by Will McGrath
More children run after me on the road, calling for sweets or money: “Give me lipompong! Give me chelete!” I turn suddenly and yell, “Ha kena lipompong!” and the kids skid to a stop on their heels, fall on their butts laughing.
Now I see our friend Ntate Khatsa, a driver for the outreach team, who once gave me some insight into how the Basotho view my relationship with Ellen. Any traditional Basotho marriage involves a woman who is younger than her husband—even if just by a few days—although the preferred age gap is closer to three or four years. When I told Khatsa that Ellen was a year older than me—we were in the midst of a multi-hour drive with the outreach team—he fell into a deep silence. When he spoke again, he seemed uncomfortable, as if I had just informed him that I was married to my sister.
“Ah,” Khatsa said, “ah no.” He was fumbling for the right phrasing, venturing out and then retreating from his word choice, trying his best to bridge this impossible chasm. After some time, he said in a measured tone: “For Basotho people, that would not be ideal.”
Even stranger is our childlessness. Producing offspring is an essential marker of adulthood in Lesotho, so to many people Ellen and I come across as some kind of benignly confused adult babies. When Ellen talks with grandmothers out in the villages, they don’t ask if, they ask how many. She once told an old nkhono that she planned to finish her research before having children, and the woman began laughing sweetly. “Oh, ngoaneso!” she said—“Oh, my sweetheart!”—and patted Ellen’s knee kindly, a gesture of support for a poor simpleton.
I wave to Khatsa from across the road, then pass our drunk neighbor, who staggers by and stops momentarily to steady himself against a piece of chain-link fence. He sees me and his eyes go wide. “NAY-BAH!” he yells. I have never seen the man sober, only in various shades of intoxication. I am unsure if his current bender extends from last night or has just begun anew, or whether distinctions like these can even be drawn. He works for the local government, a notary of some kind; birth certificates, passports, and subpoenas all must bear his stamp before they can become legal documents.
Here is Ntate Bokang, further down the road, the night watchman from the safe home. He is sitting on a tarp with his wife selling bananas, his daytime gig. Last week it was cabbage, before that apples, whatever is in surplus at the moment. I buy a banana and Bokang comps me a second one, cheerfully insistent that I take it, but then his face becomes serious.
“You have seen the very drunk one?”
“Yes, I greeted him just now.”
“Ache, that man! I have been telling ‘M’e Nthabeleng that the night guards must have a weapon. You must tell her. That man, the very drunk one, he was beaten so badly one night. Some men were waiting for him as he came home and they beat him! I shouted but I did not have a weapon to stop them.”
For some time now, Bokang has been attempting to convince Nthabeleng that the organization should furnish the night watchmen with firearms, and recently he has enlisted me to prevail upon Nthabeleng’s better judgment. It strikes me as doubtful that anyone is planning an armed incursion against a safe home filled with slumbering AIDS orphans, but I have hesitated so far in saying this directly to Bokang. I try to picture him, with his sweet smile and credulous eyes, gunning down these men who were drunkenly fighting in the road. I see myself returning to the grounds of the safe home late some sightless Mokhotlong night, rattling the gate as I unlock it, and Bokang emptying a revolver into me. I try to envision the other guard, the ancient Ntate Motsi, wielding a pistol—Motsi who can barely walk.
“I will suggest your idea to ‘M’e Nthabeleng. But I think she will say no.”
Bokang seems satisfied with this. Before I continue along, I tell him what I’m trying to purchase. He stares at me, a smile growing on his lips, and then he begins laughing.
“You are not a shepherd!” he calls out.
Bokang’s wife is laughing too. This is the best joke I have ever told.
I have almost reached the place where I will buy Ellen’s birthday present. My path through town has been rambling and unhurried.
I pass the permanently burned-down bar, just rubble inside, with men working every day to rebuild it and nothing ever progressing.
