The Poisonwood Bible

Book Four. BEL AND THE SERPENT

Orleanna Price

SANDERLING ISLAND

THE STING OF A FLY, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.

Maybe it was just a chance meeting. A Belgian and an American, let’s say, two old friends with a hunger in common, a hand in the diamond business. A fly buzzes and lights. They swat it away and step into the Belgian’s meticulously polished office in Elisabethville. They’re careful to ask after each other’s families and profits, and to speak of how they are living in a time of great change, great opportunity. A map of the Congo lies on the mahogany table between them. While they talk of labor and foreign currency their hunger moves apart from the gentlemanly conversation with a will of its own, licking at the edges of the map on the table, dividing it between them. They take turns leaning forward to point out their moves with shrewd congeniality, playing it like a chess match, the kind of game that allows civilized men to play at make-believe murder. Between moves they tip their heads back, swirl blood-colored brandy in glass globes and watch it crawl down the curved glass in liquid veins. Languidly they bring their map to order. Who will be the kings, the rooks, and bishops rising up to strike at a distance? Which sacrificial pawns will be swept aside? African names roll apart like the heads of dried flowers crushed idly between thumb and forefinger-Ngoma, Mukenge, Mulele, Kasavubu, Lumumba. They crumble to dust on the carpet.

Behind the gentlemen’s barbered heads, dark mahogany planks stand at attention. The paneling of this office once breathed the humid air of a Congolese forest, gave shelter to life, felt the scales of snake belly on its branches. Now the planks hold their breath, with their backs to the wall. So do the mounted heads of rhinoceros and cheetah, evidence of the Belgian’s skill as a sport hunter. Cut down, they are now mute spies in the house built by foreigners. Outside the window palm fronds rattle in a rising wind. An automobile creeps past. Leaves of unraveling newspaper blow into the rank water that runs in an open ditch; the newspaper wheels along the street, scattering its sheets onto the water, where they float as translucent squares of lace. No one can say whether it’s good news or bad. A woman strides alongside the ditch under her basket of roasted corn. When the Belgian rises to close the window, the scent of all this reaches him: the storm, the ditch, the woman with the corn. He shuts the window and returns to the world of his own making. The curtains are damask. The carpet is Turkish. The clock on the table is German, old but still accurate. The heads on the wall observe with eyes of imported glass. The perfect timepiece ticks, and in that small space between seconds the fancy has turned to fact.

Given time, legions of men are drawn into the game, both ebony and ivory: the Congo’s CIA station chief, the National Security Council, even the President of the United States. And a young Congolese man named Joseph Mobutu, who’d walked barefoot into a newspaper office to complain about the food he was getting in the army. A Belgian newspaperman there recognized wit and raw avarice-a useful combination in any game. He took this young Mobutu under his wing and taught him to navigate the airy heights where foreigners dwell. A rook who would be king. And the piece that will fall? Patrice Lumumba, a postal worker elected to head his nation.The Belgians and Americans agree, Lumumba is difficult. Altogether too exciting to the Congolese, and disinclined to let White control the board, preferring the counsel and company of Black.

The players move swiftly and in secret. Each broad turn sweeps across rivers, forests, continents, and oceans, -witnessed only by foreign glass eyes and once-mighty native trees cut away from their roots.

I’ve surmised this scene, assembled it piece by piece over many years from the things I read, when it all began to come out. I try to imagine these men and their game, for it helps place my own regrettable acts on a broader field, where they seem smaller. What trivial thing was I doing “while they divided the map beneath my feet? Who was the woman walking by with the roasted corn? Might she have been some distant kin of someone I haggled with on market days? How is it that neither of us knew the ways of the world for so long?

Fifteen years after Independence, in 1975, a group of Senators called the Church Committee took it upon themselves to look into the secret operations that had been brought to bear on the Congo. The world rocked with surprise. The Church Committee found notes from secret meetings of the National Security Council and President Eisenhower. In their locked room, these men had put their heads together and proclaimed Patrice Lumumba a danger to the safety of the world. The same Patrice Lumumba, mind you, who washed his face each morning from a dented tin bowl, relieved himself in a carefully chosen bush, and went out to seek the faces of his nation. Imagine if he could have heard those words-dangerous to the safety of the world!-from a roomful of white men who held in their manicured hands the disposition of armies and atomic bombs, the power to extinguish every life on earth. Would Lumumba have screamed like a cheetah? Or merely taken off his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, shaken his head, and smiled?

On a day late in August, 1960, a Mr. Allen Dulles, who was in charge of the CIA, sent a telegram to his Congolese station chief suggesting that he replace the Congolese government at his earliest convenience. The station chief, Mr. Lawrence Devlin, was instructed to take as bold an action as he could keep secret: a coup would be all right. There would be money forthcoming to pay soldiers for that purpose. But assassination might be less costly. A gang of men quick with guns and unfettered by conscience were at his disposal. Also, to cover all bases, a scientist named Dr. Gottlieb was hired to make a poison that would produce such a dreadful disease (the good doctor later testified in the hearings), if it didn’t kill Lumumba outright it would leave him so disfigured that he couldn’t possibly be a leader of men.

On the same August day, this is all I knew: the pain in my household seemed plenty large enough to fill the whole world. Ruth May was slipping away into her fever. And it was Rachel’s seventeenth birthday. I was wrapping up green glass earrings in tissue paper, hoping to make some small peace with my eldest child, while I tried to sponge the fire out of my youngest. And President Eisenhower was right then sending his orders to take over the Congo. Imagine that. His household was the world, and he’d finished making up his mind about things. He’d given Lumumba a chance, he felt. The Congo had been independent for fifty-one days.

Mr. Devlin and his friends sat down with the ambitious young Mobutu, who’d been promoted to colonel. On September 10, they provided one million dollars in UN money for the purpose of buying loyalty, and the State Department completed its plans for a coup that would put Mobutu in charge of the entire army. All the ducks were lined up. On September 14, the army took control of the momentarily independent Republic of Congo, and Lumumba was put under house arrest in Leopoldville, surrounded by Mobutu’s freshly purchased soldiers.

Throughout those days, while we scratched and haggled for our daily bread, I had a photograph of President Elsenhower for company in my kitchen house. I’d cut it out of a magazine and nailed it over the plank counter where I kneaded the bread. It was so much a part of my life I remember every detail of him: the clear-rimmed glasses and spotted tie, the broad smile, the grandfatherly bald head like a warm, bright light bulb. He looked so trustworthy and kind. A beacon from home, reminding me of our purpose.

On November 27, very early in the day, probably while I was stoking our woodstove for breakfast, Lumumba escaped. He was secretly helped along by a net of supporters stretching wide across the Congo, from Leopoldville to our own village and far beyond. Of course, no one spoke to me about it. We’d only heard faint rumors that Lumumba was in trouble. Frankly, we were more interested in the news that heavy rain was falling to the west of us and might soon reach our own parched village. The rain provided the Prime Minister’s cover, as it turned out. Leopoldville had been drenched the previous night. I can imagine the silk texture of that cool air, the smell of Congolese earth curling its toes under a thatch of dead grass. In the dense fog, the nervous red glow of a guard’s cigarette as he sits dreaming, cursing the cold but probably rejoicing in the rain-most likely he’d be the son of farmers. But in any case, alone now, at the front gate of Lumumba’s prison house in Leopoldville. The tires of a station wagon hiss to a stop in the darkness. The guard sits up, touches his uniform, sees the station wagon is full of women. A carload of household employees from the night shift on their way home to the shantytown margins of the city. The boy puts on an attitude of impatience: he’s much too busy with matters of state to be bothered by maids and a chauffeur. He flicks his thumb and forefinger, motioning for the station wagon to pass.

Behind the backseat, pressed against the white-stockinged knees of the maids, the Prime Minister crouches under a blanket.

A Peugeot and a Fiat are waiting down the street to file in behind the station wagon. All three cars head east, out of the city. After they’ve crossed the Kwango River by ferryboat, the Prime Minister rises from the backseat, stretches his long, narrow frame, and joins his wife, Pauline, and small son, Roland, in a car belonging to the Guinean embassy. It proceeds alone, east toward Stanleyville, where loyal crowds wait to hail their chief, believing with all their hearts that he’ll restore their dreams of a free Congo.

But the roads are terrible. The same delicious mud that’s salvation to manioc is the Waterloo of an automobile. They inch forward through the night, until dawn, when Lumumba’s party is halted by a flat tire. He paces on the flattened grass by the ditch, remaining remarkably clean, while the driver labors to change the tire. But the effort stirs the black, wet road to a mire, and when he starts up the car again, it won’t move. Lumumba kneels in the mud to add the force of his own shoulder to the back bumper. It’s no use; they’re hopelessly bogged down. They’ll have to wait for help. Still exuberant with freedom, they remain confident. Two of Lumumba’s former cabinet members are behind them, coming from Leopoldville in another car.

But there has been bad luck. Those two men have reached the Kwango River and are gesturing helplessly at an astonished fisherman. They want him to go wake the ferryman. The ferry squats low in the water at the opposite shore, where it left off Lumumba’s party the night before. These fugitive dignitaries are both from the Batetela tribe and learned French in mission schools, but have no inkling of how to talk to the Kwango tribesmen who fish the rivers east of Leopoldville. It never mattered before; prior to Independence, hardly anyone gave a thought to the large idea of a geographical Congo. But now, on the morning of November 28, it means everything. The river is not so wide. They can plainly see the ferry, and point to it. But the fisherman stares at these men’s city suits, their clean hands, and their mouths, which exaggerate incomprehensible syllables. He can see they’re desperate. He offers fish. This is how things go.

Lumumba’s party waited most of the day, until they were found and rescued by a regional commissioner, who took them to Bulungu. There they paused, since Lumumba’s wife and son were hungry and needed to eat. While he waited in the shade of a tree, brushing dried mud from his trousers, the Prime Minister was recognized by a villager and pulled into what quickly became an excited crowd. He gave an impromptu speech about the unquenchable African thirst for liberty. Somewhere deep in that crowd was a South African mercenary pilot who owned a radio. Very shortly, the CIA station chief knew Lumumba was free. All across the Congo on invisible radio waves flew the code words: The Rabbit has escaped. The army recaptured Lumumba less than fifty miles from our village. People flocked to the roads, banging with sticks and fetishes on the hoods of the army convoy that took him away. The event was reported quickly with drums, across our province and beyond, and some of our neighbors even ran there on foot to try to help their captured leader. But in the midst of all that thunder, all that news assaulting our ears, we heard not a word. Lumumba was taken to Thysville prison, then flown to Katanga Province, and finally beaten so savagely they couldn’t return the body to his widow without international embarrassment.

