The Poisonwood Bible
Page 76
The matter of giving us each day our daily bread was clearly up to us girls to figure out, and the sheer work of it exhausted me. I often felt like taking to bed myself. My sisters were similarly affected: Rachel became hollow-eyed and careworn, sometimes combing her hair only once per day. Leah slowed from a run to a walk. We had not understood what our mother had gone through to get square meals on the table for the past year. Father still didn’t, as he thought nothing of leaving it in the charge of a cripple, a beauty queen, and a tomboy who approaches housework like a cat taking a bath.What a family unit we do make.
Sometimes in the middle of the night Leah would sit bolt upright in her bed, wanting to talk. I think she was frightened, but she frequently brought up her vexation with Mama Mwanza, who had spoken so matter-of-factly about having a strong husband at home. It troubled Leah that people thought our household deficient, not because our mother was parked at death’s door, but because we lacked a bakala mpandi—a strong man—to oversee us.
“Father doesn’t hunt or fish because he has a higher calling,” Leah argued from her cot, as if I might not have thought of this. “Can’t they see he works hard at his own profession?”
Had I felt like entering the discussion, I would have pointed out that to Mama Mwanza his profession probably resembles the game of “Mother May I?,” consisting of very long strings of nonsense words in a row.
It took less than a month for our household to fall into chaos. We had to endure Father’s escalating rage, when he returned home to find dinner no farther along than an unresolved argument over whether there are or are not worms in the flour, or any flour at all. After his displeasure had reached a certain point, the three of us rubbed our bruises and called ourselves to a womanly sort of meeting. At the great wooden table where we had spent many a tedious hour studying algebra and the Holy Roman Empire, we now sat down to take stock.
“First of all, we have to keep boiling the water, no matter what,” announced Rachel, our elder. “Write that down, Adah. If we don’t boil our water for thirty full minutes we’ll get plebiscites and what not.”
Duly noted.
“Second of all, we have to figure out what to eat.”
On the pantry shelves in the kitchen house we still had some flour, sugar, Carnation milk powder, tea, five cans of sardines, and the Underdown prunes; I recorded all this in a column in my notebook. Wrote it, for the benefit of my sisters, left to right. Leah added to the list: mangoes, guavas, pineapples, and avocados, all of which came and went in mysterious seasons (not unlike the Lord’s ways) but at least did grow in our yard, free of charge. Bananas were so abundant around the village people stole them off each other’s trees in broad daylight. When Mama Mwanza’s children cut down a bunch from the Nguzas’ big garden, Mama Nguza picked up the ones they’d dropped and brought them over later. Thus emboldened, Leah and I cut down a bunch the size of Ruth May from behind Eeben Axelroot’s outhouse, while he was inside. Fruit, then, was one thing we could have without money. Oranges we had always bought at the marche, as they grew deep in the jungle and were difficult to find, but Leah claimed to know where to look. She appointed herself in charge of fruit gathering, not surprisingly, this being the category of housework that takes place farthest from a house. She pledged to collect palm nuts also, even though these taste to us exactly like candle wax, however much the Congolese children seem to prize them. Still, I wrote “Palm nuts” in my book, to prolong the list. The point of our exercise was to convince ourselves that the wolf was not actually at the back door but perhaps merely salivating at the edge of our yard.
Resting up between crucial observations, Rachel was studying the tails of her hair very closely for split ends. She resembled a cross-eyed rabbit. At the mention of palm nuts she whined, “But, you all, on a diet of just fruit we could plumb die or even get diarrhea.”
“Well, what else is free?” Leah asked.
“The chickens, of course,” Rachel said. “We can kill those.”
We couldn’t kill them all, Leah explained, because then we’d have no eggs for omelets—one of the few things -we knew how to cook. But if we let some of the hens brood, to increase our flock, we might get away with frying a rooster once a month or so. My sisters put me in charge of all chicken decisions, thinking me the least likely to act on a rash impulse that would cause regrets later. The rash-impulse portion of my brain was destroyed at birth. We did not discuss who would be in charge of killing the unfortunate roosters. In earlier times our mother did that, with a flourish. Back when she was a happier woman, she used to claim Father married her for the way she wrung a rooster’s neck. Our mother used to have mystery under her skin, and we paid not the slightest attention.