I pass a man with an enormous bull’s head in a wheelbarrow. The head looks shockingly large when removed from its natural context; it fills the entire wheelbarrow. Its round, glassy eyes gaze into the recent past.
I pass the coffin shop. The PA system outside this metal shanty is blasting an old hip-hop song at deafening volume. I stop and listen to the line It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes as the man out front kneels in the dust and hammers together the sides of a casket.
Ahead, I can see sparks and the men welding.
The welders have a table and workbench set up along the road, out in the open air. Their tools are strewn about, but their metalwork creations are exhibited in orderly rows on the ground: small shelving units, footstools, and bells—a broad spectrum of handmade shepherd’s bells, some as small as a deck of cards, intended for sheep and goats, and some as large as a loaf of bread, ponderous things that will hang from the necks of cattle.
Here at the welders’ station, I will find a cowbell, which I intend to purchase for my wife, to honor her three decades of planetary existence. This is something she will find amusing, I think.
I run my gaze over the panoply of bells. Each is beautiful in a rough and unfinished way. They are crafted from scraps of metal, molded into hexagonal tubes and fused along the seams. Their edges are jagged and the sides of the bells are a deep steel blue, daubed with sienna and white whorls of rust. There are tiny nubs and metallic bubbles frozen in the surface. The clapper is an inch-long segment of rebar.
I tell one of the welders that I want to purchase a bell. He turns off his brazing torch and pulls up his goggles.
“You are a shepherd?”
I start to explain and then trail off. I shake my head. I am not a shepherd.
The welder shrugs, then lays his torch on the workbench and comes around front. We look at the bells together and he encourages me to ring them and listen to the differences in sound. I give one a shake. It is tremendous—a round, massive tone leaps from the mouth of the bell. I reach for another to test it, but the welder stops me. He is not pleased with this one, doesn’t like its sound.
As I crouch to examine and ring various bells, a small crowd develops. Bystanders murmur, my behavior having moved into alien territory. No one can fathom why a non-shepherd would waste money on something so distinctly pastoral. But eventually there is acceptance, my actions filed away in the cabinet labeled Weirdo Makhooa Stuff.
Then people begin to advise me:
No, no, that one is too small.
Ah, but not that large. That is unnecessary.
That one is fine in size, but the tone, it could be nicer.
Finally I pick a mid-sized bell with—at least to my eyes—artful veining and subtle, strange discolorations. I give it a shake, then tell the welder that this is the one. People in the crowd nod. I have made a good pick. My wife will be well pleased, even if she can have no use for the bell, even if she is married to a non-shepherd dummy.
I think about trying to explain how this cowbell might sit proudly on our mantle someday, this otherworldly metal sculpture, but I am not sure how this will translate.
Once I read a short story called “Everyday Use,” by Alice Walker, a story about a mother and her two daughters. The mother has a quilt, a family heirloom that dates all the way back to the days of slavery. She wants to pass this quilt along to her younger daughter, the quiet and practical homebody who still lives on the family farm. This enrages the older daughter, the cosmopolite, now off living in the city. She should have the quilt. She understands its aesthetic value and will treat it with honor. She will frame it and hang it on the wall of her apartment—the quilt is art! The younger daughter will ruin this quilt through everyday use.
I probably d
on’t need to say that the older daughter is the villain in this story.
I pay the welder for his creation—the bell has set me back about thirteen dollars—and turn to the gathered crowd. They are awaiting closure, some final comment, since they are now invested in this purchase as well.
I do the only thing that feels right. I shake that bastard as hard as I can.
WHIPPING
On Thursday morning, I give a quiz to my Form A math students. Ninety-two erasers at the ends of ninety-two pencils trace ninety-two curlicues in the air. The classroom is humid and dense with teenagers, knobby, hormonal bodies suffusing the air with pheromones and desperate joy. The windows are fogged over—it is raining outside—but it is hot in the room and I am sweating through my clothes. I ask them if I can crack a window, allow the room to breathe.
“No, sir! The rain!”
