We tried to ignore his strange remarks, but we all did hear him. In some corner of our hearts we all drew back, knowing he was right. The dead beasts in our hands seemed to be cursing and mocking us for having killed them. In the end we all crept home with our meat, feeling hunted ourselves. What was surely the oldest celebration of all, the sharing of plenty, had fallen to ruin in our hands.

Rachel

BY NIGHTFALL my sisters and parents came home and everything had gone crazy. Nothing went the way I expected. I had gotten out of my bath, dressed in clean clothes, towel-dried my hair, and was sitting quietly in the front room prepared to announce to my family that I was a vegetarian. I understood full well what this meant: from now on I would have to exist on bananas and have poor nutrition. I knew Mother would have strong opinions about where I’d wind up, with curved legs and weak bones like the poor Congolese children. But I shan’t care, not even if my hair falls out. At seventeen I have my rights, and besides, I’d made my own secret plan. As soon as Eeben Axelroot came back I was determined to use my feminine wilds to my own advantage. No matter what it took, I would get him to take me away from here in his airplane. “My fiance, Mr. Axelroot, and I are planning on returning to America,” I would tell them, “where it’s a free country and you can get anything to eat that you want.”

But this is not the conversation that happened. When they came home, everybody was having a conniption about a big giant fight in the village over who got whose share of their horrid meat. They went on talking and remarking about it while Mother built a fire in the stove and put in their antelope leg to roast, and mashed some plantains. It did smell so good. You could hear it all sizzling and crispy and juicy, and I have to confess when dinnertime came I did eat a few small bites, but only because I was positively weak with hunger. And I got to thinking about my hair falling out. But if there had been a grocery store within one hundred miles, believe me, I would have walked there on my own reconnaisance for some cuisine that didn’t still have feet attached to it.

At dinner the ruckus of our household was still going on, with Leah still saying over and over how she shot a whole antelope herself and it was not fair that our family didn’t get it. Father informed her that God showed no mercy upon those who flouted their elders, and that he, Reverend Price, had washed his hands of her moral education. He said this in just the plainest everyday voice, as if discussing that the dog had gotten into the garbage again. He stated that Leah was a shameful and inadequate vessel for God’s will, and that was “why he would no longer even stoop to punishing her when she needed it.

Leah spoke back to him in a calm voice as if she too were discussing whatever had gotten into the garbage and it certainly wasn’t her. She said, “Is that your point of view, Father? How interesting that you think so,” and so forth. Which was fine and dandy for her, I guess, if she wasn’t going to get punished for it! Lucky duck. Ruth May and Adah and I stayed out of it, us still being adequate vessels for a good licking, the last we’d heard. Even though someone could have pointed out to Father that at least somebody finally brought home some bacon at our house. Someone could have remarked that it is Leah who wears the pants in our family, which is true. Mother took sides against Father without saying so, in the noisy way she stacked the plates.

Then suddenly from one second to the next they were all transposed on Nelson, who came running into the house afraid for his life. It was something about a snake. He’d seen the evil sign outside our chicken house. Well, that was hardly a surprise because for the last few days people had been finding snakes everyplace. Inside the house, for instance, inside a bean basket with the lid on tight. Places where you wouldn’t think it was natural for a snake to be. Everybody was so afraid, Nelson said, you could see Afraid walking around on its own two feet. When he saw the evil sign it sent him singing like a canary, because our chicken house is where he sleeps.

He was positive he was doomed, and there was just no reasoning with him. Mother did try, but he wouldn’t listen. He said he’d been just fixing to go to bed when he heard a sound and went outside to look. When he stepped out the door, two shadows in the shape of an X fell across his path. Lately he’s been tying the chicken-house door shut with a rope when he turns in for the night, but now it was plain to see no rope -was going to be strong enough. Nelson was not going to sleep in our chicken house for all the teeth in China.

Well, any two straight things can make a shadow of an X is what Mother told him, which is true, especially with a wild imagination coming into play. Probably some clown is just trying to scare him and needs a good poke in the puss. But Nelson said this was not just ordinary shadows. He said it was the dreaming of snakes.