by David Masiel
“I ain’t against the coup.”
“Even if you can’t tell what is better or worse?”
“Who can say about that? All depends which team you’re on,” said Snow, and with that, he figured he’d said enough. He shook Thorson’s hand. His bony little fingers gripped like clothespins.
TRIAL BY ORDEAL
Out at the car, Snow slid behind the wheel and just sat there a minute, Beth climbing in on the passenger side. “Now what?” she said.
“I gotta go see a guy.” He backed out, turning left up the gravel drive of Nimba Road and counted up four houses before he turned into the empty drive. “Why don’t you come on in?”
Snow glanced back at the sleeping trio. They looked almost innocent save for the tattoos and earrings, the white hair and twenty-inch biceps. The two got out and walked up the front steps toward the house, where a light shone dimly around the edges of a thick curtain. Snow knocked three times hard and stood back to wait. Beth looked toward a narrow gap in the curtain, Snow staring at her wide eyes before he realized someone was looking out at them through the front window, drape held aside covertly. “Who is this guy?” she asked.
“Miner.”
Her brown eyes shifted toward Snow, and he didn’t know what he saw there—fear or anger or some look in between. But he had to believe she sensed something here, maybe even recognized the man peering past the drapes. The door swung open and there he stood dressed in overalls, dirt-dusted, ready to go to work. And the thing was, Snow knew the man. Not by name but by face. He’d worked for Thorson a long time, he was sure of that. He’d been to Goodhouse Creek once with a group of Dan elders, ate kola and drank palm wine with him on the porch with Yasa. Three years back. Haroun. They hadn’t talked more than five minutes. Snow kept wondering what Haroun meant in Arabic, or whatever language it was borrowed from.
“Yay?” the man said, looking at the girl.
“Bethy, this here—” Snow paused, the gears grinding. “This here’s Haroun Abudjah. I believe he’s your father. You’re Haroun Abudjah, ain’t that right?”
The man nodded. “Abudjah, that is right. I am also running late for work.”
She had his face, top to bottom.
“This here is your daughter, Elisabeth Farrah,” Snow said.
“Yah, I heard you say. How have you been?”
Beth’s face underwent something akin to spontaneous polymerization. She looked down even as she spoke. Her words seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. “They told me you were dead.”
“Your mother’s family, yes. A man cannot worry over what is lost.”
She kept looking down, like she was staring at the man’s feet. Snow had never seen her do that. He wondered if she’d ever stop now. He wondered if she hadn’t been doing it some other way all this time.
“Would you like coffee? I have some prepared.”
“Sure,” said Snow. “Love a cup.”
Beth followed as if struck on the head.
Inside, the house was an exact replica of Thorson’s, except three ebony-wood masks were lined up along a coffee table shoved against a concrete wall. The gray walls were exposed cinder block, gray, without images of Swedish tundra and Norski fjords. Two narrow masks hung there on concrete nails, one Senegalese by the look of it, the other Hausa.
Abudjah poured two half cups of coffee and left them on the counter. Snow slugged his back, hoping it would counteract Thorson’s vodka. Beth held hers by the rim and sipped it off one side and stared at her father. The three stood there, mute. Snow kept thinking about something Beth had told him about traveling to London with her mother. They made only one trip there, by train, to stare silently at her grandmother and aunt over tea until her grandmother said to the girl, “Your father—your father must be very dark,” between bites of tea cake and sips of Earl Grey. Her mother’s family had known of her existence but not her race. Her mother had played her for shock value. A marker of the mother’s independence, a black stone in a game of Go. On the ferry crossing from Dover, with the salt air in their faces and the Channel sweeping Beth’s mind into the North Sea, her mother had turned and said, “Did you hear her, after all? ‘Your father must be very dark.’ Indeed! Now you see the people you spring from, my dear. Of course, there’s no point in dwelling on such matters.” She lit a cigarette. “They’re rather bitches.” Rather.
