by Okey Ndibe
The interpreter paused to allow his pent-up anger to seep away. Then he said, “If it were only for that fool, I wouldn’t open my mouth.” He cast a haughty, condescending look in Nwafo’s direction. “What I’m going to tell you is the truth. The book doesn’t talk to the white man. He reads what’s written in the book.”
“Don’t we have eyes like the white man? So why can’t we read the same thing?”
“Because you haven’t gone to the white man’s school. That’s where people learn how to read. If you went to the school, you’d be able to read.”
“We’re saying the same thing,” insisted the man who had called Stanton a wizard. “Wizards go to a place where they are initiated into wizardry. That’s what you call school.”
“Don’t speak what passes your understanding,” Jacob chided.
“It doesn’t pass my understanding. It’s you whose mouth says what it doesn’t know.”
The interpreter stood silent, askance. There was little profit, he felt, in arguing with village know-nothings. Stanton read the stalemate.
“What’s the ruckus about?” he asked Jacob.
“Huh?”
“I mean, what’s the matter?”
Jacob explained that the villagers wondered how a book talked to the white man. On that account, they insisted that Stanton was some kind of wizard or spirit. Stanton’s lips parted in a suppressed smile.
“Tell that man to come to me,” he instructed Jacob, pointing to Nwafo, the young man who’d asked the interpreter to hop off and eat shit. “And him, him, her, him, and her,” he added, pointing to more of the vocal participants in the argument. The chosen, their faces apprehensive, drew gingerly close to the Englishman. They arranged themselves, the six of them, on either side of him. Stanton grasped a bunch of pages from the Bible. He held out a random page for their perusal, passing the script from eye to baffled eye. They peered at the page, at its strange inert symbols that told them nothing, symbols that resembled half-formed crawly creatures. How, they wondered, could anybody decipher these symbols? Only a man who communed with spirits could do it.
Stanton flipped through some pages and then stopped. He read, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believeth in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.” His finger traced the text, as if the words might peel off the page and evaporate without that act of vigilance. His eyes darted from the page to the converts’ astonished eyes. His listeners understood nothing, grasping only that sonorous mystique of an unfamiliar language. “Jacob,” said Stanton, “tell them that if they stand fast, if they embrace the living God, they too will soon be able to read the Good Book. Tell them.”
EACH DAY, STANTON ASKED those who wished to be baptized and to know the one true God to raise their hands. Those who did were led to Utonki River, huddled behind Stanton’s broad, imposing back. The rite of baptism, the interpreter explained to initiates, literally meant “dipping in God’s water.” It made them new creatures, he proclaimed. (One day, an outraged woman stormed the church. She addressed Jacob: “Ask your white dibia why my husband still can’t do what other men do at night—even after he’d been dipped in the water and made a new man.” The interpreter was vexed. He would ask the white man no such question, he said. Then, in a caustic tongue, he asked the woman to go home and look between her thighs. “The witchcraft you put there, that’s what killed your husband’s manhood!”)
Each day, a few men and women joined the Christians. They hungered to experience what it meant to be born anew. The rank of converts swelled daily.
Still, each night, in the secrecy of his hut near the river, Stanton raved, his anger aimed mostly at himself. He sat at his scruffy desk and made agonized entries in his diaries, his hut dully lit with a paraffin lamp. Outside, the darkness engorged everything. The river rumbled, its sound a preternatural beast’s gag after swallowing a huge prey. Goats bleated. Cocks crowed, as if startled awake by terrible dreams. Dogs growled and barked. Crickets buzzed their monotonous trill. The two sentries outside his hut snored like overfed gorillas—as if they were paid to sleep.