Pauline and her children grieved, but having no body to bury properly is a terrible thing for a Congolese family. A body unmourned can’t rest. It flies around at night. Pauline went to bed those nights begging her husband not to gnaw with his beak at the living. That’s what I believe, anyway. I think she would have pled with him not to steal the souls of those who would take his place. Despite her prayers, the Congo was left in the hands of soulless, empty men.

Fifteen years after it all happened, I sat by my radio in Atlanta listening to Senator Church and the special committee hearings on the Congo. I dug my nails into my palms till I’d pierced my own flesh. “Where had I been? Somewhere else entirely? Of the coup, in August, I’m sure we’d understood nothing. From the next five months of Lumumba’s imprisonment, escape, and recapture, I recall-what? The hardships of washing and cooking in a drought. A humiliating event in the church, and rising contentions in the village. Ruth May’s illness, of course. And a shocking scrap with Leah, who wanted to go hunting with the men. I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn’t cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of good-will adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.

Strange to say, when it came I felt as if I’d been waiting for it my whole married life. Waiting for that ax to fall so I could walk away with no forgiveness in my heart. Maybe the tragedy began on the day of my wedding, then. Or even earlier, when I first laid eyes on Nathan at the tent revival. A chance meeting of strangers, and the end of the -world unfolds. Who can say where it starts? I’ve spent too many years backing over that muddy road: If only I hadn’t let the children out of my sight that morning. If I hadn’t let Nathan take us to Kilanga in the first place. If the Baptists hadn’t taken upon themselves the religious conversion of the Congolese. What if the Americans, and the Belgians before them, hadn’t tasted blood and money in Africa? If the world of white men had never touched the Congo at all?

Oh, it’s a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it’s easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that’s nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.

You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don’t expect them to do a thing for you. They’re far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven’s name we will do next.

What We Lost

KILANGA, JANUARY 17,1961

Leah

You CAN’T JUST POINT to the one most terrible thing and wonder why it happened. This has been a whole terrible time, from the beginning of the drought that left so many without food, and then the night of the ants, to now, the worst tragedy of all. Each bad thing causes something worse. As Anatole says, if you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you’ll go crazy if you think it’s all punishment for your sins. I see that plainly when I look at my parents. God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

Looking back over the months that led to this day, it seems the collapse of things started in October, with the vote in church. We should have been good sports and lit out of the Congo right then. How could Father not have seen his mistake? The congregation of his very own church interrupted the sermon to hold an election on whether or not to accept Jesus Christ as the personal Saviour of Kilanga.

It was hot that day, in a season so dry our tongues went to sleep tasting dust and woke up numb. Our favorite swimming holes in the creek, which should have been swirling with fast brown ‘water this time of year, were nothing but dry cradles of white stones. Women had to draw drinking water straight from the river, while they clucked their tongues and told stories of women fallen to crocodiles in other dry years, -which were never as dry as this one. The manioc fields were flat: dead. Fruit trees barren. Yellow leaves were falling everywhere, littering the ground like a carpet rolled out for the approaching footsteps of the end of time. The great old kapoks and baobabs that shaded our village ached and groaned in their branches.They seemed more like old people than plants.

We’d heard rumors of rain in the river valleys west of us, and those tales aroused the deepest thirst you can imagine-the thirst of dying crops and animals. The dead grass on the distant hills was a yellowish red, not orange but a drier color: orange-white, like the haze in the air. Monkeys gathered in the high, bare branches at sunset, whimpering to one another as they searched the sky. Anything living that could abandon its home, some of our neighbors included, had migrated westward, in the direction from which we heard drums every night. Tata Kuvudundu cast his bone predictions, and nearly every girl in the village had danced with a chicken held to her head, to bring down rain. People did what they could. Church attendance rose and fell; Jesus may have sounded like a helpful sort of God in the beginning, but He was not bearing out.

That Sunday morning Tata Ndu himself sat on the front bench. Tata Ndu rarely darkened the door of the church, so this was clearly a sign, though who could say whether a good or bad one. He didn’t appear to be paying much heed to the sermon. Nobody was, since it didn’t have to do with rain. A month earlier when thunderstorms seemed imminent, Father had counseled his congregation to repent their sins and the Lord would reward them with rain. But in spite of all this repentance the rain hadn’t come, and now he told us he refused to be party to the superstitions. This morning he was preaching on Bel in the temple, from the Apocrypha. Father has always stood firm on the Apocrypha, though most other preachers look down on him for it. They claim those books to be the work of fear-mongers who tagged them on to the Old Testament just to scare people. Yet Father always says, if the Lord can’t inspire you to leave off sinning any other way, why then, it’s His business to scare the dickens out of you.

Bel and the Serpent wasn’t so frightening, as it mainly featured the quick wits of Daniel. This time Daniel was out to prove to the Babylonians that they were worshiping false idols, but even I was

having trouble paying attention. Lately I’d rarely felt touched by Father’s enthusiasm, and never by God.

“Now the Babylonians had an idol they called Bel” he declared, his voice the only clear thing in the haze that hung over us. People fanned themselves.

“Every day they bestowed upon the statue of Bel twelve bushels of flour, forty sheep, and fifty gallons of wine.”

Anatole translated this, substituting,manioc, goats, and palm wine. A few people fanned themselves faster, thinking of all that food going to just one hungry god. But most had dozed off.

“The people revered the statue of Bel and went every day to worship it, but Daniel worshiped the Lord our Saviour. And the King said to him,’Why don’t you worship Bel?’Why, Daniel replied,’I do not revere false idols but the living God, who is chief of all mankind.’ And the Babylonians said”-here my father dropped his voice to a more conversational tone-’“Can’t you see Bel is a living God? Don’t you see how much he eats and drinks every day?’

“Daniel laughed and told them, ‘Don’t be fooled! That is only a statue made of clay and bronze.’“

Father paused, and waited for Anatole to catch up. I personally like Bel and the temple; it’s a good story, but with all the delays for translation it was going too slowly to hold people’s interest. It’s a private-eye story, really. That’s how I’d tell it, if it were up to me: Daniel knew very well that the King’s high priests were sneaking in at night and taking all that food. So Daniel set up a trick. After everyone left their offerings in the temple, he went in and spread fireplace ashes all over the floor. That night the priests snuck in as usual through a secret stairway under the altar. But they didn’t notice the ashes, so they left their footprints all over the floor of the temple. They were having a big old party every night, compliments of their pal Bel. But with the ashes on the floor, Daniel caught them red-handed.

Father was poised to go on with the story when suddenly Tata Ndu stood right straight up, cutting him off in the middle of hammering home his message. We all stared. Tata Ndu held up his hand

and declared in his deep, big-man’s voice, giving each syllable the exact same size and weight: “Now it is time for the people to have an election.”

“What?” I said out loud.

But Father, who’s accustomed to knowing everything before it happens, took this right in stride. He replied patiently, “Well, now, that’s good. Elections are a fine and civilized thing. In America we hold elections every four years to decide on new leaders.” He waited while Anatole translated that. Maybe Father was dropping the hint that it was time for the villagers to reconsider the whole proposition of Tata Ndu.

Tata Ndu replied with equal patience, “A yi bandu, if you do not mind,Tata Price, we will make our election now. Id, maintenant! He spoke in a careful combination of languages that was understood by everyone present. This was some kind of a joke, I thought. Ordinarily Tata Ndu had no more use for our style of elections than Anatole did.

“With all due respect”,my father said,”this is not the time or the place for that kind of business. Why don’t you sit down now, and announce your plans after I’ve finished with the sermon? Church is not the place to vote anyone in or out of public office.”

“Church is the place for it,” said Tata Ndu.”Id, maintenant, we are making a vote for Jesus Christ in the office of personal God, Kilanga village.”

Father did not move for several seconds.

Tata Ndu looked at him quizzically. “Forgive me, I “wonder if I have paralyzed you?”

Father found his voice at last. “You have not.”

“A bu, we will begin. Beto tutakwe kusala”

There was a sudden colorful bustle through the church as women in their bright pagnes began to move about. I felt a chill run down my spine. This had been planned in advance. The women shook pebbles out of calabash bowls into the folds of their skirts and moved between the benches, firmly placing one pebble into each outstretched hand. This time women and children were also getting to vote, apparently. Tata Mwanza’s father came forward to set up the clay voting bowls in front of the altar. One of the voting bowls was for Jesus, the other was against. The emblems were a cross and a bottle of nsamba, new palm wine. Anyone ought to know that was not a fair match.

Father tried to interrupt the proceedings by loudly explaining that Jesus is exempt from popular elections. But people were excited, having just recently gotten the hang of the democratic process. The citizens of Kilanga were ready to cast their stones. They shuffled up to the altar in single file, just exactly as if they were finally coming forward to be saved. And Father stepped up to meet them as if he also believed this was the heavenly roll call. But the line of people just divided around him like water around a boulder in the creek, and went on ahead to make their votes. The effect of it wasn’t very dignified, so Father retreated back to his pulpit made of wired-together palm fronds and raised up one hand, intending I guess to pronounce the benediction. But the voting was all over with before he could really get a word in sideways.Tata Ndu’s assistant chiefs began counting the pebbles right away. They arranged them in clusters of five in a line on the floor, one side matched up against the other, for all to see.

“C’est juste” Tata Ndu said while they counted. “We can all see with our own eyes it was fair.”

My father’s face was red. “This is blasphemyl” He spread his hands wide as if casting out demons only he could see, and shouted, “There is nothing fair here!”

Tata Ndu turned directly to Father and spoke to him in surprisingly careful English, rolling his r’s, placing every syllable like a stone in a hand. “Tata Price, white men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,” he said. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good.”

A shouting match broke out in the church, mostly in agreement with Tata Ndu. Almost exactly at the same time, two men yelled, “Ku nianga, ngeye uyele kutalal”

Anatole, who’d sat down in his chair a little distance from the pulpit, leaned over and said quietly to Father, “They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if

it rains.”

Father ignored this parable. “Matters of the spirit are not decided at the marketplace,” he shouted sternly. Anatole translated.

“A bu, kwe? Where, then?” asked Tata Nguza, standing up boldly, la his opinion, he said, a white man who has never even killed a bushbuck for his family was not the expert on which god can protect our village.

When Anatole translated that one, Father looked taken aback. Where we come from, it’s hard to see the connectioin.

Father spoke slowly, as if to a half-wit, “Elections are good, and Christianity is good. Both are good.” We in his family recognized the danger in his extremely calm speech, and the rising color creeping toward his hairline. “You are right. In America we honor both these traditions. But we make our decisions about them in different houses.”

