The Poisonwood Bible
Page 38
Mama Lo is the main hairdresser. She also runs a palm-oil business on the side, getting little boys to squash it out of the little red oil-palm nuts in her homemade press and selling it to the other villagers just a little each day, for frying their greens and what not. Mama Lo doesn’t have any husband, though she’s as industrious as the day is long. With the way they do here, it seems like some fellow would snap her up as a valuable add-on to his family. She isn’t a whole lot to look at, I’ll grant you, with her sad little eyes and wrinkled mouth she keeps shut, morning till night, while she does everybody’s hair. The state of her own hair is a mystery, since she always wraps her head in a dazzling cloth printed with peacock feathers.Those lively feathers don’t really match her personality, but like Tata Boanda in his ladies’-wear sweater, she seems unaware that her outfit is ironic.
If I settle down on a stump somewhere at the edge of the village square, they’ll forget about me sooner or later, I’ve found. I like to sit there and keep an eye out for the woman with the great big white purse, exactly like what Mamie Eisenhower might take shopping, which she carries proudly through the village on her head. And I love to watch the boys climb up palm trees to cut down the oil nuts. Way high up there with the sunlight falling reddish-brown on the palm trunks and the boys’ narrow limbs, they look beautiful. They seem touched by the Lord’s grace. In any event, they never fall.The palm fronds wave around their heads like ostrich plumes.
Twice I’ve seen the honey man who comes out of the forest carrying a block of honeycomb dripping with honey—sometimes bees and all!—in his bare hands. A smoking roll of leaves juts from his mouth like a giant cigar. He sings softly to the bees as he walks through the village, and the children all run after him, mesmerized by the prospect of honey, their eagerness for a sweet causing them to vibrate and hum like the bees.
On the rare days when Eeben Axelroot is in his shack at the end of the airplane field, I’ve been known to go down there and spy on him, too. Sometimes Adah comes, although she generally prefers her own company to anyone else’s. But Mr. Axelroot provides a grave temptation, as he is such an abominable curiosity. We hide amongst the banana trees that have sprung up all around his latrine, even while it gives us the creeps knowing all this lush growth is fertilized by such a disgusting man’s night soil. The big banana-tree leaves grow right up against the shack’s filthy back window, leaving narrow gaps perfect for spying. Mr. Axelroot himself is boring to watch; on a typical day he sleeps till noon, then takes a nap. You can just tell he isn’t saved. But his clutter is fascinating: guns, tools, army clothes, even a radio of some kind, which he keeps in an army foot-locker. We can hear the faint static emanating from the trunk, and the spooky, distant voices speaking French and English. My parents told us there was not a radio within a hundred miles of our whole village (they wanted to get one for safety’s sake, but neither the Mission League nor the Lord has so far provided). So they aren’t aware of Mr. Axelroot’s radio, and since I only learned of it through spying, I can’t tell them about it.
My parents shun him completely. Our mother is so sure none of us would want to go near his house she hasn’t bothered to forbid it. That’s good luck for me. If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn’t technically hold it against me. The Hardy Boys did spying for the cause of good, and I have always felt mine is in this same vein.
It was midway through September when Ruth May made her inroads. I came back from my spying foray one afternoon to find her playing “Mother May I?” with half the village’s children. I was flabbergasted. There stood my own little sister in the center of our yard, the focal point of a gleaming black arc of children strung from here to there, silently sucking their sugarcane sticks, not even daring to blink. Their faces concentrated on Ruth May the way a lens concentrates sunlight. I half expected her to go up in flames.
“You, that one.” Ruth May pointed and held up four fingers. “Take four scissors steps.”
The chosen child opened his mouth wide and sang a rising four-note song: “Ma-da-meh-yi?”
“Yes, you may,” Ruth May replied benevolently. The little boy crossed his legs at the knees, leaned back, and minced forward twice plus twice more, exactly like a crab that could count.
