by Will McGrath
Inside, Retselisitsoe has just woken from a nap. He is disoriented and, perhaps understandably, begins screaming when he sees us. Ma Mohlomi slings him onto her back and wraps him in a blanket, assuring him that we are not on a repo mission for the safe home. Soon, in the comfort of Ma Mohlomi’s swaddling, Retselisitsoe begins laughing and making faces at us. We swoon. Something about his enormous inverted pyramid of a head, something about his brute and oblivious pinball trajectory through the other children as he chased a rolling ball, something about his skeleton-to-calzone transformation, like a perverse before-and-after photo—it all inspires the crushing desire to wrap him in your arms and squeeze him into dough.
Once, when he was back at the safe home, I held him as I pulled a booger from his nose. It came out like a great green garden slug, occupying his whole nasal passage. Retselisitsoe’s eyes went wide with the attendant release of pressure. He gaped rapturously at me, and for the first time I understood that parental and godlike desire to protect and soothe and banish pain.
We hand over the antiretroviral meds and Ma Mohlomi offers us a seat, a cylindrical chunk of log. Their rondavel is a squat circular hut, the piled-stone walls insulated with a plaster of mud and dung, the same cohesive mixture that makes up the flooring. A shard of mirror hangs on the wall next to a picture of Jesus, which is wrapped in protective plastic and which could be titled White Jesus Returns from the Salon, His Lustrous Mane in Rolling Gentle Curls. Chickens scuttle and dart between suitcases and nested washbasins tucked beneath the ancient single bed.
Now that we have transferred the meds, it is time to sample joala. Ma Mohlomi—with her imperious eyes and mouth perpetually on the horizon of an outright smile—skips over to the giant barrel of joala stewing in the corner. Retselisitsoe indulges us as we pull him onto our laps. His chunky body has regained that deep country scent, an intoxicating perfume of soil, rain, hay, sweat, minerals, and cookfire smoke. I nuzzle my face into the tight, tiny coils of his hair; he smells like a rutabaga freshly plucked from the earth.
We show Ma Mohlomi the bucket we have brought with us: a small cornflower-blue pail that a child might take to the beach, able to hold a half gallon of seawater or a half gallon of Basotho moonshine. Joala is always BYO container.
“Ke bo kae?” we ask, holding up the pail.
Ma Mohlomi eyeballs the bucket for a moment. “Two,” she says.
As in two maloti. As in 0.20 USD. As in four nickels.
Ellen and I quickly huddle, agreeing that two maloti is ludicrous. Instead, we offer to pay twenty maloti, claiming we have no change and feeling okay with a self-imposed 900 percent markup. Ma Mohlomi smiles and Pa Mohlomi takes the bucket from us, dips it into the murky vat, fills it to the brim, and puts the lid back on. Then he scoops up an extra cup’s worth for us to taste.
We sip the joala carefully and smile with delight. “It is excellent,” we say.
It is not excellent.
I have come to realize that the batch Malereko cooked up—the sweet, winy raisin brew—was the exception, perhaps wasn’t even joala at all. Real village joala is uniformly terrible. Take, for instance, this batch: it is a sour, porridge-like aberration. It has the tang of turned dairy, a cream-of-leek viscosity, and the scent of old carpet. Small mysterious chunks bob in and out of sight. Scraps of maize husk float by on their way to hell. This joala is warm—not room temperature, but actually warm—something that hints at the exothermic reactions taking place down in its brackish depths. The aftertaste is distinctly that of cured meats—perhaps a fine Genoa salami—salty and fatty and clinging to the tongue.
We drink it down and sigh contentedly. We have never tasted anything so sublime.
Now—too soon, too soon—it is time to go. We collect our joala pail and chat a few extra minutes in our hybrid Engli-Sotho. We take turns hugging Retselisitsoe and smothering him with kisses. We head out the door, past the crowd of curious milling neighbors, past the tree branch with the scrap of white cloth, past the gorge and the scrabbling mountain goats, and then head home. And only once, on the road back, does the joala bucket nearly explode, the plastic lid bulging, suddenly domelike—pulsing and expanding from the unknowable reactions taking place inside.