“Then you may do so in America,” said Tata Ndu. “I will not say you are unwise. But in Kilanga we can use the same house for many things.”

Father blew up. “Man, you understand nothing! You are applying the logic of children in a display of childish ignorance.” He slammed his fist down on the pulpit, which caused all the dried-up palm fronds to shift suddenly sideways and begin falling forward, one at a time. Father kicked them angrily out of the way and strode toward Tata Ndu, but stopped a few feet short of his mark.Tata Ndu is much heavier than my father, with very large arms, and at that moment seemed more imposing in general.

Father pointed his finger like a gun at Tata Ndu, then swung it around to accuse the whole congregation. “You haven’t even learned to run your own pitiful country! Your children are dying of a hundred different diseases! You don’t have a pot to piss in! And you’re presuming you can take or leave the benevolence of our Lord Jesus Christ!”

If anyone had been near enough to get punched right then, my father would have displayed un-Christian behavior. It was hard to believe I’d ever wanted to be near to him myself. If I had a prayer left in me, it was that this red-faced man shaking with rage would never lay a hand on me again.

Tata Ndu seemed calm and unsurprised by anything that had happened. “A, Tata Price,” he said, in his deep, sighing voice. “You believe we are mwana, your children, who knew nothing until you came here. Tata Price, I am an old man who learned from other old men. I could tell you the name of the great chief who instructed my father, and all the ones before him, but you would have to know how to sit down and listen. There are one hundred twenty-two. Since the time of our mankulu we have made our laws without help from white men.”

He turned toward the congregation with the air of a preacher himself. Nobody was snoozing now, either. “Our way was to share a fire until it burned down, ayi? To speak to each other until every person was satisfied. Younger men listened to older men. Now the Beelezi tell us the vote of a young, careless man counts the same as the vote of an elder.”

In the hazy heat Tata Ndu paused to take off his hat, turn it carefully in his hands, then replace it above the high dome of his forehead. No one breathed. “White men tell us: Vote, bantu! They tell us: You do not all have to agree, ce n’est pas necessaire! If two men vote yes and one says no, the matter is finished. A bu, even a child can see how that will end. It takes three stones in the fire to hold up the pot. Take one away, leave the other two, and what? The pot will spill into the fire.”

We all understood Tata Ndu’s parable. His glasses and tall hat did not seem ridiculous. They seemed like the clothes of a chief.

“But that is the white man’s law, n’est-ce pas’?” he asked. “Two stones are enough. nous faut seulement la majorite.”

It’s true, that was what we believed: the majority rules. How could we argue? I looked down at my fist, which still clutched my pebble. I hadn’t voted, nor Mother either. How could we, with Father staring right at us? The only one of us who’d had the nerve was Ruth May, who marched right up and voted for Jesus so hard her pebble struck the cross and bounced. But I guess we all made our choices, one way or the other.

Tata Ndu turned to Father and spoke almost kindly. ‘Jesus is a white man, so he will understand the law of la majorite, Tata Price. Wenda mbote.”

Jesus Christ lost, eleven to fifty-six.

Rachel

MAYBE I SHOULDN’T SAY so but it’s true: Leah is the cause of all our problems. It goes back to when she and Father commenced World War Three at our house. What a crazy mixed-up scene. Leah would rare up and talk back to Father straight to his face, and then, boy oh boy. The rest of us would duck and cover like you have to do whenever they drop the A-bomb. Leah always had the uppermost respect for Father, but after the hullabaloo in church where they voted Father out, she just plumb stopped being polite.

How it started was her declaring she was going hunting with her little bow and arrow. My sister, little Miss The-Lord-Is-My-Shepherd, now thinks she is Robin Hood. I am surprised she hasn’t tried to shoot an apple off my head, if we had an apple that is. There is not a speck of food anywhere. The ants ate everything people had stored up, which was not much to begin -with because of the drought. It clouds up every morning and gets muggy for an hour, but then the sun beats down and dries up everything. Market day looks like you just came out of your fallout shelter after the bomb attack: nobody there but a few old guys with car parts and knives and cookpots, hoping to trade for food. Lots of luck, Charlie! We’re only still scraping by with what Mrs. Fowles gave us off their boat, plus some eggs, because thank goodness Mama Mwanza brought us over two laying hens after the ants ate up ours. She lets her chickens just run here, there, and everywhere, so they escaped their fateful death by flapping up into the treetops. I happen to think Axelroot could get us some food too, if he tried, but he has been making himself scarce for months now, supposedly because he’s on some top-secret mission. It’s enough to drive you crazy. He said he’d bring me cigarettes and Hershey’s chocolate when he came back, and I was very thrilled at the time, I’m sure, but, jeez, oh man. Right now I’d settle for a good old-fashioned loaf of Wonder Bread.

Well, the next thing we knew, Tata Ndu announced the whole village has to go on a big hunt, and that will save us. All of us together! It is quite involved. The plan, as Nelson explained it, is they start a fire in a huge circle around the big hill behind the village. That hill is mostly tall dead grass, not jungle, so it would burn up in a flash. The women are supposed to wave palm leaves and chase the flames in toward the middle until all the trapped animals inside get completely nerve-racked and jump out through the fire. That is the cue for the men to shoot them. Kids and old folks get the wonderful j ob of walking along behind and picking up all of God’s creatures that got burnt to a crisp. Nelson says every person in the village is to be there, required precipitation.

Well, fine, I can go walk through a burnt field and get covered with soot from head to toe. I gave up long ago trying to pass the white-glove test. But Lean’s little plan is to go with the men right up front and shoot things with her bow and arrow. Her new best friend, Anatole, seems to encourage it. When they held the meeting about it, he kept remarking how she is a very good shot, and if we’re dying of hunger why should we care who shoots the antelope as long as it gets killed? And Nelson jumped right in to agree with Anatole, saying we should be glad for every arrow that shoots straight, even if it comes from a girl. Honestly. Nelson is just proud of being the one that taught her to shoot. And Leah is just primarily a show-off.

Tata Ndu and the older men were all against, at the meeting. Tata Kuvudundu especially. He sat with his lips pursed until whenever it came around again for his turn to talk. Then he’d stand up in his white wraparound robe and tell whole entire stories about horrid things that happened in the olden days: poison water coming out of the ground, elephants going berserk, exetera, whenever people

didn’t listen to him and insisted on doing things not the normal way. Then they’d all say, “Oh, yeah, I remember.” The old men all nodded a lot, sitting up straight with their elbows close to their sides, hands on their laps, and feet flat on the ground a little bit pigeon-toed. The younger men leaned back on their stools with their knees wide apart, taking up all the room they needed, and were quick to yell out what was on their minds. Mostly it was in French and such, but Adah took things down in English in her notebook and held it where I could read it. So for once she made herself useful as well as a bump on a log.

Naturally Father had his own addenda for the meeting. When he got his one chance to speak, he tried to turn the whole hunt around into a kind of new, improved prayer meeting with animal shooting at the end. Which nobody listened to, because they were all jazzed up about a girl wanting to hunt with the men. I’m sure Father resented his own daughter being such a distraction. It’s just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.

In the end it came down to Tata Ndu, Tata Kuvudundu, and Anatole doing the talking. Tata Ndu in his orange-and-white-striped cloth wrapped across his chest. He gave the impression, “I am the chief and don’t you forget it,” and of course Tata Kuvudundu is the voodoo witch doctor and you don’t forget that either, what with him having six toes and going cross-eyed in the middle of a sentence just for the scary effect. But Anatole is the schoolteacher, after all, and a lot of the boys that now at the ripe age of nineteen or so have wives and families formerly learned their two-plus-two from him in the first place. They still call him Monsieur Anatole, instead of the usual “Tata,” because he was their schoolmaster. So it got to be divided down the lines of young against old, with Anatole persuading a lot of the younger men. And in our village, believe you me, people die for the slightest provocation so there are not that many old people still hanging around.

Leah had to sit in the front of the room all night long without saying a peep. She kept looking at Anatole, but after a while you couldn’t tell really if he was on her side. He stopped mentioning

what a good shot she was and moved on to the subject of whether you should kill a rat for its skin or kill a rat for being a rat. Whatever that may mean. Tata Ndu said if it runs in a rat’s skin it is a rat. Then they all got to yelling about foreigners, the army takeover, and somebody thrown in prison which if you ask me is at least a more favorable subject than rats.

At the end it got turned into another showdown: were we going to keep talking about this all night, or have a vote? Anatole was very against the voting. He said this was a matter to be discussed and agreed on properly, because even if Kilanga ran one white family out of town, there were a million more whites in the world and if you couldn’t learn to tell a good rat from a bad one, you’d soon be living with both in your house. And, he said, don’t be surprised when your own daughter or wife wants to shoot a bow and arrow behind your back. Well, everybody laughed at that, but I failed to see the humor. Was he calling us rats?

Tata Ndu had had just about enough. He marched up and plunked down two big clay voting bowls in front of Leah. It kind of made people mad when he did it.You could see them siding with Anatole, that it needed more talk. But, no, time’s up. As for Leah, she looked like a chicken fixing to get thrown in the stewpot. But was I supposed to feel sorry for her? She asked for it! With all her attention-getting mechanisms. Some of the men still seemed to think the whole thing was funny, so maybe they thought she’d shoot an arrow through her foot, for all I know. But when it came time to walk up and cast their votes, fifty-one stones went in the bowl with Leah’s bow-and-arrow by it. Forty-five for the one with the cookpot.

Man alive, Tata Kuvudundu was not one bit happy then. He stood up and hollered that we’d turned over the natural way of things and boy, would we be sorry. He made a very big point of looking at Anatole when he said that, but he also seemed put out with Tata Ndu for the voting activity, which got backfired on him. Tata Ndu didn’t say much, but he frowned so hard his big bald forehead wrinkled up like the bread dough when you punch it down. He held his big muscle-man arms across his chest, and even though he was an elderly man of fifty or so, he looked like he could still beat the pants off anybody in the room.

“The animals are listening to us tonight!” Tata Kuvudundu yelled out and kind of started singing with his eyes closed. Then he stopped. It got real quiet and he looked very slowly around the room. “The leopards will walk upright like men on our paths. The snakes will come out of the ground and seek our houses instead of hiding in their own. Bwe?You did this.You decided the old ways are no good. Don’t blame the animals, it was your decision.You want to change everything, and now, kuleka? Do you expect to sleep?”

Nobody said a word, they just looked scared. Tata Ndu sat with his head thrown back and his eyes just little slits, watching.

