.”
“I-I don’t understand,” Julia said. “There is no supper; I never made one.”
“Perhaps you were so busy in here that you forgot.” Cripple turned and limped from the room, as if she expected Julia to follow.
If that was indeed the case, then Cripple lucked out. But it was only because Julia needed to use the toilet in the worst way. After that, Julia was able to focus on the main room and to see that not only had the table been set for supper, but that water had been poured and that a pair of mismatched candles—one blue, the other orange—flickered cheerfully on the small table.
“What the heck,” said Julia. She hurried over to the table just as Cripple pushed through the front door bearing a tray on which sat an enamel plate heaped high with food.
“Sit,” Cripple said, as if she were speaking to a small child.
Nonetheless, Julia sat obediently as she’d been directed.
“Now put serviette in lap, if you please.”
At last Cripple set the steaming plate on the table and stepped back, but she did not leave. “I made you Spam and elbow macaroni bake, with melted cheese on top, and peas and carrots. There is chocolate pudding for dessert.”
The smells coming from Julia’s plate were making her stomach suddenly clench with desire. Her pity party had come to a screeching halt. But just as she was lifting the first heaping forkful up to her mouth, her upbringing, along with Cripple’s prying eyes, prevailed upon her to do the right thing.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“Nasha.” No.
“When will you eat?”
“When you are through with me for the evening, Mamu.”
“What will you eat?”
“I brought with me a cup of rice and a small piece of salted fish. It should last me two or three days until I find out where the market is.”
“Cripple, there is no market here, because here is the middle of nowhere.” They were speaking in Tshiluba, and Julia was hoping that her American idiom made a modicum of sense when translated into Tshiluba.
It must have, because Cripple’s eyes widened. “Aiyee,” she said. “Then I shall have to buy food directly from these headhunters.”
The delicious aromas continued to call to Julia’s stomach. “Cripple,” she said, in desperation more than anything else, “you must sit and eat with me.”
“No, Mamu, I cannot!” Her expressive eyes now registered horror.
“Where I come from it is very rude to refuse an offer of food. Is it not the same here?”
“E, but we are not equals, Mamu.”
“Cripple, in just a few months you Congolese will receive your independence and you will become a free people. It is time that you begin to think of yourselves as our equals.”
“Mamu, do you forget that I am a Muluba, and as such, I am far superior to any white, man or woman? However, I cannot sit at your table, because it is still against the colonial law, and if the Belgian officials—the Rock Breakers—find out, they will beat me with the hippo hide strip.”
Julia swallowed back a combination of mirth and indignation. The fiery little woman had chutzpah, as her Jewish friends at college would have said.
“This will be our secret, Cripple. Now go to the kitchen and fetch another plate for yourself. From now on we will eat together.”
Cripple did not budge.
“Go on,” Julia urged.
“Mamu, I not wish to offend, but I find that your food tastes disgusting, and it is not filling in the least.”
“You have tasted this Spam and elbow macaroni bake?”
Cripple shrugged. “A good cook must always taste her work, is that not so?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“But what does one taste tell a person? Perhaps two tastes, or even three tastes, are a better basis on which to form an opinion. Mamu, it occurred to me that if you were to threaten me with a punishment even more severe than the Bula Matadi’s if I did not join you at this table, then I would have no choice but to obey your orders.”
“Threaten you? Punish you? Cripple, I do not want to do that.”
“But you must; it is for my own good. And for the good of my child. Do you wish my breasts to grow flat and shriveled, and that my child should starve?”
“No, of course not!”
“Then say that you will beat me with this fire poker, and that when you are through doing that you will take my child and raise her as a Christian.”
“And that is such a terrible thing?”
“Truly, truly, it is the very worst thing imaginable.”
“Eat all your meals with me,” Julia said with a straight face, “or I shall beat you with a fire poker and then snatch that baby from you and raise it up as a Christian.”
“Aiyee!” Cripple cried and shuffled off to the kitchen as fast as her halting feet could carry her.
When at last they had eaten their fill, and Julia had watched a woman hardly more than half her size eat twice as much as she, Julia insisted on helping with the dishes. It was the right thing to do; it was the Christian thing to do. After all, Julia was not only younger, she was strong and healthy. If Cripple had been a white woman, she wouldn’t have hesitated to give her a helping hand, so what difference should her dark skin color make?
Yes, Cripple was a servant, but a servant making under a dollar a day, plus room and board. Even if she didn’t do anything but complain, Cripple’s company would be worth every penny of it.
With the kitchen work completed, the two women took a pair of folding chairs out on to the breezeway to watch the sunset. This time Julia hardly noticed as Cripple untied her infant and clasped her to a swollen breast. The day had been hot, but without rain, and the banks of clouds that had been slowly building contributed to the most spectacular sunset that Julia had ever seen.