Now we have reached the end of this story about joala.
I suppose I hoped we wouldn’t get here—hoped maybe we’d get sidetracked or wander down the trails of some other story. I thought maybe I could talk around the point for long enough, or tell this story like it really was just about joala, even though it really wasn’t.
Some time has passed since our visit. Over a long holiday weekend—we will learn these details later—Retselisitsoe begins having diarrhea. He is sick, but not terribly so. Ma and Pa Mohlomi decide that they will take him into the rural clinic as soon as it reopens after the holiday.
Ma Mohlomi sets out on foot early Monday morning, trekking several hours through the mountains with Retselisitsoe swaddled to her back. When she arrives, she unwraps the blanket and passes Retselisitsoe gently to the nurses. Surely the nurses can see that he is already dead. Ma Mohlomi must understand this as well.
Only a few days have passed since he became sick. He never even seemed very ill, she tells us later—he is just suddenly gone, his quiet little body asleep.
Ma and Pa Mohlomi send word to the extended family of Retselisitsoe’s dead father, the relatives who—according to Basotho kinship rules—have rights to the child’s body, this child they haven’t attempted to care for or know in any way.
Retselisitsoe’s body lies wrapped in Ma and Pa Mohlomi’s rondavel. A day passes before members of the dead father’s family arrive to reclaim him. They take him and bury him without a funeral in another village.
Pa Mohlomi travels by donkey to see the child buried, then returns, upset that they haven’t marked the grave or even used a coffin.
“Just a wooden box,” he says. “If they didn’t want to bury him, we would bury him.”
This is how the other family sends Retselisitsoe into the earth.
It has been a month now since Retselisitsoe’s death. Ellen continues to visit Ma and Pa Mohlomi, even though the NGO’s business with them has technically concluded. Ellen tells them stories about Retselisitsoe’s time at the safe home, about how much everyone loved him. When she heads out their way on her motorcycle, Ma and Pa Mohlomi grow happy; they can hear her coming through the gorge, the motorcycle announcing her presence with its onomatopoetic Sesotho name: se-tu-tu-tu.
Today Ellen has gone to their village to help with the harvest—autumn has arrived and the world has turned hay-colored, everything saturated in yellows and browns. She and the Mohlomis spend the day hacking through maize stalks with handheld sickles. Later Ma Mohlomi will gather the cobs and de-kernel them, run the piles of golden pellets through a hand-cranked mill to make maize meal.
Ellen has brought a small lunch for them, and at midday they sit and share food in the field. As she talks, Ma Mohlomi is fiddling with the glow-in-the-dark rosary she wears around her neck. She has a little ritual now, she says, that makes it easier to start her day. When she wakes up, before first light has crept into the room, she begins to mimic Retselisitsoe’s tiny voice, calling out for his sister to set the kettle boiling—It is late, It is late, Go out!—just like he used to do each morning. Even in death he commands them, even in death he bends them to his indomitable toddler will.
But Pa is still angry, his milky eyes clouded, upset at the other side of the family. “No one was caring for them there,” he says. “This is why we took in Retselisitsoe and his siblings. That other family didn’t come to visit, they didn’t know what was happening, they never helped us. Even when Retselisitsoe was at the safe home, they didn’t care.”
A silence settles over the group. Over the years, Ma and Pa have watched both of their own children die, and now one of their grandchildren.
“God is sometimes doing it like that,” Pa says after a moment. “We have one ax to cut all the leaves—but sometim
es it can cut through just the small ones and leave the strong ones behind.”
Before she gets back on her motorcycle, Ellen gives them some pictures she has printed out, photos that hang now on the earthen walls of the Mohlomi rondavel: Retselisitsoe playing in the nursery, and running around the safe home grounds, and eating dinner with the other children, his face smeared with puréed vegetables. To me the pictures all look the same. Whether Retselisitsoe is laughing or crying, candid or posed, I can’t help but see the sadness in his gaze, the mournful foreknowledge of his death.
Here’s a memory I have of him.