The students hate the rain with unknowable fervor.
“Yes, but isn’t anyone hot?” I ask as I move toward the windows. The students, it seems to me—in their burgundy wool uniform sweaters, their button-down dress shirts, their burgundy-and-gray-striped neckties—might appreciate some ventilation.
“Sir! The rain!”
I sigh and mop sweat from my person.
“Yes,” I say, “the rain.”
They watch me anxiously until assured I will not let the odious rain in. Ninety-two heads bow once again to their quizzes while the wind pushes at the wooden plank door, held shut by a small boulder.
The odors in the tiny room rise and fall in complex curious interplay: the gamey hum of ninety-two thoroughly unwashed teenage bodies, the musty reek of damp wool, the earthen scent of rain, and the oniony tang of my own thoroughly unwashed and non-teenage body. Permeating all of this is the aroma of campfire, which is the smell of rondavel living, a smell that clings to all bodies, all books, all clothing with astounding tenacity. It is the ember-laden memory of one thousand meals cooked inside over an open fire. Even when I am alone in the staff room grading homework, I can immediately tell which students live in rondavels further out in the mountains—as opposed to living here in town, where most people have stoves or hot plates—simply by the smoky aura wafting from their notebooks.
I patrol the classroom. The cinderblock walls are painted a timid cornflower blue. A schedule hangs in the back corner of the room, listing when the girls sweep out the room with brooms of dried grass, when the boys cut weeds outside with dull, rusty hand scythes. Now I come across a boy who has finished his quiz early. He has moved on to other homework, filling out a study sheet for his agriculture exam, stumped on a question that reads: What are the four signs of a pig in heat? He has written: 1) the redding of the vulva, 2) the loss of appetite, 3) the mounting, and 4) ?????? He taps his pencil on the paper as he stares out at the rain.
As I walk around the room, I try to picture how these children will emerge in adulthood. That boy is surely some echo of my old childhood friend Joe, a parallel-reality Joe, a kind and loyal boy who became a soldier and went off to war. That girl there is a rewound version of Nthabeleng, a future world-beater; she has that charge to her, the air around her ionized. And that girl in the third row is my sister Mary, it is undeniable, she has the same bashful grin, the same surprised laugh—I would hear that laugh after school as we tore through the tunnel on our bikes, suddenly pitched out of sunlight and into shocking darkness, before we surfaced sun-dazed on the other side of the train tracks, heading toward the mild chore of piano lessons. (Two years younger and she was already the more graceful and diligent musician; I had not yet mastered “Send in the Clowns,” nor would I.) In different classrooms, I have come across incarnations of my wife, seen echoes of world leaders and celebrities, met variations on my parents—all of our personalities and idiosyncrasies shuffled and drawn from some common deck.
Now I come to Nkhopoleng—she of widest eye, of sweetest smile—who has also finished her quiz. She is chewing something as she sits staring through the chalkboard. But the students are not allowed to eat in class, so I ask Nkhopoleng what is in her mouth.
She stops mid-chew, slowly looks up at me.
She opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue, presenting an enormous half-masticated wad of notebook paper.
I try to formulate a response but nothing immediately comes to mind.
Suddenly I hear paper tearing behind me. I spin around and catch a second girl, now frozen, with a blank sheet of notebook paper halfway into her mouth.
“Why are you doing that?” I ask her.
Any student enrolled in the high school gets lunch every day—a gut-busting mound of thick, starchy papa, along with peas or beans or cabbage—so I know it is not hunger driving this strange behavior.
This second girl is on the verge of tears now. “Sir, I don’t know,” she says. Then she cautiously begins to chew.
I look back at Nkhopoleng, I look around the room. Everywhere students are silently chewing on mouthfuls of notebook paper, staring at me in wonder, ninety-two pairs of eyes trying to parse my unanswerable questions.
