The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver Read Free Book Online Page A

could name. There was no telling how he might have influenced Mama Tataba. But we needed her help. She carried all our water up from the river and cleaned and lit the kerosene lamps and split wood and built the fire in the cookstove and threw buckets of ash down the hole in the outhouse and paused to kill snakes more or less as a distraction between heavier jobs. My sisters and I stood in awe of Mama Tataba, but were not quite used to her yet. She had a blind eye. It looked like an egg whose yolk had been broken and stirred just once. As she stood there by our garden, I stared at her bad eye, while her good eye stared at my father.
    “What you be dig for? Worm grub?” she demanded. She turned her head slightly from side to side, surveying my father’s work with what he calls her “acute monocular beam.” The galvanized bucket remained perfectly still on top of her head—a great, levitating crown.
    “We’re cultivating the soil, sister,” he said.
    “That one, brother, he bite,” she said, pointing her knuckly hand at a small tree he was wresting from his garden plot. White sap oozed from the torn bark. My father wiped his hands on his trousers.
    “Poisonwood,” she added flatly, emphasizing the descending syllables as if she were equally tired of all three.
    My father mopped his brow again and launched into the parable of the one mustard seed falling on a barren place, and the other one on good soil. I thought of the bright pointy-nosed mustard bottles we used in abundance at church wiener suppers—a world apart from anything MamaTataba had ever seen. Father had the job of his life cut out for him, bringing the Word to a place like this. I wanted to throw my arms around his weary neck and pat down his rumpled hair.
    Mama Tataba seemed not to be listening. She pointed again at the red dirt. “You got to be make hills.”
    He stood his ground, my father, tall as Goliath and pure of heart as David. A film of red dust on his hair and eyebrows and the tip of his strong chin gave him a fiendish look untrue to his nature. He ran his large, freckled hand across the side of his head, where his hair was shaved close, and then through the tousled crown, where Mother lets it grow longer. All this while inspecting Mama Tataba -with Christian tolerance, taking his time to formulate the message.
    “Mama Tataba,” he said at last, “I’ve been tending the soil ever since I could walk behind my father.”
    When he says anything at all, even a simple thing about a car or a plumbing repair, it tends to come out like this—in terms that can be interpreted as sacred.
    Mama Tataba kicked the dirt with her flat, naked sole and looked disgusted. “He won’t be grow. You got to be make hills,” she stated, then turned on her heel and went in the house to help my mother slosh Clorox water across the floor to kill the hookworms.
    I was shocked. In Georgia I’d seen people angered by my father before, or intimidated, but not contemptuous. Never.
    “What does she mean, make hills?” I asked. “And why did she think a plant could bite you?”
    He showed no trace of concern, though his hair blazed as if it had caught fire in the late-afternoon light. “Leah, our world is filled with mystery” was his confident reply.
    Among all of Africa’s mysteries, here were the few that revealed themselves in no time flat. My father woke up the next morning with a horrible rash on his hands and arms, presumably wounded by the plant that bites. Even his good right eye was swollen shut, from where he’d wiped his brow. Yellow pus ran like sap from his welted flesh. He bellowed when Mother tried to apply the salve. “I ask you, how did I earn this?” we heard him roar in their bedroom, through the closed door. “Ow! Great God almighty, Orleanna. How did this curse come to me, when it’s God’s own will to cultivate the soil!” The door flew open with a bang, and Father barreled out. Mother chased him with bandages but he batted her