The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  ‘Her baby died last night, Nkosikaas,’ murmured Philemon.

  How many tragedies had happened since her arrival? Clara found her ignorance distressing. Inside the blacksmith’s hut, the man himself and his assistant were forging an axe. One fanned the coals with goatskin bellows while the other hit the red-hot metal with a hammer, grunting with every blow. The men gazed at Clara with undisguised suspicion.

  ‘Why do they stare so, Philemon?’

  Philemon seemed embarrassed. ‘Our own women never come near when they are menstruating. The men think a white woman does not know that her blood can spoil new metal.’

  Her own menses had started the day before, and she wondered how the men had known or even suspected. She was still puzzling over this, when Herida came into view, approaching between the huts. She was preceded by a boy driving a black goat. Her left leg was bandaged with a bloodstained rag.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ asked Clara.

  Philemon asked a few questions and then explained that Herida’s leg had been cut by her father. The witch doctor had caught the blood in a horn and rubbed medicine into the wound. Herida’s blood would now be mixed with another medicine. But try as he might, the preacher could not get Herida to disclose the use to which the mixture would be put. Although understanding only a word or two, Clara could not help watching Herida’s beautiful face. Her nose tilted upwards becomingly, and her long and narrow eyes gave her a slightly Oriental appearance – though she was not inscrutable. Her moods were wonderfully clear, whether sadness, roguish good humour, or indignation.

  Philemon asked, gently, ‘Where are you taking your goat?’

  ‘To sacrifice him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To appease the spirit that has bewitched my husband.’

  ‘That’s untrue, child. Your husband is not bewitched.’

  ‘Umfundisi, you sacrifice to the spirits, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how can you be safe from bad spirits?’

  Philemon said quietly, ‘No spirits can harm us, Herida; only the bad desires in our own hearts.’

  ‘Which spirits do you speak to, Umfundisi, when you talk to the air?’

  ‘Only one. The spirit of God, the father of Jesus Christ. He watches over all of us.’

  ‘Is he watching now?’ Herida looked about her uneasily.

  ‘Not one hair falls from my head that he does not see.’

  Herida shuddered. ‘How can that be? Where is he now?’

  ‘He is everywhere.’

  ‘I cannot see him.’

  ‘You can talk to Him if you pray.’

  ‘I do not know how to.’

  Just as Clara was asking Philemon to promise to teach Herida how to pray, a commotion broke out on the path ahead. Some men jumped forth from the long grass, and staves flashed as they began to beat the mission women. A pot fell to the ground and smashed. Screams rang out as women were thrown to the ground. Like a spindly Quixote, Philemon ran forward bravely. Clara dashed after the old man and overtook him, shedding combs and pins from her streaming hair. As in a happy dream, the attackers recoiled as she bore down on them. But though scared at first by her white face, the men soon stood firm. One naked warrior even stepped towards her. Clara’s heart was banging so hard against her ribs that she fancied they must hear it. Philemon’s feet flapped behind her, sounding as sadly ineffectual as an old bird’s wings. But firmer steps were following. Herida’s angry voice rang out. Clara turned and saw her waving the men away.

  The aggressors stood crestfallen beside the path, while the Christian women scampered off in the direction of the well. Just when the danger seemed over, more shouting erupted. Mponda’s guard belatedly sprang out from the long yellow grass. Seeing Herida apparently commanding the attackers, they pointed their assegais at her breast. Clara screamed and dashed to place herself between Herida and the chief’s men. Very slowly, Mponda’s guards lowered their spears. As they did so, the malefactors jumped back into the bush like startled bucks.

  Still breathing in gasps, Philemon smiled at Herida. ‘You see how Jesus Christ saves us?’

  She smiled back at him with gentle mockery. ‘Jizzus won’t protect my marriage if Mponda drinks his blood.’ She laughed softly. ‘The white woman saved me, old man, not your Jizzus.’

  Clara resolved to do whatever she could to aid this brave and touching person. Herida had taken a huge risk in helping the Christian women. Her father would be especially angry.