Stanton felt himself tainted by the African night, smudged with Africa’s darkness. His mind, alert and rational in the day, strayed at night into superstition. He had wide-eyed dreams that teemed with chimeras, goblins, ghosts, and orgiastic spectacles. Africa afflicted him with insomnia. He’d sit for hours gaping at the lamp’s feeble, flickering tongue of fire. He’d chomp on his nails, paring them until there was only raw flesh, his mind held captive by half-formed, faraway thoughts. Sometimes his gaze wandered from one part of the hut to another. Then he’d fix it again on the lamp. Compelled by the breeze, its light swayed now this way, now that. Shadows filled the hut. Some had thin, oblong shapes, like giant fingers. Other shapes were denser. He watched the shadows twist in the wavering light, their wavy forms giving an illusion of movement. Stanton followed their contortions, riveted. Sometimes he’d mistake or imagine their spry, gossamery shadows as living things, restless, peripatetic, and sinister. It was as if some malevolent presences shared his hut. Other times, he felt that they owned the hut, with him a mere intruder. His heart fluttered, pounded.
After a spell of gazing, Stanton would pick up his quill. He would dip it in ink and begin to scribble. He’d lose himself in long spells of writing, an exercise in self-flagellation and atonement. He confided his frustrations to his diary, transferred his unwept tears to it. He detailed his fears, his faith, the hopes that lifted spirits, and the doubts that weakened his will. He penned sketches of some of his converts and also of some of those he’d failed to draw into Christ’s fold. He wrote copious instructions for those who would succeed him in the vineyard of evangelism. He quivered over his health, which he felt failing, slipping. Gripped by foreboding, he was racked by a sense of death lurking.
Most of all, he grieved over his failures as a missionary. Why hadn’t all of Utonki abandoned its false god and come into God’s fold? Why were the chief priest and his acolytes still holding out, embracers of darkness? Stanton assumed all the guilt. He saw himself as an inept fisher of men. Reluctant to measure himself in the currency of success, he fixated on all the missed opportunities, untaken roads, and forsaken paths. It didn’t matter that his number of converts grew by the day.
The more converts he won, the more viciously doubt stabbed his heart. He was convinced that he’d not done enough for the Lord. When he pondered his life and mission, he glimpsed little glory. In his mind, everything about him hurtled toward darkness and oblivion. When he imagined his future, the dominant image was the end of all light.
Each night, he’d write until his hands became numb. Then he’d collapse on his knees in petrified prayer. “Lord, lift this yoke of sickness from your humble servant,” he’d implore. If only God would spare him, he’d try harder to save all the souls in Utonki.
Stanton sometimes wondered if he had set unreasonable standards for himself.
Upon arrival in Utonki, he had made a solemn pledge to God and Queen. That promise was that, as part of his personal sacrifice in the effort to bring souls to Christ, he would brave the perils and pestilences of Africa, endure the mercilessness of mosquitoes, brook the sun’s tropical blast, and subsist on the native’s spicy and strange menu that gave him recurrent bouts of diarrhea. He would mortify his flesh in any way that was asked of him, and he would persist until Ngene was vanquished, until the true God triumphed. To God and Queen he vowed that, until the last pagan turned away from the blighted path and trod the Way of Light, he would not count his mission fulfilled.
Eight months later, Stanton had a lot to show for his fervor. Many natives had abandoned their deity and embraced the Way. Yet, in the secrecy of his heart, Stanton chafed. He could never forgive himself for falling short of banishing Ngene. His denunciation of Ngene as a powerless, inert idol had struck a chord with many villagers, but he’d fallen short of dethroning the deity. Daily, on his way to the makeshift structure that served as
a church, he crossed paths with many villagers headed for the deity’s shrine. How could he be happy? How avoid the pain that tore at his insides, the pangs that wrenched his soul and mangled his spirits?
Two months after his arrival in Utonki, his interpreter approached him wearing a toothy, satisfied smile. “What’s the matter?” Stanton asked, his face stern. He’d learned to keep Jacob—and other Africans for that matter—at arm’s length. To their sly smiles, he’d learned to return a disinterested expression.
“Our God magic is working,” Jacob said excitedly, in his faltering English.
“What do you mean by that, Jacob?” Stanton asked.
“Many pagans falling, sah. Our Jesus doing excellent magic, sah.”
