Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

“Why not?” I asked her. “I would, just to tell him where to get off.”

“I guess I was scared of seeing him as a crazy person. The tales got wilder and wilder as the years went by.That he’d had five wives, who all left him, for example.”

“That’s a good one,” I said. “Father the Baptist Bigamist.”

“The Pentecostal Pentigamist,”Adah said.

“It was really the best way for him to go, you know? In a blaze of glory,” Leah said. “I’m sure he believed right up to the end that he was doing the right thing. He never did give up the ship.”

“It’s shocking he lasted as long is he did,”Adah said.

“Oh, true! That he didn’t die fifteen years ago of typhus or sleeping sickness or malaria or the combination. I’m sure his hygiene went to hell after Mother left him.”

Adah didn’t say anything to that. Being the doctor, of course, she would know all about tropical diseases and wouldn’t care for Leah sounding like the expert. That’s how it always is with us. Step too far one way or the other and you’ve got on your sister’s toes.

“For gosh sakes,” I said suddenly. “Did you write to Mother? About Father?”

“No. I thought Adah might want to tell her in person.”

Adah said carefully, “I think Mother has presumed him dead for a long time already.”

We finished our shish kebabs and talked about Mother, and I even got to tell a little about the Equatorial, and I thought for once in our lives we were going to finish out the afternoon acting like a decent family. But then, sure enough, Leah started in about Mobutu putting her husband in prison, how the army terrorizes everybody, what was happening with the latest payola schemes in Zaire, which between you and me is the only reason I have any customers at all on my side of the river, but I didn’t say so. Then she moved on to how the Portuguese and Belgians and Americans have wrecked poor Africa top to bottom.

“Leah, I am sick and tired of your sob story!” I practically shouted. I guess I’d had one too many, plus my cigarettes were gone, and it was hot. I’m so extremely fair the sun goes straight to my head. But really, after what we’d just seen in that palace: wife murdering and slave bones in the walls! These horrible things had nothing to do with us; it was all absolutely hundreds of years ago. The natives here were ready and waiting when the Portuguese showed up wanting to buy slaves, I pointed out. The King of Abomey was just delighted to find out he could trade fifteen of his former neighbors for one good Portuguese cannon.

But Leah always has an answer for everything, with vocabulary words in it, naturally. She said we couldn’t possibly understand what their social milieu was, before the Portuguese came. “This is sparse country,” she said. “It never could have supported a large population.”

“So?” I examined my nails, which were frankly in bad shape.

“So what looks like mass murder to us is probably misinterpreted ritual. They probably had ways of keeping their numbers in balance in times of famine. Maybe they thought the slaves were going to a better place.”

Adah chimed in: “A little ritual killing, a little infant mortality, just a few of the many healthy natural processes we don’t care to think about.” Her voice sounded surprisingly like Leah’s. Although I presume Adah was joking, whereas Leah never jokes.

Leah frowned at Adah, then at me, trying to decide which one of us was the true enemy. She decided on me. “You just can’t assume that what’s right or wrong for us is the same as what was right or wrong for them,” she said.

“Thou shalt not kill,” I replied. “That’s not just our way of thinking. It happens to be in the Bible.”

Leah and Adah smiled at each other.

“Right. Here’s to the Bible,” Leah said, clinking her bottle against mine.

“Tata Jesus is bangala!” Adah said, raising her bottle too. She and Leah looked at each other for a second, then both started laughing like hyenas.

“Jesus is poisonwood!” Leah said. “Here’s to the Minister of Poisonwood. And here’s to his five wives!”

Adah stopped laughing. “That was us.”

“Who?” I said. “What?”

“Nathan’s five legendary wives. They must have meant US.”

Leah stared at her. “You’re right.”

Like I said: night, day, and the Fourth of July. I don’t even try to understand.

Adah Price

ATLANTA JANUARY 1985

FULL FATHOM five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

This is no mortal business.The man occupied us all in life and is still holding on to his claim. Now we will have to carry away his sea-changed parts rich and strange to our different quarters. Estranged, disarranged, we spend our darkest hours staring at those pearls, those coral bones. Is this the stuff I came from? How many of his sins belong also to me? How much of his punishment?

Rachel seems incapable of remorse, but she is not. She wears those pale white eyes around her neck so she can look in every direction and ward off the attack. Leah took it all-bones, teeth, scalp-and knitted herself something like a hair shirt. Mother’s fabrication is so elaborate I can hardly describe it. It occupies so much space in her house she must step carefully around it in the dark.

Having served enough time in Atlanta with her volunteer work, Mother has moved to the Georgia coast, to a hamlet of hoary little brick houses on Sanderling Island. But she carried the sunken treasure along to her little place by the shore. She stays outdoors a lot, I think to escape it. When I go to visit I always find her out in her walled garden with her hands sunk into the mulch, kneading the roots of her camellias. If she isn’t home, I walk down to the end of the historic cobbled street and find her standing on the sea wall in her raincoat and no shoes, glaring at the ocean. Orleanna and Africa at a standoff. The kids flying by on bicycles steer clear of this barefoot old woman in her plastic babushka, but I can tell you she is not deranged. My mother’s sanest position is to wear only the necessary parts of the outfit and leave off the rest. Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one. “My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.”

Personally I have stolen an arm and a leg. I am still Adah but you would hardly know me now, without my slant. I walk without any noticeable limp. Oddly enough, it has taken me years to accept my new position. I find I no longer have Ada, the mystery of coming and going. Along with my split-body drag I lost my ability to read in the old way. When I open a book, the words sort themselves into narrow-minded single file on the page; the mirror-image poems erase themselves half-formed in my mind. I miss those poems. Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking. Like Jekyll I crave that particular darkness curled up within me. Sometimes it almost comes. The books on the shelf rise up in solid lines of singing color, the world drops out, and its hidden shapes snap forward to meet my eyes. But it never lasts. By morning light, the books are all hunched together again with their spines turned out, fossilized, inanimate.

No one else misses Ada. Not even Mother. She seems thoroughly pleased to see the crumpled bird she delivered finally straighten up and fly right.