The Girl Who Married an Eagle

by Tamar Myers

  “E, you did. ‘But one’s machete grows thirsty for blood, as one’s heart grows hungry for vengeance.’ Is this not so?” Clementine had heard this saying more than once and hated it. In the Belgian Congo it was ever so true.

  Chief Eagle smiled for the first time. “I will agree to sell you the worthless girl, Buakane, daughter of Bad Odor and Grasshopper Paddle. Now show me your gift. Is it in that sack?”

  “Indeed it is, Your Majesty.”

  With great flair, worthy of the most famous magicians that you can imagine, the Overly Dramatic Clementine Hayes, the Great Distraction, Daughter of the Problematic Elizabeth, withdrew a doll’s head. Although it was only half the size of Miss Julia’s head, it had sapphire blue eyes that opened and closed and long blond hair.

  “I killed that ugly white woman on your behalf, Your Majesty. Then I shrunk her head and preserved it so that it will not decay. Now you can display it in your hut, as a symbol of your eternal greatness.”

  Chief Eagle was speechless, but not the crowd. They made a great deal of holy racket as they beat a hasty retreat. Old babas screamed, as did young children. Jumping Geronimo, if they weren’t all screaming by the time the royal compound had been cleared.

  “Go ahead, take it,” Clementine said. “It will not harm you. In fact, it will do just the opposite. It will protect you from your enemies. If you put this in your hut, no one will dare to come in and do you harm. The preserved head of this white woman contains much magic power.”

  Chief Eagle, the bully master of so many wives and concubines, who was riding the express train straight to hell, gingerly outstretched an arm.

  “Take it by the hair. Sometimes, however, you must lay the head down so that it can sleep.”

  “Sleep?”

  “E, like this.” Clementine grabbed the doll head in both tiny hands and held it flat. The blue eyes, surrounded by the long dark lashes, closed, causing the chief to gasp and jump back. “As I said, much, much power.”

  Chief Eagle reached for the doll’s head again. “Tell me all that it can do,” he said.

  “Your Majesty, I cannot tell you what this head—your head now—can do. That is for you to discover. And you must keep that information secret. If you do not, the head will crumble and become dust. Dust to dust. Have you not heard these words spoken, Your Majesty?”

  “His Majesty is a heathen,” said one of the two warriors. “But I have heard these words. I used to be a Christian in my youth.”

  “There, you see?” Clementine said. “Now, truly, I must commence my return, for the walk is long and my legs are but short.”

  “You will not walk from here,” Chief Eagle said.

  “E, I will,” said Clementine. Keep a stiff upper lip, she told herself. Then eat steak and kidney pies, and God save the Queen.

  Chief Eagle clapped his hands. “Kippoi,” he barked. Immediately, eight burly men appeared out of nowhere carrying a sedan chair, or as Papa called it, the “throne on two sticks.” The chief motioned for her to climb aboard. “My men will carry you back as far as the entrance to Mushihi Station. From there you must walk to your house.”

  “We laugh and we cry,” said Clementine.

  “But let us laugh more than we cry.”

  “E. Your Majesty, may I ask you a question?”

  Chief Eagle smiled. “I think that you already have.”

  “Do you think that a father should protect his children?” said Clementine.

  “Always! That is his job.”

  “What if he has only a girl child?”

  “Then most especially,” said Chief Eagle. “A girl child will bring in dowry payments; a girl child has value.” At that everyone laughed—except for Clementine. “Do not worry, small one,” the chief said, “for if that is your worry, I will see that no harm comes to you.”

  “Amen and glory hallelujah!” Clementine said. Then, realizing that she had just spoken aloud in English, she told a lie. Just like the grown-ups. “Those words were how one expresses gratitude in my language,” she said.

  Chief Eagle beamed. “One more thing, little white girl.”

  “E, Your Majesty?”