The statement filled Stanton with rage. He couldn’t decide what riled him more. Was it Jacob’s proprietary claim to a God he had yet to understand? He had a problem with a bloody African, who beneath the skin was probably as benighted as any other pagan, laying a claim to the same God. And in a cavalier, offhand sort of way, too! Or was the offense in Jacob’s devaluation of God as a weaver of magic spells? The implication that the converts had fallen under some spell cast by Jesus galled him. He knew that Jacob was a victim of his grave deficiencies in English. Even so, Stanton believed that the devil could sneak in and speak in different guises.
Unleashing two quick slaps on Jacob’s face, Stanton barked, “Never, ever call my God a magician! And never, ever mention the name Jesus in vain! Vile, heathen pig!” The smile drained away from Jacob’s face.
Later that day, as he sat down to reflect on the incident, Stanton felt that he’d probably overreacted. He even entertained the idea of apologizing to his interpreter, but the temptation passed. What was the injustice of slapping a man unjustly compared with the heresy of reducing God to a magician? And what if Lucifer himself had planted the heretical speech in Jacob’s tongue? It was better, he decided, to err on the side of injustice to man.
Besides, Stanton was in no mood to encourage premature celebration. Arduous labor lay ahead; there were still too many people to evangelize, and too many of the converts seemed in danger still of sliding back into darkness. He was not a man to make peace with failure. Utter failure.
What if his Creator chose, in the midst of his ineptitude, to call him home? With such an unfulfilled task on his plate, he dreaded the prospect of standing before God’s mighty, judgment throne. Why, God would cast him into the dungeon of eternal damnation.
So each evening he bruised his knees in prayer. He beseeched God to show him how to defeat Satan, his works and his idol. He was disconsolate, unable to sleep. In the day, he became a sulking man, prone to outbursts of fury. He took to slapping Jacob more and more. The converts were bewildered. In one breath, their missionary talked to them about peace and love and Christian charity. Then in another he flew into a rage, frothing at the sides of his mouth, slapping thunder into Jacob’s eyes.
In the ninth month of his career as a soul saver in Utonki, Stanton’s inner demons finally crept out to the surface. The converts saw that he’d been left a shell of a man. Pimples rigged his face and formed a mass of ripe pustules. His eyes became puffy, ringed with dark lines. There was a dull discoloration to his skin, as if his body had been emptied of blood.
“What sickness has wrestled the white man to the ground?” a convert asked Jacob one evening. Stanton had sent a message that he couldn’t make it to lead evening prayers.
The interpreter shrugged. He was no encourager when it came to exchanging confidences with converts. He often feigned possession of some succulent bit of information but made it clear he was in no haste to share it with scum like them. He would boast that anybody who spoke the white man’s tongue knew what the white man knew. His design was that the converts would view him as some sort of honorary white man, that they would approach him with the same deference and awe they showed for Stanton. Jacob was confident that he would have carried it off, and with ease, too, if Stanton did not so carelessly berate him and frequently slap him.
“The sickness that would leave a man in such poor shape has come to kill him,” another convert chimed in.
Jacob smirked, then turned away. The expression on his face suggested that he knew some intimate details about Stanton’s health he was not about to divulge.
The next day, Stanton showed up for morning devotions and baptisms. It was as if he’d aged in the hours since the converts last saw him. One among them espied one of the white man’s toenails, hideously swollen. The convert advised that the agnail should be treated with the sap of a certain herb mixed with pepper and honey. When Jacob translated the therapy, Stanton smiled sadly.
“Tell him I’m touched, but that God will take care of his own,” he said coolly.
“The white man said I should warn you and pigs like you,” Jacob said in Igbo. “He said you must keep your stinking foolishness to yourself.”
A murmur of disapprobation swept through the throng.
By the next day, the toe had bloated like a sun-cooked pear. Its size forced Stanton to discard his sandals. He trudged on in an unusually labored gait. The converts were used to him flouncing, walking in short, brisk steps. Now, his heels touched the earth tentatively, lightly. He shambled like a man beset by acute arthritis, each step accompanied by a grimace. One of the converts made him a shabby walking stick. To their surprise, he accepted it. As he lumbered about, he used the stick to balance his weight. It steadied him somewhat but also made his motion awkward. He was no longer able to lunge at Jacob, but the stick came in handy when he wanted to beat the interpreter.
