Chanda's Wars

by Allan Stratton

  Their only fright comes when Mrs. Tafa drops by at bedtime. “Leo’s taking me to the hairdresser’s at the crack of dawn,” she says. “But he’ll have me back to see you off by lunchtime.”

  “Lunchtime!” Iris wails. “We may be gone by then!”

  Mrs. Tafa laughs. “Not if I know Obi Palme!”

  Obi Palme is the bus man who drives the open-air flatbed truck between Bonang and Mfualatown, the trading center by the entrance to Mfuala National Park. Officially, he’s supposed to leave Mfualatown at dawn, pass through Tiro by breakfast, and get here by noon, returning through Tiro by supper, and to the park by dusk. In real life, Mr. Palme shows up midmorning to swap stories and smoke cigarettes with the merchants setting up their stalls at the park gates. He hardly ever gets away till noon. And since he stops everywhere to let folks hop on and off the flatbed, we’re lucky if he drives through Bonang by midafternoon and gets to Tiro by midnight. There’s even times he’s rolled back to Mfualatown the following morning because of trouble with the engine—or because he’s run out of gas, on account of the fuel lines leak and the gauge doesn’t work. At least there’s never a problem with the fan belt; Mr. Palme keeps a bag of old pantyhose in his glove compartment for emergency repairs. He gets them from friends in the hotels who fish them out of tourists’ wastebaskets. “At least, that’s the story he tells his wife,” Mrs. Tafa winks.

  In a blink it’s morning. Departure day. As I rub my eyes, I feel a glow. Maybe my dream—Tiro, the loss of loved ones—came from the shock of finding Mama at the ruin. Going back to Tiro, seeing my relatives, I’ll have the chance to face down that horror: to bury the past in the present.

  Right after breakfast, Mr. Selalame bicycles by on his way to class. “All the best.” He gives me three cards: one from my students with their names in crayon on a piece of construction paper; the second from the teachers at my school; and the third from him and his wife. Next thing I know, he’s halfway down the street, waving goodbye. The trip suddenly feels real. My stomach flips.

  Neighbors drop over all morning. The kids are skittish as chickens before a storm. They chase each other around the outhouse, get me to give them rides in the wheelbarrow, and brag to Esther about the adventures they’re going to have. Then they hug her as if they’re never going to see her again, and fret about whether Mrs. Tafa will be back from downtown before we leave.

  As it turns out, the Tafas don’t return till early afternoon, but it doesn’t matter; the bus is still an idea, somewhere in the distance. As Mr. Tafa helps Mrs. Tafa out of his truck, Soly and Iris race to see who can get to them first. Mrs. Tafa drops to her knees so she won’t be knocked down. They crawl over her like ants on a mango pit.

  “Careful of Auntie Rose’s new hairdo!” I holler, as her kerchief comes undone.

  “You think I’d really go to the hairdresser’s on a day like today?” Mrs. Tafa hoots. “Where’s your sense, girl? I went shopping! Leo, get those wicker baskets over to Chanda’s.” She pats her forehead with the kerchief. “We can’t have you showing up in Tiro empty-handed, can we? What would your mama say?”

  Mrs. Tafa’s bought us each a new set of clothes. “By the end of the ride you’ll be plenty dusty,” she says. “Wet your dirty tops in the bathroom sink at the last rest stop, wipe yourselves clean, and change into these. First impressions are important.” Mrs. Tafa’s also bought gifts for my relatives. New socks for my uncles and Grampa, pot holders for my aunties and Granny, plus two tins of gingered pears, a jar of marmalade, and a box of chocolates.

  “This last little gift has seen better days, but it’s still in good working order,” Mrs. Tafa says. She hands me a small cardboard box. Inside is her old cell phone patched with sticky tape. “It’s topped up for an hour.”

  I’m overwhelmed. “I can’t accept this.”

  “Nonsense. The Mister’s got me a new one,” she says. “Besides, I won’t have you children getting homesick. If ever you feel like a one-legged dog at the races, home is only a call away. To tell the truth, getting your news’ll be good for me.”

  I hesitate, but then I look at Esther. I miss her already. Making sure she’s all right will help me rest easy.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Mrs. Tafa beams. “Esther here’s been kind enough to program my number. She’s also programmed the number of the general dealer in Tiro, so you can check for truck delays the day you return. Promise you won’t waste my time card calling him for groceries.”

