The Tomorrow-Tamer

by Margaret Laurence

  The grove was quiet. The only sounds were the clicking of palm boughs and the deep low voice of Owura the river. Others were there–Kofi never knew who–young men and old, his friends and his uncles, all now changed, distorted, grown ghostly and unknown in the grey moonlight.

  “Here is wine from our hands,” Okomfo Ofori said. “God of the river, come and accept this wine and drink.”

  The palm wine was poured into the river. It made a faint far-off splash, then the river’s voice continued unchanged, like muted drums. The priest lifted up a black earthen vessel, an ordinary pot fashioned from river clay, such as the women use for cooking, but not the same, for this one was consecrated. Into the pot he put fresh river water, and leaves he had gathered from the thicket of ghosts, and eggs, and the blood and intestines of a fowl whose neck he wrung, and white seeds, and a red bead and a cowrie shell. He stirred the contents, and he stared for a long time, for this was the vessel wherein the god could make himself known to his priest. And no one moved.

  Then–and the night was all clarity and all madness–the priest was possessed of his god, Owura the river. Kofi could never afterwards remember exactly what had happened. He remembered a priest writhing like a snake with its back broken, and the clothing trance-torn, and the god’s voice low and deep. Finally, dizzied with sleeplessness and fear, he seemed to see the faces and trees blurred into a single tree face, and his mind became as light and empty as an overturned water vessel, everything spilled out, drained, gone.

  Back at the hut, Kofi’s father told him the outcome. Libation would be poured to the ancestors and to the god of the river, as propitiation for the disturbance of the waters. Also, one young man had been selected to go to the bridge work. In order that the village could discover what the bridge-men would do to the sons of Owurasu, one young man had been chosen to go, as a man will be sent to test the footing around a swamp.

  Kofi was to be that young man.

  He was put to work clearing a space for the bridgemen’s dwellings. He knew his machete and so he worked well despite his apprehension, swinging the blade slowly, bending low from the waist and keeping his legs straight. The heat of the sun poured and filtered down the leaves and bushes, through the fronds and hairy trunks of the oil palms. The knotted grasses and the heavy clots of moss were warm and moist to the feet, and even the ferns, snapping easily under the blade, smelled of heat and damp. Kofi wore only his loincloth, but the sweat ran down his sides and thighs, making his skin glossy. He worked with his eyes half closed. The blade lifted and fell. Towards mid-day, when the river had not risen to drown him, he ventured to sing.

  “We are listening, we are listening.

  Vine, do not harm us, for we ask your pardon.

  We are listening, River, for the drums.

  Thorn, do not tear us, for we ask your pardon.

  River, give the word to Crocodile.

  The crocodile, he drums in the river.

  Send us good word, for we ask your pardon.”

  Before he left at nightfall, he took the gourd bottle he had brought with him and sprinkled the palm oil on the ground where his machete had cleared.

  “Take this oil,” he said to the earth, “and apply it to your sores.”

  Kofi returned home whole, day after day, and finally Nana Ayensu gave permission for other young men to go, as many as could be spared from the farming and fishing.

  Six bungalows, servants’ quarters, latrines and a long line of labourers’ huts began to take shape. The young men of Owurasu were paid for their work. The village had never seen so much cash money before. The white men rarely showed their faces in the village, and the villagers rarely ventured into the strangers’ camp, half a mile upriver. The two settlements were as separate as the river fish from the forest birds. They existed beside one another, but there was no communication between them. Even the village young men, working on the bungalows, had nothing to do with the Europeans, whose orders filtered down to them through Badu or the head carpenter. The bridgemen’s cooks came to the village market to buy fruit and eggs, but they paid good prices and although they were haughty they did not bother anyone. The carpenters and drivers came to Danquah’s in the evening, but there were not many of them and the villagers soon took them for granted. The village grew calm once more in the prevailing atmosphere of prosperity.