  “It is enough that you have given me that terrible woman’s head, especially now that it has been imbued with so much magic. Therefore, I am refusing your offer to repay the dowry.”

  “But, Your Majesty—”

  “Yai,” he said to the bearers. Go!

  As the Great Distraction, aka My Darling Clementine, was being carried aloft on the shoulders of eight burly headhunters, her mind, as usual, was kept busy planning ahead. Might one even go so far as to suggest scheming?

  After all, she would have to explain to Chief Eagle how the ugly white woman not only survived her own death, but managed to regrow a perfectly good new head. On second thought, that might not be too hard. The Auntie Julia he saw next time would be a ghost, one made to look superreal by the powerful magic of the Great Distraction. Ta-da!

  No, the real scheming involved how to get Papa and Julia to see how brilliantly right they were for each other. But before that happened, Papa was going to have to choose between his principles and real live human beings. There’d be no use bringing Auntie Julie into their little family, For Which We Give Thee Thanks, unless Papa was prepared to defend her to the teeth.

  Clementine had already picked out the dress that she would wear in her role as maid of honor. It would be the white lace dress that her mother had worn to Brussels when she received the Order of the Lion from King Baudouin. She would refuse to wear a belt with this dress. She would let the skirt drag like a train, unless Papa could see his way to have it hemmed. And maybe, just maybe, Clementine would forgo a hat so that Mama looking down from heaven could see the happiness in her daughter’s eyes. Glory, Hallelujah, Amen, and pass the peas.

  AFTERWORD

  The young woman despised being cold. Each year, when winter arrived, she felt as if her soul had curled up along with the leaves that had turned brown and lay uncollected, caught in the naked shrubbery around campus. The icy winds that penetrated her coat blew down from Canada—not directly—but came screaming across the stubble of Indiana cornfields to the west. The border between Ohio and Indiana did nothing to stop the cold, and when it was funneled through the valleys between the steep hills of Cincinnati, it seemed to emerge magnified. It seldom snowed in Cincinnati, Ohio. At least not enough to make up for all the gray skies, with trees silhouetted against them like the claws of dead crows lying on their backs.

  The young woman’s name was Buakane, and she was an African from the Congo; more specifically, she hailed from a highborn clan of the Bashilele tribe. Her mother’s name was Grasshopper Paddle, and her father’s name was Bad Odor. At one time, when she was but a girl of ten—or thereabouts—Buakane was sold in marriage to a powerful chief named Eagle. That very night the girl who married Chief Eagle ran away, setting into action a chain of events, like dominoes, that would eventually land her on the frozen campus of the College of Nursing at the University of Cincinnati.

  What was a child of the Southern Star, a young woman with the constitution of a tropical flower, doing in such a distant, inhospitable place as this? Ah, that is a fair question. But the Americans are fond of a saying that goes something like this: “If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me that question . . .” That is, the complete story of just how Buakane of the Bashilele, that once-fierce tribe known for their headhunting, came to be shivering on an Ohio campus would fill an entire book. Or it would take many nights around a hearth to even scratch the surface of such a story, and Buakane had neither the time nor the inclination to dwell on her past.

  All that must be known is that after the Congo became independent, terrible tribal wars raged over much of the Kasai, but it was famine that was death’s closest companion. Shortly after independence all the missionaries evacuated, although a year later, Tatu Henry and Mamu Julia (who were now married) returned, along with Clementine, to resume work at Mushihi St
ation. There they discovered that both of Buakane’s parents, Paddle and Bad Odor, had perished in the famine.

  The Hayes family remained in the Congo for only one more year. When they returned to the United States to stay, they took Buakane with them. They settled in Dayton, Ohio, not too far from Oxford where Julia had grown up, and Dayton is where Buakane came into her own. It was there that she learned how to speak English and about the strange American ways. Through hard work, and thanks to her formidable intellect, she was able to graduate from an American high school when she was just eighteen.

