I tried to calm him with meaningless sounds of reassurance. Then I asked him to tell me. He spoke in a harsh whisper, his face averted.
“She come dis place like she crez’. She say–do so.” He gestured unmistakably. “I–I try, but I can no do so for she. I too fear.”
He held out his hands then in an appeal both desperate and hopeless. He was a desert man. He expected no mercy here, far from the dwellings of his tribe.
Ruth still had not moved. I do not think she had even heard Yindo’s words. At last she lifted her head, but she did not speak. She scanned slowly the mud walls, the tin basin for washing, the upturned box that served as table, the old hurricane lamp, and in a niche the grey and grinning head of the dead chameleon, around it the blue beads like naive eyes shining and beside it the offering of a toffee wrapped in grimy silver paper.
I stood there in the hut doorway, leaning on my ebony cane to support my cumbersome body, looking at the three of them but finding nothing simple enough to say. What words, after all, could possibly have been given to the outcast children?
I told Dr. Quansah. I did not spare him anything, nor myself either. I imagined he would be angry at my negligence, my blundering, but he was not.
“You should not blame yourself in this way,” he said. “I do not want that. It is–really, I think it is a question of time, after all.”
“Undoubtedly. But in the meantime?”
“I don’t know.” He passed a hand across his forehead. “I seem to become tired so much more than I used to. Solutions do not come readily any more. Even for a father like myself, who relies so much on schools, it is still not such an easy thing, to bring up a child without a mother.”
I leaned back in my scarlet chair. The old rattan received my head, and my absurdly jagged breath eased.
“No,” I said. “I’m sure it can’t be easy.”
We were silent for a moment. Then with some effort Dr. Quansah began to speak, almost apologetically.
“Coming back to this country after so long away–you know, I think that is the last new thing I shall be able to do in my life. Does that seem wrong? When one grows older, one is aware of so many difficulties. Often they appear to outweigh all else.”
My hands fumbled for my cane, the ebony that was grown and carved here. I found and held it, and it both reassured and mocked me.
“Perhaps,” I said deliberately. “But Ruth–”
“I am taking her away. She wants to go. What else can I do? There is a school in the town where a cousin of mine lives.”
“Yes. I see. You cannot do anything else, of course.”
He rose. “Goodbye,” he said, “and–”
But he did not finish the sentence. We shook hands, and he left.
At Eburaso School we go on as before. Miss Povey and I still snipe back and forth, knowing in our hearts that we rely upon our differences and would miss them if they were not there. I still teach my alien speech to the young ones, who continue to impart to it a kind of garbled charm. I grow heavier and I fancy my lameness is more pronounced, although Kwaale assures me this is not the case. In few enough years I will have reached retirement age.
Sitting in my garden and looking at the sun on the prickly pear and the poinsettia, I think of that island of grey rain where I must go as a stranger, when the time comes, while others must remain as strangers here.
GODMAN’S MASTER
The sky cracked open like a broken bowl that held a sea-full. The moment the rain began, the thick heat vanished. Humans and animals would shudder in the unaccustomed cool until the returning sun made the drenched foliage steam. Hours passed, and the dense rain went on, soaking the palms down to their fibrous roots, turning the forest moss spongy and saturated, causing the great ferns to droop like bedraggled peacocks. The water coursed down the flanks of the hardwood trees, and in high and sighing branches the ravens and scarlet-winged parrots huddled, their bold voices overcome by the wind’s even more raucous voice. In the grey-green baobab trees, the egrets wrapped their cloak-wings around themselves like flocks of sorcerers, white as mist. The wild bees and dancing gnats and tribes of flies all disappeared as though they had never been. The children of Ananse, the Father of Spiders, from the giant hairy banana spiders down to diminutive crimson jewel spiders, all crept back into the deep and hidden womb of their mother the forest.
