The Poisonwood Bible

by Barbara Kingsolver

384

  eat and children who might outlive us. My life was a business of growing where planted and making good on the debts life gathered onto me. Companionship and joy came unexpectedly, mostly in small, exploding moments when I was apart from my husband and children. A kiss of flesh-colored sunrise while I hung out the wash, a sigh of indigo birds exhaled from the grass. An okapi at the water. It didn't occur to me to leave Nathan on account of unhappiness, any more than Tata Mwanza would have left his disfigured wife, though a more able woman might have grown more manioc and kept more of his children alive. Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. And it happened finally by the grace of hell and brimstone that I had to keep moving. I moved, and he stood still.

  But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. "Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them. The Pharaoh died,sxys Exodus, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of their bondage. Chains rattle, rivers roll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Even a language won't stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze. Washington crossing the Delaware. The capture of Okinawa. They're desperate to hang on.

  But they can't. Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land. What does Okinawa remember of its fall? Forbidden to make engines of war, Japan made automobiles instead, and won the world. It all moves on. The great Delaware rolls on, while Mr. Washington himself is no longer even what you'd call good compost. The Congo River, being of a differ-

  EXODUS 385

  ent temperament, drowned most of its conquerors outright. In Congo a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own. If you are the eyes in the trees, watching us as we walk away from Kilanga, how will you make your judgment? Lord knows after thirty years I still crave your forgiveness, but who are you'? A small burial mound in the middle of Nathan's garden, where vines and flowers have long since unrolled to feed insects and children. Is that what you are? Are you still my own flesh and blood, my last-born, or are you now the flesh of Africa? How can I tell the difference when the two rivers have run together so? Try to imagine what never happened: our family without Africa, or the Africa that would have been without us. Look at your sisters now. Lock, stock, and barrel, they've got their own three ways to live with our history. Some can find it. Many more never do. But which one among us is without sin? I can hardly think where to cast my stones, so I just go on keening for my own losses, trying to wear the marks of the boot on my back as gracefully as the Congo wears hers.

  My little beast, my eyes, my favorite stolen egg. Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

  What We Carried Out

  Leak Price

  BULUNGU, LATE RAINY SEASON 1961

  WE ONLY TOOK what we could carry on our backs. Mother never once turned around to look over her shoulder. I don't know what would have become of us if it hadn't been for Mama Mwanza's daughters, who came running after us, bringing oranges and a demijohn of water. They knew we'd get thirsty, even though the rain hammered our shirts to our backs and chilled us right through the skin, and being thirsty ever again seemed out of the question. Either we'd never known such rain, or we'd forgotten. In just the few hours since the storm broke, the parched road through our village had become a gushing stream of mud, blood-red, throbbing like an artery. We couldn't walk in it at all, and could barely keep our footing on the grassy banks beside it. A day ago we'd have given up our teeth for a good rain, and now we gnashed them in frustration over the deluge. If only we'd had a boat, it seemed possible we could ride the waves straight to Leopoldville. That's the Congo for you: famine or flood. It has been raining ever since.

  Late that afternoon as we trudged along we spotted a bright bouquet of color up ahead, glowing dimly through the rain. Eventually I recognized the huge pink starburst across the rump of Mama Boanda. She, Mama Lo, and several others huddled together beside the road under elephant-ear leaves, waiting out a particularly fierce

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  spell of the downpour. They motioned us into their shelter and we joined them, stupefied by the rain. It's hard to believe any water on earth could be so unequivocal. I put out my hand and watched it disappear at the end of my arm. The noise on our heads was a white roar that drew us together in our small shelter of leaves. I let my mind drift into a pleasant nowhere as I breathed the manias' peanut-and-manioc scent. The upright sprigs of Mama Boanda's hair dripped from their ends, like a tiny garden of leaking hoses.

  When it slowed back down to mere cloudburst, we set off together. The women carried leaf-wrapped packets of manioc and other things on their heads, food they were taking to their husbands in Bulungu, they said. A large political meeting was going on there. Mama Lo also had palm oil to sell in Bulungu. She balanced the immense rectangular can of oil on her head while she chatted with me, and looked so comfortable at it that I tried placing my plastic demijohn on my own head. To my great surprise I found I could keep it there as long as I had one hand on it. In all our time in the Congo I'd been awestruck by what the ladies could carry this way, but had never once tried it myself. What a revelation, that I could carry my own parcel like any woman here! After the first several miles I ceased to feel the weight on my head at all.

  With no men around, everyone was surprisingly lighthearted. It was contagious somehow. We laughed at the unladylike ways we all sank into the mud. Every so often the women also sang together in little shouted bursts of call and response.Whenever I recognized the tune, I joined in. Father's mission had been a success in at least one regard: the Congolese loved our music. They could work miracles with "Soldiers of the Cross" in their own language. Even that most doleful of Christian laments�"Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen"�sounded snappy and upbeat through these women's windpipes as they sauntered along: "Nani oze mpasi zazol Nani oze mpasi!" We had seen trouble beyond compare, but in that moment as we marched along with rain streaming off the ends of our hair, it felt like we were out on a grand adventure together. Our own particular Price family sadness seemed to belong to another time that

  EXODUS . 391

  we didn't need to think about anymore. Only once I realized I was looking around for Ruth May, wondering whether she was warm enough or needed my extra shirt. Then I thought with astonishment, Why, Ruth May is no longer with us! It seemed very simple. We were walking along this road, and she wasn't with us.