  In the Hail Mary Chop-Bar the young men of Owurasu began to swagger. Some of them now kept for themselves a portion of the money they earned. Danquah, bustling around his shop, pulled out a box of new shirts and showed them off. They were splendid; they shimmered and shone. Entranced, the young men stared. A bottle of beer, Danquah urged. Would the young men have another bottle of beer while they considered the new shirts? They drank, and pondered, and touched the glittering cloth.

  Kofi was looked up to now by the other young men. Some of them called him the chief of the young men. He did not admit it, but he did not deny, either. He stretched to his full height, yawned luxuriously, drank his beer in mighty gulps, laughed a little, felt strength flooding through his muscles, walked a trifle crookedly across the room to Danquah, who, smiling, was holding up a blue shirt imprinted with great golden trees. Kofi reached out and grabbed the shirt.

  When he left the Hail Mary that night, Kofi found Akua waiting for him in the shadows. He remembered another purchase he had made. He drew it out and handed it to her, a green bottle with a picture of flowers. Akua seized it.

  “For me? Scent?”

  He nodded. She unstopped it, sniffed, laughed, grasped his arm.

  “Oh, it is fine, a wonder. Kofi–when will you build the new hut?”

  “Soon,” he promised. “Soon.”

  It was all settled between their two families. He did not know why he hesitated. When the hut was built, and the gifts given and received, his life would move in the known way. He would plant his crops and his children. Some of his crops would be spoiled by worm or weather; some of his children would die. He would grow old, and the young men would respect him. That was the way close to him as his own veins. But now his head was spinning from the beer, and his mouth was bitter as lime rind. He took Akua by the hand and they walked down the empty path together, slowly, in the dark, not speaking.

  The next week the big machines came rolling and roaring into Owurasu. Lorries brought gangs of skilled labourers, more Europeans and more cooks. The tractor drivers laughed curses at the gaping villagers and pretended to run them down until they shrieked and fled in humiliation like girls or mice.

  Gong-gong beat in Owurasu that night, and the drums did not stop their rumble until dawn. The village was in an uproar. What would the machines do? Who were these men? So many and so alien. Low-born coast men, northern desert men with their tribal marks burned in long gashes onto their cheeks and foreheads, crazy shouting city men with no shame. What would become of the village? No one knew.

  Nana Ayensu visited the shrine where the carved and blackened state stools of dead chiefs were kept and where the ancestral spirits resided.

  “Grandsires, we greet you. Stand behind us with a good standing. Protect us from the evils we know and from the evils we do not know. We are addressing you, and you will understand.”

  Danquah sat at the counter of the Hail Mary with a hurricane lamp at his elbow. He was laboriously scrawling a letter to his cousin in the city, asking him to arrange for four cases of gin and ten of beer, together with fifty cartons of cigarettes, to be sent on the next mammy-lorry to Owurasu.

  Okomfo Ofori scattered sacred summe leaves to drive away spirits of evil, and looked again into his consecrated vessel. But this time he could see only the weeping faces of his father and his mother, half a century dead.

  When morning came, the big machines began to uproot the coconut palms in the holy grove beside the river. The village boys, who had been clearing the coarse grass from the river bank, one by one laid down their machetes and watched in horrified fascination as the bulldozers assaulted the slender trees. Everyone had
thought of the river’s being invaded by strangers. But it had never occurred to anyone that Owura’s grove would be destroyed.

  Kofi watched and listened. Under the noise of the engines he could hear the moaning of Owura’s brown waters. Now would come the time of tribulation; the plague and the river-blindness would strike now. The bulldozer rammed another tree, and it toppled, its trunk snapping like a broken spine. Kofi felt as though his own bones were being broken, his own body assaulted, his heart invaded by the massive blade. Then he saw someone approaching from the village.

  Okomfo Ofori was the river’s priest, and there was nothing he did not know. Except this day, this death. Kofi stared, shocked. The old priest was running like a child, and his face was wet with his tears.

  At the work site, the Superintendent listened wearily while the old man struggled to put his anguish into words.

  “What’s he saying, Badu? If it isn’t one damn thing, it’s another–what’s the trouble now?”

