The Poisonwood Bible

by Barbara Kingsolver

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

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  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.

  Nelson was weaving together palm fronds to make a funeral arch of leaves and flowers to set over the table. It looked something like an altar. I thought perhaps I ought to help him, but I couldn't think how. Several women from the village had already come. Mama Mwanza arrived first, with her daughters. A few at a time, the others followed. They fell down at the edge of our yard when they came, and walked on their knees to the table. All of them had lost children before, it dawned on me through my shock. Our suffering now was no greater than theirs had been, no more real or tragic. No

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  different. They all knelt around the table silently for quite a while, and I knew I should join them, but I felt unaccountably afraid to get close to the table. I stayed at the back of the group.

  Suddenly one woman shrieked, and I felt my skull would split open. All the others immediately joined in with the quivering, high bildla. I felt blood rushing through all the narrow parts of my body: the wrists, the throat, the backs of my knees. Adah was white-faced beside me, and looked into my eyes as if she were drowning. We'd heard this strange mourning song many times before, back during the heavy rains when so many children got sick. It had tricked us at first, more than once, sending us running to the windows to see what beautiful, exotic birds made such a strange call. Now, of course, we couldn't think of birds. The trilling of our neighbors' tongues set loose knives that cut the flesh from our bones and made us fall down with our shame and our love and our anger. We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope, for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

  In our family, the last was first. I would like to believe she got what she wanted. I ground my knees in the dust and shook and sobbed and opened my mouth to cry out loud. I crossed my arms over my chest and held on to my own shoulders, thinking of Ruth May's sharp, skinny shoulder blades under her little white shirt. Thinking of ant lions and "Mother May I." Recalling her strange, transfigured shadow the last time I pushed her in the swing. The sounds of our voices rose up through the tree branches into the sky, but Ruth May did not.

  When the wailing finally stopped, we were wrapped in silence and the buzzing of locusts. The air was thick and ponderous with humidity. It felt like a wet wool blanket you could not take off.

  Mother had begun moving all of our furniture into the yard. First the chairs. Then our beds and my father's roll-top desk. These heavy things she dragged by herself, even though I know for a fact that two months ago she couldn't have moved them. I continued to watch without any particular expectation as she emerged, next,

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  with our clothes and books. Then our cooking pots. She stacked these things on the chairs and desk. The women watched closely, as my sisters and I did, but no one moved. Mother stood looking at us all, waiting. Finally she took the good skillet we'd brought from home and pressed it into Mama Mwanza's hands. She offered our blouses and dresses to Mama Mwanza's children. They accepted them in both hands, thanked her, and left. Mama Mwanza balanced the skillet on her head, since she needed her hands for walking, and solemnly led her family away from our funeral. Tentatively the other women touched our things. Their initial reluctance gave way to excited chatter as they began to sort through the piles of our possessions, unabashedly holding our clothes up to their children's chests, scrutinizing such oddities as a hairbrush and fingernail clippers, thumping on the enamel pans with their knuckles to test their worth. Eventually they took what they needed, and left.

  But the children soon came back, unable to resist the scene of such a spectacle. Just as they used to do when we first arrived here, they materialized one by one out of the moist air and the bamboo thickets until they'd formed a silent, watchful circle around the periphery of our yard. I suppose they were as astonished as we were that a member of our family was capable of death. Gradually they crept forward, closing their circle around the table, and there they remained for a very long time, staring at Ruth May.

  Mother had gone back in the house, where we could hear her strange, tireless industry moving upon the empty rooms. Our father seemed to be nowhere. My sisters and I stayed outside with the children because they seemed to embrace our presence. Out of habit we knelt on the ground and prayed the dumb prayers of our childhood: "Our Father which art in heaven," and "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." I could not remotely believe any Shepherd was leading me through this dreadful valley, but the familiar words stuffed my mouth like cotton, and it was some relief to know, at least, that one sentence would follow upon another. It was my only way of knowing what to do.. . ..........

