The Poisonwood Bible

by Barbara Kingsolver

Finally he sent Leah in, but long after dinner we could still hear the Reverend out there beating the ground with his hoe, revising the earth. No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds.

  Leak

  IT ONLY TAKES FIVE DAYS in hot weather for- a Kentucky Wonder bean to gather up its vegetable willpower and germinate. That was all we thought we needed. Once the rains abated, imy father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper. He loved to stand out there just watching things grow, he said, and you could believe it.The beanstalks twisted around the sapling teepees he'd built for them, and then they wavered higher and higher like ladies' voices in the choir, each one vying for the top. They reached out for the branches of nearby trees and twined up into the canopy.

  The pumpkin vines also took on the personality of jungle plants. Their leaves grew so strangely enormous Ruth May could sit still under them and win at "Hide and Seek" for a very long time after the rest of us had stopped playing. When we squatted down we could see, alongside Ruth May's wide blue eyes, yellow blossoms of cucumber and squash peering out from the leafy darkness.

  My father witnessed the progress of every new leaf and fat flower bud. I valked behind him, careful not to itrample the vines. I helped him construct a sturdy stick barricade around the periphery so the jungle animals and village goats would mot come in and wreck our tender vegetables when they came. Mother claims I have the manners of a wild animal myself, as I am a toimboy, but I never fail to be respectful of my father's garden. His devotion to its progress, like his devotion to the church, was the anchoring force in my life throughout this past summer. I knew my father icould taste those Kentucky Wonder beans as surely as any pure soul can taste heaven.

  GENESIS 65

  Rachel's birthday came in late August, but the Betty Crocker cake mix let us all down. Normal cake production proved out of the question.

  To begin with, our stove is an iron contraption with a firebox so immense a person could climb right in if they felt like it. Mother yanked Ruth May out by the arm, pretty hard, when she found her in there; she dreaded that Mama Tataba in one of her energetic fits might stoke up the stove with the baby inside. It was a sensible concern. Ruth May is so intent on winning Hide and Seek, or any game for that matter, she would probably go ahead and burn up before she'd ever yell and give herself away.

  Mother has figured out how to make bread "by hook or by crook," she likes to say, but the stove doesn't really have a proper oven. In fact, it looks less like a stove than a machine hammered together out of some other machine. Rachel says it was part of a locomotive train, but she is famous for making things up out of thin air and stating them in a high, knowing tone.

  The stove wasn't even the worst of our cake troubles. In the powerful humidity the powdered mix got transfigured like Lot's poor wife who looked back at Gomorrah and got turned to a pillar of salt. On the morning of Rachel's birthday I found Mother out in the kitchen house with her head in her hands, crying. She picked up the box and banged it hard against the iron stove, just once, to show me. It clanged like a hammer on a bell. Her way of telling a parable is different from my father's.

  "If I'd of had the foggiest idea," she said very steadily, holding her pale, weeping eyes on me, "just the foggiest idea. We brought all the wrong things."

  The first time my father heard Methuselah say, "Damn," his body moved strangely, as if he'd received the spirit or a twinge of bad heartburn. Mother excused herself and went in the house.

  Rachel, Adah, and I were left on the porch, and he looked at each one of us in turn. We had known him to forbear with a silent grimace when Methuselah said, "Piss off," but of course that was the

  THE POISONWOOD BIBLE

  66

  doing of Brother Fowles. The mote in his brother's eye, not the sin of his own household. Methuselah had never said "Damn" before, so this was something new, spoken right out very chipper in a feminine tone of voice.

  "Which one of you taught Methuselah to say that word?" he

  demanded.

  I felt sick to my stomach. None of us spoke. For Adah that's normal, of course, and for that very reason she often gets accused when none of us speaks up. And truthfully, if any of us was disposed to use curse words, it would be Adah, who could not care less about sin and salvation. That's the main reason I got Mother to cut my hair in a pixie, while Adah kept hers long: so nobody would get our attitudes mixed up. I myself would not curse, in or out of Methuselah's hearing or even in my dreams, because I crave heaven and to he my father's favorite. And Rachel wouldn't�she'll let out a disgusted "Jeez" or "Gol!" when she can, but is mainly a perfect lady when anybody's listening. And Ruth May is plain too little.

