by Tamar Myers
“Nurse Verna,” Henry said in English, “what is it?”
Nurse Verna swallowed hard. She swallowed three times—one for each person of the Trinity. It was her version of counting to ten before answering.
“You were there last night. You saw this child’s open gash. She has to stay off her leg or she is going to open up the stitches. If that happens, then there is a good chance of her wound going septic, and then—well, you know what comes next. So you tell me!”
Henry sighed, just as Nurse Verna knew that he would. The man had a heart as soft as Limburger cheese.
“Death,” he whispered, so that the Great Distraction wouldn’t hear, but she did anyway.
“Oh, Papa,” the urchin practically wailed. Then she ran to him and fell into his arms with a great show of generated drama. That was her specialty, and of course the natives thrived on it. “Are you saying that Buakane might die if she doesn’t stay off her leg?” The Great Distraction had the annoying habit of speaking loudly, and in perfectly accented Tshiluba.
Upon hearing such an extreme, although medically sound, prognosis, Buakane collapsed on the dirt floor of the church and commenced keening at death’s door. There she implored the Grim Reaper to grant her immediate access. But if that was not to be the case, then would her ancestors intercede on her behalf, so that she might be spared all the pain and suffering that normally accompanies gangrene and amputation.
Clearly the child named Buakane had witnessed much in her young life, but that didn’t make it all right for the Great Distraction to spill the beans. If that spoiled brat Clementine was Nurse Verna’s child, she’d soon be the recipient of a spanking that would make it all but impossible to sit on her gluteus maximus for a few days.
The only redeeming quality the Hayes girl possessed was one that Nurse Verna shamefully coveted; Clementine had the ability to actually sound like a native when she spoke Tshiluba—not to mention that she had mastered the much more difficult tongue of Bushilele. Okay, to be honest—and Nurse Verna was always honest with herself, unlike some—the child did possess an uncanny ability to think fast on her feet. In that regard, she was sometimes way ahead of the adults.
Like the very next moment. This pint-size person, who was practically drowning in her mother’s clothes and oversized pith helmet, suddenly released herself from her father’s embrace and just took over.
“Muyishi,” Clementine said, addressing the headmaster as “teacher” and thus demoting him on the spot, although she had no authority to do so. The congregation certainly found the disrespectful twerp funny—of course, natives laughed at just about anything.
“Teacher,” Clementine Hayes said again, and again it was in Tshiluba, “you must send one of your girls to where my father is building the new bookshop. There she will find a wheelbarrow. Have her bring it here, and then you will ask Mamu Snake to assist you in putting Buakane in it, and after that, you will take her back to the girls’ compound. There she will stay and rest—sitting or lying down, as Mamu Snake instructs you. Listen to me, you Teacher of Girls, your wife may not use Buakane as a servant. Neither you nor your wife may press her into any sort of work that involves standing or walking. Is that clear? Do you hear my words?”
“E,” Born Without a Neck said.
“Why, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Nurse Verna said aloud.
To be sure the congregation was practically rolling in the aisles, and there was even a smattering of applause, but clearly, the child’s words had been quite effective. Oh, what a bitter pill to swallow; the Lord of Hosts using the Great Distraction to accomplish something that was beyond Nurse Verna’s capabilities.
But that didn’t necessarily make it right. A child ought not to speak to an adult that way—even if the adult was a native. On the other hand, the Bible did say that “a little child shall lead them.” Isaiah 11:6. Yes, well, it wasn’t natural for a child of not quite ten to talk like that. What’s more, given the political climate, it was downright dangerous. Now that Born Without a Neck had been shamed in front of a congregation composed mostly of children, fat cats, and old women, he was sure to take revenge.
Born Without a Neck claimed to be the younger son of a Muluba chief. It was even possible that he was the eldest son but had been passed over in the line of succession because of his deformity. Whatever the case might have been, Nurse Verna believed that Born Without a Neck was a person to be reckoned with. From now on she would keep a better eye on the disgusting little man to see that he treated his girls right. Miss Julia Newton was going to need all the help she could get, to put the girls’ school back in shape, whether she wanted it or not. By the grace of God, Nurse Verna was there to give her just what she needed. That’s what older, more experienced missionaries were for.
