The Poisonwood Bible
Page 187
Back in your skin, of course, you’ll shriek for a cure. But remember: air travel, roads, cities, prostitution, the congregation of people for efficient commerce—these are gifts of godspeed to the virus. Gifts of the foreign magi, brought from afar. In the service of saving Africa’s babies and extracting its mineral soul, the West has built a path to its own door and thrown it wide for the plague.
A toad can die of light! Death is the common right of toads and men. Why swagger, then? My colleagues accuse me of cynicism, but I am simply a victim of poetry. I have committed to memory the common rights of toads and men. I could not swagger if I tried. I don’t have the legs for it.
My work is to discover the life histories of viruses, and I seem to be very good at it. I don’t think of the viruses as my work, actually. I think of them as my relations. I don’t have cats or children, I have viruses. I visit them daily in their spacious glass dishes, and like any good mother I cajole, I celebrate when they reproduce, and I take special note when they behave oddly. I think about them when I am not with them. I have made important discoveries about the AIDS and Ebola viruses. As a consequence, I must sometimes appear at public functions where I am lauded as a saviour of the public health. This startles me. I am nothing of the kind. Certainly I’m no mad exterminator bent on killing devil microbes; on the contrary, I admire them. That is the secret of my success.
My life is satisfying and ordinary. I work a great deal, and visit my mother on Sanderling Island once a month. I enjoy my time there, which we mostly pass without speaking. Mother lets me be. We take long walks on the beach, where she watches those namesake shore-birds, the sanderlings, leaving no stone unturned. Sometimes in mid-January when she seems restless we’ll take the ferry and drive up the coast highway, passing through the miles of flat, uninhabited palmetto scrub and the occasional stick shack, where old, dark women sit weaving beautiful sweetgrass baskets. Late in the evening we will sometimes pull into the dirt parking lot of a clapboard praise house and listen to old, dark Gullah hymns rising out the windows. We never go inside. We know our place. Mother keeps her head turned the “whole time toward Africa, with her eye on the ocean, as if she expects it might suddenly drain away.
But on most of my visits we go nowhere. We sit on her porch, or I watch while she works her small jungle, snapping off dead leaves, forking rotted manure into her camellias, talking under her breath. Her apartment is the ground floor of one of those century-old brick boxes with earthquake bolts, remarkable pieces of giant hardware that run right through the building from east to west, capped off on the outside with iron washers the size of end tables. I think of them as running through Mother too. It would take something on this order, really, to hold her together.
She inhabits her world, waiting for forgiveness, while her children are planted in or upon the four different nations that have claimed us. “Lock, stock, and barrel,” she calls us. Rachel is clearly the one with locks on every possible route to defenestration. And Leah barrels forward, setting everything straight. So I am the one who quietly takes stock, I suppose. Believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth. Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn’t know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.
She still suffers from the effects of several diseases she contracted in the Congo, including schistosomiasis, Guinea worms, and probably tuberculosis. When she sticks out her tongue and allows me to treat her small maladies, I can see that every one of her organs has been compromised in some way. But as the years pass and she bends over more and more, she seems to survive in her narrowing space. She never married again. If anyone asks, she says, “Nathan Price was all the marriage I needed.” I can see this is true. Her body was locked up tight, years ago, by the boundaries of her costly liberty.
I have not married either, for different reasons. The famous upstart neurologist wanted to be my lover, it turned out, and actually won me to his bed for a time. But slowly it dawned upon my love-drunk skull: he had only welcomed me there after devising his program to make me whole! He was the first of several men to suffer the ice storms of Adah, I’m afraid.
This is my test: I imagine them back there in the moonlight with the ground all around us boiling with ants. Now, which one, the crooked walker, or the darling perfection? I know how they would choose. Any man who admires my body now is a traitor to the previous Adah. So there you are.
Sometimes I play chess with one of my colleagues, an anchorite like myself, who suffers from post-polio syndrome. We can pass whole evenings without need for any sentence longer than “Checkmate.” Sometimes we go out to a restaurant in the Atlanta Underground, or see a film at a theater that accommodates his wheelchair. But the racket always overwhelms us. Eros is not so much an eyesore, it turns out, as just too much noise. Afterward we always have to drive out of town toward Sandy Springs or the Chattahoochee, anywhere that is flat and blank and we can park the car in a red dirt road between peanut fields and let moonlight and silence reclaim us. Then I go home by myself and write poems at my kitchen table, like William Carlos Williams. I write about lost sisters and the Great Rift Valley and my barefoot mother glaring at the ocean. All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.