  "I fail to understand," said Father, who understands everything, "why you would have a poor dumb creature condemn us all to

  eternal suffering."

  I'll tell you what, though, Methuselah is not dumb. He imitates not just words, but the voices of people that spoke them. From Methuselah we have learned the Irish-Yankee voice of Brother Fowles, whom we picture as looking like that Father Flanagan that runs the Boys Town. We could also recognize MamaTataba, and ourselves. Furthermore, Methuselah didn't just imitate words, he knew them. It's one thing simply to call out, "Sister, God is great! Shut the door!" when the spirit moves him, but he'll also call out "banana" and "peanut" as plain as day, when he sees these things in our hands and wants his share. Oftentimes he studies us, copying our movements, and he seems to know which words will provoke us to laugh or talk back to him, or be shocked. We already understood what was now dawning on my father: Methuselah could betray our secrets.

  I didn't say so, of course. I haven't contradicted my father on any subject, ever.� : ,

  GENESIS 67

  Rachel finally blurted out, "Father, we're sorry."

  Adah and I pretended to be fascinated by our books.We brought our schoolbooks with us and study them whenever Mother threatens we're going to fall behind and wear the dunce cap when we go home, which there's no chance of really, except for Rachel, who is the one stubbornly mediocre mentality in our family. I think our mother is really just afraid we're going to forget about normal things like George Washington crossing the Delaware and autumn leaves and a train speeding west toward St. Louis at sixty-five miles per hour.!,,

  I peeped up from my book. Oh, dear Lord. He was staring directly at me. My heart palpitated fiercely.

  "The Lord will forgive you if you ask," he said, very disgusted and quiet, the tone of voice that makes me feel worse than any other. "Our Lord is benevolent. But that poor African bird can't be relieved of what you've taught it. It's an innocent creature that can only repeat what it hears. The damage is done." He started to turn away from us. We held our breath as he paused on the steps and looked back, right in my eyes. I burned with shame.

  "If there's anything to be learned from this," he said, "it's about the stink and taint of original sin. I expect you'd better think about that while you do The Verse." Our hearts fell. "All three of you," he said. "Book of Numbers, twenty-nine thirty-four."

  Then he walked off abruptly, leaving us like orphans on the porch.

  The thought of spending the rest of the day copying out the tedious Book of Numbers sobered me deeply as I watched my father go. He directed his stride toward the river. He'd been going down there nearly every day, tearing his walking stick into the elephant-ear leaves that curtained the riverbank. He was scouting out baptismal sites.

  I already knew how Numbers 29:34 came out, as I'd gotten it before.The hundredth verse winds up at 32:32, with how when you sin against the Lord you get found out, and to watch what proceeds out of your mouth.

  THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 68

  I hadn't
even considered the irreversible spoiling of Methuselah's innocence, which just goes to show I have much to learn. But I'll admit I prayed that afternoon that Father had taken Rachel's apology as a confession, so he wouldn't think the sin was mine. It was hard, accepting his accusations by keeping silent. We all knew very well who'd been the one to yell that word Damn! She'd said it over and over when she wept over the wreck of her useless cake mixes. But none of us could let him in on that awful secret. Not even me�and I know I'm the one to turn my back on her the most.

  Once in a great while we just have to protect her. Even back when we were very young I remember running to throw my arms around Mother's knees when he regaled her with words and worse, for curtains unclosed or slips showing�the sins of womanhood. We could see early on that all grown-ups aren't equally immune to damage. My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's foot soldiers, while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit. The whole time Father was interrogating us on the porch, in my mind's eye I was seeing her slumped over in the kitchen house, banging in mortal frustration against that locomotive engine of a stove. In her hand, Rachel's Angel Dream cake mix, hard as a rock; in her heart, its heavenly, pink-frosted perfection, its candles ablaze, brought proudly to the table on that precious bone-china platter with the blue flowers. She'd been keeping it a secret, but Mother was going to try and have a real sweet-

  sixteen party for Rachel.

  But Angel Dream was the wrong thing, the wrong thing by a mile. I'd carried it over in my own waistband, so it seemed like some part of the responsibility was mine.