In the meantime, she was happy to take over entirely. “Born Without a Neck, a wheelbarrow! Send one of your girls!”
“Yes, Mamu Snake,” the headmaster said, bowing with his entire torso, although his eyes burned with rage. He swiveled to face his girls. “You, you who are called Born After Much Medicine, go fetch the wheelbarrow. Do not return without it. And take She Whose Eyes Are Vacant with you. I do not want to discover that you have taken the morning off to pick mushrooms or to nap under a mango tree. I want the wheelbarrow now. Buasha, buasha.”
No one laughed. One girl looked terrified, the other stared blankly, then off they ran. After that Henry led Buakane to the nearest bench in the native section, and Born Without a Neck continued his strut down to the front with his conga line of very young and very attractive Bashilele girls.
As soon as everyone was seated, Reverend Doyer, who’d been seated up front on a metal folding chair, took his place behind the pulpit. He smiled as if nothing untoward had happened, and he held up a pocket-size blue hymnbook.
“Let us praise God by singing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ ” he said.
Immediately the boys’ headmaster, Directeur Ends Famine, took his place at the front of the church and began waving his arms. The congregation burst into song with great gusto and full voice, but no one paid attention to poor Ends Famine. With the exception of some of the heathen women at the back of the church, virtually everyone, fat cats included, knew both words and tune to this simple song by now. However, no two people could be bothered to sing quite the same tune as anyone else, or at quite the same speed.
“Mulunda, mulunda muimpe, Yesu udi mulunda!”
Perhaps the worst offender of anyone was Henry Hayes. His normally beautiful tenor voice seemed to try to unite their voices by wandering all over the map with them. Nurse Verna could only sit through the first stanza, then she had to flee. May God forgive her, she really had to.
FOURTEEN
Buakane did not let on how terrified she was to be lifted into a shallow metal box that was mounted over a single wheel, and to which were attached two long wooden handles. When the girl’s headmaster Born Without a Neck began to push it, she did not scream. When twice he lost control of it to the point that the device tipped entirely over, spilling Buakane—once onto dirt, and once into a clump of head-high, bug-infested tshisuku—she forbade her throat from making the slightest noise. She was, after all, the highborn daughter of Grasshopper Paddle, of the Leopard Slayers clan, and the twenty-third wife of Chief Eagle of the Snake Eaters clan.
Although she was in great pain, especially following the second fall, Buakane eventually learned how to compensate for the movement. Toward the end of the trip she was almost enjoying herself. But as with most good things, that too came to an abrupt ending. One moment the stout, panting headmaster was pushing her through the tshisuku on a footpath, and the next moment they were in a large clearing, surrounded by a stockade of sharpened bamboo stakes, each twice as tall as your average Mushilele man (almost four meters in height as a Belgian measures).
Inside the stockade were ten tidy palm-thatch huts. In the center of the huts stood a palm-thatch house with mud walls. The mud walls gave the large house a mor
e permanent nature, so that in addition to its size, one knew instinctively that this was where the headman lived. There were a few smaller structures within the stockade wall—sheds of sorts, chicken houses, and the like, but nothing intended for human habitation.
At this hour of the day there was no activity at the girls’ compound except for the antics of a buff-colored hen with an orange-brown and black neck ruff. She’d managed to overturn a large piece of rotten wood that was riddled with termites and was calling frantically to all twelve of her chicks. In the meantime, a leathery old hen about half her size, but with twice the temperament, was trying to scare mother and brood away with a series of vicious attacks.
“The old one will be our supper,” Born Without a Neck said.
Buakane shrugged. After all, she was not supposed to know Tshiluba, which was the headmaster’s language.
