Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

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.