  After Herida had left them, Clara turned to Philemon. ‘If Mponda must have one wife, why can’t it be Herida?’

  ‘Nkosikaas,’ he objected, amazed at her obtuseness, ‘Herida was not his first wife.’

  ‘Does that matter? All Mponda’s wives were married in the proper tribal fashion, I’m sure.’

  ‘You must talk with master, Nkosikaas.’

  ‘But surely you must have your own opinion, Philemon? If the chief had been a Christian when he took his second and third wives, then of course his first wife would be his only true one. But Mponda was a pagan when he married all three, so each has an equal claim.’

  Even as she spoke, Clara knew that the old preacher’s opinions about Herida did not matter. Robert was the one who had decided the issue in Chizuva’s favour, without even considering which wife loved the chief most.

  *

  The rains were late, and when the wind blew from the east across the dried-up riverbed, clouds of tawny dust would rise and fling themselves upon the huts. On such a morning, Clara struggled back from the mission to find that the housemaid, Hannah, was plastering the floor with a mixture of liquid cow dung and clay. She ran out again and, coughing and choking, dragged Paul back from the school.

  ‘Witchcraft?’ He laughed. ‘No, no, Mrs Robert. Nothing lays the dust better than dung. Kills fleas too.’

  Already Hannah was giving the vile-smelling mess a surface of glassy smoothness with the help of a length of wood.

  ‘How long till it dries?’

  ‘Very soon it will be hard,’ promised Paul.

  ‘And smelly?’

  ‘No smell, Mrs Robert.’ He laughed again, and Clara could not help joining in. She enjoyed her lessons with Paul much more than those with Philemon.

  Paul was easily embarrassed. And because a number of words had two or more meanings, depending upon which syllable was stressed, the opportunities for misunderstanding were numerous. Mala, for example, could mean both bowels and cold; libe could be sin or cow dung; and tsetla, yellow or bladder. When Clara unwittingly pronounced words in their lewder sense, Paul would look away and mutter about the importance of correctly emphasizing this or that vowel.

  ‘But what’s wrong with pholo with the stress on the last letter?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean health, Mrs Robert.’

  ‘What does it mean, Paul?’

  ‘A man’s …’

  ‘If it’s important I know, you shouldn’t make me guess, should you, Paul?’

  ‘His penis.’

  Why he should be so embarrassed, when large numbers of men in the village walked about with their penises exposed, was a mystery to Clara.

  Sometimes she tried to impress Paul by increasing her vocabulary from other sources. Recently she had asked Matiyo for the name of a particular lizard. ‘Kaya,’ he had replied. So when Paul came to teach her, she pointed to an identical lizard. ‘Kaya,’ she announced confidently. Paul laughed uproariously. Matiyo had been ignorant of the name of this variety of lizard and, when pressed, had replied, ‘I don’t know.’ That was what kaya meant.

  Clara found Paul’s love for Hannah very affecting. He knew so much more than she, yet Hannah had a serenity that he entirely lacked. Nothing rushed or flustered her. She was not upset by Paul’s laughter when he found her using a sock as a coffee strainer or misapplying one of the other mysterious household contraptions. While working, she moved about so softly on her bare feet that her presence was strangely calming. Her lighting of the kit
chen fire each morning struck Clara as miraculous. Hannah could blow longer and more powerfully than seemed possible for a girl of her slenderness. If she found a pin or button on the floor, she always placed it on the table. Even spent matches were preserved in this way. Clara thought her a model of trustworthiness.

  Whenever Paul came over, he would watch his loved one with a devoted smile. He delighted in repeating for Clara some of Hannah’s ingenuous remarks about white people. Why did they wash themselves so often and use so many implements to eat a simple meal? And why did they nibble at their food instead of taking big, satisfying mouthfuls? Paul’s laughter was never condescending. ‘I too once asked such things, Mrs Robert.’ His good-natured cheerfulness was a tonic to Clara. A gap between his front teeth made him look much younger than his seventeen years. Five years earlier, Paul had been a shop boy in Bulawayo, selling alarm clocks, concertinas, patent medicines, canvas trousers, and cricket bats.