His face became sadder and more swollen. He spat a lot, like a pregnant woman. His skin became a flaxen, wilted flab, sallow and pale. His early morning swims ceased. Tangled knots appeared in his beard and scurf covered his hair.
The physical devastation was not the worst of it. He seemed distracted; often he gazed vacantly ahead, his sight set at nothing. When he spoke, his voice had the faintness of a man in terribly low spirits. Often, he lisped inaudibly. As he couldn’t hear his words, the interpreter began to take liberties. He made up answers to converts’ questions. He heaped abuse on converts, ascribing his venom to Stanton.
Stanton began to skip meals, and his eyes sunk deeper into their sockets. When he looked at people, he gave the impression of moping in a distant, unseeing way, as if his eyes could find no grip. When the converts asked why he didn’t eat, he drew apart his cheeks, revealing stained teeth.
Speculations swarmed among the converts. Was Ngene behind the man’s malaise? Or had he offended the spirits that taught him to hear the speech of wormy symbols in a book? Had he defied a summons back to the land whence he came?
Some converts who knew how to foretell things said that Stanton’s shadow had become leaner, paler on the ground. “It means the silencer of dogs is on his heels,” one of them said lugubriously. “The silencer of dogs” was their polite expression for “death.”
One evening, Stanton finished baptizing five new converts. The cloud of faithlessness had lifted, and his spirits seemed buoyed. Two or three dry days, and then the Holy Spirit had touched three women and two men. They’d raised their hands and asked to be lifted from the yoke of darkness and admitted into the splendor of light. It was a day the Lord had made.
As Stanton turned to retire to his hut, it began to rain. The rain poured down in huge, slanting sheets. Within seconds, he was drenched. The sheets pelted his brow with a heaviness he found altogether new. It was as if the knots of rain were beads flung at his head. He was filled with the oppressive sense that something was terribly wrong.
He walked on. The rain gathered strength. Pools formed everywhere. Small sluices disappeared into larger, speeding pools. Walking in the downpour, he had the impression that he was engaged in futile animation, as if each step he took landed on the same spot. Suddenly, his path darkened. Whether he was nearing his hut, or getting farther away from it, he could not tell.
Then his mi
nd became a whorl, awhirl with a parade of images, faces intimate and shadowy. His parents were the first to amble across the flickering screen in his mind, ghostly in their bone-weary gait. Then his wife and their two boys, their eyes set downward. He desperately wanted to shout out to them, to beckon them to him, but some invisible force gripped his throat in a vice. As he opened his mouth and closed it, wordless, he became aware of murmurs intruding. His family dissolved into oblivion. Next, images from his seminary days flicked past. He saw many of his teachers and fellow seminarians turned out in clerical habits. Their faces radiated holy purpose, something he found himself increasingly unable to summon. Then a succession of fuzzy figures, their faces covered with filmy matter. Finally, a wooden statue, hands spread out as if to embrace him, mouth shaped into an O, strode past, headed in the direction of the river.
“Satan!” Stanton cursed. “Accursed!”
The murmurs became louder. Their sorrowful notes wafted, like smoke, into his consciousness. The rain ceased. He awoke from his spell.
He felt drained. He half expected to see the images still. But Ngene was gone, along with the other images. All around him, he saw eyes. They stabbed him, those eyes. They belonged to his converts, including the five he had just baptized. They stood staring at him. He detected consternation, shame, confusion, and pity in their gazes. His throat tightened. A hint of tears rose in his eyelids. It was indistinguishable from the rainwater that still trickled down his body. He smothered the tears with the back of his hand. He wished he could as easily swipe away the memories of his shame.
Stanton felt an urge to swing the walking stick straight at his own skull. If he could shatter his skull in two, perhaps then God would see his P-A-I-N. The converts, especially the five brand-new ones, would see the tragic majesty of faith. They would have the uncommon luck of starting off their Christian journeys with a martyr as their guardian. They would have stories to tell, witness to bear about a man of God and the blood he shed and the death he died for God. His self-immolation in order to give God all he had. Smash this skull, he commanded his hand. His hand defied his heart. He limped away to his hut.
