Adah and I dragged our sewing projects out to the porch so we could still keep an eye out for interesting goings-on in the world. Something had come between Adah and me for the worse, since the day she was supposed to have been followed by that lion, which the whole village was still talking about. They loved to point Adah out when they saw us, pantomiming a lion’s roar, which didn’t help us to put the affair behind us. But on the bright side, the event provided a great boost for Father’s church. People seem to think that if Jesus could stop a lion from gobbling up a poor lame girl, he must be staying awake pretty good for the Christians—ha! Just when everybody was thinking their regular African gods were aggravated with us and fixing to teach us a lesson. The way they see it, it was kind of a wrestling match between the gods, -with Jesus and Adah coming out on top. Father of course says this is superstitious and oversimplifying matters. But as luck would have it, he’d preached the parable of Daniel and the lions’ den just a few days before, so naturally now they are knocking each other over to get to church on Sunday. And Adah is the cause. Father is pleased as punch with Adah, I don’t care what he says—he put his arm around her shoulder in public! Which is not entirely fair.

But we still had to go on being each other’s main company. Chained to the porch by Mothers instructions, like grumpy twin bears in captivity, we enviously watched Nelson as he went about his business, free to go back and forth to the village and contract the kakakaka any time he had a mind to. As he walked away we could see his round pink scar spying back at us through the trees like a small, laughing eye. We also watched Methuselah, who after four months of liberation still hung around our house mumbling. It was very strange to hear the voices of our own family members coming from the tree branches, as if we’d been transformed into flying spirits of a type preoccupied with peanuts, bananas, and common phrases of greeting. Sometimes at night he’d startle us, when we forgot he spent his lonely nights in the latrine. Believe me, it gives you a queer feeling to sit down in the dark to pee and hear a voice right behind you declare, “Sister, God is great!” But we felt sorry for him and took to leaving him pieces of fruit in there. We were careful to keep the latrine door shut and latched at night, so no mongoose or civet cat would find its way in and polish him off.

At first I wanted Methuselah to come back and live in his cage, until Father explained to me that this whole arrangement was wrong. We let Methuselah go because his captivity was an embarrassment to us. It made the parrot into a less noble creature than God intended. So I had to root for Methuselah to learn to be free. I don’t know what Adah rooted for as we lay out there with our needlework, watching him waddle up and down the branches. I have to say she probably didn’t care one way or the other, really, and was just fascinated to see what would happen next. Adah is that way. She feels no obligation to have good thoughts on behalf of her mortal soul in the hereafter, or even the here and now. She can simply watch life, without caring.

Certainly she wasn’t putting in any effort on behalf of her future womanhood. Adah did weird, morbid things for her hope chest, black borders on cloth napkins and the like, which exhausted our mother. And Ruth May was exempt from hope chest, but was allowed to lie in a hammock with us and make cat’s cradles out of yarn if she promised not to run off and break something.

I lolled on my back and worked on my tablecloth listlessly, to preserve my mother’s fantasy that I’d be getting married one day, and after a while it began to draw me in. The cross-stitch itself was tedious, but the prospects were beautiful; Mother had the foresight to give me a botanical motif, knowing how I love green and growing things. Bunches of pansies and roses were meant to bloom in the four corners, all connected by a border of twining green vines. And in the very same way the Spirit long ago became manifest in the Body of Christ, the first cabbage rose began to materialize on my tablecloth. From there, I could envision the whole garden.

Still, the project seemed impossibly large. Rachel polished off a complete set of dinner napkins in the time it took me to fill in one pink rose. The humidity was so thick it dripped off our eyelashes, and in this damp atmosphere the first bouquet took so long that my metal embroidery hoops rusted in place.

The hope-chest program didn’t last long as our main preoccupation. Rachel hoped too much and ran out of material, while the rest of us hoped too little and ran out of steam. Once in a great while I still do pull out my tablecloth and try to get reinspired. I’ve even prayed for God to make me more fit to be a wife. But the rusted embroidery hoops left an unsightly orange ring on the linen that may have damaged my prospects for good.