The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver Read Free Book Online

ream the sweat, carefully, out of one eye socket and then the other. He has a scar on his temple and poor vision on the left side, from a war injury he doesn’t ever talk about, not being one to boast. He refolded the handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. Then he handed me the hoe and held his hands out from his sides, palms up, to illustrate the heavenly balancing act. “Small works of goodness over here,” he let his left hand drop slightly, “small rewards over here.” His right hand dropped just a mite with the weight of an almost insignificant reward. “Great sacrifice, great rewards!” he said then, letting both hands fall heavily from the shoulders, and with all my soul I coveted the delicious weight of goodness he cradled in those palms.
    Then he rubbed his hands together, finished with the lesson and with me. “God merely expects us to do our own share of the perspiring for life’s bounty, Leah.”
      He took back the hoe and proceeded to hack out a small, square dominion over the jungle, attacking his task with such muscular vigor we would surely, and soon, have tomatoes and beans coming out our ears. I knew God’s scale to be vast and perfectly accurate: I pictured it as a much larger version of the one at the butcher’s counter in the Bethlehem Piggly Wiggly. I vowed to work hard for His favor, surpassing all others in my devotion to turning the soil for God’s great glory. Someday perhaps I shall demonstrate to all of Africa how to grow crops! Without complaint I fetched bucket after bucket of water from the big galvanized tub on the porch, so he could douse the plot a little at a time ahead of his hoe, to hold down the awful dust. The red mud dried on his khakis like the blood of a slain beast. I walked behind him and found the severed heads of many small, bright orange orchids. I held one close to my eye. It was delicate and extraordinary, with a bulbous yellow tongue and maroon-spotted throat. Nobody had ever planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind’s follow-through capabilities, on the day He created flowers.
    Mama BekwaTataba stood watching us—a little jet-black woman. Her elbows stuck out like wings, and a huge white enameled tub occupied the space above her head, somewhat miraculously holding steady while her head moved in quick jerks to the right and left. Mama Tataba’s job, we were surprised to learn, was to live with us and earn a small stipend by doing the same work she’d done for our forerunner in the Kilanga Mission, Brother Fowles. He’d left us two boarders, in fact: Mama Tataba and a parrot named Methuselah. Both had been trained by him in the English language and evidently a good deal else, for Brother Fowles left some mystery in his wake. I gathered through overhearing my parents that Brother Fowles had entered into unconventional alliances with the local people, and too he was a Yankee. I heard them saying he was New York Irish, which tells you a lot, as they are notorious for being papist Catholics. Father explained to us that he had gone plumb crazy, consorting with the inhabitants of the land.
    That’s why the Mission League finally allowed us to come. At first they’d insulted my father by turning us down, even after our Bethlehem congregation had done special tithes for a whole year to fly us here for the perfusion of Jesus’ name. But no one else volunteered for the Kilanga post, and the Underdowns had requested that it be taken by someone steady, with a family. Well, we were a family all right, and my father is steady as a stump. Still, the Underdowns insisted that our mission last no more than one year—not enough time for going plumb crazy but only partway, I guess, even if things went poorly.
    Brother Fowles had been in Kilanga six years, which really when you think about it is long enough for about any kind of backsliding you