Possessing the Secret of Joy Read Free

in the water, and held the kiss all the way to the bottom of the stream.

OLIVIA
    T HIS IS THE WAY Tashi expressed herself.
    The way she talked and evaded the issue, even as a child. Her mother, Catherine, whose tribal name was Nafa, used to send her to the village shop for matches, which were a penny each. Tashi would be given three pennies. She would lose at least one of them. The story she would tell about the lost penny might go like this: That a giant bird, noticing the shimmer of the coin in the glass of water in which she’d temporarily stored the pennies for safekeeping and for aesthetic enjoyment, had swooped down from the sky, flapped its wings so boldly that the glass of water fell from her hand, and when next she looked, having hidden her face from the creature for fear of its large beak and outspread wings, why—dash! No more penny!
    Her mother would scold, or she’d put her hands on her hips, shake her head sadly and make a self-pitying cry to the neighbors about this incorrigible little liar, her daughter.
    We were about the same age, Tashi and I, six or seven. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my first glimpse of her. She was weeping, and the tears made a track through the dust on her face. For the villagers, in gathering to meet us, the new missionaries, had raised a cloud of it, reddish and sticky in the humidity. Tashi was standing behind Catherine, her mother, a small, swaybacked woman with an obdurate expression on her dark, lined face, and at first there was only Tashi’s hand—a small dark hand and arm, like that of a monkey, reaching around her mother’s lower body and clutching at her long, hibiscus-colored skirts. Then, as we drew nearer, my father and mother and Adam and myself, more of her became visible as she peeked around her mother’s body to stare at us.
    We must have been quite a sight. We had been weeks on the march that brought us to Tashi’s village and were ourselves covered with the dust and bruises of the journey. I remember looking up at my father and thinking what a miracle it was that we’d somehow—through jungle, grassland, across rivers and whole countries of animals—arrived in the village of the Olinka that he’d spoken so much about.
    I saw that he too took note of Tashi. He was sensitive to children, and often stated as fact that there could be no happy community in which there was one unhappy child. Not one! he used to say, slapping his knee for emphasis. One crying child is the rotten apple in the barrel of the tribe! It would have been difficult to ignore Tashi. Because though many of the faces that greeted us seemed sad, she was the only person weeping. Yet she uttered not a sound. The whole of her little cropped head and reddened brown face bulged with the effort to control her emotions, and except for the tears, which were so plentiful they cascaded down her cheeks, she was successful. It was a remarkable performance.
    In the course of our daylong welcome Tashi and her mother disappeared. Even so, my father inquired after them. Why was the little girl crying? he asked, in his stiff, newly learned Olinka. The elders seemed not to understand him. They shifted their robes, looked genially at him and at us and at each other and replied, looking about now over the heads of those assembled, What little girl, Pastor? There is no little crying girl here.
    And Tashi and her mother did seem gone forever. We didn’t see them for a long time, after they’d spent several weeks on Catherine’s farm, a day’s walk from the village. They turned up at vespers one evening, both Tashi and her mother dressed in new pink gingham Mother Hubbards with high collars and large flowered pockets, their faces similarly set in the look of perplexed, instinctive wariness that characterized Catherine’s face whenever she encountered “the Pastor,” as they all called my father, or “Mama Pastor,” as they called my mother.
    We did not know that on the morning we arrived in the