  Adah

  HOLY FATHER, bless us and keep us in Thy sight," the Reverend said. Sight Thy blessed father holy. And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed. The Reverend towered over the rickety altar, his fiery crew cut bristling like a woodpeckers cockade. When the Spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into this weekly purge.The "Amen enema," as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend.

  Mama Tataba's body next to mine in the pew, meanwhile, was a thing gone dead. Her stiffness reminded me of all the fish lying curved and stiff on the riverbanks, flaking in the sun like old white bars of soap. All because of the modern style of fishing Our Father dreamed up.The Reverend's high-horse show of force. He ordered men to go out in canoes and pitch dynamite in the river, stupefying everything within earshot. Shot ears. Now, where did he get dynamite? Certainly none of us carried it over here in our drawers. So from Eeben Axel-root, I have to think, for a large sum of money. Our family receives a stipend of $50 a month for being missionaries. This is not the regular Baptist stipend; Our Father is a renegade who came without the entire blessing of the Mission League, and bullied or finagled his way into this lesser stipend. Even so, it is a lot of Congolese francs and would be a Congolese fortune if that were that, but it is not. The money comes in an envelope on the plane, brought by Eeben Axel-root and to Eeben Axelroot it mostly returns. Ashes to ashes.

  I

  THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 70

  To Kilanga's hungry people Our Father promised at summer's end the bounty of the Lord, more fish than they had ever seen in their lives. "The word of Christ is beloved!" he cries, standing up precariously in his boat."7ita Jesus is bangala!" So determined he is to win or force or drag them over to the Way of the Cross. Feed the belly first, he announced at dinner one night, seized with his brilliant plan. Feed the belly and the soul will come. (Not having noticed, for a wife is beneath notice, that this is exactly what our mother did when she killed all the chickens.) But after the underwater thunder, what came was not souls but fish. They came rolling to the surface with mouths opened wide by that shocking boom. Round shocked bubbles for eyes. The whole village feasted all day, ate, ate till we felt bug-eyed and belly-up ourselves. He performed a backward version of the loaves and fishes, trying to stuff ten thousand fish into fifty mouths, did the Reverend Price. Slogging up and down the riverbank in trousers wet to the knees, his Bible in one hand and another stickful of fire-blackened fish in the other, he waved his bounty in a threatening manner. Thousands more fish jerked in the sun and went bad along the riverbanks. Our village was blessed for weeks with the smell of putrefaction. Instead of abundance it was a holiday of waste. No ice. Our Father forgot, for fishing in the style of modern redneck Georgia you need your ice.

  He was not going to bring up the loaves and fishes in today's sermon, was a good guess. He would merely give out the communion with the usual disturbing allusions to eating flesh and drinking blood. Perhaps this perked up congregational interest, but we Price girls all listened with half an ear between us. And Adah with her half a brain. Hah. The church service lasts twice as long now because the Reverend has to say it once in English, and then the schoolteacher Tata Anatole repeats it all in Kikongo. Our Father finally caught on, nobody was understanding his horrible stabs at French or Kikongo, either one.

  "It was lawlessness that came forth from Babylon! Law less ness!" declared the Reverend, waving an arm impressively toward Babylon as if that turbulent locale lurked just behind the school latrine.

  GENESIS 71

  Through the bedraggled roof a ray of sun fell like God's spotlight across his right shoulder. He paced, paused, spoke, and paced behind his palm-leaf altar, giving every impression he was inventing his Biblical parables on the spot. This morning he was spinning the tale of Susanna, beautiful and pious wife of the rich man Joakim. Annasus ho! While she bathed in the garden, two of Joakim's advisors spied her naked and cooked up their vile plan. They leaped from the bushes and demanded that she lie down with them. Poor Susanna. If she refused they would bear false witness against her, claiming they caught her in the garden with a man. Naturally the righteous Susanna refused them, even though this meant she would be accused and stoned for adultery. Stoning moaning owning deboning. We were not supposed to wonder what kind of husband was this Joakim, who would kill his own lovely wife rather than listen to her side of the story. No doubt the Babylonians were already out scouting around for their favorite rocks.

