The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

desk has wooden legs and cast-iron chicken’s feet, each clutching a huge glass marble, though three of the marbles are cracked and one is gone, replaced by a chink of coconut husk in the interest of a level writing surface. In our parents’ room, more furniture: a wooden bureau and an old phonograph cabinet with no workings inside. All brought by other brave Baptists before us, though it is hard to see quite how, unless one envisions a time when other means of travel were allowed, and more than forty-four pounds. We also have a dining table and a rough handmade cupboard, containing a jumble-sale assortment of glass and plastic dishes and cups, one too few of everything, so we sisters have to bargain knives for forks while we eat. The cabinet also contains an ancient cracked plate commemorating the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and a plastic cup bearing the nose and ears of a mouse. And in the midst of this rabble, serene as the Virgin Mother in her barnful of shepherds and scabby livestock, one amazing, beautiful thing: a large, oval white platter painted with delicate blue forget-me-nots, bone china, so fine that sunlight passes through it. Its origin is unfathomable. If we forgot ourselves we might worship it.
    Outdoors we have a long shady porch our mother in her Mississippi-born way calls a veranda. My sisters and I love to lounge there in the hammocks, and we longed for refuge there even on the day of our first downpour. But the storm lashed sideways, battering the walls and poor Methuselah. When his screaming got too pathetic to bear, our grim-faced mother brought in his cage and set it on the floor by the window, where Methuselah continued his loud, random commentary. In addition to papism, the Reverend probably suspected this noisy creature of latent femaleness.
    The deluge finally stopped just before sunset. The world looked stepped on and drenched, but my sisters ran out squealing like the first free pigs off the ark, eager to see what the flood had left us. A low cloud in the air turned out to be tiny flying antlike creatures by the millions. They hovered just above the ground, making a long, low hum that stretched to the end of the world. Their bodies made clicking sounds as we swatted them away from us. We hesitated at the edge of the yard, where the muddy clearing grades into a long grass slope, then charged on into the grass, until our way was barred by the thousand crossed branches of the forest’s edge: avocado, palms, tall wild sugar-cane thickets.This forest obscures our view of the river, and any other distance. The village’s single dirt road skirts our yard and runs past us into the village to the south; on the north it disappears into the woods.Though we watch MamaTataba vanish that way and return again, intact, with her water buckets full, our mother did not yet trust the path to swallow and deliver her children. So we turned and tromped back up the hill toward the pair of flowery round hibiscus bushes that flank the steps to our porch.
    What a landing party we were as we stalked about, identically dressed in saddle oxfords, long-tailed shirts, and pastel cotton pants, but all so different. Leah went first as always, Goddess of the Hunt, her weasel-colored pixie haircut springing with energy, her muscles working together like parts of a clock. Then came the rest of us: Ruth  May  with  pigtails  flying behind her, hurrying  mightily because she is youngest and believes the last shall be first. And then Rachel, our family’s own Queen of Sheba, blinking her white eyelashes, flicking her long whitish hair as if she were the palomino horse she once craved to own. Queen Rachel drifted along several paces behind, looking elsewhere. She was almost sixteen and above it all, yet still unwilling for us to find something good without her. Last of all came Adah the monster, Quasimodo, dragging her right side behind her left in her body’s permanent stepsong sing: left... behind, left...