“No one will sleep!”Tata Kuvudundu suddenly shrieked, leaping up and waving his arms in the air.

Everybody else kind of jumped at that, but Leah sat stock-still. Like I said, showing off. She didn’t even blink. Then we all got up and left and she followed us out, and no one in our family said boo to each other all the way home. When we got to the door Father stopped, blocking the way. Oh, brother. We were going to have to stand out there on the porch and hear the moral of the story. “Leah,” he said, “who is the master of this house?” She stood with her chin down, not answering.

Finally she said, “You are,” in a voice as little as an ant.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you?” “You are!” she screamed at him.

Mother and I jumped, but Father merely replied in a normal voice, “What occurred this evening may be of some consequence to the village, but it’s of no consequence to you. God has ordained that you honor thy father and submit thyself to the rules of his house.”

Leah didn’t even move. Her chin was still tilted down, but her eyes were straight on him like nobody’s business. “So,” she said quietly, “you agree with Tata Ndu and the witch doctor.”

Father sucked in his breath. “They agree with me. It’s nonsense for you to hunt with the men. You’re only causing trouble, and I forbid it.”

Leah slung her bow over her shoulder. “I’m going with the men and that’s final.” Marched off the porch, right out into the dead of night, where supposedly the animals were wide awake and walking around like human beings. Mother and Adah and I stood there with our traps hanging open. You could have knocked us over with a feather.

Father went crazy. We’d always wondered what would happen if we flat-out disobeyed him. Now we were fixing to see. He lit out after her with his wide leather belt already coming out of his pants as he stomped through the dirt. But by the time he got to the edge of the yard she was gone. She’d vamoosed into the tall grass, and off she was headed for the jungle, where it was plain to see he’d never find her. Leah can climb trees like a chimpanzee, when nobody’s even chasing her.

Instead of coming back, he acted like he’d just decided to stroll out there for the sake of thrashing the trees with his belt, and man alive, he did.We heard him for an hour.We peeked out the window and saw he’d cut down a whole stand of sugar cane by lashing it with his belt. We started to get scared about what he’d do when he finally came in, for there was really no telling. Our doors didn’t lock, but Mother came in our room with us and helped us push the beds around so the door was blocked. We went to bed early, with metal pot lids and knives and things from the kitchen to protect ourselves with, because we couldn’t think of anything else. It was like the armor they had in the nights of old. Ruth May put an aluminum saucepan on her head and slid two comic books down the seat of her jeans in case of a whipping. Mother slept in Leah’s bed. Or lay there quiet, rather, for really none of us slept a wink. Leah came in the window before dawn and whispered to Mother awhile, but I don’t think she slept either.

Half the village was in the same boat with us, even though I guess for different reasons. After the way Tata Kuvudundu carried on at the meeting and gave off the evil eye, nobody could sleep. According to Nelson that was the one and only topic of conversation.They said their animals were looking at them. People killed the last few they had-goats, chickens, or dogs. You could smell the blood everywhere. They put the animals’ heads in front of their houses in calabash bowls, to keep away the kibaazu, they said.

Well, why were they dumb enough to vote for Leah anyway, is what I asked Nelson. If they knew it was going to get Tata Kuvudundu so riled up?

Nelson said some of them that voted for her were put out with Tata Ndu, and some were put out with Father, so everybody ended up getting what they didn’t want, and now had to go along with it. Nobody even cares that much one way or another about Leah, is what Nelson said.

Oh, well, I told him.That is what we call Democracy.

Strange to say, at our house the next morning it was suddenly peace on earth. Father acted like nothing much had happened. He had cuts and poisonwood boils on his arms from all his thrashing in the bushes, but yet he just drank his tea at breakfast without a word and then put some poultice on his arms and went out on the porch to read his Bible. We wondered: Is he looking for the world’s longest The Verse to give Leah on the subject of impudence? Is he looking up what Jesus might have to say about preachers that murder their own daughters? Or maybe he’d decided he couldn’t win this fight, so he was going to pretend it never happened and Leah was beneath his notice. With Father, life’s just one surprise after another.

Leah did at least have the brains to make herself scarce. She stayed either at Anatole’s school or out in the woods having a bow-and-arrow contest with Nelson to see who could shoot a bug off a branch. That was the kind of thing she usually did. But there was plenty of nervous tension left in our household, believe you me. Ruth May peed in her pants just because Father coughed out on the porch. And guess who had to be the one to get her cleaned up: me. I did not appreciate what we were being put through, all because of Leah.

That evening was the night before the hunt, with Leah still keeping her distance. But her pal Anatole found an evil sign outside his hut. So we were told by Nelson. Mother had sent him over to the school to take Leah some boiled eggs for dinner, and he came running back to tell us Anatole was over there looking like he’d seen a ghost. Nelson wouldn’t say what the evil sign was, just that it was a dreaded kibaazu sign of a bad curse put on Anatole. We kind of thought he might have made the whole thing up. Nelson could be dramatic.

Well, no, sir. Next morning bright and early, Anatole found a green mamba snake curled up by his cot, and it was just by the grace of God he didn’t get bit on the leg and die on the spot. Good luck, or a miracle, one. They said he usually always gets out of bed before daybreak and goes out for his constitutional and would have stepped right on it, but that morning for some reason he woke up too early and decided to light his lamp and read in bed awhile before getting up, and that’s when he saw it. He thought someone had thrown a rope inside his house for another evil sign, but then it moved! No more signs; this was the true evil thing! The story went buzzing around the village quicker even than if we’d had telephones. People were running around because it was the big day and they had to get ready, but this gave them something extra to think about, and boy oh boy, they did. I don’t care if they were followers of God almighty or the things that bump you in the night, they were praying to it now, believe you me. Thanking their lucky stars that what happened to Anatole hadn’t happened to them.

Adah

BETO NKITUTASALA means: What are we doing? Doing, we are what? Alas atuti knot eb. Alas. The night before the hunt there was no sleep at all. Eye on sleep peels no eye! We thought we were looking, but could not see what was before us. Leopards walked upright on the paths and snakes moved quietly from their holes. The S on the floor -was not for sleep.

People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through all those conditions unchanged. The Bantu speak of “self” as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die. The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. It is a ride on the power of nommo, the force of a name to call oneself. Nommo rains from a cloud, rises in the vapor from a human mouth: a song, a scream, a prayer. A drum gives nommo in Congo, where drums have language. A dance gives nommo where bodies are not separate from the will that inhabits them. In that other long-ago place, America, I was a failed combination of too-weak body and overstrong will. But in Congo I am those things perfectly united: Adah.

The night before the hunt, while no one slept, every muntu in Kilanga danced and sang: drums, lips, bodies. In song they named the animals that would become our feast and salvation in the morning. And they named the things they feared: Snake. Hunger. Leopards that walk upright on the paths like men. These are the nommo, they chanted, these bodies living and dancing and joining together with slick, black other bodies, all beating the thing with feathers: beating out the dear, dear hope, a chance to go on living. But muntu did not care if the bodies lived or died on the morrow. Muntu peered out through the eyeholes, watching closely to see what would happen next.

Before first light we all came together at the edge of the village, not down by the river, where Our Father would have gathered us, but away from there, on the side toward the hill, where our salvation lay. We made our march into the field of elephant grass, tramped upon the big hill rising. Grass as tall as living men, and taller, but dry and white as a dead woman’s hair. With sticks the men laid the tall grass down. They beat it in unison as if beating down grass were a dance, grunting softly in a long, low rhythm that ran back to us from the head of the file. Men with bows and arrows, men with spears, even a few with guns were up ahead of us. Their chant was the only sound in the cool morning haze. Children and women followed, carrying the largest baskets their arms were able to circle. Mine hung on a strap over my shoulder because my arms do not circle well. Behind us came the oldest women, carrying smoldering torches, greenheart poles wrapped in palm-oil-soaked rags. High up they held their torches, bruising the air overhead with the smoke of our procession. The sun hung low on the river, seeming reluctant to enter this strange day. Then it rose redly into the purpled sky, resembling a black eye.

At a signal given by Tata Ndu our single file divided and curved outward to either side of the hill. A solemn wishbone of eager, hungry people-that is how we might have appeared to the muntu dead and unborn who watched from above. In half an hour the fronts of the two lines met, and we hungry wishbone people of Kilanga completed our circle around the hill. A shout fluttered up. The fire starters laid down their torches.Younger women opened their pagnes and ran forward, fanning the flames like moths dancing before a candle.

Our circle was so large the shouts we heard from the other side seemed to come from another country. Soon all sound was swallowed by the fire. It did not roar but grumbled, cracked, shushed, sucking the air from our throats and all speech with it. The flame rose and licked the grass and we all moved forward, chasing the line of brightness ahead of us. Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass, leaving nothing of life behind. Nothing but hot, black, bare ground and delicate white filaments of ash, which stirred and crumbled under the trample of bare feet. Now the men rushed ahead with bows cocked, impatient for the circle to shrink toward its center. Smaller and smaller the circle ungrew, with all the former life of a broad grassy plain trapped inside. The animals all caught up in this dance together, mice and men. Men who pushed and pranced, appearing to us as dark stick puppets before the wall of fire. The old people and children came along slowly behind. We were like odd ruined flagpoles, bent double, with our bright clothes flapping. Slow scavengers. We fanned out across the hissing black field, picking up charred insects. Most common were the crisp nguka caterpillars, favorite snack of Anatole’s schoolboys, which resembled small twigs and were impossible to see until I learned to sense their particular gray curve. We picked them up by the basketful until they filled my mind’s eye so completely I knew I would see them in my sleep. Easier to find were the dikonko, edible locusts and crickets, whose plump abdomens were shrunk translucent like balloons half-filled with water. Caterpillars one after another I laid on my tongue, their char crisp bristle taste a sweet momentary salve to a body aching for protein. Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

The fire moved faster than we did, we the young and elderly shepherdesses of dead insects. Sometimes I stood up straight to let the blood run from my head to the numb slabs of muscle at the backs of my thighs. Mother held on tight to the hand of Ruth May, her chosen child, but also stayed near me. Since the terrible night of the ants, Mother had been creeping her remorse in flat-footed circles around me without ever speaking of it, wearing her guilt like the swollen breasts of a nursing mother. So far I had refused to suckle and give her relief, but I kept close by. I had no choice, since she and Ruth May and I were thrown together by caste, set apart from Leah the Huntress. By choice, we also stayed far from Rachel and Father. Their noisy presences, of two different kinds, embarrassed us in this field of earnest, quiet work. Sometimes I set a hand above my eyes and looked for Leah, but did not see her. Instead I watched Ruth May crunch thoughtfully on a caterpillar. Soiled and subdued, she looked like a small malnourished relative of my previous sister. The faraway look of her eyes must have been the muntu of Ruth May, chained to this briefly belligerent child through forelife, life, and afterlife, peering out through her sockets.