Sometimes in the middle of the night Leah would sit bolt upright in her bed, wanting to talk. I think she was frightened, but she frequently brought up her vexation with Mama Mwanza, who had spoken so matter-of-factly about having a strong husband at home. It troubled Leah that people thought our household deficient, not because our mother was parked at death’s door, but because we lacked a bakala mpandi—a strong man—to oversee us.
“Father doesn’t hunt or fish because he has a higher calling,” Leah argued from her cot, as if I might not have thought of this. “Can’t they see he works hard at his own profession?”
Had I felt like entering the discussion, I would have pointed out that to Mama Mwanza his profession probably resembles the game of “Mother May I?,” consisting of very long strings of nonsense words in a row.
It took less than a month for our household to fall into chaos. We had to endure Father’s escalating rage, when he returned home to find dinner no farther along than an unresolved argument over whether there are or are not worms in the flour, or any flour at all. After his displeasure had reached a certain point, the three of us rubbed our bruises and called ourselves to a womanly sort of meeting. At the great wooden table where we had spent many a tedious hour studying algebra and the Holy Roman Empire, we now sat down to take stock.
“First of all, we have to keep boiling the water, no matter what,” announced Rachel, our elder. “Write that down, Adah. If we don’t boil our water for thirty full minutes we’ll get plebiscites and what not.”
Duly noted.
“Second of all, we have to figure out what to eat.”
On the pantry shelves in the kitchen house we still had some flour, sugar, Carnation milk powder, tea, five cans of sardines, and the Underdown prunes; I recorded all this in a column in my notebook. Wrote it, for the benefit of my sisters, left to right. Leah added to the list: mangoes, guavas, pineapples, and avocados, all of which came and went in mysterious seasons (not unlike the Lord’s ways) but at least did grow in our yard, free of charge. Bananas were so abundant around the village people stole them off each other’s trees in broad daylight. When Mama Mwanza’s children cut down a bunch from the Nguzas’ big garden, Mama Nguza picked up the ones they’d dropped and brought them over later. Thus emboldened, Leah and I cut down a bunch the size of Ruth May from behind Eeben Axelroot’s outhouse, while he was inside. Fruit, then, was one thing we could have without money. Oranges we had always bought at the marche, as they grew deep in the jungle and were difficult to find, but Leah claimed to know where to look. She appointed herself in charge of fruit gathering, not surprisingly, this being the category of housework that takes place farthest from a house. She pledged to collect palm nuts also, even though these taste to us exactly like candle wax, however much the Congolese children seem to prize them. Still, I wrote “Palm nuts” in my book, to prolong the list. The point of our exercise was to convince ourselves that the wolf was not actually at the back door but perhaps merely salivating at the edge of our yard.
Resting up between crucial observations, Rachel was studying the tails of her hair very closely for split ends. She resembled a cross-eyed rabbit. At the mention of palm nuts she whined, “But, you all, on a diet of just fruit we could plumb die or even get diarrhea.”
“Well, what else is free?” Leah asked.
“The chickens, of course,” Rachel said. “We can kill those.”
We couldn’t kill them all, Leah explained, because then we’d have no eggs for omelets—one of the few things -we knew how to cook. But if we let some of the hens brood, to increase our flock, we might get away with frying a rooster once a month or so. My sisters put me in charge of all chicken decisions, thinking me the least likely to act on a rash impulse that would cause regrets later. The rash-impulse portion of my brain was destroyed at birth. We did not discuss who would be in charge of killing the unfortunate roosters. In earlier times our mother did that, with a flourish. Back when she was a happier woman, she used to claim Father married her for the way she wrung a rooster’s neck. Our mother used to have mystery under her skin, and we paid not the slightest attention.