  My mind wandered around a great deal, until it found Anatole. I had peculiar thoughts weighing on me that I badly needed to tell him. That the inside of a green mamba's mouth is pure sky-blue, for example. And that we'd strewn ashes on the floor like Daniel, capturing the six-toed footprints, which I had not mentioned to anybody. Anatole might not be safe in Kilanga, any more than we were. But perhaps nobody was safe, with so many things getting turned upside-down. What was the purpose of the political meeting in Bulungu? Who was the secretive man Adah had seen in Axelroot's shack, laughing about orders from President Eisenhower? Did they truly mean to kill Lumumba? As we passed through the forest we heard gunfire in the distance, but none of the women spoke of it, so we didn't either.

  The road followed the
Kwilu River upstream. I spent our year in Kilanga thinking of civilization as lying downstream from us, since that was the way the boats went to Banningville. But when Mother set out from the village on foot she'd asked some of our neighbors which way led to Leopoldville and they'd all agreed, upstream was the best.They said in two days we would get to Bulungu.There the path joined up with a larger road going west, overland, toward the capital. There would be trucks, the neighbor women said. Probably we could find a ride. Mother had asked the women, Did they ever take the road to Leopoldville? And they looked at each other, surprised at this odd question. No. The answer was no, they'd had no reason to go that way. But they were certain we would have a pleasant trip.

  In fact our shoes filled with mud and our clothes turned to slime, and it was the farthest thing from pleasant. Mosquitoes that had lain dormant through the long drought now hatched and rose from the forest floor in clouds so thick they filled our mouths and nostrils. I

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  learned to draw back my lips and breathe slowly through my teeth, so I wouldn't choke on mosquitoes.When they'd covered our hands and faces with red welts they flew up our sleeves and needled our armpits. We scratched ourselves raw. There were always more mosquitoes rising up from the road like great columns of smoke, always moving ahead of us, and we dreaded them. But by putting one foot ahead of the other we traveled farther in one day than we ever had thought to go before.

  Some time after dark we arrived in the small village of Kiala. Mama Boanda invited us to come to the house where her mother and father lived with two unmarried sisters, who appeared to be twenty years older than Mama Boanda. We couldn't really get straight whether they were actually sisters, aunts, or what. But, oh, were we happy to come in out of the rain! Cows rescued from the slaughter could not have been happier. We squatted around the family's large kettle and ate_/w/w and nsaki greens with our fingers. Mama Boanda's ancient parents looked just alike, both of them tiny, bald, and perfectly toothless. The tata stared out the doorway with indifference, but the mama paid attention and nodded earnestly while Mama Boanda chattered on and on with a very long story. It was about us, we realized, since we heard the word nyoka�snake� many times, and also the word Jesus. When the story ended, the old woman studied my mother for a long time while she wrapped and rewrapped her faded blue pagne over her flat chest. After a time she sighed and went out into the rain, returning shortly with a hard-boiled egg. She presented it to my mother and motioned for us to eat it. Mother peeled the egg and we divided it, crumbling it carefully from hand to mouth while the others watched us closely, as if expecting immediate results. I have no idea whether this treasured egg was meant as a special cure for sorrow, or if they merely thought we needed the protein to sustain our dreadful journey.

  We all shook from exhaustion.The rain and mud had made every mile into ten. Adah's weak side was overtaken by convulsive trembling, and Rachel seemed to be in a trance. The old woman worried aloud to her daughter that the guests might die in her house;

  I

  EXODUS 393

  this kind of thing was felt to be bad luck. But she didn't throw us out, and we were grateful. With slow, deliberate movements of her bone-thin arms, she plucked up sticks from a pile near the door and started a fire to warm us, right inside the hut. The smoke made it hard to breathe but did give us relief from the mosquitoes. We wrapped ourselves in the extra pagnes offered to us as blankets, and settled down on the floor to sleep among strangers.

  The night was pitch-dark. I listened to the pounding rain on the thatch and the quiet drips that leaked through, and only then did I think of Father. "They say you thatched your roof and new you must not run out of your house if it rains. "Father was no longer with us. Father and Ruth May both, as simple as that. My mind ached like a broken bone as I struggled to stand in the new place I found myself. I wouldn't see my baby sister again, this I knew. But I hadn't yet considered the loss of my father. I'd walked in his footsteps my whole life, and now without warning my body had fallen in line behind my mother. A woman whose flank and jaw glinted hard as salt when she knelt around a fire with other women; 'whose pale eyes were fixed on a distance where he couldn't follow. Father wouldn't leave his post to come after us, that much was certain. He wasn't capable of any action that might be seen as cowardice by his God. And no God, in any heart on this earth, was ever more on the lookout for human failing.

