The Tomorrow-Tamer Page 6

  We reached shanty town, where the mud and wattle huts crowded each other like fish in a net, where plantains were always frying on a thousand smoky charcoal burners, where the rhythm of life was forever that of the women’s lifted and lowered wooden pestles as the cassava was pounded into meal, where the crimson portulaca and the children swarmed over the hard soil and survived somehow, at what loss of individual blossom or brat one could only guess.

  “It’s a crime,” Brother Lemon said, “that people should have to live like this.”

  He made the mistake all kindly people make. He began to give money to children and beggars–sixpences, shillings–thinking it would help. He overpaid for everything he bought. He distributed largesse.

  “These people are poor, real poor, Mr. Kettridge,” he said seriously, “and the way I figure it–if I’m able through the Angel of Philadelphia Mission to ease their lives, then it’s my duty to do so.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But the shilling or two won’t last long, and then what? You’re not prepared to take them all on as permanent dependants, are you?”

  He gazed at me blankly. I guess he thought I was stony-hearted. He soon came to be surrounded by beggars wherever he went. They swamped him; their appalling voices followed him down any street. Fingerless hands reached out; half-limbs hurried at his approach. He couldn’t cope with it, of course. Who could? Finally, he began to turn away, as ultimately we all turn, frightened and repelled by the outrageous pain and need.

  Brother Lemon was no different from any stranger casting his tiny shillings into the wishful well of good intentions, and seeing them disappear without so much as a splash or tinkle. But unlike the rest of us, he at least could console himself.

  “Salvation is like the loaves and fishes,” he said. “There’s enough for all, for every person in this world. None needs to go empty away.”

  He could hardly wait to open his mission. He frequently visited my office, in order to discuss the building plans. He wanted me to hurry with them, so construction could begin the minute his land-site was allocated. I knew there was no hurry–he’d be lucky if he got the land within six months–but he was so keen that I hated to discourage him.

  He did not care for the hotel, where the bottles and glasses clinked merrily the night through, disturbing his sombre slumbers. I helped him find a house. It was a toy-size structure on the outskirts of the city. It had once (perhaps in another century) been whitewashed, but now it was ashen. Brother Lemon immediately had it painted azure. When I remonstrated with him–why spend money on a rented bungalow?–he gave me an odd glance.

  “I grew up on the farm,” he said. “We never did get around to painting that house.”

  He overpaid the workmen and was distressed when he discovered one of them had stolen a gallon of paint. The painters, quite simply, regarded Brother Lemon’s funds as inexhaustible. But he did not understand and it made him unhappy. This was the first of a myriad annoyances.

  A decomposing lizard was found in his plumbing. The wiring was faulty and his lights winked with persistent malice. The first cook he hired turned out to have both forged references and gonorrhoea.

  Most of his life, I imagine, Brother Lemon had been fighting petty battles in preparation for the great one. And now he found even this battle petty. As he recounted his innumerable domestic difficulties, I could almost see the silken banners turn to grey. He looked for dragons to slay, and found cockroaches in his store-cupboard. Jacob-like, he came to wrestle for the Angel’s blessing, and instead was bent double with cramps in his bowels from eating unwashed salad greens.

  I was never tempted to laugh. Brother Lemon’s faith was of a quality that defied ridicule. He would have preferred his trials to be on a grander scale, but he accepted them with humility. One thing he could not accept, however, was the attitude of his servants. Perhaps he had expected to find an African Barnabas, but he was disappointed. His cook was a decent enough chap, but he helped himself to tea and sugar.

  “I pay Kwaku half again as much as the going wage–you told me so yourself. And now he does this.”

  “So would you,” I said, “in his place.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Brother Lemon contradicted, so sharply that I never tried that approach again.

  “All these things are keeping me from my work,” he went on plaintively. “That’s the worst of it. I’ve been in the country three weeks tomorrow, and I haven’t begun services yet. What’s the home congregation going to think of me?”

  Then he knotted his big hands in sudden and private anguish.