Retselisitsoe—his name means We give condolences—is throwing a tantrum, screaming hysterically about something, probably nothing at all. He is wearing a pink and purple shirt that someone has donated, the words Little Princess stamped in rhinestones across the front. I take him in my arms and leave the nursery. We walk the hallways until he is calm.
We walk into Nthabeleng’s empty office. I stand up on a chair, still holding him, so we can look out the high windows.
Suddenly Retselisitsoe is entranced, staring out at the land around him, captivated by the pickup trucks on the road, the meandering cattle, the children playing down by the river, the innumerable darting birds. He looks back at me, eyes wide: Are you seeing this? He stares up at the sky, pupils dilating. Then he looks back into the room, notices the ceiling just inches from his head, and reaches a cautious hand up to touch it. His gaze keeps shifting from the dimensionless blue span of the sky to the firm yellow plaster of the ceiling.
He looks at me in wonderment, trying to parse these two concepts, how funny it is, how strange, that there is ceiling above us, just over our heads, where there should be sky.
III.
AUTUMN
GROWING UP
During morning assembly, I hid in a pocket of shade under the eaves of a classroom building. The students were gathered in ranks facing the assembly leaders. I stood behind them, one thousand students in maroon and white, one thousand shaved heads, boys and girls alike, as the school required. They sung a ghostly fragile song, teenage voices rising in morning stillness, male and female tones, weight and counterweight. On certain beats they stomped their feet and puffs of dust rose around their ankles.
After class, I graded homework and watched some boys through the window as they did school chores. They were bent over, cutting weeds with dull hand sickles, pulling the grass up tall and sawing through. It reminded me of a poem from the Harlem Renaissance that I had taught as a student teacher: “Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones / Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones / In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done, / And start their silent swinging, one by one.” I had asked the class what the poem was about. One kid said: Racism? Another said: Slavery? “Look at the language,” I told them. “What mood is Toomer trying to foster here?” Isaiah spoke up then, a thin, sweet boy, and said, “It’s about violence coming for you.” Before the end of the year he dropped out of school, went to jail on a gun charge a month later. I don’t think he was eighteen.
Sometimes I looked out at the students in my classroom and wondered what it meant to grow up in Lesotho. I knew that—statistically speaking—more than a quarter of my students had lost one or both of their parents. But the numbers don’t always tell the story.
Outside the boys slashed at weeds. Pull taut, slit. I heard a shriek and ran to the window.
By the harvested plots of moroho, some girls were playing a riotous game, screaming happily as they tried to build a tower of small flat stones, racing to balance one atop the other before another girl could topple this precarious construction. They ran wild, drunk on joy, kicking up dirt and falling over themselves in laughter.
ON THE OCCASION OF BUYING SOMETHING FOR WHICH I HAVE NO NEED
Sunlight filters through the burlap shade and into our rondavel, which sits out back on the safe home property. It is early still—maybe six o’clock—but most of Mokhotlong has already kicked back its covers, up at dawn, asleep at dark, attending to the rhythms of a preelectrified world. I have been pulled from my dreams by a clamor of bells. Shepherds hike past our rondavel daily, driving sheep into the mountains, the herd, hundreds deep, marching by like a parade of steel drummers: tiny clappers peal joyously against hand-welded metal bells that hang from woolly necks. The sobbing of the bells, Poe called it, but I don’t think he had it quite right.
The din of bleating and tintinnabulation swells and then subsides. Later today, as I walk through town, I will see the mountainside undulating strangely, as if I am looking through a shimmering wall of heat. Then I will realize that the uncanny shifting of the mountain’s surface is the movement of this same flock, grazing high above, a ripple in the fabric of the earth.
But for now I am up and out of bed. I have a plan. Today is Ellen’s thirtieth birthday.
As I walk into town, a man tries to sell me a pig, or a future pig, as he has no animal with him at the moment.
“Yes, this one, kannete, it is so nice. I know you will like it.”
I tell the man I am not currently in the market for a future pig. He looks disappointed, but I do not buy livestock sight unseen. I continue up the hill, then stop and call back to the man. I tell him there is something I’m trying to buy today, but I am not exactly sure where to get it. I explain my plan. Would he know where I can find one?