  “He says the grove belongs to the gods,” Badu explained.

  “All right,” Wain sighed. “Ask him how much he wants. It’s a racket, if you ask me. Will ten pounds do it? It can be entered under Local Labour.”

  The village boys looked towards Kofi, who stood unmoving, his machete dangling uselessly from his hand.

  “What does it mean? What will happen?”

  He heard their questioning voices and saw the question in their eyes. Then he turned upon them in a kind of fury.

  “Why do you ask me? I know nothing, nothing, nothing!”

  He dropped his machete and ran, not knowing where he was going, not seeing the paths he took.

  His mother was a woman vast as mountains. Her blue cloth, faded and tinged with a sediment of brown from many washings in river water, tugged and pulled around her heavy breasts and hips. She reached out a hand to the head of her crouched son.

  So the grove was lost, and although the pleas were made to gods and grandsires, the village felt lost, too, depleted and vulnerable. But the retribution did not come. Owura did not rise. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

  In the days following, Kofi did not go to the bridge work. He built the new hut, and when the gifts were given and taken, Akua made a groundnut stew and half the villagers were invited to share this first meal. Kofi, drinking palm wine and eating the food as though he could never get enough, was drawn into his new wife’s smile and lapped around with laughter.

  After a week, the young men of Owurasu went back to work for the bridgemen.

  The approaches were cleared and the steamy river air was filled with the chunking of the pile-driver and the whirr of the concrete-mixer, as the piers and anchor blocks went in.

  To the villagers, the river bank no longer seemed bald without the grove. Kofi could scarcely remember how the palms had looked when they lived there. Gradually he forgot that he had been afraid of the machines. Even the Europeans no longer looked strange. At first he had found it difficult to tell them apart, but now he recognized each.

  Akua bought a new cloth and an iron cooking-pot. On one memorable day, Kofi came home from the Hail Mary with a pocket torch. It was green and handsome, with silver on its end and silver on the place one touched to make the light come on. Kofi flicked the switch and in the tiny bulb a faint glow appeared. Akua clapped her hands in pleasure.

  “Such a thing. It is yours, Kofi?”

  “Mine. I paid for it.”

  The glow trembled, for the battery was almost worn out from the village boys’ handling. Kofi turned it off hastily. Danquah had forgotten to tell him and so he did not know that the power could be replaced.

  At the bridge, Kofi’s work had changed. Now he helped in the pouring of concrete as the blocks were made. He unloaded steel. He carried tools. He was everywhere. Sweat poured from him. His muscles grew tough as liana vines. He talked with the ironworkers, some of whom spoke his tongue. They were brash, easy-laughing, rough-spoken men, men of the city. Their leader was a man by the name of Emmanuel, a man with a mighty chest, hugely strong. Emmanuel wore a green felt hat enlivened with the white and lightly dancing feathers of the egrets that rode the cattle on the grasslands of the coast. He spoke often to Kofi, telling of the places he had been, the things he had seen.

  “The money goes, but who cares? That’s an ironworker’s life–to make money and spend it. Someday I will have a car–you’ll see. Ahh–it’ll be blue, like the sea, with silver all over it. Buick–Jaguar–you don’t know those names. Learn them, hear me? I’m telling them to you. Wait until you see me on the high steel. Then you’ll know what an ironworker does. Listen–I’ll tell you something–only men like me can be ironworkers, did you know that? Why? Because I know I won’t fall. If you think you might fall, then you do. But not me. I’ll never fall, I tell you that.”

  Kofi listened, his mouth open, not understanding what Emmanuel was talking about, but understanding the power of the man, the fearlessness. More and more Kofi was drawn to the company of the bridgeman in the evenings at the Hail Mary. Akua would click her tongue disapprovingly.

  “Kofi–why do you go there so much?”

  “I am going,” he would reply, not looking into her eyes. “It is not for you to say.”

  He still went each evening to see his father and his mother. His father was morose, despite the money, and had taken to quoting proverbs extensively.