  “No–” he said slowly. “I shouldn’t say that. It shouldn’t matter to me. The question is–what is the Almighty going to think?”

  “I expect He’s learned to be patient,” I ventured.

  But Brother Lemon hadn’t even heard. He wore the fixed expression of a man beholding a vision.

  “That’s it,” he said finally. “Now I see why I’ve been feeling so let down and miserable. It’s because I’ve been putting off the work of my mission. I had to look around–oh yes, see the sights, buy souvenirs. Even my worry about the servants, and the people who live so poor and all. I let these things distract me from my true work.”

  He stood up, there in his doll’s house, an alabaster giant.

  “My business,” he said, “is with the salvation of their immortal souls. That, and that alone. It’s the greatest kindness I can do these people.”

  After that day, he was busy as a nesting bird. I met him one morning in the Post Office, where he was collecting packages of Bibles. He shook my hand in that casually formal way of his.

  “I reckon to start services within a week,” he said. “I’ve rented an empty lot, temporarily, and I’m having a shelter put up.”

  “You certainly haven’t wasted any time recently.”

  “There isn’t any time to waste,” Brother Lemon’s bell voice tolled. “Later may be too late.”

  “You can’t carry all that lot very far,” I said. “Can I give you a lift?”

  “That’s very friendly of you, Mr. Kettridge, but I’m happy to say I’ve got my new car at last. Like to see it?”

  Outside, a dozen street urchins rushed up, and Brother Lemon allowed several of them to carry his parcels on their heads. We reached the appointed place, and the little boys, tattered and dusty as fallen leaves, lively as clickety-winged cockroaches, began to caper and jabber.

  “Mastah–I beg you–you go dash me!”

  A “dash” of a few pennies was certainly in order. But Brother Lemon gave them five shillings apiece. They fled before he could change his mind. I couldn’t help commenting wryly on the sum, but his eyes never wavered.

  “You have to get known somehow,” Brother Lemon said. “Lots of churches advertise nowadays.”

  He rode off, then, in his new two-toned orchid Buick.

  Brother Lemon must have been lonely. He knew no other Europeans, and one evening he dropped in, uninvited, to my house.

  “I’ve never explained our teaching to you, Mr. Kettridge,” he said, fixing me with his blue-polished eyes. “I don’t know, mind you, what your views on religion are, or how you look at salvation–”

  He was so pathetically eager to preach that I told him to go ahead. He plunged into his spiel like the proverbial hart into cooling streams. He spoke of the seven golden candlesticks, which were the seven churches of Asia, and the seven stars–the seven angels of the churches. The seven lamps of fire, the heavenly book sealed with seven seals, the seven-horned Lamb which stood as it had been slain.

  I had not read Revelation in years, but its weird splendour came back to me as I listened to him. Man, however, is many-eyed as the beasts around that jewelled throne. Brother Lemon did not regard the Apocalypse as poetry.

  “We have positive proof,” he cried, “that the Devil–he who bears the mark of the beast–shall be loosed out of his prison and shall go out to deceive the nations.”

  This event, he estim
ated, was less than half a century away. Hence the urgency of his mission, for the seven churches were to be reborn in strategic spots throughout the world, and their faithful would spearhead the final attack against the forces of evil. Every soul saved now would swell that angelic army; every soul unsaved would find the gates of heaven eternally barred. His face was tense and ecstatic. Around his head shone the terrible nimbus of his radiant hair.

  “Whosoever is not found written in the book of life will be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, and will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. But the believers will dwell in the new Jerusalem, where the walls are of jasper and topaz and amethyst, and the city is of pure gold.”

  I could not find one word to say. I was thinking of Danso. Danso as a little boy, in the evangel’s meeting place, listening to the same sermon while the old gods of his own people still trampled through the night forests of his mind. The shadow spirits of stone and tree, the hungry gods of lagoon and grove, the fetish hidden in its hut of straw, the dark soul-hunter Sasabonsam–to these were added the dragon, the serpent, the mark of the beast, the lake of fire and the anguish of the damned. What had Danso dreamed about, those years ago, when he slept?