A woman emerged from the mud house with an infant tied to her back, a toddler on her hip, and a slightly older child gripping her wrap cloth. She looked hopefully at the approaching wheelbarrow, but when the headmaster shook his head, the woman stepped immediately back inside.
“My wife,” the headmaster said, almost ruefully, “and three of my children. I have eight altogether. Look, I am putting you in the far hut for today. No work for you; if you lose your leg, then I will lose my job. Do you understand? Have you eaten today?”
She shrugged again. Strictly speaking that was a lie. She had eaten a piece of something called toast that morning, but it had been like eating a flake of white ash after the hottest of fires.
“Tch. Unfortunately, now you must wait until the evening meal. But as I said, then we will all share that mischievous black hen, cooked up with chilies and palm oil, cassava greens, and a big ball of cassava mush. I will put all forty of the girls to work on this night’s dinner so that we can all eat until our bellies groan. That way, tomorrow when you’ve been asked about your treatment, you can put in a good report. Yes?”
Buakane’s head hurt along with her leg. The thing about foreigners—white ones and black ones—is that you could never tell when they were joking. Often, she thought, it was just simpler to ask.
“How can just one chicken serve fifty people?” she asked.
The headmaster stopped the wheelbarrow so quickly that he neatly sent Buakane pitching face forward over the front. Although she was able to grab hold of the sides in time to prevent a spill, her right elbow jammed into her thigh, causing a blinding shot of pain that would have made her cry out at any other time—except for this one. She would never give this fool the satisfaction of having contributed to her misery.
“You speak Tshiluba!” he cried. “You speak the language of Kasai! The language of civilized peoples!”
“Tch,” she said, pretending to herself that she was an old woman, instead of a small girl, so that she might have the courage that she needed. “Tshiluba is an easy language. That is why it is a trade language for all of Kasai Province, where there are many languages spoken. Before yesterday, I knew that even a baby could speak your tongue. Then yesterday, I learned that the white man can speak your tongue. The white man!”
“Wewe wakuhende meme,” he said ominously. You have offended me.
“Nasha,” Buakane said. “I was merely making an observation. If I offended anyone, it was the white man. Yes, that was my intent: they are so stupid that the only language that they are capable of learning is Tshiluba.”
Unable to cock his head, Born Without a Neck tilted his body this way and that in an apparent attempt to read Buakane’s expression. At last he sighed in resignation.
“Well, at the very least you have offended my wife deeply,” he said.
Buakane was genuinely surprised at this sudden turn of events. Her only intent had been to offend the headmaster.
“How did I offend your wife?” she asked. “I have yet to speak to her.”
“You have questioned her ability to coax the flavor of this bird into the sauce—so that one small hen could share itself with many. It is like the story of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is it not?”
“I do not know this story, Headmaster.”
“Then perhaps it is your job to shut up and listen while others speak.”
“Yes, Headmaster.”
Buakane shut her lips, but in her mind she spoke of everything that she saw and heard to her mother. Now and then she made pointed comments to her father as well. See what a dikenga you have gotten me into, Bad Odor, she said. The fact that Bad Odor could neither talk back nor strike her across the mouth—these were trade-offs that made the white man’s girls’ school somewhat bearable.
Then she remembered the real reason that she was there: Oh, you stupid, stupid Buakane, she said to herself. How soon you forgot that Chief Eagle is a violent man who does far more than strike his wives across the mouth. What a fool you are to have forgotten that when this cruel man dies, then you and all his wives must be buried alive with him. Even that hen that you are about to eat possesses more intelligence than you.
Aiyee! Now the Headmaster was speaking, and she had not been listening. When he was finished, he puffed up like a sun-bloated corpse and put his face close to hers.
“So what do you make of this Jesus?” he rasped.
“I have not yet made up my mind,” she said. “I must hear more.”
Born Without a Neck grunted. “You surprise me, Buakane. If I could not see that gap where your two front teeth should be, I might, if I squinted, take you for a Muluba. Except that you have very black skin—too dark for me. All you Bashilele are so black. Nonetheless, and I say this truly, I think that you will learn quickly.”
