Father said, “An election. Frank, I’m embarrassed for you. You’re quaking in your boots over a fairy tale. Why, open your eyes, man. These people can’t even read a simple slogan: Vote for Me! Down with Shapoopie! An election! Who out here would even know it happened?”

Nobody answered him. We girls never said a peep, of course, any more than the palm trees did, for we knew he was talking to Mother and the Underdowns. I knew just how they felt, getting one of Father’s pop quizzes.

“Two hundred different languages,” he said, “spoken inside the borders of a so-called country invented by Belgians in a parlor. You might as well put a fence around sheep, wolves, and chickens, and tell them to behave like brethren.” He turned around, looking suddenly just like a preacher. “Frank, this is not a nation, it is the Tower of Babel and it cannot hold an election. If these people are to be united at all, they will come together as God’s lambs in their simple love for Christ. Nothing else will move them forward. Not politics, not a desire for freedom—they don’t have the temperament or the intellect for such things. I know you’re trying to tell us what you’ve heard, but believe me, Frank, I know what I see.”

Mrs. Potato Head spoke up for the first time since they’d drifted from the subject of malaria pills. “Orleanna, all we really came here for is to tell you to make your plans to leave. I know you were going to stay on till the fifteenth of June, but we have to send you home.”

Boy, my heart did the cha-cha, hearing that. Home! Well. If there’s one solitary thing Father does not like it’s being told what to do. “My contract expires in June,” he announced to all concerned. “We will stay through July to help welcome the Reverend and Mrs. Minor when they come. I’m sure Christian charity will be forthcoming from America, regardless of any problems Belgium may have with its fatherly hand”

“Nathan, the Minors...” Frank started to say, but Father ran him right over and kept going.

“I’ve worked some miracles here, I don’t mind telling you, and I’ve done it single-handedly. Outside help is of no concern to me. I can’t risk losing precious ground by running away like a coward before we have made a proper transition!”

Transition when, is what I wanted to know. Another week? A month? July was practically half a year away!

“Frank, Janna,” my mother said, in a voice that sounded scared. “For my own part,” she said, and faltered. “For the girls, I’d like to...”

“You’d like to what, Orleanna.” Father was still right out there in the doorway, so we could see his face. He looked like a mean boy fixing to smash puppies with a brick. “What is it you’d like to say, for your own part?” he asked.

Mrs. Underdown was shooting worried looks over at her husband like, “Oh, Lordy, what next?”

“Nathan, there may not be a transition,” Mr. Underdown said nervously, saying Father’s name the way you’d say a growling dog’s name to calm it down. “The Minors have declined their contract, on our advice. It may be years before this mission resumes.”

Father stared at the trees, giving no indication he’d heard his poor frightened wife, or any of this news. Father would sooner watch us all perish one by one than listen to anybody but himself. Years before they send someone else to this mission, I thought. Years! Oh, please God make a tree fall on him and smash his skull! Let us leave right now!

Mrs. Underdown pitched in helpfully, “We are making preparations to leave, ourselves.”

“Oh, yes,” her husband said. “Absolutely. We are packing to leave. We have called the Congo our home for many years, as you know, but the situation is very extreme. Nathan, perhaps you don’t understand how serious this is. In all likelihood the embassy will evacuate from Leopoldville.”

“I believe I understand perfectly well,” Father said, turning around suddenly to face them. In his khakis and rolled-up white shirt sleeves he looked like a working man, but he raised up one hand above his head the way he does in church to pronounce the benediction.

“Only God knows when our relief may arrive. But God does know. And in His benevolent service we will stay.”

Adah

SO MUCH DEPENDS on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water standing beside the white chickens. That is one whole poem written by a doctor named William C. Williams. Chickens white beside  standing water rain, with glazed wheelbarrow. Red  on! Depends much. So?

I particularly like the name Williams C. William. He wrote the poem while he was waiting for a child to die. I should like to be a doctor poet, I think, if I happen to survive to adulthood. I never much imagined myself as a woman grown, anyway, and nowadays especially it seems a waste of imagination. But if I were a doctor poet, I would spend all day with people who could not run past me, and then I would go home and write whatever I liked about their insides.