  “I promise.”

  “And no excuses about being in a dead zone, you hear? There’s towers all through the north to keep those fancy safari camps hooked to civilization. And another thing—”

  “Enough, Auntie,” I laugh. “I’ll call.”

  “See that you do.” She picks a twig from Soly’s hair, then licks her thumb and wipes a smudge from Iris’s forehead. “Mind you behave.”

  The truck to Tiro rounds the corner. We run to the side of the street and flag it down. “Take care of these three, Obi,” Mrs. Tafa says to our driver. Mr. Palme grunts and helps us scramble up onto the flatbed.

  Mrs. Tafa’s face trembles. Her eyes embrace us. “Be good.”

  “Don’t worry, we will.” For a second, it’s like saying goodbye to Mama.

  The truck lurches forward. We blow kisses. Bonang disappears in a cloud of dust.

  Part Two

  9

  WHENEVER MRS. TAFA drives Mr. Tafa’s truck, she goes so fast you expect to be killed, thrown through the windshield or crushed in a pileup. The ride to Tiro with Mr. Palme is different. All I expect to die from is boredom.

  For the first hour, the flatbed is packed with other travelers, but they’ve mostly left by the time we pass the Kawkee turnoff. Some have hopped off with their fishing poles to try their luck in the river and wetlands above the dam. Others have headed into the village to visit relatives, or to see Dr. Chilume, the herbal doctor whose farms are a short way off.

  The farther we get from Bonang, the more the highway’s in need of repair. Soon the paving disappears and we’re driving on dirt. Gravel’s been laid down on either side of the villages dotting our route to protect against erosion, but most of it’s been washed away anyway, along with chunks of the road.

  An hour north of Kawkee, the highway narrows to a single lane. The truck slows to a crawl as we wait for mule carts and bicycles to move to the side. We stop entirely while our driver, Mr. Palme, argues with an oncoming tractor about who should back up. The tractor ends up perched on the edge of nothing. We pass, and it regains the road, as the dirt shoulder crumbles.

  After about an hour, the highway widens back to two lanes. Rainy season is over, and already the smaller streams that run into the ditches have started to disappear. The sedges and reeds beside their banks are turning yellow in the hardening mud. We jolt through miles and miles of scrub brush. Trees close to the road have been chopped for kindling. In the distance, though, we can see scattered mopane, acacia, and baobab trees.

  Soly and Iris love the baobabs. They don’t get to see many in town. I let them peer through Mr. Lesole’s binoculars at the squat, bulbous trunks, some over sixty feet around and a thousand years old, their topknot of branches looking like a tangle of roots. They giggle as I tell them stories about how the baobab got its shape: “Once, the baobab was the most beautiful tree in the forest. But it wouldn’t stop bragging. So God said, ‘I’ll teach you not to boast.’ He ripped it up and stuck it back into the ground headfirst, with its ugly roots up in the air for all the other trees to laugh at.” Or my favorite: “God gave every animal a seed to plant. He gave the baobab seed to a hyena, but the hyena was so stupid he planted it upside down, and it grew that way.”

  “The baobab tree got its revenge, though, didn’t it?” Soly says. “When it gets big and old, it goes hollow, and people can hide inside from the hyena.”

  “From lions, too,” Iris adds, not to be outdone. “From everything.”

  “That’s right
,” I smile and stroke the top of their heads.

  The sun starts to set as we reach the rest stop at Rombala, the halfway point in our journey. There are a couple of picnic tables next to the gas pumps. I packed some maize bread and dried chicken, but after bouncing around all day in the back of the pickup, none of us is hungry. We settle our stomachs with water from the roadside pump.

  Rombala is a trading post with an army base nearby. It’s got its own paper, The Rombala Gazette, that publishes once a week. A few crumpled sheets from last week’s edition have blown against a leg of our table. Before I toss them in the garbage, I check to see if there’s anything interesting to read.

  There’s a front-page story about the town’s new chief. She’s the niece of the past chief, and the first woman ever chosen for the post.

