Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

“Pascal our friend?” I thought and thought. “Oh. That little boy with the holes in his pants you ran around with?”

Leah nodded, and kept on staring out at the big jacaranda trees that shaded the street. They dropped their huge purple flowers every so often, one at a time, like ladies dropping their hankies to get your attention. I lit another cigarette. I had expected two cartons of Lucky Strikes to last me the whole trip, but, boy, what with all the nervous tension those suckers were gone. I dreaded to think about it. Here on the street there were plenty of grimy little boys who’d sell you cigarettes one at a time with brand names like Black Hat and Mr. Bones, just to remind you they had no filter tips and

tasted like burning tar and were going to kill you in a jiffy. African tobacco is not a pretty picture.

“So,” I finally said, nudging Leah. “Dear old Dad. What’s the scoop?”

She continued looking out at the street, where all kinds of people were going by. It was almost like she was waiting for somebody. Then she sighed, reached over and shook out one of my last precious cigarettes and lit up.

“This is going to make me sick,” she said.

“What, smoking? Or telling about Father?”

She kind of laughed. “Both. And the beer, too. I’m not used to this.” She took a puff, and then frowned at the Lucky Strike like it was something that might bite her. “You should hear how I get after the boys for doing this.”

“Leah, tell!”

“Oh… it’s kind of awful. He’d been up there for a while on the north bend of the Kasai, in the area where they grow coffee. He was still trying to baptize children, I know this for a fact. Fyntan and Celine Fowles get up that way every few years.”

“Brother Fowles” I said. “You still keep in touch with him? Jeez Louise, Leah. Old home week. And he still knows Father?”

“They actually never got a look at him. I guess Father had reached a certain point. He hid from strangers. But they always heard plenty of stories about the white witch doctor named Tata Prize. They got the impression from talking to people that he was really old. I mean old, with a long white beard.”

“Father? Now I can’t picture that, a beard,” I said. “How old would he be now, sixty?”

“Sixty-four,” Adah said. Even though she talked now, it was like she was still handing over her little written announcements on notebook paper.

“He’d gotten a very widespread reputation for turning himself into a crocodile and attacking children.”

“Now that I can picture,” I said, laughing. The Africans are very superstitious. One of my workers swears the head cook can turn himself into a monkey and steal things from the guest rooms. I believe it!

“Still trying to drag the horse to “water,” Adah said.

“What horse?”

“So there was a really horrible incident on the river. A boat full of kids turned over by a croc, and all of them drowned or eaten or maimed. Father got the blame for it. Pretty much hung without a trial.”

“Oh,Jesus”I put my hand on my throat.”Actually hung?”

“No,” Leah said, looking irritated but getting tears in her eyes at the same time. “Not hung. Burned.”

I could see this was hard for Leah. I reached out and took hold of her hand. “Honey, I know,” I told her. “He was our daddy. I think you always put up with him better than any of us. But he was mean as a snake.There’s nothing he got that he didn’t deserve.”

She pulled her hand out of mine so she could wipe her eyes and blow her nose. “I know that!” She sounded mad. “The people in that village had asked him to leave a hundred times, go someplace else, but he’d always sneak back. He said he wasn’t going to go away till he’d taken every child in the village down to the river and dunked them under. Which just scared everybody to death. So after the drowning incident they’d had enough, and everybody grabbed sticks and took out after him. They may have just meant to chase him away again. But I imagine Father was belligerent about it.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “He was probably still preaching hell and brimstone over his shoulder while he ran! “Which is true.

“They surrounded him in an old coffee field and he climbed up on one of those rickety watchtowers left over from the colonial days. Do you know what I’m talking about? They call them tours de maitre.The boss towers, where in the old days the Belgian foreman would stand watching all the coffee pickers so he could single out which ones to whip at the end of the day.”

“And they burned him?”

“They set the tower on fire. I’m sure it went up like a box of matches. It would have been twenty-year-old jungle wood, left over from the Belgians.”;

“I’ll bet he preached the Gospel right to the very end,” I said.

“They said he waited till he was on fire before he jumped off. Nobody wanted to touch him, so they just left him there for the animals to drag off.”

I thought, Well, nobody around there’s going to be drinking any coffee for a while! But it seemed like the wrong moment for a joke. I ordered another round of Elephant beers and we sat pondering our different thoughts.

Then Adah got a very strange look and said, “He got The Verse.”

“Which one?” Leah asked.

“The last one. Old Testament. Second Maccabees 13:4: ‘But the King of Kings aroused the anger of Antiochus against the rascal.’“

“I don’t know it,” Leah said.

Adah closed her eyes and thought for a second and then quoted the whole thing out: ‘“The King of Kings aroused the anger of Antiochus against the rascal. And when Lysias informed him this man was to blame for all the trouble, he ordered them to put him to death in the way that is customary there. For there is a tower there seventy-five feet high, filled with ashes, and there they push a man guilty of sacrilege or notorious for other crimes to destruction. By such a fate it came to pass that the transgressor died, not even getting burial in the ground.’“

“Holy shit!”I declared.

“How come you know that verse?” Leah asked.

“I must have gotten that one fifty times. It’s the final ‘The Verse’ in the Old Testament, I’m trying to tell you. One-hundred-count from the end. If you include the Apocrypha, which of course he always did.”

“And what’s at the finish of it?” I asked. “The take-home lesson?”

“The closing statement of the Old Testament: ‘So this will be the end.’“

“So this will be the end,” Leah and I both repeated, in complete amazement. After that we were speechless for approximately one hour, while we listened to each other’s throat sounds every time we took a swallow of beer.And Leah smoked the last two Lucky Strikes in West Africa.

Finally she asked, “Why would he give you that verse so many times? I never got that one.” Which if you ask me is really not the point.

But Adah smiled, and answered like it mattered, “Why do you think, Leah? For being slow.”

After a while I smelled wood smoke. Some vendors were setting up to grill meat along the side of the street. I got up and bought some for everyone with my own money, so I wouldn’t have to hear Leah gripe that it was too expensive, or Adah telling us what exact germs were living on it. I got chicken on wooden skewers and brought it back to the table wrapped in wax paper.

“Eat up and be merry!” I said. “Cheers.”

“In memory of the Father,” Adah said. She and Leah looked at their shish kebabs, looked at each other, and had another one of their private little laughs.

“He was really his own man, you have to give him that,” Leah said, while we munched. “He was a history book all to himself. We used to get regular reports from Tata Boanda and the Fowleses, when he was still around Kilanga. I probably could have gone to see him, but I never got up the nerve.”