  “I am not a particularly religious man,” I said abruptly.

  “Well, okay,” he said regretfully. “Only–I like you, Mr. Kettridge, and I’d like to see you saved.”

  Later that evening Danso arrived. I had tried to keep him from meeting Brother Lemon. I felt somehow I had to protect each from the other.

  Danso was dressed in his old khaki trousers and a black mammy-cloth shirt patterned with yellow diamonds. He was all harlequin tonight. He dervished into the room, swirled a bow in the direction of Brother Lemon, whose mouth had dropped open, then spun around and presented me with a pile of canvases.

  Danso knew it was not fashionable, but he painted people. A globe-hipped market mammy stooped while her friends loaded a brass tray full of tomatoes onto her head. A Hausa trader, encased in his long embroidered robe, looked haughtily on while boys floated stick boats down a gutter. A line of little girls in their yellow mission-school dresses walked lightfoot back from the well, with buckets on their heads.

  A hundred years from now, when the markets and shanties have been supplanted by hygienic skyscrapers, when the gutters no longer reek, when pidgin English has grown from a patois into a sedate language boasting grammar texts and patriotic poems, then Africans will look nostalgically at Danso’s pictures of the old teeming days, and will probably pay fabulous prices. At the moment, however, Danso could not afford to marry, and were it not for his kindly but conservative uncles, who groaned and complained and handed over a pound here, ten shillings there, he would not have been able to paint, either.

  I liked the pictures. I held one of them up for Brother Lemon to see.

  “Oh yes, a market scene,” he said vaguely. “Say, that reminds me, Mr. Kettridge. Would you like me to bring over my colour slides some evening? I’ve taken six rolls of film so far, and I haven’t had one failure.”

  Danso, slit-eyed and lethal, coiled himself up like a spitting cobra.

  “Colour slides, eh?” he hissed softly. “Very fine–who wants paintings if you can have the real thing? But one trouble–you can’t use them in your church. Every church needs pictures. Does it look like a church, with no pictures? Of course not. Just a cheap meeting place, that’s all. Real religious pictures. What do you say, Mr. Lemon?”

  I did not know whether he hoped to sell a painting, or whether the whole thing was one of his elaborate farces. I don’t believe he knew, either.

  Brother Lemon’s expression stiffened. “Are you a Christian, Mr. Danso?”

  Immediately, Danso’s demeanour altered. His muscular grace was transformed into the seeming self-effacement of a spiritual grace. Even the vivid viper markings of his mammy-cloth shirt appeared to fade into something quiet as mouse fur or monk’s robe.

  “Of course,” he said with dignity. “I am several times a Christian. I have been baptised into the Methodist, Baptist and Roman Catholic churches, and one or two others whose names I forget.”

  He laughed at Brother Lemon’s rigid face.

  “Easy, man–I didn’t mean it. I am only once a Christian–that’s better, eh? Even then, I may be the wrong kind. So many, and each says his is the only one. The Akan church was simpler.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The Akan church–African.” Danso snapped his fingers. “Didn’t you know we had a very fine religion here before ever a whiteman came?”

  “Idolatry, paganism,” Brother Lemon said. “I don’t call that a religion.”

  Danso had asked for it, admittedly, but now he was no longer able to hold around himself the cloak of usual mockery.

  “You are thinking of fetish,” he said curtly. “But that is not all. There is plenty more. Invisible, intangible–real proper gods. If we’d been left alone, our gods would have grown, as yours did, into One. It was happening already–we needed only a prophet. But now our prophet will never come. Sad, eh?”

  And he laughed. I could see he was furious at himself for having spoken. Danso was a chameleon who felt it was self-betrayal to show his own hues. He told me once he sympathized with the old African belief that it was dangerous to tell a stranger all your name, as it gave him power over you.

  Brother Lemon pumped the bellows of his preacher voice.

  “Paganism in any form is an abomination! I’m surprised at you, a Christian, defending it. In the words of Jeremiah–‘Pour out thy fury upon the heathen!’”

