Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Possibly I’ve imagined this; the whole episode seems impossibly strange. I mentioned it later and Anatole laughed at what he called my reconstructed history. He claims I rode inside the canoe, at my own request, because the weight of the oddly shaped battery tipped the boat dangerously. Yet the event keeps returning to me in my dreams exactly as I’ve described it, with all the same sights and smells occurring in sequence as I stretched my weight over the water. It’s hard for me to doubt this is how it happened. I can’t deny my brain was still muddled, though. I have only the haziest recollection of waving at my mother and sister in a rising cloud of diesel exhaust and mosquitoes as they began their slow, permanent exodus from the Congo. I wish I could remember their faces, Adah’s especially. Did she feel I’d helped to save her? Or was it just more of the same parceling out of fortunes that had brought us this far, to this place where our path would finally divide into two?

I’ve compensated by remembering everything about Anatole in the days that followed. The exact green taste of the concoctions he boiled to cure me; the temperature of his hand on my cheek. The stitched patterns of light through thatch when morning entered the darkness where we slept, I against one wall, he against the other. We shared the fellowship of orphans. I felt it acutely, like a deep hunger for protein, and despaired for the flat-dirt expanse between Anatole and me. I begged him closer, inch by inch, clinging to his hands when he brought the cup. Now the bitterness of quinine and sweetness of kissing are two tastes perfectly linked on my soft palate. I had never loved a man before, physically, and I’ve read enough of both Jane Eyre and Brenda Starr to know every first love is potent. But when I fell into mine, I was drugged with the exotic delirium of malaria, so mine is omnipotent. How can I ever love anyone now but Anatole? Who else could make the colors of the aurora borealis rise off my skin where he strokes my forearm? Or send needles of ice tinkling blue through my brain when he looks in my eyes? What else but this fever could commute my father’s ghost crying, “Jezebel!” into a curl of blue smoke drifting out through a small, bright hole in the thatch? Anatole banished the honey-colored ache of malaria and guilt from my blood. By Anatole I was shattered and assembled, by way of Anatole I am delivered not out of my life but through it.

Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say, for I’ve loved my father fiercely my whole life, and it changed nothing. But now, all around me, the flame trees have roused from their long, dry sleep into walls of scarlet blossom. Anatole moves through the dappled shade at the edges of my vision, wearing the silky pelt of a panther. I crave to feel that pelt against my neck. I crave it with a predator’s impatience, ignoring time, keening to the silence of owls. When he’s gone away for a night or two, my thirst is inconsolable. When he comes back, I drink every kiss down to its end and still my mouth aches like a dry cave.

Anatole didn’t take me: I chose him. Once, long ago, he forbade me to say out loud that I loved him. So I’ll invent my own ways to tell him what I long for, and what I can give. I grip his hands and don’t let go. And he stays, cultivating me like a small inheritance of land where his future resides.

Now we sleep together under the same mosquito net, chastely. I don’t mind saying I want more, but Anatole laughs and rubs his knuckles into my hair, pushes me playfully out of the bed. Tells me to go get my bow and hunt a bushbuck, if I want to kill something. The word bandika, for “kill with an arrow,” has two meanings, you see. He said it wasn’t the time for me to become his wife, in the sense used by the Congolese. I was still mourning, he said, still sick, still living partly in another place. Anatole is a patient farmer. He reminds me that our arrangement is not at all unusual; he’s known many men to take even ten-year-olds as brides. At sixteen I am worldly by some people’s standards, and by anyone’s I’m devoted. The fever in my bones has subsided and the air no longer dances with flames, but Anatole still comes to me at night in the pelt of a panther.

I’m well enough to travel now. It’s been true for a while, really, but it was easy for me stay on here with Anatole’s friends in Bulungu, and hard for us to speak of what comes next. Finally, this evening, he had to ask. He took my hand as we walked to the river, which surprised me, as he’s normally reticent to show affection in public. I suppose it wasn’t very public-the only people we could see were the fishermen mending their nets on the opposite shore. We stood watching them while the sunset painted the river with broad streaks of pink and orange. Islands of water hyacinths floated past in the drowsy current. I was thinking I’d never felt more content or known such beauty in all my life. And right then he said, “Beene, you’re well.You can go, you know. I promised your mother I would see that you get home safely.”

My heart stopped.”Where does she think home is?”

“Where you are happiest.”

“Where do you want me to go?”,

“Where you will be happy,” he said again, and so I told him where that place is. Nothing could be easier. I’ve thought about it long and hard and decided that if he will tolerate me as I am, I’ll decline to return to all familiar comforts in order to stay here.

It was an unusual proposal, by the standards of any culture. We stood on the bank of the Kwenge listing the things we’ll have to abandon or relinquish. It’s important information. For all I may be forsaking, he’s giving up a good deal more: the possibility of having more wives than one, for instance. And that’s only the beginning. Even now, I think Anatole’s friends doubt his sanity. My whiteness could bar him outright from many possibilities, maybe even survival, in the Congo. But Anatole had no choice. I took him and held on. There’s enough of my father in me that I had to stand my ground.

Rachel Price Axelroot

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA 1962

VAANT so LIEF HET GOD die werddgehad, dat Hy sy eniggebore Seun 1 ‘ ‘ SeSee het, sodat elkeen wat in Homglo, nie verlore maggaan nie, maar die ewige lewe kan he.

How do you like that? Ha! That is John 3:16 in Afrikaans. For the last entire year I have worn my little white gloves and pillbox hat to the First Episcopal Church in Johannesburg and recited it right along with the best of them. And now one of my very close friends happens to be from Paris, France, and has taken me under her wings, so I can also go to the Catholic service with her and recite: Car Dieu a tant aime le monde qu’il a donne son Fils unique… In French, another words. I am fluent in three languages. I have not remained especially close with my sisters, but I dare say that for all their being gifted and what not, they can’t do a whole lot better than John 3:16 in three entire languages.

Maybe that won’t necessarily guarantee me a front-row seat in heaven, but considering what all I have had to put up with from Eeben Axelroot for the last year, just for starters, that ought to at least get me in the door. His gawking at other women when I am still so young and attractive myself, and with my nerves shot already, I might add, since I have been through so much. Not to mention his leaving me alone while he goes on all his trips, getting rich on one crackpot scheme after another that never did pan out. I put up with him out of gratitude, mainly. I guess trading away your prime of life is a fair price for somebody flying you out of that hellhole. He did save my life. I promised him I would testify to those very words: Rescued from imminent prospect of death. And I did, too, in a whole slew of forms, so we could collect the money from the U.S. Embassy. They had emergency money available to help their citizens in reaching safety after the Communist crisis with Lumumba and all of that hubbub. Axelroot even got himself a little medal of honor for heroic service, which he is very vain of and keeps in a special box in the bedroom. For that reason we couldn’t actually get legally married right away. The way he explained it was it wouldn’t look right for him to collect money on saving his own wife. That kind of thing you would just naturally be expected to do on your own, without getting paid for it or winning any medals of honor.