“Thank you, Headmaster,” Buakane said.
“Now,” said the Born Without a Neck, “we have come to your hut, and it is time for you to get out of the box on wheels.” Then he summarily dumped her out on the ground.
Immediately a pack of little children appeared from nowhere and had themselves a good laugh at her plight. As the only words she heard were Tshiluba, and the accent was exactly like the Headmaster’s accent, Buakane deduced that at least some of the urchins were his. She decided to milk the situation a bit for their entertainment.
“Aiyee,” she cried. “Oh my leg! Children, come see what your father has done.”
Five little heads, three of them with necks, peered down at her with worried expressions.
“Katuka!” Born Without a Neck shouted and the children scattered.
Buakane pulled herself erect. She was shaking with anger.
“You are not a nice man,” she said. “What is it that I am supposed to learn from you? Besides cruelty?”
He stared straight ahead for a long time while Buakane struggled to stand on her injured leg. “It is not a good day for me,” he said. “You are not the only one with problems. Now listen to me, child. Eight girls share this hut. Your bed is the one with a package wrapped in banana leaves on it. Follow me.”
They went inside, but he left the door wide open, so Buakane was not afraid. This hut was built in the Baluba style, and it was something truly to marvel at. The walls were made of mud that had been packed into a framework of crisscrossed bamboo. This meant that the house could not be disassembled, then picked up and carried away in a single night like a Bashilele hut. At the same time, with the thicker mud walls and the higher-pitched thatch roof, this hut was considerably cooler inside than Buakane had expected it to be.
“Bimpe be,” she said. Very nice.
The headmaster pointed to the bed with the banana leaf package. “Open it,” he said.
Buakane had never had a gift, much less been given the privilege of opening something tied with a bow. “Yours are a primitive people,” the headmaster said as he untied the lukodi bow for her. “This is not judgment on my part; it is merely fact. The point is that you must never be ashamed to ask for help. That is the only way you will learn. Of course, a woman can never hope to become civilized, but you need not remain a savage, either.”
“Look, you little heathen, when I speak, you must acknowledge it.”
“Yes, Headmaster.” If you were in my village, she thought, and my father heard you speak thus to me, your head would soon be his new drinking cup. So this is what I will do to survive your voice, which grates on my ears; your breath, which is rank; and your words, which are cruel: every time you speak, I will call you Head Drinking Cup in my mind.
“Now open your package,” Head Drinking Cup said.
As she did so, certain items spilled out that brought to mind a goat being sliced from sternum to anus. These, however, were no entrails, but strange gifts, the likes of which Buakane had never seen, or perhaps she had seen them but had not been given the opportunity to use them.
“This is soap,” said Head Drinking Cup, and he picked up something as long and thick as her forearm that was speckled with the color of the sky on a sunny day, and white. “Take a small piece of this down to the spring when the other girls go and rub this on your body while you stand or sit in the flowing water. Observe how they do it. Do the same with your hair. That will cleanse your body.”
“Yes,” Buakane said, as if she were a simpleton. She knew what soap was, but except for old Diamba who had a record hemp crop one year, or Chief Eagle, who stole from everyone with his levies, no one in the village of Mushihi could afford this white man’s invention.
There were many marvelous things in that bundle, including two cotton dresses with bright African scenes printed on them and a pair of plastic sandals the color of water in which cassava leaves have been boiled. But the thing that pleased Buakane the most was the palm-size mirror with the picture of King Baudouin on one side and reflective glass on the other. Old man Diamba with his hemp crop had been the first person in the village to acquire one of those. Buakane had heard a rumor that Chief Eagle’s stable of wives shared two more of those mirrors (although one of them was cracked). So now, should Buakane return any time soon, she would have only the fourth mirror in the village. That would certainly make her popular among the girls her age—or any age for that matter. Even old women would come with little gifts—