But that close to the equator the sun doesn’t slip behind the horizon, it plummets like a red hot orb that has burned through a crepe-paper sky. In the next minute the clouds would be in silhouette, rimmed with gold; then the gold would melt and the blue sky deepen into indigo blue. Yet even
before the last traces of the sun were gone from the clouds, the planet Venus would proudly take her place in the sky, the first of the night beings to do so.
“Look, Mamu,” Cripple said, pointing to Venus, “there is the moon’s wife.”
Julia smiled. “Is that so? Well, in that case the moon is very much bigger than his wife.”
“Eyoa, this is true. This is true, but as you will soon see, they have many, many children, so it must not be too bad a thing to be his wife.”
Cripple was right. The clouds on the horizon stayed put, and soon there were so many stars in the sky that Julia actually began to despair of coming up with an adequate way of describing them to her mother. Every phrase she could think of sounded hackneyed and trite.
In the end she decided to do a very un-Julia-like thing; she sat there at peace with herself and with Cripple, and simply enjoyed the night sky.
SIXTEEN
Nurse Verna Doyer despised tattletales. No, that was too strong a word. Nurse Verna strove mightily to love everyone as God had commanded her to do so in Leviticus, chapter nineteen, the same book and chapter in which the Lord had commanded her to stand up in respect every time she saw a gray-haired person, and which also forbade her from getting a tattoo. Nurse Verna tried hard—exceedingly hard—to be a good Christian, so she merely disdained tattletales. She did, however, make one broad exception to her rule: anything that might affect Mushihi Station was not to be considered gossip.
That afternoon, Verna, having felt somewhat guilty about her feelings toward the newcomer, Miss Julia Elaine Newton, had left instructions for her cook to bake a batch of brownies from a recipe she’d translated from the Settlement Cookbook. It was one that her cook had made only a few times before, because it used valuable ingredients, like cacao powder and a fresh egg. For Nurse Verna, this was carrying the commandment to the extreme; it was practically like throwing her arms around the interloper and calling her “daughter.” Perish that thought!
The brownies were delicious, as anticipated. Following their own supper, after Reverend and Nurse Verna had each eaten two, they stacked the remainder on a dessert plate, covered them with a used but nicely smoothed piece of aluminum foil, and set out to deliver the delicacies. Reverend Arvin Doyer carried a flashlight to use on the way back, in case the young woman prevailed upon them to come inside and eat yet another of the delicious treats. Should dusk fall before their return, there was the ever-present danger of poisonous snakes waiting for small prey in the open path.
But there are many kinds of snakes in Eden, are there not? That is one of the many thoughts that raced through Nurse Verna’s mind just minutes later, as she and her husband waited impatiently outside the Hayeses’ door for someone to answer. Reverend Doyer pounded this time, and finally Henry opened it slowly, but looking none too pleased.
“It is the dinner hour,” he said. “Missionaries generally eat between five thirty and six. We always have; you know that.”
“How do you know it isn’t an emergency?” Reverend Doyer said.
“Because your wife is holding a plate of brownies, but she’s wearing a scowl.”
Nurse Verna heard the Great Distraction snicker from behind the door. It wasn’t the child’s fault that she was being raised like a hooligan. In a proper environment she might have stood a chance. Clearly, that was no longer an option.
Nurse Verna could either demand that the impudent little brat be suitably punished or that the real purpose of their visit be addressed. Ever the pragmatic and prayerful woman, Nurse Verna chose the latter.
“These brownies aren’t intended for you,” she said while thrusting the goodies at him anyway. “They have been poisoned by Satan, so you might as well give them to the Great Distraction.”
“Nurse Verna, if I weren’t an ordained minister, and you weren’t a—never mind. I should not have said that. I am sorry for my words.”
Now it was Verna’s turn to feel sorry. Whether or not Henry Hayes meant what he said, Nurse Verna truly regretted her hateful words. However, she just wasn’t ready to take them back. Stewing over the continued presence of the distracting waif was like scratching a mosquito bite; it felt good to do so, even if it was the wrong thing to do. The Great Distraction belonged either far away at a boarding school or in the United States, living with a set of her grandparents.
“Reverend Hayes,” Nurse Verna said—which was practically an apology, given that she almost never used his ecclesiastical title—“we have come to lay upon you a very disturbing piece of news. We do so in order that the three of us might then join together in earnest prayer.”
Much to Verna’s relief Henry stepped outside completely, pulling the door tightly shut behind him. He motioned his visitors to follow him back down the path a few paces.
“What is your concern, Nurse Doyer?”