  Whenever I stopped praying, the buzz of the locusts grew horrible in my ears. So I didn't stop. Sometimes Rachel prayed with me, and sometimes the Congolese children also prayed in whatever words they knew. I recited the 23rd Psalm, the I2ist Psalm, the looth and 137th and igth and 66th Psalms, the 2ist chapter of Revelation, Genesis one, Luke 22, First Corinthians, and finally John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life."


  Then I stopped. It was very late in the afternoon, and I could think of no more prayers. I'd come to the end of all I knew. I listened to the world around me, but all other sound had ceased entirely. Not a single bird called. I felt terrified. The air seemed charged and dangerous but I couldn't pray anymore, and I couldn't get up and do anything else. To go back inside our empty house, where Mother was, especially, I couldn't make myself do. Not for anything. It seemed impossible. So I stayed where I was, kneeling beside my sisters with our heads bowed low beneath the crackling air.

  The sky groaned and cracked, and suddenly the shrill, cold needles of rain pierced our hands and the backs of our necks. A thunderstorm broke open, and with a strength as mighty as the thirst of crops and animals, the rain poured down on our heads. It lashed us hard, answering months of prayers. Some of the smaller children rushed to break off elephant-ear leaves for umbrellas, but most of us simply stayed where we were, receiving the downpour. Lightning sang and hissed around our shoulders, and the thunder bellowed.

  Our father came out of the house and stood looking at the sky, holding out his hands. It seemed to take him a long time to believe in the rain.

  "The Lord spoke to the common people gathered at the well," he said at last, in his old booming voice that allowed no corner for doubt. He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the downpour. "And the Lord told them, Whosoever drinks of this ordinary water will be thirsty again, but the water I will give unto him will

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  quench his thirst forever. It will become a spring within him, bubbling up for eternal life."

  The children weren't paying much mind right then to my father or his bubbling spring of eternal life. They were so transfixed by the rain. They held up their faces and arms to the cold water, as if the whole of their skin were a manioc field that needed to be soaked.

  "If anyone is thirsty," my father shouted, "let him come to me and drink! If anyone believes in me, streams of living water shall flow forth from his heart!"

  He walked to a tall boy near me, Pascal's half brother. I'd spoken to him twice and knew his name was Lucien, though I'm sure my father didn't know it. Nevertheless, Father held out his large, white hand and spread his fingers wide over the boy's head. Lucien looked my father in the eye as if he expected to be struck, but he didn't flinch.

  "I am a voice of one shouting in the desert, Straighten the Lord's way!" my father cried."! am only baptizing in water, but someone is standing among you of whom you do not know. He is God's Lamb, who is to remove the world's sin."

  My father lowered his hand and closed his fingers gently over the top of Lucien s head.

  "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost I baptize you, my son. Walk forward into the light."

  Lucien didn't move. Father took his hand away and waited, I suppose, for the miracle of baptism to take hold. Then he turned to Lucien s tiny sister Bwanga, who held on to Lucien's hand for dear life. Their mother had died during the disease time, and their father's other wife�Pascal's mother�had taken them both into her house. Throughout this time of loss and salvation, Bwanga had remained Ruth May's most loyal playmate. Even that my father wouldn't have known. I felt an unspeakable despair. He knew nothing about the children. Under his cupped hand Bwanga's little bald head looked like an overripe avocado he was prepared to toss away. She stood wide-eyed and motionless.' O

  "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," he repeated, and released her.

  "Mah-dah-mey-I?" Bwanga asked.

  Several other children remembered this game and echoed: "Mah-dah-mey-I?" Their eyes left Father and came to rest on Ruth May inside the drenched cloud of netting on the table. They all picked up the refrain, asking again and again in a rising plea: Mother May I? And though they surely knew no permission would be granted, they kept up their soft, steady chant for a very long time in the pouring rain. Water clung to their eyelashes and streamed in runnels down their open faces. Their meager clothes, imposed on them by foreigners, clung to their thin chests and legs like a second skin finally ready to accept the shape of their bodies. The dust on our feet turned blood-colored and the sky grew very dark, while Father moved around the circle baptizing each child in turn, imploring the living progeny of Kilanga to walk forward into the light.

  Book Five

  EXODUS

  . . . And ye shall cany up my bones

  away hence with you. And they took their journey . . . and encamped .

  in the edge of the wilderness. . . .

