Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

“You should get up. It’s dark and damp here, and our clever sons have gone off and left us.”

I raised my head and looked for the truck, which was indeed gone. There was something I needed to explain to Anatole, but I couldn’t be bothered with it at the peak of a contraction. Straight overhead was the tree, with its circle of limbs radiating out from the great, pale trunk. I counted my way around that circle of branches like numbers on the face of a clock, slowly, one deep breath for each number. Seventeen. A very long minute, maybe an hour. The contraction subsided.

“Anatole,” I said. “I mean to have this baby right here and now.” “Oh, Beene.You have never had any patience at all.” The boys drove on for some time before stopping and backing up, by the grace of God and Martin-Lothaire. He’d lost the argument about driving and was pouting out the back window when it dawned on him to shout for his brother to stop: “Wait, wait, Mama must be having the baby!”

Anatole threw things around madly in the truck before finding an elephant-grass mat and some shirts (at least we had with us everything we owned, and it was clean). He made me sit up so he could tuck these things under me. I don’t remember it. I only remember my thighs tensing and my pelvis arching forward with that sudden thunderous urge that is so much more powerful than any other human craving-the need to push. I heard a roar, which I suppose was me, and then Nataniel was here with us, bloodying a clean white shirt of Anatole’s and an old, soft pagne printed with yellow birds.

Anatole did a laughing, backward-hopping dance of congratulation. It wasn’t yet quite a year since his release from Camp Hardy, and he was sympathetic to his son’s eager escape from solitary confinement. But the baby was weak. Anatole immediately settled down to driving us anxiously through the dark while I curled around our suckling boy in the backseat, alarmed to see he wasn’t even that-he couldn’t nurse. By the time we arrived in Kimvula he felt feverish. From there he wasted very quickly to a lethargic little bundle of skin-covered bones and a gaunt, skin-covered skull. He didn’t even cry. The next many days and nights ran together for me because I was terrified to put him down at all, or even to fall asleep holding him, for fear he’d slip away. Anatole and I took turns rocking his limp little body, talking to him, trying to coax him into the world of the living. Martin insisted on taking his turn, too, rocking and whispering boy secrets into the little printed blanket. But Nataniel was hard to convince. Twice he stopped breathing altogether. Anatole blew into his mouth and massaged his chest until he gasped faintly and came back.

After a week he began to eat, and now seems to have no regrets about his decision to stay with us. But during that terrible first week of his life I was racked with the miseries of a weak, sore body and a lost soul. I could recollect having promised some God or other, more than once, that if I could only have Anatole back I would never ask for another thing on this earth. Now here I was, banging on heaven’s door again. A desolate banging, from a girl who could count the years since she felt any real presence on the other side of that door.

One night as I sat on the floor rocking, sleepless, deranged by exhaustion, cradling this innocent wreck of a baby, I just started to talk out loud. I talked to the fire: “Fire, fire, fire, please keep him warm, eat all the wood you need and I’ll get more but just don’t go out, keep this little body I already love so much from going cold!” I spoke in English, fairly certain I’d gone mad entirely. I spoke to the moon outside and the trees, to the sleeping bodies of Anatole and Patrice and Martin, and finally to the kettle of boiled, sterile water and tiny dropper I was using to keep the baby from dehydrating. Suddenly I had a fully formed memory of my mother kneeling and talking-praying, I believe-to a bottle of antibiotics when Ruth May was so sick. I could actually hear Mother’s breath and her words. I could picture her face very clearly, and feel her arms around me. Mother and I prayed together to whatever it is that we have. This was enough.

If God is someone who thinks of me at all, he must think of me as a mother. Scraping fiercely for food and shelter, mad entirely for love, by definition. My boys all cry,”Sala mbote!” as they run out the door, away from my shelter and advice but never escaping my love.

Pascal has gone farthest-for two years he’s been in Luanda, where he studies petroleum engineering and, I sincerely believe, chases girls. He reminds me so much of his namesake, my old friend, with similar wide-set eyes and the same cheerful question breaking like a fresh egg upon every new day: “Beta nki tutasala? What are we doing?”

Patrice is just the opposite: studious, sober, and an exact physical copy of his father. He wants to study government and be a Minister of Justice in a very different Africa from this one. I go weak in the knees with dread and admiration, watching him sharpen his hopes. But it’s Martin-Lothaire who’s turning out to be the darkest of my sons, in complexion and temperament. At twelve, he broods, and writes poetry in a journal like his father’s hero Agostinho Neto. He reminds me of his Aunt Adah.

Here in Kimvula District we’re working with farmers on a soybean project, trying to establish a cooperative-a tiny outpost of reasonable sustenance in the belly of Mobutu s beast. It’s futile, probably. If the government catches wind of any success here, the Minister of Agriculture will rob us out of existence. So we quietly plant our hopes out here in the jungle, just a few kilometers from the Angolan border, at the end of an awful road where Mobutu’s spies won’t often risk their fancy cars.

We count our small successes from day to day. Anatole has reorganized the secondary school, which had been in pure collapse for ten years-hardly a young adult in Kimvula village can read. I’m busy with my ravenous Taniel, who nurses night and day, riding in his sling on one side or the other so he won’t have to pause while I boil his diapers. Patrice and Martin have been commandeered by their father to teach French and mathematics respectively, even though this puts Martin in charge of children older than himself. Myself, I’m just happy to be living among fruit trees and cooking with wood again. I don’t mind the satisfying exhaustions of carrying wood and water. It’s the other exhaustion I hate, the endless news of Mobutu’s excesses and the costs of long-term deprivation. People here are instinctively more fearful and less generous than they were twenty years ago in Kilanga. Neighbor women do still come calling to offer little gifts, a hand of bananas or an orange for the baby to suck on and make us laugh at his puckery face. But their eyes narrow as they look around the room. Never having known a white person before, they assume I must know Mobutu and all important Americans personally. In spite of my protests, I think they worry I’ll report to someone that they had an orange to spare. There’s nothing like living as a refugee in one’s own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist. Zaireans are tired to death, you can see it anywhere you look.

Our house here is mud and thatch, plenty large, with two rooms and a kitchen shed. A happier place, for sure, than the tin-and-cement box that packaged us up with all our griefs in Kinshasa. There, the cranky indoor plumbing constantly grumbled at us like God to Noah, threatening the deluge, and Anatole swore if he lived through ten thousand mornings in Kinshasa he would never get used to defecating in the center of his home. Honestly, a latrine does seem like a return to civilization.

But our life in this village feels provisional. We have one foot over the border into the promised land, or possibly the grave. Our plan is to pack up our truck again and drive from here to Sanza Pombo, Angola, as soon as we possibly can.There we’ll keep our hands busy in a new, independent nation, whose hopes coincide with our own. We’ve been leaning toward Angola for ten years now-Anatole had a chance to serve in the new government there in 1975, right after the treaty that gave Neto the presidency. But Anatole wasn’t yet ready to abandon the Congo. And then Neto died, too young. In 1982 another invitation came from the second President, Jose dos Santos. Anatole was prevented from accepting that post by the inconvenience of living in a two-meter-square room with a bucket of his excrement for company in the Thysville penitentiary.