So I asked Adah rather loudly, “Say, isn’t today’s date the twentieth of August?” She nodded that it was, and I looked around me in amazement, for there was my very own family, setting the breakfast table and making lesson plans and what not as if this were simply the next day after yesterday and not even anything as special as Thursdays back home in Bethlehem, which was always the day we had to set out the trash.

Mother did finally remember, as it happened. After breakfast she gave me a pair of her own earrings and a matching bracelet I had admired. It’s only cut glass, but a very pretty shade of green that happens to set off my hair and eyes. And since it was about the only jewelry I’d seen in an entire year, it could have been diamonds—I was that depraved. Anyway it was nice to have some small token. She’d wrapped it up in a piece of cloth and written on a card made from Adah’s notebook paper: For my beautiful firstborn child, all grown up. Sometimes Mother really does try. I gave her a kiss and thanked her. But then she had to go back to giving Ruth May her sponge baths, so that was the whole show. Ruth May’s fever shot up to a hundred and five, Adah got stung on the foot by a scorpion spider and had to soak it in cold water, and a mongoose got in the chicken house and ate some eggs, all on the same day: my birthday! And all of them just to detract attention away from me. Except, I guess, the mongoose.

Adah

TATA JESUS is BANGALA!” declares the Reverend every Sunday at the end of his sermon. More and more, mistrusting his interpreters, he tries to speak in Kikongo. He throws back his head and shouts these words to the sky, while his lambs sit scratching themselves in wonder. Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree. Praise the Lord, hallelujah, my friends! for Jesus will make you itch like nobody’s business.

And while Our Father was preaching the gospel of poisonwood, his own daughter Ruth May rose from the dead. Our Father did not particularly notice. Perhaps he is unimpressed because he assumed all along this would happen. His confidence in the Lord is exceptional. Dog ho! Evol’s dog! The Lord, however, may or may not be aware that our mother assisted this miracle by forcing Ruth May to eat the same pills twice.

Sllip emas. There is no stepping in the same river twice. So say the Greek philosophers, and the crocodiles make sure. Ruth May is not the same Ruth May she was. Yam Htur. None of us is the same: Lehcar, Hael, Hada. Annaelro. Only Nahtan remains essentially himself, the same man however you look at him. The others of us have two sides. We go to bed ourselves and like poor Dr. Jekyll we wake up changed. Our mother, the recent agoraphobe, who kept us pumpkin-shelled indoors through all the months of rain and epidemic and Independence, has now turned on her protector: she eyes our house suspiciously, accuses it of being “cobwebby” and “strangling us with the heat.” She speaks of it as a thing with will and motive. Every afternoon she has us put on our coolest dresses and run away from our malignant house. Down the forest path we march, single file, to the stream for a picnic. When we run off and she thinks we cannot see her she sways in the clearing, gently, like a tree blown by wind. Despite the risk of hookworm, she removes her shoes.

And now rejoice, oh, ye faithful, for Ruth May has risen, but she has the naked stare of a zombie and has lost interest in being first or best at anything. Nelson will not go near her. This is his theory: the owl we held as a temporary captive memorized our floor plan so it could find its way back through a window and consume her soul.

My other sisters, in different ways, have become stricken with strange behavior regarding men. Rachel is hysterical and engaged. The engagement is feigned, but that does not keep her from spending hours at a time playing “Mirror Mirror on the Wall” in her new green glass earrings, then throwing tantrums of protest against her upcoming marriage.

And Leah, the tonier twin. Leah has come down with a devout interest in the French and Kikongo languages—specifically, in learning them from Anatole. In the mornings she teaches arithmetic to his younger pupils, and afterward spends many hours at his bright-white shirtsleeve conjugating the self-same reflexive verbs— I’homme se noie—which a year ago she declared pointless. Apparently reflexive verbs gain a new importance for certain girls at the age of fifteen. She is also being instructed in the art of bow hunting. Anatole gave her as a gift a small, highly functional bow and a quiver of arrows with red tail feathers—like the “Hope” in Miss Dickinson’s poem, and like the quite hopelessly dead Methuselah, our former parrot. Anatole, with his very own knife, slipped these gifts for Leah out of a branch of greenheart wood.