Snow had bad feelings rising in him, that somehow he’d done the same thing in reverse, that he had used her father against her. For his shock value. To knock a death ship off course. But somehow the familiarity of the man’s face—Snow stared too now—maybe it went beyond the resemblance to Elisabeth. For one thing he wasn’t dark at all; he looked half European. And the more Snow looked at him the more other faces came into his, a swirl of people, familiar and familial, and all at once Snow shot down the rest of the coffee and felt it scald his tonsils and burn down into his stomach. His mind tumbled. He shook his head unconsciously, and when next he looked at him he thought maybe Abudjah wasn’t familiar at all, just some stranger he knew because he saw Beth’s face in him, and her face was somehow stuck in with his own. The man came at him like that ink drawing Youth/Old Age where you blinked once and saw the craggy old woman, blinked again and saw the lithe beauty.
“You mind I ask where your mother’s from?”
Abudjah looked grateful for something to draw him away from Beth’s relentless stare. “She is from Freetown.”
“Freetown? That right. What year you born?”
“I was born in 1930. Why do you come asking questions of me?”
Snow waved his hand: never mind, sorry, never mind. Had his father been to West Africa in ’29? He looked at Elisabeth. “You want some time alone?”
“All right,” she said.
“I really must be going soon,” said Abudjah.
“It won’t take long,” she said.
Snow went outside and stood on the concrete step, listening to the halting murmur of their voices, thinking she was almost certainly questioning him, like why did you leave us? Why did you fuck my mother and leave us? He was glad he couldn’t make out the words, and wished to hell he’d never come here. He went back to the car and sat behind the wheel, watching the three sleeping in back, their heads tilted and their mouths open. Kairos lay like a snow-haired ghost with his head against the window. Bracelin slept with his arms crossed. Maciel fought a continual battle. His head bobbed around in a state of semi-sleep, reaching the end of its range only to bound back up and shift again in an endless unconscious attempt to find rest.
And rest lay in balance.
When Beth came back out, the old man was right behind her, turning to lock his door and striding off in his miner’s covies with his lunch bucket and his hard hat with the lamp attached. He moved toward the mine without once looking at her. She came to the car and pulled open the door, got in and started rolling a cigarette. “Some things are better left undone,” she said, staring mutely forward as she licked the paper and held the smoke lightly in her fingertips. “The worst of it is you, Harold. I have this feeling you did it for your own pervy reasons.”
Snow gripped the wheel. She flicked at a lighter over and over to try to light her smoke, but got only sparks, no flame. She held her head down, leaning forward, her body bouncing with the road under their tires, and Snow wished he could stop looking over at her. He drove with only one hand on the wheel, could tell she wanted out, to jump and flee the car. Sea-foam, she’d done nothing but carve sea-foam, just like him. Salt water parted in front of you and closed off behind.
“I thought you’d want to see your father,” he finally said.
She turned to him. “You really are off on your own planet.”
His nostrils flared and started in to burn. He looked forward, both hands on the wheel, and steered along a lumpy section of road. He kept seeing the face of Abudjah. He looked at her face and saw his father there too. Snow rubbed his own face, felt the friction of his clammy hand
burn his nose and cheeks. “Family’s important,” he heard himself saying. “I know ’cause I ain’t got one. I think it’s best to make peace with people while you can.”
“You haven’t any idea what he tried to do to me.”
Well, shit, when she put it that way Snow couldn’t help but imagine the most heinous things. Somewhere inside it titillated him too. He chided himself. What was missing in him? He wanted to know. He thought maybe he was incapable of feeling. He felt consumed by scar tissue sometimes, or like his nerve endings were all burned up and curled like the delicate trailing of ash at the end of a candlewick.
“You know what they do to girls around here when they’re of age, don’t you?”
So it was that. They’d cut her. She’d been cut and cleansed in a twisted-up way. Scoured out. Sewn up. Snow thought he might puke. He could see it, the scraping, the scars left behind there, and all so a woman would not want to fuck. The ultimate in use, a man’s use, saying your pleasure don’t matter. For all he loved this place, he hated this about it. He could think of Beth in no way now, no way but there, hurt and small and innocent, and for the first time since he’d known her, he saw her as a little girl.