  Out of the thunderous rain the words came to my ears in Ana-tole's serene, particular voice: You must not run out of your house if it rains. Anatole translated the rage of a village into one quiet sentence that could pin a strong-willed man to the ground. It is surprising how my mother and father hardened so differently, when they turned to stone.

  I imagined him still standing in our yard, frozen under the deluge, baptizing an endless circle of children, who would slip away and return with new faces requiring his blessing. I'd never understood the size of my father's task in the world. The size, or the terrible extravagance. I fell in and out of sleep under a strange dream of awful weight that I had to move to free myself. A mountain of

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  hard-boiled eggs that turned into children when my hands touched them, dark-eyed children whose faces begged me for a handful of powdered milk, my clothes, whatever I had. But I've brought nothing to give you, I told them, and my heart took me down like a lead weight, for no matter whether these words were true or false, they were terrible and wrong. Each time I drifted off I sank down again through the feverish damp scent and dark blue hopelessness of this awful dream. Finally I shuddered it off and lay sleepless, hugging around my shoulders a thin cotton cloth that smelled of sweat and smoke. With exhaustion for company, I listened to the pounding rain. I would walk in no one's footsteps now. How could I follow my mother out of here now, and run away from -what we'd done? But after what we'd done, how could I stay?

  We didn't reach Bulungu on the second day, and on the third we came down with a fever. Our bodies finally surrendered to the overpowering assault of mosquitoes. For all these months I'd imagined malaria as a stealthy, secret enemy, but now that it was fully upon me it was as real as anything. I could feel the poison move through my bloodstream like thick, tainted honey. I pictured it as yellow in color. At first I was terrified, shaking with the cold and the panicky flight of my heart, which seemed to be drowning as the poison rose up in my chest. But even if I could have attached words to my terror, there was no one to hear them. The rain on our heads dashed all other sound. On and on we walked, straight through fatigue and far, far beyond it. In time I arrived at a strange, sluggish calm. I imagined honey-colored parasites celebrating in my golden-tinted organs as I alternately froze and burned. When I discovered my face was hot as a stove, I happily used it to warm my freezing hands. The rain turned to ice as it lashed my arms. The trees began to burn with a pinkish aura that soothed my eyes. I lost one of my shoes in the mud, and failed to care. Then I lost the other. My legs began to fold strangely under me. At some point I lay down in an irresistible hollow at the base of a tree and urged Mother and the others to go on without me.

  EXODUS 395

  I have no recollection of arriving in Bulungu. I'm told I was carried on a pallet by some men who met us coming out of the jungle from a camp where they made charcoal during the dry season. I owe them my life, and regret that I can't recall a face or voice or even the rhythm of their step as they carried me. I worry that I might have been indecent to them, yelling insults as Ruth May sometimes did when she was delirious with malaria fever. I suppose I'll never know.

  Bulungu was a whirl of excitement, which I took in gradually, thinking it must be due to our arrival. That we were an unlikely cause for celebration didn't occur to me, since I was surrounded by so many other entirely improbable things: men beating drums and dancing with the crowns of palm trees sprouting out of their heads, for example. Women with iridescent feathers on their heads and trailing down their spines. Eeben Axelroot's airplane with coro
nas of flame dancing around the wings as it touched down on a field of waving pink grass. Later on, in the dark shelter of someone's house where we were staying, I watched the man Axelroot bizarrely transformed. The Underwood devil's horns glowed through his slicked-down hair, as he sat in front of the window facing my mother. A living tail crept like a secretive velvet snake through the rungs of the chair behind him. I couldn't take my eyes off that sinister restlessness. He held the tail in his left hand, trying to quiet it down as he talked. Discussing Rachel. Mother's profile in the window turned to salt crystal, reflecting all light.

  Other people came and went through the darkness where I lay under thatch, sheltered in my cave of dreams and rain. Sometimes I recognized Grandfather Wharton by my bed, patiently waiting for me to take my turn. With a guilty shock I saw we were playing checkers and I wasn't holding up my end. Grandfather told me in the most offhand manner that we'd both died.

  My father came only once, with blue flames curling from his eyebrows and tongue: Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. The thin blue line of words rose straight up from his lips through the air. I watched, entranced. At

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  the point where they touched the thatched ceiling, they became a line of ants. Morning and dusk and morning again I watched them trailing up to a hole in the peak of the roof, carrying their tiny burdens out into the light.

  Nothing here has surprised me. Least of all, the presence of Ana-tole Ngemba. One morning he was here, and every day after that, holding a burning tin cup of bitter tea to my mouth and repeating my name: "Beene-beene." The truest truth. For my whole sixteen years I've rarely thought I was worth much more than a distracted grumble from God. But now in my shelter of all things impossible, I drift in a warm bath of forgiveness, and it seems pointless to resist. I have no energy for improving myself. If Anatole can wrap all my rattlebone sins in a blanket and call me goodness itself, why then I'll just believe him.