The fire ran ahead at times, and sometimes flagged, as if growing tired like the rest of us. The heat was unspeakable. I imagined the taste of water.

As the ring burned smaller we suddenly caught sight of its other side, the red-orange tongues and black ash closing in. The looming shapes of animals bunched up inside: antelopes, bushbucks, broad-headed warthogs with warthog children running behind them. A troop of baboons ran with arched tails flying as they zigzagged, not yet understanding their entrapment. Thousands of insects beat the air to a pulpy soup of animal panic. Birds hit the wall of fire and lit like bottle rockets. When it seemed there was no more air, no more hope, the animals began to run out through the fire into the open, where spears and arrows waited. The antelopes did not leap gracefully as I imagined they would; they wheeled like spooked horses around the inside of the circle, then suddenly veered out as if by accident or blindness. Seeing their companions shot in the neck with arrows, they heeled in panic, sometimes turning back to the flames but mostly running straight on, straight toward people and death. A small spotted antelope fell down very near me and presented me with the strange, singular gift of its death. I watched its heaving sides slowly come to rest, as if it had finally caught its breath. Dark blood leaked from its delicate black mouth onto the charred ground.

For every animal struck down, there rose an equal and opposite cry of human jubilation. Our hungry wishbone cracked and ran slick with marrow. Women knelt with their knives to skin the meat, even before the hooves stopped beating the ground in panic. Of the large animals who came through the fire-bushbuck, warthog, antelope- few escaped. Others would not come out and so they burned: small flame-feathered birds, the churning insects, and a few female baboons who had managed against all odds to carry their pregnancies through the drought. With their bellies underslung with precious clinging babies, they loped behind the heavy-maned males, who would try to save themselves, but on reaching the curtain of flame where the others passed through, they drew up short. Crouched low. Understanding no choice but to burn with their children.

The curtain of heat divided the will to survive from survival itself. I could have fallen trembling on the ground but stood and watched instead, watched Kilanga’s children shout and dance each time they found the scorched, angular bodies of a mother baboon and baby seared together. On account of these deaths, Kilanga’s gleeful children would live through another season. The bantu who watched from above would have seen a black festival of life and death indistinguishable one from the other against the black-scorched ground.

As that day would turn out, my sister Rachel became (briefly) a vegetarian. My sisters Ruth May and Leah: forager and hunter. I became something else. On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals.The lion kills the baboon; the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love. The hungry antelope’s shadow passes over the startled grass. And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Leah

I KILLED MY FIRST GAME, a beautiful tawny beast with curved horns j and a black diagonal stripe across his flank: a young male impala. He was completely bewildered by the fire, too young to have any good strategy for danger, but old enough to need to put on a show. He ran pell-mell, snorting like a playground bully till he was one of the last of his kind left inside the circle. I knew he’d soon come through.The way his hooves tore at the ground was so desperate, and his family already gone. I crouched near Nelson, watching. Nelson had taken down two bushbucks, one after the other, and signaled to me that he was going to claim his arrows. The impala he was leaving to me. I followed it with my eye as Nelson had taught me to do, looking for the path of its hopes. Suddenly I saw exactly where it would break through the fire. He would come straight toward me and veer to my right, where his mother had gone. Even a playground bully will want his mother in the bitter end. I held my breath to stop my arms from trembling. I had the hunger and thirst of a famine all to myself, smoke in my burning eyes, and no strength left. I prayed to Jesus to help me, then to any other god who would listen. Help me keep my left arm straight and my right pulled back and my arrow tight against the gutstring ready to sing and fly. One, he came and dodged… two, he came closer… three, he broke his gait, paused… four!

He leaped sideways away from me, all four legs drawn together in midair for half a second, and then he ran on. Only when I saw the spray of brown blood did I understand I’d hit him. My own heart plunged and burst against my ears. I have killed an animal larger than myself!

I screamed as if struck by an arrow myself. Before I realized my legs had moved me I was chasing the impala down the path of his hopes-the forest he could see at the end of the long, charred valley, where he would find his mother and safety. But he crumpled, slowed and fell down. I stood over him, breathing fast. It took me a minute to understand what I saw: two arrows in his flank. Neither one of them fletched red, as my arrows were. And Tata Ndu’s oldest son Gbenye shouting at me to get away, go on away, “A, baki!” Meaning that I was a thief.

But then Nelson was beside me, waving my arrow. “This arrow killed that impala” he shouted at Gbenye. “It passed through the neck. Look at yours.Two little pricks in his flank. He never even felt them before he died.”

Gbenye’s lip curled. “How would a woman’s arrow kill a yearling impala?”

“By making a hole in his neck, Gbenye. Your arrows went for the tail like a dog after his bitch. Where was your aim, nkento?”

Gbenye raised his fist, and I was sure he would kill Nelson for that insult. But he flung his finger toward me instead, and shook it as if he were ridding himself of blood or slime. Commanded me to skin the impala and bring the meat down to the village. Then turned and walked away from us.

Nelson drew his knife and knelt to help me with the tedious work of cutting through the tendons and peeling back the pelt. I felt mixed up, grateful, and sick at heart.

Nelson had ridiculed Gbenye’s aim by calling him nkento. A woman.

Rachel

IF YOU EVEN THINK you can picture how awful it was, you are wrong. Lambs to the slaughter. We were, or the animals were, I don’t even know who I feel sorry for the most. It was the most despicable day of my life. I stood on that burnt-up field with the taste of ashes in my mouth, ashes in my eyes, on my hair and my dress, all stained and tarnished. I stood and prayed to the Lord Jesus if he was listening to take me home to Georgia, where I could sit down in a White Castle and order a hamburger without having to see its eyes roll back in its head and the blood come spurting out of its corpse.

Oh, they cheered to see it. I have not seen so much cheering since a homecoming game. Everybody jumped for joy. Me too at first, for I was thinking, Hooray, a halfway decent meal at last. If I eat one more egg omelet I think I’ll turn over easy and cluck. But by the end of the day everybody was smeared with blood like creepy, happy ghouls, and I couldn’t bear to be one of them myself. Everything changed. The villagers transformed into brutish creatures before my very eyes, with their hungry mouths gaping wide. My own sister Leah got down on her knees and eagerly skinned a poor little antelope, starting out by slitting its belly and peeling back the skin over its back with horrible ripping sounds. She and Nelson hunkered down side by side, using a knife and even their teeth to do it. Both of them were so covered with ashes they looked like the pot and the kettle, each one blacker than the other. When they finished with the thing, it lay there limp on the ground all shiny blue and red, covered with a slick white film. It looked like our old hound dog Babe, except all made of gristle and blood. Its bare dead eyes gaped out of its head, pleading for mercy. I bent over and threw up on my PF Flyers. Lord Jesus. I couldn’t help it. I went straight back down the burned-up hill and marched all the way home, without even telling Mother I was leaving. I am seventeen years old, after all, not a child, and I alone will decide the fate of my life. The rest of them were all going to the stupid town square, with the plan I’m sure being to whoop and holler about our good fortune and divide up all the dead loot.

Not me. I latched myself up tight in our kitchen house, tore off my filthy clothes and threw them into the stove. I heated the big kettle of water and poured it into the galvanized tub and sat in it like a scalded potato, alone in this world, just crying. Mother’s picture of President Eisenhower looked down at me from the wall, and I crossed my arms over my naked chest for shame, crying even harder. I felt my red skin was going to scald plumb off, and then I’d look just like that poor antelope. They wouldn’t be able to tell me from any other skinned carcass they drug home that day. Fine with me if I died right along with the rest of the poor animals. Who would care anyway? While the water cooled down I sat there looking up at the President. His round white head was so friendly and kind, I cried like a baby because I wanted him for a father instead of my own parents. I wanted to live under the safe protection of somebody who wore decent clothes, bought meat from the grocery store like the Good Lord intended, and cared about others.

I vowed that if I lived through this ordeal, I would not touch a single one of those animals they trapped and killed out there on the hillside like innocent children. That’s all they were-the baboons and warthogs and antelopes scared crazy by the fire. And the people no different from animals: Leah and all those men licking their lips, already tasting roasted meat in the smoke of the fire. And poor little Ruth May picking up burnt grubworms and putting them straight in her mouth because her own parents can’t keep her fed. All of them out there in the hot sun that day were just dumb animals cursed with the mark of ash on their brow. That’s all. Poor dumb animals running for their lives.

Leah

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN the most glorious day in our village, but instead it all came crashing down. Fifty years from now if I’m still living I will look back on that one afternoon, and the morning that followed. Even then I swear I’ll know it for what it was: the most terrible day of our lives.

After the hunt ended there was supposed to be a celebration, but before the old men could drag their drums out under the tree and get the dancing started, it had already turned into a melee of screaming and fighting. Men we had known as kindly, generous fathers suddenly became strangers -with clenched fists and wide eyes, shouting into each other’s faces. Ruth May burst into tears and hid in Mother’s skirt. I don’t think she ever understood what happened. Not ever.

I know I played a part. I do understand that. But so much had already gone wrong before I joined in. From the time we first set foot in Kilanga things were going wrong, though we couldn’t see it. Even the glorious Independence was not going to be good for everyone, as they’d promised that day on the riverbank, when Lumumba and the Belgians raised up their different promises and the white King lurked somewhere in disguise. There were going to be winners and losers. Now there are wars in the south, killings in the north, rumors that foreigners took over the army and want to murder Lumumba. On the day of the hunt a war was already roaring toward us, whites against blacks. We were all swept up in a greediness we couldn’t stop.

My argument with Gbenye over the impala, which really I killed, became a shouting match between people who’d voted for me and those who’d voted against. Some changed sides, mostly turning against me because of Tata Kuvudundu’s warnings. The terrible things he promised were already starting to happen. Eyes watched us from the trees as we dragged our burden of meat down to the village, piled it up, and gathered around in a hungry knot. Gbenye was the first to move, pulling my antelope off the pile and holding it proudly in the air. Tata Ndu took it from him, raised his machete, and with one hard blow sliced off a hindquarter. This he picked up and threw toward me. It hit the ground with a thump in front of me, throwing blood on my socks. In the perfect absence of any human sound, the locusts in the leaves above us roared in my ears.