Later that afternoon, I come into the Math and Science staff room and find two boys lying on the ground. They look up as I enter, expectant and embarrassed. I pause, as I assume anyone might upon encountering such a sight: two high school boys lying on their stomachs in the faculty office, both in a state of high tension.
I am about to ask them what they are doing when my vallie, ‘M’e Poho, calls me over. She asks me to check her work on a problem she is writing for an exam, and although I am still aware that these two boys are lying face down in the middle of the room, I briefly become engrossed in the question. I have not yet realized it is an attempt to distract me from the situation I’ve walked into.
Poho and I are sketching out solutions on the back of a curriculum guide—stamped, like all school-issued material, with the slogan Fight AIDS, be faithful, and live!—when Ntate Hlompho enters the room.
He looks directly at me and stops. A sheepish look crosses his face.
“Oh,” he says, flatfooted.
Hlompho has tiny eyes that nuzzle slightly too close together, as if seeking each other’s warmth. He is mild-mannered and generally inoffensive—a milksop of a man, the Cheerios of people—a person whom the female teachers often gently mock behind his back. Hlompho looks down at the two boys on the floor and then back at me. He gives a quiet chuckle and shakes his head. “Ntate Moshoeshoe,” he says, “you will have to cover your eyes.”
Pauses.
“I am about to skin an elephant.”
It is at this moment that I register what he is holding in his hand: a three-foot length of thin rubber hose. At the same moment that my brain processes this information, Hlompho begins to whip the shit out of these two boys with the rubber hose. He whips them across their thighs and across their backsides. He lustily heaves his body into the whipping, his arms in full torsion, his torso snapping efficiently and then recoiling, everything about him elastic. It is an act of stunning brutality—and yet there is something obscenely graceful in the way his body moves, his body which is normally so artless. After the first few blows, as he alternates between the two boys, he begins yelling something in Sesotho.
The boys are rolling in pain, rocking from side to side, turning over onto their backs to beg restraint, eyes welled with tears. Then they roll again onto their stomachs because Hlompho will hear no petitions for clemency, looming ferociously over them, and he will whip them across their fronts if he has to.
Before I continue, a digression on the physics of whipping:
A whip, to reach its maximum potential for pain distribution, must find a delicate balance between Flexibility and Mass. Too much Flexibility and the whip becomes unmanageable, like a strand of wet spaghetti. Too little Flexibility—the stiffness of a garden hose, say—and there is no real action in the whip, no bite. You have moved from whipping into beating. There is also Mass to consider: a whip that is too light produces no impact, too heavy and it can’t generate
the velocity needed for that skin-lacerating crack. The three-foot length of pliable rubber tubing that Hlompho currently wields is, not surprisingly, the optimization of the Flexibility-Mass graph, because Hlompho is a high school math teacher.
The two boys extend their arms beseechingly, but each time the whip is already accelerating downward and they roll again onto their stomachs. I can see the emotions cycling across their faces throughout the ordeal: first wide-eyed entreaty, then clenched agony, and finally—in those micro moments just after the whip bites, their faces pressed against the linoleum—knuckle-whitened loathing.
This whipping seems to stretch out indefinitely, although it probably only lasts a few minutes. The rawness of the moment—the sheer intimacy of what I am witnessing—has unmoored me. At a certain point, I become aware that other teachers are staring at the proceedings too. Their attitudes range anywhere from clear discomfort to yawning complacency.
Eventually, I leave the room and walk home. I walk in silence across the autumnal plateau, feeling violent and guilty.
Friday is here and I can tell the students are bored. I am bored too. We are bored at each other. We have been working on fractions for several decades and we are making no headway. And it is Friday. Perhaps I mentioned that.
“We are going to play a game today,” I explain to the ninety-two. They are packed into the narrow cinderblock room, sitting two and three to a bench. “I will write a fraction on the board. You will race to see who can put the fraction into its lowest terms. Do you understand?”
Yes, sir. They answer in chorus.
“I will call on whomever I see raising a hand first.”
Yes, sir.