“It concerns us all,” said Reverend Doyer. “In the spirit of Christian charity, my wife had the cook bake these brownies, which we just now tried to deliver to our newest coworker, Miss Julia Newton. But when we arrived at her house—well, as you know, the path from our house passes directly in front of her main room. Her dining room. You will never guess what we saw in there.”
“A partridge in a pear tree?” Henry said.
“As usual, Henry,” said Nurse Verna, “I shall have to swallow my irritation, and so again I thank the Good Lord above that he has chosen to set only a minor stumbling block in my path.”
Henry bit his lip and nodded. “Go on, please.”
“Well,” said Reverend Doyer, who could be quick with the words when he wanted to, “as one might expect, Miss Julia Newton was eating her supper—some horrible red-and-yellow noodle glop—but she wasn’t alone.”
“It was a Spam and elbow macaroni bake with cheese, and you love it,” Nurse Verna snapped. “But about the alone part; she was dining with a black! An African, no less. It was that same crippled woman who you brought with you last night from Belle Vue. I think she is supposed to be Miss Newton’s housekeeper. They had no idea that we were watching, of course, because we stood stock-still, like we do when we’re hunting and the game is being driven in our direction.”
“That’s not all,” Reverend Doyer said. “When they were finished with their meal, that African woman casually reached under her blouse and pulled up a b-r-e-a-s-t and proceeded to nurse her infant. Right there in a white woman’s dining room! Can you imagine that?”
Henry smiled. “You don’t need to spell the word breast. Your wife is a nurse, and I am a widower, and we live among a tribe that goes topless to church. But yes, we aren’t allowed to entertain Africans in our houses. And we certainly are not allowed to eat with them at the same table. The Mission Board should have made this very clear to her. We can lose our lease if word of this gets around.”
“Think of all the sheep that will be lost,” Reverend Doyer said, for he was ever the good shepherd.
“Think of all the sick and hurting who will go untreated,” Nurse Verna said. Her heart ached at the thought of any of Arvin’s lost sheep suffering needlessly, all because of some college girl with liberal ideas and a point to prove.
“You needn’t worry yourselves,” said Henry. “I’ll go over just as soon as I’ve finished eating and speak to her.”
“Oh, no,” said Reverend Doyer, “that would be exactly the wrong thing to do.”
“How so?” Henry said.
“Have we not just established that she is a young woman—one who is pleasant to behold, in fact? Does not Bathsheba come to mind?”
“Bathsheba committed adultery with an old coot named David,” Nurse Verna said.
Henry chuckled, so Nurse Verna gave him her sternest, and much practiced, glare. Unfortunately, in the gathering gloam it lacked much of its full potential.
“That is my point exactly,” said Reverend Doyer. “I have no doubt that you can be trusted, Henry, but it is she who worries me. You happen to exude a certain—well—animal magnetism that I am told certain women
find to be quite irresistible.”
“He didn’t hear it from me,” Nurse Verna said quickly.
“Putting the two of you alone together in the postdinner hours could be like putting the goat in with the bear.”
Even though they were now standing well away from the closed front door, completely off the front porch as a matter of fact, Nurse Verna was positive that she heard someone snicker. And since there weren’t any bushes behind which to hide—just a border of scarlet amaryllis flowers, the obnoxious, mocking noise had to be emanating from inside Henry’s house. The Great Distraction was living up to her name yet again!
“Did you hear that?” Nurse Verna demanded.
“Did I hear what?” Henry said.
“Don’t play games with us, Reverend Hayes,” Reverend Doyer said. “We all know that it is the Great Distraction.”
Henry let out a loud sigh that was obviously packed with meaning, most probably a message intended for that elfin child of his. Why on earth Henry continued to coddle the girl a full two years after her mother’s death was beyond Nurse Verna’s ken. The fact that he allowed her to wear her dead mother’s clothes was not only ridiculous, it was downright unchristian.
“We will wait right here on your verandah,” Nurse Verna said, “until after you have eaten your evening meal, and then the three of us will walk over there together. Then in unison we shall confront the new arrival and her lame housekeeper.”
“Cripple,” Henry said in Tshiluba.
“Tch,” Nurse Verna said. She had served the Lord in Africa so long that at times she wasn’t even aware of the Africanisms she’d incorporated into her lexicon. This time, however, was an exception. Nurse Verna was not going to stand quietly and be corrected while there was still a chance that the Great Distraction was listening in on the other side of the door.
So many little battles fought, and for what? Most of these battles weren’t even for the Good Fight; they weren’t part of the war against Satan. The battles for which Nurse Verna girded herself in armor—both physical and spiritual—at the start of each day were battles that Nurse Verna fought in order to control the people, environment, and events happening around her. They were Verna’s personal battles, not God’s battles.