I knew what I ought to do: pick it up in both hands and give it to Mama Mwanza. I should turn the other cheek. But the sin of pride took hold of me with a fierce grip. I picked up the whole bleeding leg and threw it at Gbenye, hitting him square across the back as he gloated to his friends. He staggered forward and one of his friends laughed.

Tata Ndu turned to me, his eyes ferocious under his huge furrowed brow. He flung his hand toward us in disgust. “Tata Price has refused his family’s share of meat,” he announced in Kikongo. “A bu mpya.Who’s next?”

He glared at each silent face in turn.

“Anatole!”he declared at last. “Anatole baana bansisila au a-aana!” Anatole the orphan without descendants!-the bitterest insult that could be borne by a Congolese man. “For you this will be plenty,” pronounced Tata Ndu, pointing at the same skimpy hindquarter in the dirt. Only hours ago it had been the strong hind leg of an antelope boy. Now it lay naked at our feet, covered with filth. It looked more like a curse than a gift.

Anatole answered in his polite schoolteacher’s voice. “Excusez-moi, Tata Ndu, mais non. ca, c’est de compte a demi de la famille Price. La grande bete la, c’est la mienne” In his two hands, by himself, Anatole the orphan without descendants began to drag away one of the large bushbucks he’d shot on the hill. It wasn’t right for Tata Ndu to insult Anatole, who hadn’t really taken my side but only argued for people to think for themselves. Now I was terrified that he’d be driven away from associating with our family at all.

Tata Boanda stepped forward to help Anatole, I saw with relief. But then Tata Boanda pulled away abruptly and began to shout, and I understood he was claiming Anatole’s bushbuck for himself. The elder Mama Boanda ran forward screaming and struck Anatole in the face. He let go, stumbling backward. I ran to steady him but was rammed from behind by old one-armed Tata Kili, who could not get past me fast enough in his hurry to claim his own stake. Behind him came the two Mama Kilis, determined to oversee his claim and raise it. Tata Ndu spoke again but was drowned out by the wave of our neighbors that rolled forward, parting and closing around him.

And so it came to pass that the normal, happy event of dividing food after a hunt became a war of insults and rage and starving bellies. There should have been more than enough for every family. But as we circled to receive our share of providence, the fat flanks of the magnificent beasts we’d stalked on the hill shrank to parched sinew, the gristle of drought-starved carcasses. Abundance disappeared before our eyes. Where there was plenty, we suddenly saw not enough. Even little children slapped their friends and stole caterpillars from each other’s baskets. Sons shouted at their fathers. Women declared elections and voted against their husbands. The elderly men whose voices hardly rose above a whisper, because they were so used to being listened to, were silenced completely in the ruckus. Tata Kuvudundu looked bedraggled and angry. His white robe was utterly blackened with ash. He raised his hands and once again swore his prophecy that the animals and all of nature were rising up against us.

We tried to ignore his strange remarks, but we all did hear him. In some corner of our hearts we all drew back, knowing he was right. The dead beasts in our hands seemed to be cursing and mocking us for having killed them. In the end we all crept home with our meat, feeling hunted ourselves. What was surely the oldest celebration of all, the sharing of plenty, had fallen to ruin in our hands.

Rachel

BY NIGHTFALL my sisters and parents came home and everything had gone crazy. Nothing went the way I expected. I had gotten out of my bath, dressed in clean clothes, towel-dried my hair, and was sitting quietly in the front room prepared to announce to my family that I was a vegetarian. I understood full well what this meant: from now on I would have to exist on bananas and have poor nutrition. I knew Mother would have strong opinions about where I’d wind up, with curved legs and weak bones like the poor Congolese children. But I shan’t care, not even if my hair falls out. At seventeen I have my rights, and besides, I’d made my own secret plan. As soon as Eeben Axelroot came back I was determined to use my feminine wilds to my own advantage. No matter what it took, I would get him to take me away from here in his airplane. “My fiance, Mr. Axelroot, and I are planning on returning to America,” I would tell them, “where it’s a free country and you can get anything to eat that you want.”

But this is not the conversation that happened. When they came home, everybody was having a conniption about a big giant fight in the village over who got whose share of their horrid meat. They went on talking and remarking about it while Mother built a fire in the stove and put in their antelope leg to roast, and mashed some plantains. It did smell so good. You could hear it all sizzling and crispy and juicy, and I have to confess when dinnertime came I did eat a few small bites, but only because I was positively weak with hunger. And I got to thinking about my hair falling out. But if there had been a grocery store within one hundred miles, believe me, I would have walked there on my own reconnaisance for some cuisine that didn’t still have feet attached to it.

At dinner the ruckus of our household was still going on, with Leah still saying over and over how she shot a whole antelope herself and it was not fair that our family didn’t get it. Father informed her that God showed no mercy upon those who flouted their elders, and that he, Reverend Price, had washed his hands of her moral education. He said this in just the plainest everyday voice, as if discussing that the dog had gotten into the garbage again. He stated that Leah was a shameful and inadequate vessel for God’s will, and that was “why he would no longer even stoop to punishing her when she needed it.

Leah spoke back to him in a calm voice as if she too were discussing whatever had gotten into the garbage and it certainly wasn’t her. She said, “Is that your point of view, Father? How interesting that you think so,” and so forth. Which was fine and dandy for her, I guess, if she wasn’t going to get punished for it! Lucky duck. Ruth May and Adah and I stayed out of it, us still being adequate vessels for a good licking, the last we’d heard. Even though someone could have pointed out to Father that at least somebody finally brought home some bacon at our house. Someone could have remarked that it is Leah who wears the pants in our family, which is true. Mother took sides against Father without saying so, in the noisy way she stacked the plates.

Then suddenly from one second to the next they were all transposed on Nelson, who came running into the house afraid for his life. It was something about a snake. He’d seen the evil sign outside our chicken house. Well, that was hardly a surprise because for the last few days people had been finding snakes everyplace. Inside the house, for instance, inside a bean basket with the lid on tight. Places where you wouldn’t think it was natural for a snake to be. Everybody was so afraid, Nelson said, you could see Afraid walking around on its own two feet. When he saw the evil sign it sent him singing like a canary, because our chicken house is where he sleeps.

He was positive he was doomed, and there was just no reasoning with him. Mother did try, but he wouldn’t listen. He said he’d been just fixing to go to bed when he heard a sound and went outside to look. When he stepped out the door, two shadows in the shape of an X fell across his path. Lately he’s been tying the chicken-house door shut with a rope when he turns in for the night, but now it was plain to see no rope -was going to be strong enough. Nelson was not going to sleep in our chicken house for all the teeth in China.

Well, any two straight things can make a shadow of an X is what Mother told him, which is true, especially with a wild imagination coming into play. Probably some clown is just trying to scare him and needs a good poke in the puss. But Nelson said this was not just ordinary shadows. He said it was the dreaming of snakes.

Father announced this was the unfortunate effect of believing in false idols and he washed his hands of the affair. He was washing his hands left and right that evening. Mother didn’t necessarily agree with him, but I could see she didn’t want us going anywhere near that chicken house to investigate. Father quoted a Bible verse about the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. He told Mother if she let Nelson sleep in our house that night she’d be playing directly into the hands of the idol worshipers, and if she wanted to count herself as one of them she could take her children and go seek shelter among them. Then he turned to us and declared it was high time for us to go to bed and put the light out on laughable Congolese superstitions.

But Nelson slunk out of the house in such a terrified state we couldn’t find anything to laugh about, that is for sure. Even Anatole had been telling us to be extra careful right now, and Anatole, I must admit, has his head firmly attached to his shoulders. We tried to get ready for bed, but all we could hear was Nelson outside whimpering to be allowed to come in, and we became scared out of our minds. Even Leah did. We did not believe in voodoo spirits, and informed each other of that fact till we were blue in the face. But still there was some dark thing out there watching us from the forest and coiling up under people’s beds at night, and whether you call it fear or the dreaming of snakes or false idolatry or what-it’s still something. It doesn’t care what prayers we say at bedtime, or whether we admit we believe in it. Does it believe in us, that’s the question.

We lay in our beds listening to Nelson’s steady, high-pitched begging. Sticky-toed lizards ran sideways along the walls. The moon made shadows on our mosquito netting. Nelson pleaded, “Bdkala mputu Nelson, bakala mputu” over and over like a poor starving dog that’s been whining so long it doesn’t know how to stop. We heard Father’s bedsprings groan suddenly, then Father at the window yelling for him to shut up. Leah rolled over and put her pillow on her head. I felt sick to my stomach. We all did. Father’s hatefulness and Mother’s silent fright were infecting our minds.

“This is wrong,” Leah said finally. “I’m going to help him. Who has the guts to come with me?”

The thought of going out there gave me the willies. But if the others went, I wasn’t going to stay in here with the shadows and lizards, either. I think our house gave me the worst willies of all. That house was the whole problem, because it had our family in it. I was long past the point of feeling safe huddling under my parents’ wings. Maybe when we first came to Congo I did, because we were all just hardly more than children then. But now everything has changed; being American doesn’t matter and nobody gives us any special credit. Now we’re all in this stewpot together, black or white regardless. And certainly we’re not children. Leah says in Congo there’s only two ages of people: babies that have to be carried, and people that stand up and fend for themselves. No in-between phase. No such thing as childhood. Sometimes I think she’s right.

After a while she said again, “I’m going out there to help Nelson, and Father can go straight to hell.”

Whether we said so or not, the rest of us certainly agreed upon where Father could go straight to.

Surprisingly, Adah sat up and started to pull on her jeans. That was her way of saying, “I’m in.” So I felt around on the floor for my penny loafers. Leah pulled Ruth May’s shirt on over her head and

stuck her tennis shoes on her feet. As quiet as mice, we crept outside through the window.

What we decided to do was to set a trap, like Daniel in the temple. This was Leah’s inspiration. Nelson raked a pan of cold ashes out of the stove, and together we strewed them all around the hard-pan-dirt yard outside the chicken house. Inside it, too. We worked by candlelight. Nelson kept a lookout to make sure no one saw us. But Ruth May was careless, and the rest of us were also, to some extent, and made tracks over each other’s tracks. Then our two chickens got disturbed by our lights, since they’d come from a different way of life over at Mama Mwanza’s and weren’t used to living in our chicken house yet, so they ran around making chicken tracks on top of everything. We had to sweep it all up and start over. The second time we were much more careful. We made Ruth May stand in one spot, and chased the chickens back into the nest box to roost. They looked down at us with their stupid little eyes and made soft noises into their feathers to calm themselves down.

