After we found all the eggs in the bushes and took them, Baby Jesus made all the chickens be good and lay their eggs in the one big nest we made in the corner of the chicken house. Mama took a pencil and marked thirteen eggs with X.We kept those in the nest, and when the hens laid fresh ones, we took those for eating. Sometimes scrambled, sometimes hard-boiled. We don’t ever eat the X-mark eggs, because they’re a-going to turn into baby chickens. When they grow up they’ll be our new laying hens, some of them. And the other ones will grow up to be fried chicken! The not-lucky ones. They’ll get their necks chopped off and jump around squirting blood, ha ha ha, poor them. The chickens better get their own little gree-grees to wear on their necks, I reckon.
Every day I looked to see if the babies hatched out, and I was the first one to find them. They all hatched out but save for one, and it got squashed. It was flat against the mud wall behind the nest like a picture hanging up. Nelson lived in there with a dead baby chicken picture on the wall. I was sorry and didn’t try to look at his peewee any more after that.
If it’s dark outside and you see a snake, or even if you just want to talk about one, you can’t say snake.You have to say string.You say, Remember that day we saw a little black string coming home from the picnic? If it’s nighttime, that’s how you talk. Nelson got so mad at me for saying snake when it was dark, because he says after the sun goes down a snake can hear you calling its name and it’ll come a-running. Other animals too. They can hear real good in the dark, so watch out.
Nelson got mad at Leah, too, for keeping her a owl for a pet.The owl was a baby that couldn’t fly right when we found it, so Leah made it a cage and fed it bugs and some meat. Its fur is white and sticks out all over. Leah named it a word in that language they have here: Mvufu. It means owl. But Leah’s friend Pascal hates it, and Nelson hates it worse. Mama Mwanza hates it when she comes over scooting on her hands to trade us oranges for eggs. And Mama Boanda does. She’s the one that wears the black skirt with the great big pink star across her bottom and a hairdo that looks like stars too, sticking up ever whichaways. The one that does people’s hairdos is old Mama Lo, who’s only just got the two teeth, one upstairs and one down, so she chews crossways. She hates our owl the most of all, and hollered at us for having it! Because her sister just died here awhile back. Everybody that ever sees our owl just plumb hates it. Nelson said take it out of the house or he wasn’t coming in and that
was that. Well, Mama made her take it outside, even though Leah pitched a fit because it was still yet just a baby. That’s true, it was. It was getting feathers but mostly it still had white baby hair and was tame.
Nelson went and got Anatole, pulling on him by the hand like he was a note from home. Anatole said the Congo people don’t like owls because an owl flies around at night and eats up the souls of dead people. And there’s just way too many of them here lately, he said. Too many sick children for people to abide an owl hanging around and looking at them with his eyes still hungry. Even if the owl was just a baby himself. Maybe he’d want other babies for company.
Father said that was just all superstitions. So Leah went and fetched the owl back and sashayed around the house with it sitting on her shoulder, saying Father was sticking up for her side of things. Uh-oh. He smacked her hard for the sin of pride, and made her do The Verse. She sat there holding the side of her neck while she wrote it out. When she put her hand down you could see the bruise just as plain. It looked like Father was holding his hand in front of the kerosene light and making a shadow on her. But he wasn’t, he was in the other room a-reading in his Bible.
When she got done with her Verse, she went way down in the jungle to turn that baby owl loose, and we thought she never would come back. We were all scared half to death and sat up waiting for her, except Father. It was so quiet you could hear the second hand on Rachel’s Timex going sit-sit-sit. The flames in the lantern went up and down and the shadows jiggled ever time you’d go to blink your eyes. It was way after dark by then. So whatever you were thinking might have got ahold of Leah out there, snake or leopard, you couldn’t say anything out loud but string or spotted cloth. I said, “I hope a string didn’t bite her!”
Father already went in his bedroom, way way earlier. He hollered finally for Mama to put us to bed and come on herself. He said our sister would be back, so we’d just as well go on about our business because she was just looking for the attention. He said not to pay her any mind or we’d get the same medicine. Then he said, “If an owl can eat up a soul outright, he is one step ahead of the Devil, for the Devil has to purchase them first, and I see he has made some purchases right here in my own household.” Father was mad and wanted to get the subject off of Leah, since it was him that ran her off.
We didn’t say boo to him, nor go to bed either. We just sat there. Mama stared out the open doorway with all her might, waiting on Leah to get home. The mosquitoes and big white moths came in the door and went out the windows. Some of them decided to take off their coats and stay awhile, so they flew in the kerosene lamp and got burned up. That is what happens to you if you’re bad and don’t go to heaven, you go and get burned up in the bad place instead. So that night our house was the bad place for the Congolese bugs. Ha ha.
Father is trying to teach everybody to love Jesus, but what with one thing and another around here, they don’t. Some of them are scared of Jesus, and some aren’t, but I don’t think they love Him. Even the ones that go to church, they still worship the false-eye dolls and get married to each other time and again. Father gets right put out about it.
I’m scared of Jesus, too.
When she came back from the woods, we hooped and hollered and ran to the porch and just jumped up and down and pulled her inside by her shirttails. But uh-oh, there “was Father in his dark bedroom doorway looking out. All you could see was his eyes. We didn’t want to get the same medicine, so we just looked at Leah real hard with I’m sorry for you eyes and tried to get a nice message across. After we went to bed I reached over through the mosquito net and held her hand.
Mama didn’t sleep in her room.
Mama says birds are going to be her death. I’d sooner say it was snakes. But I guess if a bird is going to eat up the dead children’s souls, that is a worry. That is one more sound to listen for at night. One more thing you can’t say out loud after dark.
Rachel
IN JANUARY the Underdowns showed up as a complete surprise from Leopoldville.They came in Mr. Axelroot’s plane, when the most we were really expecting was Potato Buds and Spam. The Underdowns don’t like to come out here in the boondoggles, so believe you me this was an occasion. They looked like they had nervous-tension headaches. Mother was upset because they’re our bosses from the Mission League, and they’d caught her red-handed doing housework in her old black Capri pants with the knees worn through. She was a sight to behold there on the floor, scrubbing away, with her flyaway hair sticking out and dark bruise-colored circles under her eyes from all her worrying about us catching the kamikaze disease. What with the mongooses and lizards traipsing in and out of the house as they pleased, she had a lot more to be embarrassed about than just getting caught in her old clothes, it seems to me. But at least that horrible owl was gone.Thank goodness to that, even if Father did come down too hard on Leah about it. That was a bad scene. We were all tiptoeing around on the eggshells even more than usual, after that. But that owl stank of rotten meat so I do have to say, Good riddance.