Father suddenly remembered he needed to stomp off and do some very important thing or another, and to make a long story short, they didn’t stay for dinner. They got the picture that they weren’t welcome in our house or the whole village probably, in Father’s humble opinion. And they were the type that seemed like they’d rather sit down and eat their own shoes before they’d put you out in any way. They told us they planned to spend the afternoon visiting a few old friends, but that they needed to be on up the river before nightfall.

We about had to tie ourselves to the chairs to keep from tagging after them. We were so curious about what they’d be saying to Tata Ndu and them.Jeepers! All this time we’ve been more or less thinking we were the one and only white people who ever set foot here. And all along, our neighbors had this whole friendship with Brother Fowles they’d just kept mum about. You always think you know more about their kind than they know about yours, which just goes to show you.

They came back before sundown and invited us to come see their boat before they shoved off, so Mother and my sisters and I trooped down to the riverbank. Brother Fowles had some more books he wanted to give Adah. That’s not the half of it, either. Mrs. Fowles kept bringing out more presents to give Mother: canned goods, milk powder, coffee, sugar, quinine pills, fruit cocktail, and so many other things it seemed like they really were Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus, after all. And yet their boat was hardly more than a little floating shack with a bright green tin roof. Inside, it had all the comforts, though: books, chairs, a gas stove, you name it.Their kids ran around and flopped on the chairs and played with stuff, giving no indication they thought it peculiar to reside on a body of water.

“Oh my stars, oh goodness, you’re too kind,” Mother kept saying, as Celine brought out one thing after another and put it into our hands. “Oh, I can’t thank you enough.”

I was of a mind to slip them a note, like a captivated spy girl in the movies: “Help! Get me out of here!” But that loaded-down little boat of theirs already looked like it was fixing to sink if you looked at it wrong. All the canned goods they gave us probably helped them stay afloat.

Mother was also taking stock of things. She asked, “How do you manage to stay so well supplied?”

“We have so many friends,” Celine said. “The Methodist Mission gets us milk powder and vitamins to distribute in the villages along the river. The tins of food and quinine pills come from the ABFMS.”

“We’re terribly interdenominational,” said Brother Fowles, laughing.”! even get a little stipend from the National Geographic Society.”

“The ABFMS?” Mother queried.

“American Baptist Foreign Mission Service,” he said. “They have a hospital mission up the Wamba River, have you not heard of it? That little outfit has done a world of good in the ways of guinea-worm cure, literacy, and human kindness. They’ve put old King Leopold’s ghost to shame, I would say. If such a thing is possible. It’s run by the wisest minister you’ll ever meet, a man named Wesley Green, and his wife, Jane.”

Brother Fowles added as an afterthought, “No offense to your husband, of course.”

“But we’re Baptists,” Mother said, sounding hurt. “And the Mission League cut off our stipend right before Independence!”

Mr. Fowles thought this over before offering, tactfully, “For certain, Mrs. Price, there are Christians and then there are Christians.”

“How far away is this mission? Do you get there on your boat?” Mother was eying the boat, the canned goods, and perhaps the whole of our future.

But both Brother and Mrs. Fowles laughed at that, shaking their heads like Mother had asked if they take their boat to the moon frequently to fetch green cheese.

“We can’t take this old bucket more than fifty miles down the Kwilu,” he explained. “You run into the rapids. But the good road from Leopoldville crosses the Wamba and reaches this river at Kikwit. Sometimes Brother Green comes up in his boat, hitches a ride on a truck and meets us at Kikwit. Or we go to the airfield at Masi Manimba to meet our packages. By the grace of God, we always seem to get whatever it is we really need to have.”

“We rely very much on our friends,” Celine added.

“Ah, yes,” her husband agreed. “And that means to get one good connection made, you have to understand the Kituba, the Lingala, the Bembe, Kunyi,Vili, Ndingi, and the bleeding talking drums.”

Celine laughed and said yes, that was true. The rest of us felt like fish out of water as usual. If Ruth May had been feeling up to snuff she’d have already climbed aboard and started jabbering with the Fowles children in probably all those languages plus French and Siamese. Which makes you wonder, are they really speaking real words, or do little kids just start out naturally understanding each other before the prime of life sets in? But Ruth May was not up to snuff, so she was being quiet, hanging on to Mother’s hand.