  ‘Until master came to buy lamp oil, nobody told me where all these wonderful things were made. Master drew pictures of factories and steamships. He said if I lived at his mission, he would teach me.’ Paul’s voice grew thick with emotion. ‘Master opened my eyes. I might have grown up proud to kill a man.’

  Clara thought of boastful soldiers at home with their campaign medals. Paul’s admiration for Robert made him forget what ordinary white men were like. It also left Clara with a guilty feeling that Robert might be a far better man than she had given him credit for.

  During the second week of his absence, the noise of drumming started to persist into the early hours of the morning, making sleep impossible and setting Clara’s heart racing. Was an assault on the mission imminent? Or even on her? The attack on the women near the well, coupled with Robert’s letter, had filled her with foreboding. Paul reassured her about the drums. He said they were summoning the adolescents to prepare for their initiation rites, but Clara still felt nervous enough to ask him to sleep in Simon’s shed until Robert returned.

  So Paul moved in. Though he understood the drumming, he too had no love for it, having his own reasons for dreading the initiation rites, especially the girls’ ceremonies: the boyale. Paul had tried hard to convert Hannah to Christianity, but he had failed. Her parents wanted her to be circumcised, and she herself believed that she would be a real woman only when she was. In Paul’s eyes, she would be siding with the pagans and rejecting him. But he knew she would cause her family great pain if she refused to attend the boyale. In that regard, Hannah knew exactly what his faith had cost him. When his father had been on his deathbed, Paul had not been able to ask the ancestral spirits to accept the dying man’s soul, as a good son should. Instead his Christian duty had obliged him to inform his father that he had worshipped the wrong god all his life and ought to repent at once, before it was too late.

  ‘You tried to convert him as he lay dying?’ Clara was aghast.

  ‘Of course I did.’ Paul looked hurt and puzzled. ‘It was my last chance to save his soul.’

  ‘Were you successful?’

  He shook his head sadly. They had just finished their meal of sadza, the local stiff porridge, and Hannah now brought in bowls of water for their hands.

  ‘You can go and join her,’ Clara murmured to Paul; but he declined. Men did not prepare food with women or clear it away.

  ‘When did you start to believe in Jesus?’ she asked as Hannah left.

  ‘In the church in Bulawayo. Master took me. People were kneeling in front of a cross. I didn’t know what it was. It was dark, and there were shining nails in the wood. I thought they were God’s eyes. I believed this till master explained.’

  Clara sighed. So much more thrilling to see God’s eyes gleaming like a lion’s than to share a white minister’s decorous vision of the deity. After a long silence, she walked to the door and looked out. A shooting star traced a chalky line across the heavens. The drumming and dancing were echoing across the village. This was the only time of day when the heat was not intolerable. She longed to watch whatever was going on but knew that Paul would not let her. After all, she was his master’s precious possession.

  ‘Mponda’s men would surely protect us,’ she pointed out.

  ‘They’d be poisoned if they didn’t. But what would people say if they saw them with us? They’d say Christians can’t feel safe if they need to go everywhere with the chief’s men. Who would want to be a Christian then?’

  After telling Paul to go to bed, Clara went back to the door, eager to feel a breath of cool air on her face. To be free again. Free! A longing to escape from this terrible error of hers and start again tantalized her. It would be as if she had never gone to the Temperance Hall that evening, never heard Robert speak. On the returning steamship’s deck, people would gaze at her intently. Behind her widow’s veil she would be mysterious – a woman who had lived and suffered without paying the price of age or ugliness. The idea was both frightening and pleasurable. Had Charles already married? Would Francis be in England? She covered her face in shame at feeling so little for her husband.