I watched for a long while, astonished to see what Ruth May had accomplished behind my back. Every one of these children could execute giant steps, baby steps, scissors steps, and a few other absurd locomotions invented by Ruth May. She grudgingly let us join the game, and grudgingly we did. For several afternoons under the gathering clouds, all of us—including the generally above-it-all Rachel—played “Mother May I?” I tried to picture myself in a missionary role, gathering the little children unto me, as it was embarrassing to be playing this babyish game with children waist-high to me. But we were so tired of ourselves and each other by then the company was irresistible.
If I settle down on a stump somewhere at the edge of the village square, they’ll forget about me sooner or later, I’ve found. I like to sit there and keep an eye out for the woman with the great big white purse, exactly like what Mamie Eisenhower might take shopping, which she carries proudly through the village on her head. And I love to watch the boys climb up palm trees to cut down the oil nuts. Way high up there with the sunlight falling reddish-brown on the palm trunks and the boys’ narrow limbs, they look beautiful. They seem touched by the Lord’s grace. In any event, they never fall.The palm fronds wave around their heads like ostrich plumes.
Twice I’ve seen the honey man who comes out of the forest carrying a block of honeycomb dripping with honey—sometimes bees and all!—in his bare hands. A smoking roll of leaves juts from his mouth like a giant cigar. He sings softly to the bees as he walks through the village, and the children all run after him, mesmerized by the prospect of honey, their eagerness for a sweet causing them to vibrate and hum like the bees.
On the rare days when Eeben Axelroot is in his shack at the end of the airplane field, I’ve been known to go down there and spy on him, too. Sometimes Adah comes, although she generally prefers her own company to anyone else’s. But Mr. Axelroot provides a grave temptation, as he is such an abominable curiosity. We hide amongst the banana trees that have sprung up all around his latrine, even while it gives us the creeps knowing all this lush growth is fertilized by such a disgusting man’s night soil. The big banana-tree leaves grow right up against the shack’s filthy back window, leaving narrow gaps perfect for spying. Mr. Axelroot himself is boring to watch; on a typical day he sleeps till noon, then takes a nap. You can just tell he isn’t saved. But his clutter is fascinating: guns, tools, army clothes, even a radio of some kind, which he keeps in an army foot-locker. We can hear the faint static emanating from the trunk, and the spooky, distant voices speaking French and English. My parents told us there was not a radio within a hundred miles of our whole village (they wanted to get one for safety’s sake, but neither the Mission League nor the Lord has so far provided). So they aren’t aware of Mr. Axelroot’s radio, and since I only learned of it through spying, I can’t tell them about it.
My parents shun him completely. Our mother is so sure none of us would want to go near his house she hasn’t bothered to forbid it. That’s good luck for me. If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn’t technically hold it against me. The Hardy Boys did spying for the cause of good, and I have always felt mine is in this same vein.
It was midway through September when Ruth May made her inroads. I came back from my spying foray one afternoon to find her playing “Mother May I?” with half the village’s children. I was flabbergasted. There stood my own little sister in the center of our yard, the focal point of a gleaming black arc of children strung from here to there, silently sucking their sugarcane sticks, not even daring to blink. Their faces concentrated on Ruth May the way a lens concentrates sunlight. I half expected her to go up in flames.
“You, that one.” Ruth May pointed and held up four fingers. “Take four scissors steps.”
The chosen child opened his mouth wide and sang a rising four-note song: “Ma-da-meh-yi?”
“Yes, you may,” Ruth May replied benevolently. The little boy crossed his legs at the knees, leaned back, and minced forward twice plus twice more, exactly like a crab that could count.
I watched for a long while, astonished to see what Ruth May had accomplished behind my back. Every one of these children could execute giant steps, baby steps, scissors steps, and a few other absurd locomotions invented by Ruth May. She grudgingly let us join the game, and grudgingly we did. For several afternoons under the gathering clouds, all of us—including the generally above-it-all Rachel—played “Mother May I?” I tried to picture myself in a missionary role, gathering the little children unto me, as it was embarrassing to be playing this babyish game with children waist-high to me. But we were so tired of ourselves and each other by then the company was irresistible.