  He took not away the pillar of cloud by day,

  nor the pillar of fire by night.

  EXODUS 13:19-22

  Orleanna Price

  SANDERLING ISLAND, GEORGIA

  AS LONG AS I KEPT MOVING, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.

  The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill. My body understood there was no safe place for me to be.

  A mother's body remembers her babies�the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has its own entreaties to body and soul. It's the last one, though, that overtakes you. I can't dare say I loved the others less, but my first three were all babies at once, and motherhood dismayed me entirely. The twins came just as Rachel was learning to walk. What came next I hardly remember, whole years when I battled through every single day of grasping hands and mouths until I could fall into bed for a few short hours and dream of being eaten alive in small pieces. I counted to one hundred as I rocked, contriving the patience to get one down in order to take up another. One mouth closed on a spoon meant two crying empty, feathers flying, so I dashed back and forth like a mother bird, flouting nature's maw with a brood too large. I couldn't count on survival until all three of them could stand alone. Together they were my first issue. I took one deep breath for every step they took away from me. That's how it is with the firstborn, no matter what kind of mother you are�rich, poor, frazzled half to death or sweetly content. A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world.

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  But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after�oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.

  My baby, my blood, my honest truth: entreat me not to leave thee,for whither thou goest I mil go. Where I lodge, we lodge together. Where I die, you'll be buried at last.

  By instinct rather than will, I stayed alive. I tried to flee from the grief. It wasn't the spirit but just a body that moved me from one place to another. I watched my hands, heard my mouth give orders. Avoided corners and stillness. When I had to pause for breath I stood in the open, in the center of a room or out in the yard. The trees roared and danced as if they were on fire in the pouring rain, telling me to go on, go on. Once I'd moved our table outside, with my baby laid out upon it, I could see no sense in anything but to bring out the rest. Such a bewildering excess of things we had for one single family, and how useless it all seemed now. I carried out armloads of fabric and wood and metal put together in all their puzzling ways, and marveled that I'd ever felt comfort in having such things. I needed truth and light, to remember my baby's laughter. This stuff cluttered my way. What relief, to place it in the hands of women who could carry off my bu
rden. Their industrious need made me light-headed: my dresses would be curtains, and my curtains, dresses. My tea towel, a baby's diaper. Empty food tins would be pounded into palm-oil lamps, toys, plowshares maybe�who could say? My household would pass through the great digestive tract of Kilanga and turn into sights unseen. It was a miracle to witness my own simple motion, amplified. As I gave it all up, the trees unrolled their tongues of flame and blazed in approval.

  Motion became my whole purpose. When there was nothing left

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  to move but myself, I walked to the end of our village and kept going, with a whole raft of children strung out behind me. Nothing to do but take my leave, Sala mbote! I went on foot because I still had feet to carry me.

  Plain and simple, that was the source of our exodus: I had to keep moving. I didn't set out to leave my husband. Anyone can see I should have, long before, but I never did know how. For women like me, it seems, it's not ours to take charge of beginnings and endings. Not the marriage proposal, the summit conquered, the first shot fired, nor the last one either�the treaty at Appomattox, the knife in the heart. Let men write those stories. I can't. I only know the middle ground where we live our lives. We whistle while Rome burns, or we scrub the floor, depending. Don't dare presume there's shame in the lot of a woman who carries on. On the day a committee of men decided to murder the fledgling Congo, what do you suppose Mama Mwanza was doing? Was it different, the day after? Of course not. Was she a fool, then, or the backbone of a history? When a government comes crashing down, it crushes those who were living under its roof. People like Mama Mwan2a never knew the house was there at all. Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

  Maybe you still can't understand why I stayed so long. I've nearly finished with my side of the story, and still I feel your small round eyes looking down on me. I wonder what you'll name my sin: Complicity? Loyalty? Stupefaction? How can you tell the difference? Is my sin a failure of virtue, or of competence? I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floor, so I did what I could. My talents are different from those of the women who cleave and part from husbands nowadays�and my virtues probably unrecognizable. But look at old women and bear in mind we are another country. We married with simple hopes: enough to