She peered at him with her head cast down, looking up under her brows. “They woke me up and told me to come with them. We lived on Garrison Street. We walked right by that house in Freetown. My father was no bloody tribesman. He was a city boy.”
Snow wanted to feel it, feel himself in the legs of her girlhood, vibrating against the back bench seat of her father’s car. Surely it had meaning inside him. In his mind he tried to put himself there. He imagined what she would have seen. He wanted to feel it, feel something besides himself. She rode quietly in the back of that car, she was just a girl after all, stared ahead and saw the sign in the headlights: Mile 91, didn’t recognize the clan village, so far removed from their city lives, from her English mother and their house on Garrison Street. But the girl knew what it meant, being there. Her father and her uncle whispered at her in the darkness, to remain calm, saying it was best, that it was said, that it was more ancient than Allah.
And she said but Daddy, we aren’t even Mende.
They pulled into the village. Stepped past roundhouses. Stepped past roundhouses. To the only angular concrete construction in the small cluster. And there: the darkness of the enclosure, the lights from yellow lanterns in the living area, weak and pitched downward by shades and flickering in a way that caused everybody to bounce and quiver. The room had a raised wooden floor that shook when you walked on it, and a medical table bought used from the Connaught hospital in Freetown. Iron stirrups swung out from the table’s end and glowed in the soft light. Rusted so completely over, their surface had the lustrous look of fur.
She had known girls who ran from these rituals rather than be cut, to be scraped out and scarred forever, who fled into the mountains and were tracked and caught and returned and “cleansed” anyway. If she could get to her mother, she thought. If she could find her way back to the city. Beneath a yellow light, one man sat, a man in a physician’s surgical mask, off-white—they took her hand as if to shake it, then pulled her toward the table. No conscious decision, nothing realized but simply acted on: she ran. Shook their hands free and ran directly through the stunned faces of elders—
Their arms flailed, but she was beyond their reach and gone into the night. She ran and fell and ran, and hit a tree with her right shoulder, and slipped on something soft and fell to her bottom, sliding down a muddy embankment toward a river. She had kept moving during the first part of that night, when she could still see by the moon filtering down through the canopy, and hear the voices back behind her calling Elisabeth! Elisaaaaaabeth! When the moon glow finally faded, leaving only blackness, she backed herself into an ancient teak tree, cleared away spiderwebs and spiders, and staked her ground, huddled inside the massive arched roots. In the deep night, she could not adjust her eyes no matter how she blinked and tried to accommodate the complete lack of light. Unable to move, she cowered and cried in a hole, the iron-red ground all around her.
Now through the thumps and pits in the road toward Likepa, Snow couldn’t keep from looking over at her. In her round face he could feel how alone she was. He couldn’t see her now without seeing the little girl. Feeling the bench seat beneath her legs. As the sun rose over the Nimba Mountains east, the Land Cruiser rocked through the high country, the roads empty of car traffic, though it still took most of the next day to reach Likepa, requiring slow navigation and good luck on the log bridges.
In Likepa, the road through the village narrowed to a single track, and Snow stopped and climbed out before a woman selling greens and yams, cassava and cracked wheat and hot peppers, bought two bags of food and climbed back behind the wheel. He put the groceries on the front floorboard and waited for the driver coming up from Monrovia. His eyes darted to the rear-and sideview mirrors, his fingers tapping on the wheel. Beth feigned sleep with her head on the window. Snow rested his hands in the ten and two position.
“Wonder when the rains are coming,” he said. “People just get up-frigging-tight around here until the rain starts—eases everybody’s minds. Old days we used to serve cane juice at the house and the elders would come for twenty miles and sit on my porch and drink my booze and eat kola just to get through it.”