  There’s also news about a hollowed-out pumpkin found smashed near the home of a local spirit doctor. Nearby, the neighbors discovered a necklace of beads carved from the stalk. The spirit doctor says a rival used the pumpkin to fly over his property to spy; the flying pumpkin fell to earth owing to a spell he cast. His rival has a broken leg. The rival says he broke it tumbling off a ladder, not from crashing in a pumpkin, but the timing is considered suspicious. Mrs. Gulubane should move to Rombala, I think. The deeper we go into north country, the more folks believe in magic.

  Turning the page, I see the headline “National pact with Ngala.” There’s a photograph of General Mandiki. He’s standing on a pile of headless bodies, brandishing an AK-47, a necklace of human jawbones over his medals. Child soldiers with machetes pose at his side. Mandiki looks like a crocodile. Cold, dead eyes. Leathery skin. Finger stubs with thick, fungal nails. An extended jaw with a wall of crooked teeth. The rumor is, when he was president of Ngala, he ripped those teeth from the mouths of his enemies and had them implanted in his own.

  According to the article under the picture, the Ngala army has marched into its national park. A sweep uncovered Mandiki’s main camp, but he and the rebels had already scattered. The article says they’re probably moving in small raiding parties of about twenty. Ngala has no idea where any of them may be heading. Our government’s pledged that any of Mandiki’s men who slip across our border will be shot on sight.

  The rest of the paper is announcements: a buy-and-sell column, a calendar of upcoming events, and a posting of births, marriages, and deaths. The dead are almost all in their twenties and thirties. According to the gazette, they all passed of pneumonia, cancer, and TB. There’s no mention of AIDS.

  It’s too dark to read anymore. I throw the paper in the trash and get Soly and Iris back on the truck, as Mr. Palme loads new passengers. There’s a couple of peddlers, a barefoot man with a toothbrush sticking out of the pocket of a filthy nylon jacket, a middle-aged couple with two sacks of sweet potatoes, and a granny with three small grandchildren, two chickens, and a goat.

  The men sit at the end of the flatbed and smoke. The granny sits with her grandkids and livestock, staring ahead, eyes vacant. When the baby cries, she gives it her thumb to suck. The couple sit near the cab with Iris and Soly and me.

  Iris and Soly are worn out. They hug the potato sacks and fall asleep. I try to sleep too, resting my head on my pillow of clothes. But lying flat makes the truck’s rattling worse. I sit up, propping myself against the back of the cab. Somehow I drift off. When I come to, the couple with the sacks are gone, and Soly and Iris are wide awake. I keep my eyes closed, curious about what they talk about when they think I’m not listening.

  “Granny Thela has long yellow teeth,” Iris declares. “They’re so long she uses them to scratch her chin. Grampa Thela is worse. He has porridge brains. When he tips his head over, the porridge spills out of his ears, and that’s what they eat for breakfast.”

  “Ewww.”

  “Then there’s Auntie Lizbet and her funny shoe. Her left foot is really a hoof.”

  “I remember the hoof,” Soly says solemnly.

  “And remember her tail, swishing under her dress? And the sharp little horns under her bonnet? Auntie Lizbet’s a witch. If you’re not careful, she’ll come in the middle of the night and eat you.”

  “She will not.”

  “Will too. And then she’ll throw up.”

  I open my eyes. “What are you two talking about?”

  “Nothing,” Iris says. “Just things.”

  “Is Auntie Lizbet a witch?” Soly asks.

  “No,” I say with a sharp look at Iris. “But little girls who tell lies grow lizard scales, and nobody wants to go near them.”

  “Ha ha ha,” Iris yawns, and crosses her eyes at me.

  We rumble along the road in silence. Soly snuggles into my side. “How much longer?”

  “Not much.”

  We pull into Shawshe, the last rest stop before Tiro. I get us cleaned up and changed in the garage washroom, while Mr. Palme fills a soft tire. He honks his horn for us to leave. Another hour, we’ll be in Tiro.

  There’s a nip in the night air. I’m covered in goose-bumps. I hold Soly and Iris close and rub their arms to keep them warm.

  “Remember,” I tell them, “we’re going to be guests. So be polite. Make Mama proud. Give Granny and Grampa big hugs. And whatever you do, don’t stare at Auntie Lizbet’s club foot.”