Moses Adu knew he was driving too fast, but he wanted to cover as much of the journey as possible before nightfall. The spiral road through the hills was bad enough in the grey light of the day rain; in the dark it could be dangerous. He braked around a corner, blinking his eyes and trying to stare away the rain which slanted down on the windscreen and seemed almost to be flowing across his own glasses. The windscreen wipers were not working properly. Moses wondered uneasily if he had been cheated on the price of the old Hillman. He did not know much about cars. He had bought this one two weeks ago, the day he arrived back in Africa. He could not really afford a car yet, but he had not wanted to ride a mammy-lorry, like any labourer or bushboy, when he went to see his parents after four years away at university in England. The car might not be much good, but it had been worth the money, Moses decided. The visit had gone well. His father, who was a government clerk, had been almost inarticulate with the new pride of having a pharmacist son. His mother, of course, had been upset that Moses would not stay with them longer, but even she had been placated when he told of the job that was waiting for him in the coast city.
Night was coming on, when Moses saw a village ahead. He slowed the car. The huts and shanties came into focus, red mudbrick, glossed with the wet, the walls partially eaten away by years of rains like this, rains that would lick and spit until finally the dwellings melted and crumbled like huts of sugar.
No movement at all in the village, no sign of inhabitants. Only the hypnotic persistency of the rain. Then–and Moses’ nerves jolted with shock–a quick frightened darting of some live thing onto the road directly in front of the wheels. Moses braked hard; the car slithered on the rain-greasy road. There was a thud as the car hit the creature and came to a stop.
For a moment Moses could not look. He had hit a child–he could think of nothing but that. Finally he opened the door. When he saw that the dead thing was not a child but a goat, his relief was so great he could barely climb back in the car and light a cigarette.
Within ten seconds, the car was surrounded by a dozen villagers. Although they spoke in Twi, which was Moses’ mother-tongue, the fact that they all shouted at once made it difficult to follow any one of them. The gist, however, was plain. The goat would have to be paid for.
Moses was willing to pay for the goat, but he refused to pay the sum demanded by the throng.
“Too much,” he said firmly. “You know it’s too much for that miserable creature.”
The goat’s owner, a loose-limbed man with the unsmiling face and shrewd eyes of a peasant-farmer who knows he will never be anything but poor, began to shake both fists at Moses.
“As the proverb says, the stranger has large eyes, but they see nothing in the village. The goat was pregnant–look there, do I have to slit her belly? I have lost two goats.”
“I am willing to pay for one,” Moses said irritably, “but not two. I’m not a fool, and I’m not a rich man, either.”
Laughter, bitter as woodsmoke.
“He says he is not a rich man, Kobla. Look at his clothes–see? Did you notice his shoes when he stepped outside a moment ago? Here–look, if you stick your head in this window, you can see them. Not rich–ei! They say a crab cannot walk straight ahead nor a city man tell the truth–”
Moses knew it was no use. He was, of course, a wealthy man to them. He would not stand outside in the pelting rain as they did. They had only their skins to get soaked, and the loincloths bound around bony hips. The silver rain streaked down them, making their bodies glisten as though with oil and their muscles contract and clench against the chill. Moses felt ashamed, keeping them standin
g there, hunched and shaking, like dogs without shelter.
“Do you have to stand there and drown?” he said brusquely. “If there is a place to go, I will come with you.”
The village had one chop-bar, they told him. Moses struggled into his trench-coat and followed them. The chop-bar was clay and wattle, like the other dwellings, but it had a roof of corrugated iron. Inside, a kerosene lamp burned, feebly pushing away the shadows from the narrow room. Low wooden benches were placed haphazardly around the clay floor, and under one bench a hen sat ruffling grimy white feathers and glaring with malevolent ebony eyes. The air reeked of smoke and the red palm oil used in cooking. On a wooden counter stood an old marmalade jar full of pink and dusty paper roses.
“They sell beer here,” one of the village young men told Moses shyly. “And palm wine.”
An old man, the boy’s father, perhaps, or his uncle, turned on him and told him with furious pride to hold his tongue, for they were not beggars. So Moses bought half a dozen bottles of beer, as the villagers had confidently expected he would.
Back to the question of the goat. When Moses enquired if there were any police in the village, they shook their heads. No, they said, the gods had spared them that kind of outsider, although sometimes a constable arrived from somewhere on his bicycle; but whatever he asked about, they never told him anything, so he soon went away again.