But maybe that wasn’t where he’d seen Abudjah. Maybe that wasn’t why his face seemed familiar. Beth leaned forward, put a cigarette in her mouth, and cupped her hands around it, flicking her lighter.
“You and your fucking cigarettes,” said Bracelin. “Put it out.”
Beth got out of the car and leaned against the door smoking, staring down at the ground. While they waited, a crowd gathered amid some roundhouses just off the main road through town, an open area that seemed like some kind of town square. A girl of maybe seventeen, pretty and dignified and tall, stood in colorful head wrap and cotton dress, tight to her hips. A raggedy old guy, two feet shorter than her, stood in front of a clay pot containing hot coals, shoving a machete down into the hot coals, working it in and out and mixing the coals with the blade. He wore a peacoat and shorts and went barefoot despite a stocking cap on his head.
Snow knew what it was: a trial by ordeal, the small man the “healer.” Beth knew what it was too. “Oh, what a crock of shit,” she said, from outside the open window. “These people need a bloody fucking lobotomy.”
The healer was there to divine truth. This particular healer had a five-day beard—gray, like silver frosting spread lightly and evenly over his face. He kept mixing the coals using the machete, not looking at the young woman. She stood some twenty feet away. Beth couldn’t take her eyes off her: she was tall, angular, slumping, turned half away from the healer, her eyes and mouth tight and worried. The healer stood up and moved to a bucket of fresh water and herbs—a kind of spiritual soup—and shoved the blade in, the hissing of steam rising up around his face. He caught the girl’s gaze and held it, his eyes someplace else. She held out her hand to him, and the healer pressed the machete to the back of the girl’s hand, held her tightly when she tried to pull away. The healer locked on her gaze, held her in place as much with his eyes as his grip.
Beth threw her smoke to the ground, crushed it out with the heel of her boot, and took off walking toward the circle. “I wouldn’t go there, Bethy!” Snow called, but her attention was fixed on the healer as he pulled the blade away, looked at the girl’s skin, looked at her eyes. The healer stood back, glared at her. Beth was making tracks toward them. Then Maciel was out of the car too, going after her. A godawful superstition, Snow thought, right up there with throwing witches into a river to see if they’d float, right up there with cutting little girls to cleanse their sex for some future man bound by virginal need. Never mind a woman might know how to fucking swim, never mind a woman might want her own pleasure in life. Never mind that the skin can’t withstand the coals and the herbs and the hot blade of the machete. Daddy gods pissed him off.<
br />
“I once heard the best healers didn’t just look for burned skin, but a flinching heart,” he said.
“It’s still some creepy-ass shit,” said Kairos.
“Brace, go get them, goddamnit.”
“Fuck her, you get ’em. What the hell I care she gets her hand chopped off.”
Beth was just making the edge of the crowd, turning her shoulder sideways to squeeze past only to find Maciel there behind her, his hand on her hand. “I said don’t touch me!” she said, shaking her hand free, but then the kid angled around in front of her, holding her back with every bit the intensity of the healer.
“Don’t get involved.”
“Bit tardy on that one.”
Snow came up just as she slipped the kid, his hands around her waist. Then Snow moved in front of her, stretching his arms to corral them back toward the car. “Sorry for the interruption, folks!” said Snow to the crowd, then eyed Beth.
The three stood on the outside of the circle then, as the old healer called out “Innocent!” and the crowd suppressed a little shout of joy, quickly falling into a secret murmur, after which the girl’s friends came to her, looked at her hand intently, and spirited her away for treatment. Beth’s shoulders relaxed. She shook them free and marched back toward the Land Cruiser, where she sat down abruptly on the ground and leaned back against the front tire. She held her head in her hands, elbows on her knees.
Snow saw a local man staring at Beth like she was some kind of an alien. “What that girl on trial for?” Snow asked.
“She accused adultery,” said the local. “She go with married man. What trouble with that one?” He pointed at Beth.
Beth muttered and threw stones across the open area, then turned to climb back into the Land Cruiser. “Men really should be killed.”