Twice I’ve seen the honey man who comes out of the forest carrying a block of honeycomb dripping with honey-sometimes bees and all!-in his bare hands. A smoking roll of leaves juts from his mouth like a giant cigar. He sings softly to the bees as he walks through the village, and the children all run after him, mesmerized by the prospect of honey, their eagerness for a sweet causing them to vibrate and hum like the bees.
On the rare days when Eeben Axelroot is in his shack at the end of the airplane field, I’ve been known to go down there and spy on him, too. Sometimes Adah comes, although she generally prefers her own company to anyone else’s. But Mr. Axelroot provides a grave temptation, as he is such an abominable curiosity. We hide amongst the banana trees that have sprung up all around his latrine, even while it gives us the creeps knowing all this lush growth is fertilized by such a disgusting man’s night soil. The big banana-tree leaves grow right up against the shack’s filthy back window, leaving narrow gaps perfect for spying. Mr. Axelroot himself is boring to watch; on a typical day he sleeps till noon, then takes a nap. You can just tell he isn’t saved. But his clutter is fascinating: guns, tools, army clothes, even a radio of some kind, which he keeps in an army foot-locker. We can hear the faint static emanating from the trunk, and the spooky, distant voices speaking French and English. My parents told us there was not a radio within a hundred miles of our whole village (they wanted to get one for safety’s sake, but neither the Mission League nor the Lord has so far provided). So they aren’t aware of Mr. Axelroot’s radio, and since I only learned of it through spying, I can’t tell them about it.
My parents shun him completely. Our mother is so sure none of us would want to go near his house she hasn’t bothered to forbid it. That’s good luck for me. If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn’t technically hold it against me. The Hardy Boys did spying for the cause of good, and I have always felt mine is in this same vein.
It was midway through September when Ruth May made her inroads. I came back from my spying foray one afternoon to find her playing “Mother May I?” with half the village’s children. I was flabbergasted. There stood my own little sister in the center of our yard, the focal point of a gleaming black arc of children strung from here to there, silently sucking their sugarcane sticks, not even daring to blink. Their faces concentrated on Ruth May the way a lens concentrates sunlight. I half expected her to go up in flames.
“You, that one.” Ruth May pointed and held up four fingers. “Take four scissors steps.”
The chosen child opened his mouth wide and sang a rising four-note song: “Ma-da-meh-yi?”
“Yes, you may,” Ruth May replied benevolently. The little boy crossed his legs at the knees, leaned back, and minced forward twice plus twice more, exactly like a crab that could count.
I watched for a long while, astonished to see what Ruth May had accomplished behind my back. Every one of these children could execute giant steps, baby steps, scissors steps, and a few other absurd locomotions invented by Ruth May. She grudgingly let us join the game, and grudgingly we did. For several afternoons under the gathering clouds, all of us-including the generally above-it-all Rachel-played “Mother May I?” I tried to picture myself in a missionary role, gathering the little children unto me, as it was embarrassing to be playing this babyish game with children waist-high to me. But we were so tired of ourselves and each other by then the company was irresistible.
We soon lost interest, though, for there was no suspense at all: the Congolese children always passed us right by on their march to victory. In our efforts to eke the most mileage out of a scissors step or whatever, my sisters and I sometimes forgot to ask (or Adah to mouth) “Mother May I?” Whereas the other children never, ever forgot. For them, shouting “Ma-da-me-yi” was one rote step in a memorized chain of steps, not a courtesy to be used or dropped the way “yes, ma’am” and “thank you” are for us. The Congolese children’s understanding of the game didn’t even take courtesy or rudeness into account, if you think about it, any more than Methuselah did when he railed us with hell and damnation. This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.
But “Mother May I?” broke the ice. When the other children got wise to Ruth May’s bossy ways and drifted off, one boy stayed. His name was Pascal, or something near it, and he captivated us with frantic sign language. Pascal was my nkundi: my first real friend in the Congo. He was about two-thirds my size, though much stronger, and fortunately for us both he owned a pair of khaki shorts. Two frayed holes in the back gave a generous view of his buttocks, but that was all right. I rarely had to be directly behind him except when we climbed trees. The effect was still far less embarrassing to me than pure nakedness. I think I would have found it impossible to be friends with a purely naked boy.
“Beto nki tutasala?” he would ask me by way of greeting. “What are we doing?” It was a good question. Our companionship consisted mainly of Pascal telling me the names for everything we saw and some things I hadn’t thought to look for. Bangala, for example, the poisonwood tree that was plaguing us all half to death. Finally I learned to see and avoid its smooth, shiny leaves. And he told me about ngondi, the kinds of weather: mawalala is rain far off in the distance that doesn’t ever come. When it booms thunder and beats down the grass, that is nuni ndolo, and the gentler kind is nkazi ndolo. These he called “boy rain” and “girl rain,” pointing right to his private parts and mine without appearing to think a thing in the world was wrong with that. There were other boy and girl words, such as right and left: the man hand and the woman hand. These discussions came several ‘weeks into our friendship, after Pascal had learned I was not, actually, a boy, but something previously unheard of: a girl in pants.The news surprised him greatly, and I don’t like to dwell on how it came about. It had to do with peeing in the bushes. But Pascal quickly forgave me, and it’s a good thing, since friends of my own age and gender were not available, the girls of Kilanga all being too busy hauling around firewood, water, or babies. It did cross my mind to wonder why Pascal had a freedom to play and roam that his sisters didn’t. While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country.
But Pascal made a fine companion. As we squatted face to face, I studied his wide-set eyes and tried to teach him English words- palm tree, house, run, walk, lizard, snake. Pascal could say these words back to me all right, but he evidently didn’t care to remember them. He only paid attention if it was something he’d never seen before, such as Rachel’s Timex watch with the sweep second hand. He also wanted to know the name of Rachel’s hair. Hen, herr, he repeated over and over, as if this were the name of some food he wanted to make sure he never got hold of by mistake. It only dawned on me later, I should have told him “blonde.”
Once we’d made friends, Pascal borrowed a machete and cut sugarcane for me to chew on. With hard, frightening whacks he cut the cane into popsicle lengths before replacing the machete beside his father’s hammock. The cane-sucking habit in Kilanga was no doubt connected to the black stumps of teeth most everyone showed off when they smiled at us, and Mother never lost an opportunity to remark upon that connection. But Pascal had a fine set of strong white teeth, so I decided to take my chances.