A toad can die of light! Death is the common right of toads and men. Why swagger, then? My colleagues accuse me of cynicism, but I am simply a victim of poetry. I have committed to memory the common rights of toads and men. I could not swagger if I tried. I don’t have the legs for it.
My work is to discover the life histories of viruses, and I seem to be very good at it. I don’t think of the viruses as my work, actually. I think of them as my relations. I don’t have cats or children, I have viruses. I visit them daily in their spacious glass dishes, and like any good mother I cajole, I celebrate when they reproduce, and I take special note when they behave oddly. I think about them when I am not with them. I have made important discoveries about the AIDS and Ebola viruses. As a consequence, I must sometimes appear at public functions where I am lauded as a saviour of the public health. This startles me. I am nothing of the kind. Certainly I’m no mad exterminator bent on killing devil microbes; on the contrary, I admire them. That is the secret of my success.
My life is satisfying and ordinary. I work a great deal, and visit my mother on Sanderling Island once a month. I enjoy my time there, which we mostly pass without speaking. Mother lets me be. We take long walks on the beach, where she watches those namesake shore-birds, the sanderlings, leaving no stone unturned. Sometimes in mid-January when she seems restless we’ll take the ferry and drive up the coast highway, passing through the miles of flat, uninhabited palmetto scrub and the occasional stick shack, where old, dark women sit weaving beautiful sweetgrass baskets. Late in the evening we will sometimes pull into the dirt parking lot of a clapboard praise house and listen to old, dark Gullah hymns rising out the windows. We never go inside. We know our place. Mother keeps her head turned the “whole time toward Africa, with her eye on the ocean, as if she expects it might suddenly drain away.
But on most of my visits we go nowhere. We sit on her porch, or I watch while she works her small jungle, snapping off dead leaves, forking rotted manure into her camellias, talking under her breath. Her apartment is the ground floor of one of those century-old brick boxes with earthquake bolts, remarkable pieces of giant hardware that run right through the building from east to west, capped off on the outside with iron washers the size of end tables. I think of them as running through Mother too. It would take something on this order, really, to hold her together.
She inhabits her world, waiting for forgiveness, while her children are planted in or upon the four different nations that have claimed us. “Lock, stock, and barrel,” she calls us. Rachel is clearly the one with locks on every possible route to defenestration. And Leah barrels forward, setting everything straight. So I am the one who quietly takes stock, I suppose. Believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth. Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn’t know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.
She still suffers from the effects of several diseases she contracted in the Congo, including schistosomiasis, Guinea worms, and probably tuberculosis. When she sticks out her tongue and allows me to treat her small maladies, I can see that every one of her organs has been compromised in some way. But as the years pass and she bends over more and more, she seems to survive in her narrowing space. She never married again. If anyone asks, she says, “Nathan Price was all the marriage I needed.” I can see this is true. Her body was locked up tight, years ago, by the boundaries of her costly liberty.
I have not married either, for different reasons. The famous upstart neurologist wanted to be my lover, it turned out, and actually won me to his bed for a time. But slowly it dawned upon my love-drunk skull: he had only welcomed me there after devising his program to make me whole! He was the first of several men to suffer the ice storms of Adah, I’m afraid.
This is my test: I imagine them back there in the moonlight with the ground all around us boiling with ants. Now, which one, the crooked walker, or the darling perfection? I know how they would choose. Any man who admires my body now is a traitor to the previous Adah. So there you are.
Sometimes I play chess with one of my colleagues, an anchorite like myself, who suffers from post-polio syndrome. We can pass whole evenings without need for any sentence longer than “Checkmate.” Sometimes we go out to a restaurant in the Atlanta Underground, or see a film at a theater that accommodates his wheelchair. But the racket always overwhelms us. Eros is not so much an eyesore, it turns out, as just too much noise. Afterward we always have to drive out of town toward Sandy Springs or the Chattahoochee, anywhere that is flat and blank and we can park the car in a red dirt road between peanut fields and let moonlight and silence reclaim us. Then I go home by myself and write poems at my kitchen table, like William Carlos Williams. I write about lost sisters and the Great Rift Valley and my barefoot mother glaring at the ocean. All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.