When it was all done, we made Nelson promise to hide out the night at Anatole’s and corne back before daybreak. Leah ran halfway there with him, because he was scared, and came back by herself. We all tiptoed inside to our beds, leaving the ashes perfect behind us like newly fallen snow. If anyone or anything set foot in our chicken house-if it had feet, that is-we would catch the culprit red-handed.

Adah

THERE ARE SEVEN WAYS for a foot to touch the ground, each with its own particular power. Did he know how it would come to us in the end? Should I have known? For I had watched him, long before. Watched him dancing, foot to ground, watched him throw the bones. In the clearing behind our house is where he made his trouble. With his machete he cut off the heads of two small living dogs and pressed their noses to the ground, reciting promises. Against him, quietly, I unlocked my voice and sang in the forest. I sang against him my most perfect backward-forward hymns, because I have no other powers of my own.

Lived a tune, rare nut, a devil,

Lived a devil!

Lived a devil!

Wets dab noses on bad stew,

Evil deed live!

Evil deed live! Sun! opus! rat! See stars upon us,

Eye, level eye!

Eye, level eye! Warn rotten Ada, net torn raw.

Eye did peep did eye.

On the morning after we spread the ashes, we woke before sunrise. Wondering “what we might have caught in our trap, we lay still and -wide-eyed in our beds until Nelson’s face appeared at our open

window. Then, while our parents still slept, we tiptoed out of the house. Nelson with a pole twice as tall as himself waited for us. In the company of nothing but our fear itself, we went to the chicken house.

Strange to say, if you do not stamp yourself with the words exhilarated or terrified, those two things feel exactly the same in a body. Creeping past our parents’ bedroom and out the door, our bodies felt as they did on Christmas Past and all the Easter mornings of the world, when Christ is risen and our mother has hidden a tribe of sugared marshmallow bunnies in the startled grass oi a parsonage lawn in Bethlehem, Georgia. Ruth May marvel-eyed with a hand cupped over her mouth, I have willed myself to forget, forget, forget, and not forget, for those eyes will see through anything, even my dreams. Ruth May with the eyes of an Easter morning.

As Nelson knew it would be, it was there inside the chicken house. He stopped us in the doorway, and we froze behind his outstretched arm until we saw it too in the far corner, in the nest box, curled tightly around our two precious hens and all their eggs. Two poor, ruffle-feathered mothers without a breath between them, bound to their stillborn future. Nest, eggs, and hens were all one package, wrapped in a vivid, slender twine of brilliant green. It was so pretty, so elaborately basket-woven among hen and egg, we did not at first understand what we saw. A tisket, a tasket, a gift. Nelson raised his long pole and shoved hard, hitting the wall above the nest so dust rained down on the dark, quiet hens.The green vine shifted suddenly, every part at once moving up, down, or sideways. Stopped, then moved forward one more inch through the path of its knot. A small blunt head emerged and swiveled to face us. Very slowly it split itself wide, showing the bright blue inside of its mouth, two bare fangs. A tongue, delicately licking the air.

Suddenly it flew at the pole, striking twice, then flung itself from the nest box and shot past us out the door into the bright morning, gone.

Without breathing we stared at the place where the snake had been until our eyes caught up and we could all witness our memory of what had passed before us. Green mamba, mistress of camouflage, agility, aggressiveness, and speed. L’ingeniosite diabolique de la nature a atteint avec ce serpent le plus haut degre de perfection, the experts claim in the library book of snakes: In this serpent the diabolic genius of nature has attained the highest degree of perfection. What had passed before us was a basket of death, exploded. A gift meant for Nelson. Three of us, then, breathed. Together. Dropped our eyes to the white-ash floor.

A foot had marked that floor in all the seven ways of a dance. Footprints fanned out in tight circles. Evil deed live. Not the paws of a leopard walking upright, turned against men by irreverence. Not the belly slither of angry snakes coming up from the sheltered ground of their own accord to punish us. Only a man, one man and no other, who brought the snake in a basket or carried it stunned or charmed like a gift in his own two hands. Only one single dancer with six toes on his left foot.

Leah

I ONLY REMEMBER hearing a gulp and a sob and a scream all at once, the strangest cry, like a baby taking its first breath. We couldn’t tell where it came from, but strangely enough, we all looked up at the treetops. A nervous wind stirred the branches, but nothing more. Only silence fell down.

It’s a very odd thing to recall, that we all looked up. Not one of us looked at Ruth May. I can’t say that Ruth May was even there with us, in that instant. Just for the moment it was as if she’d disappeared, and her voice was thrown into the trees. Then she returned to us, but all that was left of her was an awful silence. The voiceless empty skin of my baby sister sitting quietly on the ground, hugging herself.

“Ruth May, honey, it’s all right,” I said. “The bad snake is gone.” I knelt down beside her, gently taking hold of her shoulder. “Don’t be scared. It’s gone.”

Nelson knelt too, putting his face close to hers. He opened his mouth to speak, to reassure her, I imagine, for he loved Ruth May. I know this. I’ve seen how he sings to her and protects her. But the terrible silence took hold of Nelson, too, and no words came. His eyes grew wide as we all watched her face change to a pale blue mask pulled down from her hairline to her swollen lips. No eyes. What I mean is that no one we recognized was looking out through her eyes.

“Ruth May, what is it? What! What did you see’?” In my panic I shook her hard, and I think I must have screamed those words at her. I can’t change what I did: I shook her too hard, and screamed at her. Maybe that was the last she knew of her sister Leah.

Nelson shoved me away. He’d come to life again suddenly and spoke so fast in Kikongo I couldn’t think how to understand. He tore her blouse open, just ripped it, and put his face against her chest. Then drew back in horror. As we watched in dismay I remember thinking I should pay attention to where the buttons fell, so I could help her sew them back on later. Buttons are so precious here. The strangest things I thought of, so ridiculous. Because I couldn’t look at what was in front of me.

“Midiki!” he screamed at me. I waited for the word to pierce my dumb, thick brain and begin to mean something. “Milk,” he was shouting. “Get milk. Of a goat, a dog, any kind, to draw out the poison. Get Mama Nguza,” he said, “she will know what to do, she saved her son from a green mamba once. Kakakaka, go!”

But I found I couldn’t move. I felt hot and breathless and stung, like an antelope struck with an arrow. I could only stare at Ruth May’s bare left shoulder, where two red puncture wounds stood out like red beads on her flesh. Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.

Adah

BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR. DEATH-He kindly stopped for me. I was not present at Ruth May’s birth but I have seen it now, because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life. The closing parenthesis, at the end of the palindrome that was Ruth May. Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby’s first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than-life that crowds down around the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen lips clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small. While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed. A lightning that cannot strike twice, our lesson learned in the hateful speed of light. A bite at light at Ruth a truth a sky-blue presentiment and oh how dear we are to ourselves when it comes, it comes, that long, long shadow in the grass.

Rachel

THERE’S A STRANGE MOMENT IN TIME, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true but you haven’t told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet. And I thought: Now we have to go in and tell Mother. That Ruth May is, oh, sweet Jesus. Ruth May is gone. We had to tell our parents, and they were still in bed, asleep.

I didn’t cry at first, and then, I don’t know why, but I fell apart when I thought of Mother in bed sleeping… Mothers dark hair would be all askew on the pillow and her face, sweet and quiet. Her whole body just not knowing yet. Her body that had carried and given birth to Ruth May last of all. Mother asletep in her nightgown, still believing she had four living daughters. Now we were going to put one foot in front of the other, walk to the back door, go in the house, stand beside our parents’ bed, wake up Mother, say to her the words Ruth May, say the word dead.Tell her, Mother wake up!

The whole world would change then, and nothing would ever be all right again. Not for our family. All the other people in the whole wide world might go on about their business, but for us it would never be normal again.

I couldn’t move. None of us could. We looked at each other because we knew someone should go but I tthink we all had the same strange idea that if we stood there without moving forever and ever, we could keep our family the way itt was. We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it wais someone’s real life, and for once that someone wasn’t just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was one life, the only one we were going to have. The only Ruth May.

Until that moment I’d always believed I could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened. The misery, the hunt, the ants, the embarrassments of all we saw and endured-those were just stories I would tell someday with a laugh and a toss of my hair, when Africa was faraway and make-believe like the people in history books. The tragedies that happened to Africans were not mine. We were different, not just because we were white and had our vaccinations, but because we were simply a much, much luckier kind of person. I would get back home to Bethlehem, Georgia, and be exactly the same Rachel as before. I’d grow up to be a carefree American wife, with nice things and a sensible way of life and three grown sisters to share my ideals and talk to on the phone from time to time. This is what I believed. I’d never planned on being someone different. Never imagined I would be a girl they’d duck their eyes from and whisper about as tragic, for having suffered such a loss.

I think Leah and Adah also believed these things, in their own different ways, and that is why none of us moved. We thought we could freeze time for just one more minute, and one more after that. That if none of us confessed it, we could hold back the curse that was going to be our history.

Leah

MOTHER DID NOT RANT or tear her hair. She behaved as if someone else had already told her, before we got there.

Silently she dressed, tied back her hair, and set herself to a succession of chores, beginning with tearing down the mosquito netting from all of our beds. We were afraid to ask what she was doing. We didn’t know whether she wanted us all to get malaria now, for punishment, or if she had simply lost her mind. So we stood out of her way and watched. All of us, even Father. For once he had no words to instruct our minds and improve our souls, no parable that would turn Ruth May’s death by snakebite into a lesson on the Glory of God. My Father, whose strong hands always seized whatever came along and molded it to his will, seemed unable to grasp what had happened.

“She wasn’t baptized yet,” he said.

I looked up when he said this, startled by such a pathetically inadequate observation. Was that really what mattered to him right now-the condition of Ruth May’s soul? Mother ignored him, but I studied his face in the bright morning light. His blue eyes with their left-sided squint, weakened by the war, had a vacant look. His large reddish ears repelled me. My father was a simple, ugly man.

It’s true that she wasn’t baptized. If any one of us had cared about that, we could lay the blame on Father. He’d maintained that Ruth May was still too young to take the responsibility of accepting Christ, but in truth I think he was holding her back for the sake of pageantry. He was going to baptize his own child along with all of Kilanga’s, on that great day down at the river when his dream finally came true. It would lend an appearance of sincerity to the occasion. Now he seemed narrow-witted and without particular dreams. I couldn’t stand to look at him standing in the doorway, his body hanging from its frame with nothing but its own useless hands for company. And all he could think to say to his wife was “This can’t be.”