  In the kitchen, Hannah was humming to herself as she filled the kettle, using a jug to pour water down the spout. Amazed that nobody had shown the girl what to do, Clara lifted the lid and was rewarded by a shrill peal of laughter. Hannah took the lid and held it in front of her face as if to hide her embarrassment; then she peeped around it with a delighted grin, for all the world as if she had just played a joke on the white woman. Clara had thought her demure to the point of primness, but the girl’s dimpled cheeks and mischievous eyes made her think again.

  *

  A cock crowing under her window woke Clara to another burning hot morning. In three days’ time either Robert would be back or she would be arranging her departure with Philemon. When Clara was dressed, she went to the door and peered through the shimmering haze between the huts. The chief’s men were nowhere to be seen. Refusing to allow herself to be a prisoner, she stepped into the lane and headed in a direction she had often seen people take but had never tried for herself.

  She scrambled across a barrier of rocks and tangled undergrowth into a network of frowzy grass paths. A displeasing smell reached her nostrils. Before actually seeing human excrement, she noticed the dung beetles scurrying hither and thither. In her ignorance, she had stumbled on the place where villagers went to relieve themselves. She hurriedly retraced her steps.

  At the mission, Clara went in search of little Homani. He was not in the corner where he usually lay, nor could she find him in the kitchen or by the cowshed. As she went out on to the veranda, Philemon came up beside her, muttering about how happy everyone would be when the rains came.

  He scratched his fuzzy white hair. ‘Do not judge us as we are today, Nkosikaas. Soon the oxen will return from the cattle posts and the women will scatter seed after the plough.’

  ‘Where is Homani?’ She was too shaken by the child’s disappearance to respond to Philemon’s remarks.

  ‘His mother has taken him.’ The old man’s voice was low and inexpressive.

  ‘Couldn’t you have stopped her?’

  ‘She came with angry people, Nkosikaas.’

  ‘He was so much better. Even his legs were …’ She broke off, her voice wavering. The child’s recovery would have given her more satisfaction than anything since her arrival. She had let herself believe that if she could only save this little boy, other good things might follow.

  Later that day, she found Homani outside the hut where she had first seen him. He was sitting on the ground, playing with two other children. His bandages had come undone and were trailing in the dirt. Some sticky-looking red substance had been smeared all over his sores. He turned his head aside when he saw her, knowing she was angry and upset. His mother emerged from her hut and started shouting. Clara walked away with smarting eyes.

  As she entered her own house, she paused in the musty sitting room to let her eyes adjust to the dimness. An odd noise was coming from somewhere beyond the kitchen
: a sound like a wounded animal, rhythmic, anguished, and searing. The kitchen itself was empty, and the door into the yard was flapping on its hinge. A rush of courage took her outside, where she found the door to Hannah’s lean-to ajar. Light was gleaming on a sweat-drenched back, which rose and fell as the sound became more breathless and urgent. Under the man’s body were open female knees. Hannah’s. Whose else could they be? Heartbroken, Clara told herself she should not be surprised because Paul wasn’t what she’d thought him. Not pure, not innocent, but a flattering hypocrite like Simon. She imagined greeting a returning Robert: ‘Oh, by the way, that sweet Bible boy of yours …’ But already she knew she never would. It was his tragedy too, poor Robert – a tiny part of it.

  On a shelf above the bins of maize flour were some dark bottles. She clambered up on to the table and snatched one down. The usual rough Cape brandy sold in Belingwe. As she reached for it, out of the corner of her eye she spotted a naked man spinning on his heels in the doorway. Before she could turn, he was gone. But he had not been Paul. She was sure of that. This man had been taller, more muscular, with a line of raised scars on his chest. Shame at doubting Paul overwhelmed her. No longer wanting to drink, she replaced the brandy on the shelf.

  She slept that afternoon and woke to hear Paul asking when she had last seen Hannah.

  ‘About midday.’ Clara rubbed her eyes, surprised that it was already getting dark. ‘Isn’t she here?’

  Paul shook his head. He looked as if he had been crying. ‘I think she has gone to the girls’ camp. For the boyale.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ murmured Clara.