The Poisonwood Bible

Birds could swoop in and get your hair for their nest if they felt like it. Father had put up an altar made of palm leaves in front, which looked presentable in a rustic way, but you could still see black char and stains on the floor from the fire they made on our first night here, for the welcome feast. It was an unpleasant reminder of Sodom, Gomorrah, and so forth. I could still choke on the memory of goat meat if I thought about it. I never swallowed it. I carried one bite in my mouth all evening and spat it out behind the outhouse when we went home. .,..;.. ,
GENESIS
45
So all right, no new dresses. But I was hardly allowed to complain about that because, guess what. It wasn't even real Easter. We arrived smack dab in the middle of summer, far from the nearest holy day. Father was disappointed about the timing, until he made the shocking jet-age discovery that days and months do not matter one way or another to people in this village. They don't even know Sunday from Tuesday or Friday or the twelfth of Never! Theyjust count to five, have their market day, and start over. One of the men in the congregation confided to Father that having church just every old now and then, as it seems to them, instead of on market day, has always bamfuzzled everybody about the Christians. That sure gave us a hoot! So Father had nothing to lose by announcing his own calendar and placing upon it Easter on the Fourth of July. Why not? He said he needed a focal point to get the church geared up.
Our great event for counterfeit Easter Sunday was a pageant, organized by Father and whoever else could drum up the enthusiasm. So far, for our first few weeks in Kilanga, attendance in church had been marked by almost total absence. So Father saw this pageant as a splectacular mark of things being on the upswing. Four men, including the one in the janitor uniform and another with only one leg, performed the roles of soldiers and carried real spears. (There "weren't any women at the services to speak of, so they weren't going to be caught dead in any play.) At first the men wanted to have someone play out the role of Jesus and raise up from the dead, but Father opposed that on principle. So they merely dressed up as Roman guards, standing around the tomb laughing with pagan satisfaction because they'd managed to kill God, and then in the second act, leaping about, showing great dismay to find the stone rolled back.
I didn't much care for looking at those men in the pageant. We aren't all that accustomed to the African race to begin -with, since back home they keep to their own parts of town. But here, of course, with everyplace being their part of town. Plus, these men in the pageant were just carrying it to the hilt. I didn't see there was any need for them to be so African about it. They wore steel
THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 46
bracelets on their black arms, and loose, flapping clotths tucked half hazardly around their waists. (Even the peg leg one!) They came running or hopping into the church, carrying the sarnie heavy spears they would use later in the week to slew the animals.We knew they did it. Their wives came to our door daily with whole, dripping legs of something not ten minutes dead. Before the great aadventure is all over, Father expects his children to eat rhinoceros, I ssuppose. Antelope is more or less our daily bread. They started bringing us that the very first week. Even, once, a monkey. Mama Tatalba would haggle with the women at the door, and finally turn tco us with her scrawny arms raised up like a boxing champ, holding mp our dinner. Jeez oh man, tell me when it's over! Then she'd stoimp out to the kitchen hut and build such a huge fire in the iron stowe you'd think she was Cape Carniveral launching a rocket ship. Slhe is handy at cooking anything living or dead, but heaven be prraised, Mother rejected the monkey, with its little dead grin. She toldi MamaTataba we could get by on things that looked less like kinfollk.
So when the men with their bloodstained spears came jingling down the aisle of our church pageant on Easter Sumday it represented progress, I'm sure, but it wasn't what Father re:ally hoped for. He had envisioned a baptism.The whole point of Easster in July was supposed to be an altar call, followed by a joyful proceession down to the river with children dressed all in white getting saved. Father would stand waist deep out there like the Baptist Saint John and hold up one hand, and in the name of the Father amd the Son and the Holy Ghost he would dunk them under, one by one. The river would be jam-packed with purified souls.
There is a little stream that runs by the village, writh small pools where people wash clothes and get water for drinkiing, but it isn't deep or wide enough for anything near the proper bsaptismal effect. For Father it's the wide Kwilu River and nothing Icess. I could see exactly how he meant the ceremony to go. It couild have been, really, a pretty sight.
But the men said no, that was not to be. The women were so opposed to getting dunked in the river, even on hiearsay, they all
GENESIS 47
kept their children extra far from the church that day. So the dramatic points of Father's pageant were lost on most of Kilanga.What with my sisters and me, our mother, and Mama Tataba being the only females in attendance, and all the men that could walk being in the play, a higher proportion of the audience than you'd care to think was either daydreaming or examining the contents of their nostrils.
Afterwards, instead of the baptism, Father lured people down as near as he could get them to the river by means of the age-old method of a church supper. We had a picnic down on the bank of the Kwilu, which has the delightful odor of mud and dead fish. The families that would not darken the door of the church, which by the way doesn't have any door, did manage to join us for the picnic. Naturally, since we brought most of the food. They seem to think we are Santa Claus, the way the children come around begging us for food and things every single day