  At one time Buakane had thought that all whites were rich beyond measure, far richer than even a thousand village chiefs. Now that she lived in their world she could see that wealth was a relative thing, and even knowledge came at a price.

  The Hayes family was not wealthy. Tatu Henry was currently a pastor of a very small congregation, but did the occasional carpentry job on the side. Mamu Julia worked as a teacher. Clementine was a second-year student at Harvard University—which everyone said cost an “arm and a leg.” However, that was only an American expression, not something to be taken literally.

  Buakane’s dream of becoming a nurse seemed like an impossible dream until she spoke it aloud. For the Bashilele had a saying: “Words spoken aloud catch the wind and turn into action.” Now this Child of Beauty, Goodness, and Excellence, She Who Was Worthy in All Things was a first-year student at the College of Nursing at the University of Cincinnati. Who back in Mushihi Village could have imagined that? No one. But eyo, the words of Buakane’s spoken dream had caught the wind, and “out of the blue,” as it is said, a secret benefactor had stepped forward to pay for her entire course of study.

  Earlier on this particular day, under feeble sunlight, Tatu Henry and Mamu Julia had dropped the young woman off at her dorm following her first Christmas break. Now the sky was as black as a zebra’s mane, and the weather bitter in her mouth. Yet the girl had to go out, for she’d found a note slipped under her door, inviting her to meet with her benefactor at the student union. The signature on the note was illegible, giving the poor girl no information other than the time and place to meet. This unexpected appearance of her benefactor caused Buakane’s heart to beat so fast that it felt like it might leap from her chest, and then gallop away like a giant kudu.

  When at last Buakane stumbled into the tall brick building where her benefactor waited, she was so cold that her fingers clutching the note were stiff and her eyes immediately began to tear up. At first Buakane could see only students—most of them white—and a low moan escaped her lips. Was this yet another cruel trick played on her by fate? Or perhaps even a curse placed upon her by Nanabuka, the witch doctor of Mushihi Village? For despite her ten years in the United States of America, and her informal adoption by the Hayes family, the Mushilele prodigy remained a heathen.

  “Buakane! Life to you, Buakane.”

  The young woman whirled. Standing within striking distance of her elbow was Mamu Snake, the great white healer, she who had sewn the deep gash opened by the hyena the night that Buakane, the girl, had married an eagle. Buakane had not seen the missionary for ten years; what’s more, not once had she even asked after the old woman.

  “Mamu,” Buakane said with her first breath. “E, life to you.”

  Mamu Snake motioned to the nearest empty table. “May we speak in English, Buakane? I only have a few minutes before I have to leave for the airport, but I wanted to hear it for myself.”

  “Hear what?” Buakane asked in English.

  “I heard that you spoke without an accent. It has been much remarked upon. Please, say something else.”

  “Now I am embarrassed,” Buakane said, “so of course I can’t think of anything to say. Well—except to ask why it is that you pay for my nurse’s training. What I mean to say is, you don’t even know me, except for that one night when you saved my life. Which isn’t to say that I’m not grateful, because believe me, I am, but I didn’t do anything for you after that, except bring you trouble. Loads and loads of trouble.”

  “Praise God in his highest heaven,” Mamu Snake said. “You do speak English without an accent! You speak it perfectly, just like a native.”

  The old woman had a very deep, raspy voice, and she’d spoken loudly. Everyone was staring at them now, not that Buakane cared one whit—or one stick of manioc, as she would have said in her previous life. Back in Africa, where life was fraught with constant danger, old age was something to be revered, and Mamu Snake was surely the oldest woman that Buakane had ever talked with face-to-face. Even after having lived in America for half her life, Buakane found that she still could not estimate the age of a white person with any sort of accuracy. As for Mamu Snake, her age was incalculable, given that it was undoubtedly between fifty and infinity, a totally unfamiliar range in which few Bashilele women ever found themselves.

  “Are all your expenses being covered?” the ancient missionary asked.