  “Man is not a palm-nut that he should be self-centred. At the word of the elder, the young bends the knee. If you live in an evil town, the shame is yours.”

  He would continue interminably, and Kofi would feel uneasy, not certain why his father was offended, not knowing where his own offence lay. But after he had returned to his own hut and had filled himself with bean soup and kokonte, he would feel better and would be off again to the Hail Mary.

  One evening Kofi’s father sent the women and younger children away and began to speak with his son. The old man frowned, trying to weave into some pattern the vast and spreading spider-web of his anxieties.

  “The things which are growing from the river–we did not know the bridge would be like this, a defiance. And these madmen who go about our village–how many girls are pregnant by them already? And what will the children be like? Children of no known spirit–”

  Kofi said nothing at all. He listened silently, and then he turned and walked out of the hut. It was only when he was halfway to the Hail Mary that he realized he had forgotten to greet or say farewell to the grandmother who sat, blind and small, in the darkened hut, repeating in her far-off voice the names of the dead.

  At the Hail Mary, Kofi went over to Emmanuel, who was drinking beer and talking with Danquah. Danquah no longer complained about the village. These days he said that he had always known something wonderful would happen here; he had prayed and now his prayers had been answered. Emmanuel nodded and laughed, shrugging his shoulders rhythmically to the highlife music bellowed by the gramophone, a recent investment of Danquah’s. Kofi put one hand on Emmanuel’s arm, touching the crimson sheen of the ironworker’s shirt.

  “I am one of the bridgemen,” he said. “Say it is true.”

  Emmanuel clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Sure,” he said. “You are a bridgeman, bush boy. Why not?”

  He winked at Danquah, who stifled a guffaw. But Kofi did not notice.

  The dry harmattan wind came down from the northern deserts and across the forest country, parching the lips and throats of fishermen who cast their moon-shaped nets into the Owura river, and villagers bent double as they worked with their hoes in the patches of yam and cassava, and labourers on the sun-hot metal of the bridge.

  More than a year had passed, and the bridge had assumed its shape. The towers were completed, and the main cables sang in the scorching wind.

  Kofi, now a mechanic’s helper, scurried up and down the catwalks. He wore only a loincloth and he had a rag tied around his forehead as slight insulation against the fiery sun. He had picked up from the mechanics an
d ironworkers some of the highlife songs, and now as he worked he sang of the silk-clad women of the city.

  Badu, immaculate in white shirt and white drill trousers, called to him.

  “Hey, you, Kofi!”

  Kofi trotted over to him.

  “The bridge will be completed soon,” Badu said. “Do you want to stay on as a painter? We will not need so many men. But you have worked well. Shall I put your name down?”

  “Of course,” Kofi said promptly. “Am I not a bridgeman?”

  Badu gave him a quizzical glance.

  “What will you do when the bridge is finished? What will you do when we leave?”

  Kofi looked at him blankly.

  “You will be leaving? Emmanuel, he will be leaving?”

  “Naturally,” Badu said. “Did you think we would stay for ever?”

  Kofi did not reply. He merely walked away. But Badu, watching him go, felt uneasily that something somewhere was disjointed, but he could not exactly put his finger on it.

  To the people of Owurasu, the bridge was now different. It had grown and emerged and was an entity. And so another anxiety arose. Where the elders had once been concerned only over the unseemly disturbance of Owura’s waters and grove, now they wondered how the forest and river would feel about the presence of this new being.

  The forest was alive, and everywhere spirit acted upon spirit, not axe upon wood, nor herb upon wound, nor man upon steel. But what sort of spirit dwelt in the bridge? They did not know. Was it of beneficent or malicious intent? If a being existed, and you did not know whether it meant you good or ill, nor what it required of you, how could you possibly have peace of mind?

  A series of calamities enforced the villagers’ apprehension. Two of the pirogues drifted away and were found, rock-battered and waterlogged, some distance downriver. A young child fell prey to the crocodile that dwelt under the river bank. Worst of all, three of the best fishermen, who worked downstream near the rapids where the waterflies flourished, developed river-blindness.