Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

This is our permanent order: Leah, Ruth May, Rachel, Adah. Neither chronological nor alphabetical but it rarely varies, unless Ruth May gets distracted and falls out of line.

At the foot of the hibiscus bush we discovered a fallen nest of baby birds, all drowned. My sisters were thrilled by the little naked, winged bodies like storybook griffins, and by the horrible fact they were dead. Then we found the garden. Rachel screamed triumphantly that it was ruined once and for all. Leah fell to her knees in a demonstration of grief on Our Father’s behalf. The torrent had swamped the flat bed and the seeds rushed out like runaway boats. We found them everywhere in caches in the tall grass at the edge of the patch. Most had already sprouted in the previous weeks, but their little roots had not held them to the Reverend Farmer’s flat-as-Kansas beds against the torrent. Leah walked along on her knees, gathering up sprouts in her shirttail, as she probably imagined Saca-jaweah would have done in the same situation.

Later Our Father came out to survey the damage, and Leah helped him sort out the seeds by kind. He declared he would make them grow, in the name of God, or he would plant again (the Reverend, like any prophet worth his salt, had held some seeds in reserve) if only the sun would ever come out and dry up this accursed mire.

Even at sunset, the two of them did not come in for supper. Mama Tataba bent over the table in our mother’s large white apron, which made her look’ counterfeit and comic, as though acting the role of maid in a play. She watched him steadily out the window, smiling her peculiar downturned smile, and made satisfied clicks with her tongue against her teeth. We set ourselves to the task of eating her cooking, fried plantain and the luxury of some canned meat.

Finally he sent Leah in, but long after dinner we could still hear the Reverend out there beating the ground with his hoe, revising the earth. No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds.

Leah

IT ONLY TAKES FIVE DAYS in hot weather for a Kentucky Wonder bean to gather up its vegetable willpower and germinate. That was all we thought we needed. Once the rains abated, my father’s garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper. He loved to stand out there just watching things grow, he said, and you could believe it.The beanstalks twisted around the sapling teepees he’d built for them, and then they wavered higher and higher like ladies’ voices in the choir, each one vying for the top. They reached out for the branches of nearby trees and twined up into the canopy.

The pumpkin vines also took on the personality of jungle plants. Their leaves grew so strangely enormous Ruth May could sit still under them and win at “Hide and Seek” for a very long time after the rest of us had stopped playing. When we squatted down we could see, alongside Ruth May’s wide blue eyes, yellow blossoms of cucumber and squash peering out from the leafy darkness.

My father witnessed the progress of every new leaf and fat flower bud. I walked behind him, careful not to trample the vines. I helped him construct a sturdy stick barricade around the periphery so the jungle animals and village goats would mot come in and wreck our tender vegetables when they came. Mother claims I have the manners of a wild animal myself, as I am a toimboy, but I never fail to be respectful of my father’s garden. His devotion to its progress, like his devotion to the church, was the anchoring force in my life throughout this past summer. I knew my father icould taste those Kentucky Wonder beans as surely as any pure soul can taste heaven.

Rachel’s birthday came in late August, but the Betty Crocker cake mix let us all down. Normal cake production proved out of the question.

To begin with, our stove is an iron contraption with a firebox so immense a person could climb right in if they felt like it. Mother yanked Ruth May out by the arm, pretty hard, when she found her in there; she dreaded that Mama Tataba in one of her energetic fits might stoke up the stove with the baby inside. It was a sensible concern. Ruth May is so intent on winning Hide and Seek, or any game for that matter, she would probably go ahead and burn up before she’d ever yell and give herself away.

Mother has figured out how to make bread “by hook or by crook,” she likes to say, but the stove doesn’t really have a proper oven. In fact, it looks less like a stove than a machine hammered together out of some other machine. Rachel says it was part of a locomotive train, but she is famous for making things up out of thin air and stating them in a high, knowing tone.

The stove wasn’t even the worst of our cake troubles. In the powerful humidity the powdered mix got transfigured like Lot’s poor wife who looked back at Gomorrah and got turned to a pillar of salt. On the morning of Rachel’s birthday I found Mother out in the kitchen house with her head in her hands, crying. She picked up the box and banged it hard against the iron stove, just once, to show me. It clanged like a hammer on a bell. Her way of telling a parable is different from my father’s.

“If I’d of had the foggiest idea,” she said very steadily, holding her pale, weeping eyes on me, “just the foggiest idea. We brought all the wrong things.”

The first time my father heard Methuselah say, “Damn,” his body moved strangely, as if he’d received the spirit or a twinge of bad heartburn. Mother excused herself and went in the house.

Rachel, Adah, and I were left on the porch, and he looked at each one of us in turn. We had known him to forbear with a silent grimace when Methuselah said, “Piss off,” but of course that was the

doing of Brother Fowles. The mote in his brother’s eye, not the sin of his own household. Methuselah had never said “Damn” before, so this was something new, spoken right out very chipper in a feminine tone of voice.

“Which one of you taught Methuselah to say that word?” he demanded.

I felt sick to my stomach. None of us spoke. For Adah that’s normal, of course, and for that very reason she often gets accused when none of us speaks up. And truthfully, if any of us was disposed to use curse words, it would be Adah, who could not care less about sin and salvation. That’s the main reason I got Mother to cut my hair in a pixie, while Adah kept hers long: so nobody would get our attitudes mixed up. I myself would not curse, in or out of Methuselah’s hearing or even in my dreams, because I crave heaven and to he my father’s favorite. And Rachel wouldn’t-she’ll let out a disgusted “Jeez” or “Gol!” when she can, but is mainly a perfect lady when anybody’s listening. And Ruth May is plain too little.

“I fail to understand,” said Father, who understands everything, “why you would have a poor dumb creature condemn us all to eternal suffering.”

I’ll tell you what, though, Methuselah is not dumb. He imitates not just words, but the voices of people that spoke them. From Methuselah we have learned the Irish-Yankee voice of Brother Fowles, whom we picture as looking like that Father Flanagan that runs the Boys Town. We could also recognize MamaTataba, and ourselves. Furthermore, Methuselah didn’t just imitate words, he knew them. It’s one thing simply to call out, “Sister, God is great! Shut the door!” when the spirit moves him, but he’ll also call out “banana” and “peanut” as plain as day, when he sees these things in our hands and wants his share. Oftentimes he studies us, copying our movements, and he seems to know which words will provoke us to laugh or talk back to him, or be shocked. We already understood what was now dawning on my father: Methuselah could betray our secrets.