  Buakane nodded as she struggled to hold back more tears. These fresh tears were different from those caused by temperature. As the daughter of Paddle, She of the Highborn Clan, it was not fitting that she succumb to such a public demonstration of emotion.

  “Mamu, my heart overflows with gratitude.”

  Mamu Snake grunted. “How is your leg? Do you still feel the scar?”

  “Eyo. It is twice felt.” By that Buakane meant that her fingers could immediately zero in on her scar, even if she wasn’t looking at her leg, as well as the fact that she sometimes dreamed about the night the hyenas attacked her.

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” Mamu Snake said. “I did the best I could. I’m only a nurse; I’m not a surgeon. I’m not even a doctor.”

  “You did a great job,” Buakane hastened to assure her. “The doctors here all say so.”

  “Good. Buakane, I must ask you a question: Why do you wish to be a nurse?”

  “Mamu, isn’t that obvious? I want to do what you did; I want to return to my village and help my people. You know what it’s like there; they must be hurting even worse now.”

  “Then why not go as a doctor?”

  Buakane was flabbergasted. How was she supposed to respond to such a ridiculous question from someone who was being so kind to her? It was one thing to ask the wind to pay for nurses’ school, but quite another to dream of medical school. Was this old woman playing a game of some kind? What was Buakane to think? After all, this was the same woman who had been so unkind to her friend and American “sister,” Clementine.

  Just when enough words had formed in Buakane’s mind to come tumbling out of their own accord—perhaps in an unpleasant arrangement—the old woman spoke first.

  “Yes, of course, you are right. You can receive your bachelor’s degree in nursing in just four years. Medical school would take twice that long, including college, and then you’d have to complete your internship. You can go back to medical school later if you wish. In the meantime, go back to Africa and tend to your people. I’m going to arrange it so that funds are available for you to use whenever you’re ready.”

  “We laugh and we cry!” Buakane said, without realizing that she was no longer speaking English. “Mamu, why do you do this for me?”

  The old woman, she of the indeterminate age, looked away. “My husband, Reverend Arvin Doyer, passed away three years ago. I thought that he came from a very poor family—one that didn’t have two nickels to rub together—but apparently that was not the case. There was some family money, not a huge fortune, but something that the reverend could have been spending on missions over the years and didn’t. It is my intention to correct this oversight.”

  Then just like that, as the wind comes and goes, as fortunes wax and wane, Mamu Snake disappeared through the blur of Buakane’s tears. Whether she stepped out into the bitter cold or melded into the throng of returning students, Buakane was unable to determine. But where once there was a girl who married an eagle, there was now a woman who would someday be a nurse.


  About the Author

  TAMAR MYERS is the author of the Belgian Congo series and the Den of Antiquity series as well as the Pennsylvania-Dutch mysteries. Born and raised in the Congo, she lives in North Carolina.

  www.TamarMyers.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Also by Tamar Myers

  THE BOY WHO STOLE THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS

  THE HEADHUNTER’S DAUGHTER

  THE WITCH DOCTOR’S WIFE

  Den of Antiquities Mysteries

  THE GLASS IS ALWAYS GREENER

  POISON IVORY

  DEATH OF A RUG LORD

  THE CANE MUTINY

  MONET TALKS

  STATUE OF LIMITATIONS

  TILES AND TRIBULATIONS

  SPLENDOR IN THE GLASS

  NIGHTMARE IN SHINING ARMOR

  A PENNY URNED

  ESTATE OF MIND

  BAROQUE AND DESPERATE

  SO FAUX, SO GOOD

  THE MING AND I

  GILT BY ASSOCIATION

  LARCENY AND OLD LACE

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  Credits

  Cover photographs: tree © by Eric Nathan / Alamy; texture © by javarman / Shutterstock

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE GIRL WHO MARRIED AN EAGLE. Copyright © 2013 by Tamar Myers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.