It couldn’t be, but it was, and Mother alone among us seemed to realize that. With a dark scarf over her hair and the sleeves of her stained white blouse rolled up, she did her work as deliberately as the sun or moon, a heavenly body tracking its course through our house. Her tasks moved her continually away from us-her senseless shadows, a husband and living daughters. With determined efficiency she gathered up everything she would need from one room before she moved to the next, in the way I remember her doing when we were all much younger and needed her more.

She went out to the kitchen house, fired the stove, warmed a pan of water, then carried it back into the house and set it on the big dining table where Nelson had laid the body on a bedsheet. Mother bathed Ruth May with a washcloth as if she were a baby. I stood with my back to the wall, remembering too much of another time, as I watched her rub carefully under the chin and in the folds at the backs of the elbows and knees. In our house in Bethlehem I used to stand outside the bathroom door, where I could see the two of them in the mirror. Mother singing soft questions and kissing her answers into the tiny, outstretched palms. Adah and I were nine then, too old to be jealous of a baby, but still I had to wonder if she had ever loved me that much. With twins, she could only have loved each of us by half. And Adah was the one who required more of her.

A honey creeper sang from the bushes outside the window. It seemed impossible that an ordinary, bright day should be proceeding outside our house. Mother spread a small, soft hand onto hers and washed the fingers one at a time. She cradled and lifted the head to rinse it, taking care not to get the soapy water in Ruth May’s eyes. As she dried the limp blond hair with a towel, she leaned in close, inhaling the scent of my sister’s scalp. I felt invisible. By the force of my mother’s desire to conduct this ritual in private, she had caused me to disappear. Still, I couldn’t leave the room. After she dried and wrapped her baby in a towel she hummed quietly while combing out the tangles and plaiting the damp hair. Then she began to cut our mosquito netting into long sheets and stitch the layers together. At last we understood. She was making a shroud.

“Leah, help me move this table outside,” she said when she was finished. It was the first time she’d spoken in more than half a day, to anyone, and I jumped to do as I was told. She moved Ruth May to her own bed while we moved the big, heavy table out into the center of the front yard. We had to turn it on end to get it out the door. When we set it down, the legs settled soundly into the dust so it did not wobble, as it had always done inside the house. Mother went back inside and returned with the shrouded body in her arms. Gently she laid Ruth May out on the table, spending a long time arranging her arms and legs within the sheer cloth. The shade of the mango stretched all the way across the yard, and I realized it must be afternoon, a fact that surprised me. I looked at several familiar things, one at a time: a striped green mango lying in the grass; my own hand; our dining table. All these things seemed like objects I hadn’t seen before. I looked at the table and forced my mind to accept the words “This is my dead sister.” But Ruth May was shrouded in so many misty layers of mosquito netting I could barely make out any semblance of a dead child inside. She looked more like a billowy cloud that could rise right up through the trees, whenever Mother finally let her go.

Nelson was weaving together palm fronds to make a funeral arch of leaves and flowers to set over the table. It looked something like an altar. I thought perhaps I ought to help him, but I couldn’t think how. Several women from the village had already come. Mama Mwanza arrived first, with her daughters. A few at a time, the others followed. They fell down at the edge of our yard when they came, and walked on their knees to the table. All of them had lost children before, it dawned on me through my shock. Our suffering now was no greater than theirs had been, no more real or tragic. No

different. They all knelt around the table silently for quite a while, and I knew I should join them, but I felt unaccountably afraid to get close to the table. I stayed at the back of the group.

Suddenly one woman shrieked, and I felt my skull would split open. All the others immediately joined in with the quivering, high bildla. I felt blood rushing through all the narrow parts of my body: the wrists, the throat, the backs of my knees. Adah was white-faced beside me, and looked into my eyes as if she were drowning. We’d heard this strange mourning song many times before, back during the heavy rains when so many children got sick. It had tricked us at first, more than once, sending us running to the windows to see what beautiful, exotic birds made such a strange call. Now, of course, we couldn’t think of birds. The trilling of our neighbors’ tongues set loose knives that cut the flesh from our bones and made us fall down with our shame and our love and our anger. We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope, for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

In our family, the last was first. I would like to believe she got what she wanted. I ground my knees in the dust and shook and sobbed and opened my mouth to cry out loud. I crossed my arms over my chest and held on to my own shoulders, thinking of Ruth May’s sharp, skinny shoulder blades under her little white shirt. Thinking of ant lions and “Mother May I.” Recalling her strange, transfigured shadow the last time I pushed her in the swing. The sounds of our voices rose up through the tree branches into the sky, but Ruth May did not.

When the wailing finally stopped, we were wrapped in silence and the buzzing of locusts. The air was thick and ponderous with humidity. It felt like a wet wool blanket you could not take off.

Mother had begun moving all of our furniture into the yard. First the chairs. Then our beds and my father’s roll-top desk. These heavy things she dragged by herself, even though I know for a fact that two months ago she couldn’t have moved them. I continued to watch without any particular expectation as she emerged, next, with our clothes and books. Then our cooking pots. She stacked these things on the chairs and desk. The women watched closely, as my sisters and I did, but no one moved. Mother stood looking at us all, waiting. Finally she took the good skillet we’d brought from home and pressed it into Mama Mwanza’s hands. She offered our blouses and dresses to Mama Mwanza’s children. They accepted them in both hands, thanked her, and left. Mama Mwanza balanced the skillet on her head, since she needed her hands for walking, and solemnly led her family away from our funeral. Tentatively the other women touched our things. Their initial reluctance gave way to excited chatter as they began to sort through the piles of our possessions, unabashedly holding our clothes up to their children’s chests, scrutinizing such oddities as a hairbrush and fingernail clippers, thumping on the enamel pans with their knuckles to test their worth. Eventually they took what they needed, and left.

But the children soon came back, unable to resist the scene of such a spectacle. Just as they used to do when we first arrived here, they materialized one by one out of the moist air and the bamboo thickets until they’d formed a silent, watchful circle around the periphery of our yard. I suppose they were as astonished as we were that a member of our family was capable of death. Gradually they crept forward, closing their circle around the table, and there they remained for a very long time, staring at Ruth May.

Mother had gone back in the house, where we could hear her strange, tireless industry moving upon the empty rooms. Our father seemed to be nowhere. My sisters and I stayed outside with the children because they seemed to embrace our presence. Out of habit we knelt on the ground and prayed the dumb prayers of our childhood: “Our Father which art in heaven,” and “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” I could not remotely believe any Shepherd was leading me through this dreadful valley, but the familiar words stuffed my mouth like cotton, and it was some relief to know, at least, that one sentence would follow upon another. It was my only way of knowing what to do.

Whenever I stopped praying, the buzz of the locusts grew horrible in my ears. So I didn’t stop. Sometimes Rachel prayed with me, and sometimes the Congolese children also prayed in whatever words they knew. I recited the 23rd Psalm, the 121st Psalm, the l00th and 137th and16th and 66th Psalms, the 21st chapter of Revelation, Genesis one, Luke 22, First Corinthians, and finally John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Then I stopped. It was very late in the afternoon, and I could think of no more prayers. I’d come to the end of all I knew. I listened to the world around me, but all other sound had ceased entirely. Not a single bird called. I felt terrified. The air seemed charged and dangerous but I couldn’t pray anymore, and I couldn’t get up and do anything else. To go back inside our empty house, where Mother was, especially, I couldn’t make myself do. Not for anything. It seemed impossible. So I stayed where I was, kneeling beside my sisters with our heads bowed low beneath the crackling air.

The sky groaned and cracked, and suddenly the shrill, cold needles of rain pierced our hands and the backs of our necks. A thunderstorm broke open, and with a strength as mighty as the thirst of crops and animals, the rain poured down on our heads. It lashed us hard, answering months of prayers. Some of the smaller children rushed to break off elephant-ear leaves for umbrellas, but most of us simply stayed where we were, receiving the downpour. Lightning sang and hissed around our shoulders, and the thunder bellowed.

Our father came out of the house and stood looking at the sky, holding out his hands. It seemed to take him a long time to believe in the rain.

“The Lord spoke to the common people gathered at the well,” he said at last, in his old booming voice that allowed no corner for doubt. He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the downpour. “And the Lord told them, Whosoever drinks of this ordinary water will be thirsty again, but the water I will give unto him will quench his thirst forever. It will become a spring within him, bubbling up for eternal life.”

The children weren’t paying much mind right then to my father or his bubbling spring of eternal life. They were so transfixed by the rain. They held up their faces and arms to the cold water, as if the whole of their skin were a manioc field that needed to be soaked.

“If anyone is thirsty,” my father shouted, “let him come to me and drink! If anyone believes in me, streams of living water shall flow forth from his heart!”

He walked to a tall boy near me, Pascal’s half brother. I’d spoken to him twice and knew his name was Lucien, though I’m sure my father didn’t know it. Nevertheless, Father held out his large, white hand and spread his fingers wide over the boy’s head. Lucien looked my father in the eye as if he expected to be struck, but he didn’t flinch.

“I am a voice of one shouting in the desert, Straighten the Lord’s way!” my father cried.”! am only baptizing in water, but someone is standing among you of whom you do not know. He is God’s Lamb, who is to remove the world’s sin.”

My father lowered his hand and closed his fingers gently over the top of Lucien s head.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost I baptize you, my son. Walk forward into the light.”

Lucien didn’t move. Father took his hand away and waited, I suppose, for the miracle of baptism to take hold. Then he turned to Lucien s tiny sister Bwanga, who held on to Lucien’s hand for dear life. Their mother had died during the disease time, and their father’s other wife-Pascal’s mother-had taken them both into her house. Throughout this time of loss and salvation, Bwanga had remained Ruth May’s most loyal playmate. Even that my father wouldn’t have known. I felt an unspeakable despair. He knew nothing about the children. Under his cupped hand Bwanga’s little bald head looked like an overripe avocado he was prepared to toss away. She stood wide-eyed and motionless.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he repeated, and released her.

“Mah-dah-mey-I?” Bwanga asked.

Several other children remembered this game and echoed: “Mah-dah-mey-I?” Their eyes left Father and came to rest on Ruth May inside the drenched cloud of netting on the table. They all picked up the refrain, asking again and again in a rising plea: Mother May I? And though they surely knew no permission would be granted, they kept up their soft, steady chant for a very long time in the pouring rain. Water clung to their eyelashes and streamed in runnels down their open faces. Their meager clothes, imposed on them by foreigners, clung to their thin chests and legs like a second skin finally ready to accept the shape of their bodies. The dust on our feet turned blood-colored and the sky grew very dark, while Father moved around the circle baptizing each child in turn, imploring the living progeny of Kilanga to walk forward into the light.