The man looks puzzled. “You are a shepherd?”
“No, I am trying to purchase it for someone.”
“This person is a shepherd?”
“No, I am just trying to purchase it.”
The man stares at me for a moment, then points me toward an area of town, past the joala district where they cook maize beer in massive barrels, over toward the vegetable warehouse where they usually don’t have vegetables.
“It is difficult to explain,” I tell him somewhat apologetically.
The man stands and watches me go.
Up ahead I see a small knot of children playing in a muddy cow pasture—six-year-olds who have not known the cleansing touch of water in some time. They clamber about in blankets and gumboots, their woolen shepherds’ hats flopping around like rooster combs. From afar, their general appearance is that of a whirling localized dust storm. I’ve been observing their manic exploits as I come up the path, rockthrowing games and intense miniature soccer matches played with a bundle of taped-together plastic bags. One boy is chasing a rolling hubcap, goading it with a stick, and others push elaborate handmade toy cars, constructed from old hangers, rolling the vehicles over rough terrain on rusted Coke-can wheels.
Just before I reach this cluster of tiny hooligans, I see them retrieve a plastic horn from a runoff ditch. The horn is a souvenir from some forgotten soccer contest, a noisemaker used by fans to fill arenas with racket: a vuvuzela, an elongated yellow plastic tube which widens into a gentle bell-shaped mouth. On the weekends, men bring these horns to the local bars where they watch soccer, the vuvuzela being of totemic significance, an essential accoutrement on par with the giant foam fingers (We’re #1!) brandished at American sporting events or the opera glasses and top hats wielded by rowdy patrons at La Scala. When the soccer matches are finished, the inebriated supporters of the winning side spill into mountain alleyways, trumpeting their sonorous joy into the Mokhotlong evening, prehistoric animal cries that echo off surrounding peaks as dusk deepens.
This is what the children have dredged from the muck at the precise moment I pass alongside them: a vuvuzela. I can see them pondering the horn’s potential—can see the cartoonish cranking of their mental gears—just as they notice me. Their immediate and inchoate collective instinct is to run over to me, cheering and yelling Nka! Nka!—Take it! Take it!
I stand before them, eyeing it with apprehension, then glance back at the midden heap where the vuvuzela has been entombed for an unspecified period of geological time. The moment is pregnant with meaning, the children in a circle around me, waiting.
Wordlessly I take the horn and they trill with glee, shaking one another by the shoulders. I cannot understand how we have come to this point so quickly. I place the soiled instrument to my lips, an act that feels unspeakably intimate, trying to make as little physical contact as possible. I take a cautious breath, then blow. A weak moan emerges from the horn: a bleat, a flatus.
The children begin to laugh at me. The ringleader of these six-year-olds—the one who has thrust the weight of this responsibility upon me—takes the horn from me with a chastising air, as one might snatch car keys from a drunk. He says something to the rest of his cackling gang, but all I can catch is the word ngoana, which means baby. Then the ringleader places the vuvuzela against his lips and blows. The sound that issues forth is clarion, resonant, virile. Nearby cows look up. The children continue laughing.
I consider my options. It would be easy enough to continue down the road, no time for mission drift. I have nothing to prove after all: I am an adult and these are small children.
But I am also a man.
I grab the vuvuzela back from the ringleader. I brace myself, stance wide, fill my lungs, and blow—my embouchure perfect, my lips in deep spiritual union with the horn, vibrating at the frequency of celestial transmission.
Just as Athena sprang fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, so too does a sonic thunderclap leap from my trumpet. One of the six-year-olds falls to the ground. The tone is biblical and apocalyptic, the kind of fulmination that razes walled cities or unmoors glaciers. I drop the horn to the ground and saunter down the road.
Behind me, there is rejoicing.
Farther along, I run into some teachers I know. Ntate Katleho, one of my Scrabble combatants, reminds me about his upcoming wedding. ‘M’e Poho is coming back from the jail tucked down by the river, where she leads a prayer session. Both teachers give me looks of polite confusion when I tell them what I am looking for.