  10

  THERE’S A DIM glow in the sky to the right. The firepits of Tiro. We turn off the highway. A few hundred yards of potholes, a bend in the road, and we come to a place where the brush and grasses have been cleared back. Just ahead, I see the bare lightbulb shining over the front door of the general dealer’s.

  Mr. Kamwendo’s store is exactly like it was when I came for Mama six months ago. The stuccoed walls need patching, the whitewash is faded to near gray, and there’s weeds growing in the broken roof tiles. The only difference is, the neon Chibuku sign in the window is dead.

  We pull up at the gas tank to the left. I look across the lot at the cluster of people huddled on Coca-Cola crates around Mr. Kamwendo’s firepit. Four of them get up to greet us. “That’s our Granny Thela, with the black shawl,” I tell the kids. “And that’s our older sister, Lily, carrying our baby cousin Abednego in a sling. The man in the toque running ahead of them is Mr. Kamwendo, the general dealer.”

  “And who’s he?” asks Iris, pointing at the stranger slouching along at Mr. Kamwendo’s heels.

  “No idea,” I say. From what I can tell, he’s about my age. His face is set in a frown, but he’s still pretty handsome. Tall, lean, with a strong jaw and forehead. I wish it was daylight, so I could see more.

  Mr. Kamwendo’s out of breath by the time he reaches us. His whiskers are whiter than I remember. “Chanda,” he exclaims, “it’s good to see you again!” As he helps me off the truck, he whispers in my ear: “You coming means a lot to your granny. She’s been talking ’bout nothing else.” Then in a big voice: “And you must be Iris and Soly. I’m Sam Kamwendo.”

  He lifts them down. Soly presses behind me, but Iris plays tough. She puffs out her chest like she’s queen of the town. All the same, she takes my hand.

  “That your stuff?” Mr. Kamwendo says, pointing at our bundles.

  “Mm-hmm,” I nod.

  Mr. Kamwendo turns to our stranger. “Look lively, Nelson.”

  Nelson plants a hand on the truck’s floor and springs onto the flatbed. He tosses our things to Mr. Kamwendo without a glance in our direction.

  Granny’s stopped a few yards away. Lily has a protective arm around her.

  “Granny.” I step forward. She barely comes up to my shoulders. I bend down. She opens her arms and swallows me up in her shawl. It smells of smoke and earth.

  “Chanda.” She tries to say more but she can’t. I can feel her ribs under her sweater. I’m afraid to hold her tight for fear she’ll break. She hugs me for what feels like forever.

  I pull away gently. “Soly, Iris, I’d like you to meet your granny.” I motion for them to give her a hug too, but they just stare, openmouthed.

  “
It’s late. They’re tired,” Granny says. “In this shawl I must look like an old crow.” She smiles at them. “We can have a hug tomorrow. How would that be?”

  “Better,” says Iris, in a voice that says: If we have to get hugged at all.

  I look around for other relatives, but there aren’t any. Why not? Don’t they want us? I mean, I’m not expecting the world. My cousins are grown up, the male ones tending cattle with the herd boys, the females tending families of their own. But what about my aunties and uncles, my grampa, or Lily’s husband, Mopati?

  Lily reads my mind. “Everyone wanted to be here. But Auntie Lizbet’s tending Grampa’s joints, and Uncle Chisulo and Uncle Enoch are fixing the mule cart—the axle broke when we left to get you. Auntie Agnes and Auntie Ontibile, they’re minding the soup. Still, they’re all waiting to greet you at the compound—except my Mopati, he’s training our son at the shanty.” She nods toward Nelson. “Nelson’s a son of Granny’s neighbors. His people offered their cart, and him to drive it.”

  I turn to Nelson. He’s standing off to the side, our pillowcases and wicker baskets at his feet. “Thank you,” I say. He gives me a sideways look and shrugs.

  “Nelson’s a real charmer, aren’t you, Nelson?” Lily laughs.

  “If you say so.” He grabs our belongings in both hands and heads to the mule cart tethered at the far side of the general dealer’s. We follow. “Get in,” he says. Lily and I help Granny up and make a comfortable spot for her with the stuffed pillowcases. Nelson balances the load, then he unhitches his mules. He walks to the inside of the road, guiding them with his right hand, holding the reins to the side of the yoke.