  The Reverend paused, resting one hand flat on the altar. The rest of his body rocked almost imperceptibly inside his white shirt, marking time, keeping his rhythm. He scrutinized his parishioners' blank faces for signs that they were on the edge of their seats. There were eleven or twelve new faces now, a regular stampede to glory. A boy near me with his mouth hanging open closed one eye, then the other, back and forth. We all waited for Tata Anatole the school-teacher-translator to catch up.

  "But God would not let this happen," the Reverend growled, like a dog awakened by a prowler. Then rising an octave like "The Star-Spangled Banner": "God stirred up the holy spirit of a man named Daniel!"

  Oh, hooray, Daniel to the rescue. Our Father loves Daniel, the original Private Eye. Tata Daniel (he called him, to make him seem like a local boy) stepped in and demanded to question the two advisors separately. Tata Daniel asked them what kind of tree Susanna was supposedly standing under when she met this man in the garden. "Um, a mastic tree," said one, and the other, "Well, gee, I guess it was a live oak." How stupid, that they had not even con-

  I

  THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 72

  spired to get their story straight. All the evildoers in the Bible seem

  spectacularly dumb.

  I watched Tata Anatole, expecting him at least to stumble over "mastic" and "live oak," as there could not possibly be words for these trees in Kikongo. He did not pause. Kufwema, kuzikisa, kugam-bula, smoothly the -words rolled forward and I realized this slick trick schoolteacher could be saying anything under the sun. Our father would never be the wiser. So they stoned the dame and married two more wives apiece and lived happily ever after. I yawned, uninspired yet again by the pious and beautiful Susanna. I was unlikely ever to

  have her problems.

  In my mind I inven
ted snmyhymns, as I call them, my own perverse hymns that can be sung equally well forward or backward: Evil, all its sin is still alive! Also I made use of this rare opportunity to inspect MamaTataba at close range. Normally she moved much too fast. I considered her my ally because, like me, she was imperfect. It was hard to say what she ever thought of Our Father's benedictions, in church or out, so I pondered more interesting mysteries, such as her eye. How did she lose it? Was she exempt from marriage because of it, as I presumed myself to be? I had little idea of her age or hopes. I did know that many women in Kilanga were more seriously disfigured and had husbands notwithstanding. Standing with naught. Husbands. Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace. In the way of the body and other people's judgment I enjoy a benign approval in Kilanga that I have never, ever known in Bethlehem, Georgia.

  We finished off Susanna by singing "Amazing Grace" at the speed of a dirge. The ragtag congregation chimed in with every sort of word and tune. Oh, we were a regular Tower of Babel here at the First Baptist Church of Kilanga, so no one noticed that I mouthed my own words to the proper tune:

  Evil, all . . . its sin . . . is still. . . alive!

  Do go . . . Tata . . . to God!

  Sugar don't . . . No, drag us-

  GENESIS 73

  drawn onward,

  A, he rose ... ye eyesore, ha!

  When church was over Mama Tataba took us back to the house, while the clever Reverend and his wife stayed behind to smile and shake hands and bask in the general holiness. MamaTataba stomped down the path ahead of my sisters and me. Bringing up the rear, I concentrated on trying to pass up the dawdling Rachel, who walked with her hands held out slightly from her thighs as if she had once again, as usual, been crowned Miss America. "Hold your hands like you've just dropped a marble," she instructs us generally as she fashion-models her way through the house. In spite of all that stateliness, I could not catch up. So I watched an orange-and-white butterfly that hovered over her and finally lit on her white head. The butterfly poked its tiny proboscis down into her hair, probing for nurture, then flew away unsatisfied. Mama Tataba saw none of these events. She was in a bad mood and shouted at us confidentially, "Reverant Price he better be give that up!" Flesh eating and blood drinking, did she mean? The sermon had meandered from the pious Susanna to Rahab, the harlot of Jericho. So many Biblical names sound backward, like Rahab, I wonder sometimes if the whole thing was written by a mental freak like me. But in the end he got around to emphasizing baptism, as always. This was likely what disturbed Mama Tataba. Our Father could not seem to accept what seemed clear enough even to a child: when he showered the idea of baptism�batiza�on people here, it shrunk them away like water on a witch.