  “You pour it out, man,” Danso said with studied languor. “You got lots to spare.”

  He began leafing through the Bible that was Brother Lemon’s invariable companion, and suddenly he leapt to his feet.

  “Here you are!” he cried. “For a painting. The throne of heaven, with all the elders in white, and the many-eyed beasts saying ‘Holy, Holy’–what about it?”

  He was perfectly serious. One might logically assume that he had given up any thought of a religious picture, but not so. The apocalyptic vision had caught his imagination, and, he frowned in concentration, as though he were already planning the arrangement of figures and the colours he would use.

  Brother Lemon looked flustered. Then he snickered. I was unprepared, and the ugly little sound startled me.

  “You?” he said. “To paint the throne of heaven?”

  Danso snapped the book shut. His face was volcanic rock, hard and dark, seeming to bear the marks of the violence that formed it. Then he picked up his pictures and walked out of the house.

  “Well, I must say there was no need for him to go and fly off the handle like that,” Brother Lemon said indignantly. “What’s wrong with him, anyway?”

  He was not being facetious. He really didn’t know.

  “Mr. Lemon,” I asked at last, “don’t you ever–not even for an instant–have any doubts?”

  “What do you mean, doubts?” His eyes were genuinely puzzled.

  “Don’t you ever wonder if salvation is–well–yours to dole out?”

  “No,” he replied slowly. “I don’t have any doubts about my religion, Mr. Kettridge. Why, without my religion, I’d be nothing.”

  I wondered how many drab years he must have lived, years like unpainted houses, before he set out to find his golden candlesticks and jewelled throne in far places.

  By the time Danso and I got around to visiting the Angel of Philadelphia Mission, Brother Lemon had made considerable headway. The temporary meeting place was a large open framework of poles, roofed with sun-whitened palm boughs. Rough benches had been set up inside, and at the front was Brother Lemon’s pulpit, a mahogany box draped with delphinium-coloured velvet. A wide silken banner proclaimed “Ye Shall Be Saved”.

  At the back of the hall, a long table was being guarded by muscular white-robed converts armed with gilt staves. I fancied it must be some sort of communion set-up, but Danso, after a word with one of
the men, enlightened me. Those who remained for the entire service would receive free a glass of orange squash and a piece of kenkey.

  Danso and I stationed ourselves unobtrusively at the back, and watched the crowd pour in. Mainly women, they were. Market woman and fishwife, quail-plump and bawdy, sweet-oiled flesh gleaming brownly, gaudy as melons in trade cloth and headscarf. Young women with sleeping children strapped to their backs by the cover cloth. Old women whose unsmiling eyes had witnessed heaven knows how much death and who now were left with nothing to share their huts and hearts. Silent as sandcrabs, frightened and fascinated, women who sidled in, making themselves slight and unknown, as though apologizing for their presence on earth. Crones and destitutes, shrunken skins scarcely covering their insistent bones, dried dugs hanging loose and shrivelled.

  Seven boys, splendidly uniformed in white and scarlet, turbaned in gold, fidgeted and tittered their way into the hall, each one carrying his fife or drum. Danso began to laugh.

  “Did you wonder how he trained a band so quickly, Will? They’re all from other churches. I’ll bet that cost him a good few shillings. He said he wasn’t going to do things on the cheap.”

  I was glad Danso was amused. He had been sullen and tense all evening, and had changed his mind a dozen times about coming.

  The band began to whistle and boom. The women’s voices shrilled in hymn. Slowly, regally, his bright hair gleaming like every crown in Christendom, Brother Lemon entered his temple. Over his orlon suit he wore a garment that resembled an academic gown, except that his was a resplendent peacock-blue, embroidered with stars, seven in number. He was followed by seven mites or sprites, somebody’s offspring, each carrying a large brass candlestick complete with lighted taper. These were placed at intervals across the platform, and each attendant stood wide-eyed behind his charge, like small bedazzled genii.