The Poisonwood Bible
Page 52
Well, that put Mother in a whole new frame of mind. Contagion, why, this was worse than snakes, since you couldn’t see it coming! She dreamed up a hundred and one excuses for keeping us inside the house even when it wasn’t raining. She invented “rest time,” a period of endless inactivity stretching out after school and lunch, in which we were ordered to stay in our beds, under our mosquito-net canopies. Mother called it siesta time, which at first I mistook as, fiesta time, a puzzlement to me since it was not at all festive. Ruth May usually fell asleep, open-mouthed in the heat, with her hair plastered down across her sweaty face like the poster child for fever. The rest of us just sweated like swine as we sprawled side by side in our metal-frame beds, separated by the ghostly walls of our mosquito nets, insulting each other out of a sense of general outrage and wishing we could get up. I had nothing to read but The Bobbsey Twins in Eskimo Land, a childish book with nothing whatsoever to hold my interest. I just envied those dumb Bobbseys for having a superior adventure to ours, in that cool, snowy place, where no one had to endure an enforced fiesta.
I missed my freedom. There were so many things I needed to keep up with in the village. Foremost among them,EebenAxelroot. He was up to something. The last time Adah and I spied down there we heard the radio shrieking bloody murder, and for once we actually got to see him answer it. He rolled off his cot and muttered words I knew I could go to hell just for hearing. He knelt by the roaring footlocker and put a wire contraption against his head. He said, “Got it,” many times over, and “As good as dead if they do, sir.” Oh, mercy, I had to tear myself away!
And now I might never find out who or what was as good as dead, for it looked as if we were going to have to languish on our cots forever while the rain poured down. At least Rachel was useful, for once in her life. In desperate straits she can make us laugh, with her main talent being radio commercials oozed out in a fabulous fashion-model voice: “Medically tested Odo-ro-no, stops underarm odor and moisture at the source!” She’d toss her head then and throw her arms into the air, exposing her dark-stained underarms. She also did various hair products, swirling her white mane into a cow pie on top of her head, “For today’s new look of luxury! “And she loved to remind us of Carnation instant nonfat dry milk (“New magic crystals dissolve instantly!”), which had become our mainstay food and did not dissolve instantly but clotted up like white blood in our glasses. We were all so sick of those crystallized lumps they choked us in our dreams.
Sooner or later she always ran out of commercials, though, like a toy winding down. Then all would go quiet and we’d return cheerlessly to our books. Our reading material was random and inappropriate, delivered to us in unlabeled cardboard boxes from Leopoldville. We suspected Mr. Axelroot of having better boxes that he took to luckier children elsewhere. Back in Bethlehem, we ourselves had organized book drives for the underprivileged, and now I pitied those children who got slogged with our dusty second-rate novels and outmoded home-carpentry manuals, and were expected to be grateful about it. When we get back home, I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them.
From the same nursery-school lot that brought the Bobbsey Twins I chose a Nancy Drew, out of pure boredom, feeling guilty, and outraged to be reduced to that circumstance, as a young woman who menstruates and reads at the college level. Though I must confess, some of the Nancy Drews held my attention. One of them had a strange, secret-basement plot that led me astray, while I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, into long fantasies that felt sinful. I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil’s workshop. I did have thoughts of the Devil at these times. I imagined Nancy descending a long iron staircase into the netherworld, and a man who waited for her at the bottom. Sometimes he was just a shadowy faceless man in a hat. Sometimes he had a gap-toothed smile and an elegant, scarred face. Other times he was that red Devil who lurks on the Underwood ham cans, self-satisfied and corrupt in his bow tie, mustache, and arrow-point tail. The first time I dreamed this scenario I can’t really say whether I was still awake or had fallen into a feverish, colorful sleep. All I know is that suddenly I snapped out of it, surrounded by the sharp odor of my own sweat, and felt prickled and exquisitely wide awake below the waist. I knew this feeling was very wrong. Even so, I had more such dreams—and sometimes, I’m sure, I was still half awake when they began.
After a few weeks my fevers became more pronounced, and my mother realized that because I am large and active for my age she’d been underestimating my dosage of quinine. Those feelings below my waist, it turns out, were a side effect of malaria.
I missed my freedom. There were so many things I needed to keep up with in the village. Foremost among them,EebenAxelroot. He was up to something. The last time Adah and I spied down there we heard the radio shrieking bloody murder, and for once we actually got to see him answer it. He rolled off his cot and muttered words I knew I could go to hell just for hearing. He knelt by the roaring footlocker and put a wire contraption against his head. He said, “Got it,” many times over, and “As good as dead if they do, sir.” Oh, mercy, I had to tear myself away!
And now I might never find out who or what was as good as dead, for it looked as if we were going to have to languish on our cots forever while the rain poured down. At least Rachel was useful, for once in her life. In desperate straits she can make us laugh, with her main talent being radio commercials oozed out in a fabulous fashion-model voice: “Medically tested Odo-ro-no, stops underarm odor and moisture at the source!” She’d toss her head then and throw her arms into the air, exposing her dark-stained underarms. She also did various hair products, swirling her white mane into a cow pie on top of her head, “For today’s new look of luxury! “And she loved to remind us of Carnation instant nonfat dry milk (“New magic crystals dissolve instantly!”), which had become our mainstay food and did not dissolve instantly but clotted up like white blood in our glasses. We were all so sick of those crystallized lumps they choked us in our dreams.
Sooner or later she always ran out of commercials, though, like a toy winding down. Then all would go quiet and we’d return cheerlessly to our books. Our reading material was random and inappropriate, delivered to us in unlabeled cardboard boxes from Leopoldville. We suspected Mr. Axelroot of having better boxes that he took to luckier children elsewhere. Back in Bethlehem, we ourselves had organized book drives for the underprivileged, and now I pitied those children who got slogged with our dusty second-rate novels and outmoded home-carpentry manuals, and were expected to be grateful about it. When we get back home, I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them.
From the same nursery-school lot that brought the Bobbsey Twins I chose a Nancy Drew, out of pure boredom, feeling guilty, and outraged to be reduced to that circumstance, as a young woman who menstruates and reads at the college level. Though I must confess, some of the Nancy Drews held my attention. One of them had a strange, secret-basement plot that led me astray, while I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, into long fantasies that felt sinful. I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil’s workshop. I did have thoughts of the Devil at these times. I imagined Nancy descending a long iron staircase into the netherworld, and a man who waited for her at the bottom. Sometimes he was just a shadowy faceless man in a hat. Sometimes he had a gap-toothed smile and an elegant, scarred face. Other times he was that red Devil who lurks on the Underwood ham cans, self-satisfied and corrupt in his bow tie, mustache, and arrow-point tail. The first time I dreamed this scenario I can’t really say whether I was still awake or had fallen into a feverish, colorful sleep. All I know is that suddenly I snapped out of it, surrounded by the sharp odor of my own sweat, and felt prickled and exquisitely wide awake below the waist. I knew this feeling was very wrong. Even so, I had more such dreams—and sometimes, I’m sure, I was still half awake when they began.
After a few weeks my fevers became more pronounced, and my mother realized that because I am large and active for my age she’d been underestimating my dosage of quinine. Those feelings below my waist, it turns out, were a side effect of malaria.