“A chief, then?”
Yes, they all agreed. That was the thing to do, the very thing. The matter should be taken before the chief, who would decide whether the stranger owed for one goat or two.
“Fine,” Moses said. “Let us go and see him now.”
Their chief would be delighted to see him, the villagers said. Nana Owosu was well known for the graciousness with which he received strangers. Further, he had a fine house–made of stone, it was, and every man in the village had helped to build it–a house worth seeing. There was, however, one small difficulty. Nana Owosu was away at the moment, visiting his daughter at Tafo. He would, they said hopefully, almost certainly be back within a week.
Moses managed a semblance of calm.
“Look here–I will give you three pounds for the she-goat, and two bottles of palm wine for the unborn one. How is that?”
No, they chorused gravely, it would not do at all. That was not the sum they had in mind. The goat’s owner was a poor man, greatly afflicted–he had no children, think of the shame of it–and here was a rich stranger, trying to cheat him on the best goat in his herd, and what an insult to offer only two bottles of palm wine for what might have been another fine animal.
“I am not trying to cheat you,” Moses said helplessly. “But if we cannot settle it–”
The solution appeared to strike all of them at the same moment, as though they possessed not individual minds but a corporate mind, all nerves and ganglia mysteriously interconnected.
“Of course,” they said, with obvious relief. “Why did we not think of it before? We will take him to the oracle.”
Moses grinned in embarrassment. “Oracle? Some sort of suman, a fetish?”
“No, no,” they said. “An oracle. His priest also possesses powerful suman, but the oracle is an obosom, a god. He will tell us what to do. He cannot be wrong, you see. He lives in a box in the house of his priest.”
Moses had never encountered an oracle or the priest of an oracle. A box? He wondered what the trick would be. Ventriloquism? Should he go and see? He wanted to go, and yet he felt a repugnance about taking part in such a game even as onlooker. He was not an especially religious man, but he did, after all, belong to a family that had been Christian for three generations. As a pharmacist, too, one who was pledged to fight with sulpha and nivaquine the ancient darkness of fetish and necromancy, could he consult an oracle, even if it were done only to appease the complex simplicity of the village men? Moses turned his face away from the villagers, in case their illiterate eyes should be able to read him.
A god-in-the-box. Like the up-jumping jacks, the toy men, the hawk-nosed clown men who stayed still until you pressed the spring, then leapt and bowed, grimacing in paint, frightening children too young to know wood from flesh.
“It is not far to the dwelling of the oracle,” the goat’s owner was saying. “You will come with us?”
And Moses, surprised at himself, nodded abruptly and got to his feet.
The house of the oracle’s priest was not mudbrick. Made of cement blocks, it had been whitewashed and the corrugated roof painted green. A wealthy house, for this village. But the yard was untended. The coarse grass grew hip-high, and around the stoep and lintel the moonflower vines hung like great green clotted spider-webs, the clustered blossoms torn and shredded by rain.
Moses shivered in the wet wind, and found himself imagining how humiliated he would be if by any chance he were to experience fear in this place.
There was no answer to their knock and no light visible within the house. Moses’ glasses were blurred by rain, so the carved door and the blown moonflowers and the crouched villagers all looked to him as though they existed in some deep pool, and he, peering and straining, could see them only vaguely through the shifting waters. He took off his glasses and put his face close to the blank window. And saw, looking out at him, not two eyes but one. One gleaming amber eye.
Moses drew back, startled and then irritated. The tricks had begun already. Just then the door was opened by a girl child. She seemed not to notice the familiar men of the village. Her wide alarmed eyes were fixed on Moses, sombre and stocky in his good beige trench-coat. He laughed and bent down to her.
“Do not be afraid, little queen mother.”
But she turned and fled. He could hear her voice shrilling from the back of the house.
“A stranger is here! A strange man–one we have not seen before.”
And a man’s voice, harsh.
“I know. I know. Hush, foolish one.”
The man appeared in the open doorway. The single eye was explained, for in one empty socket the skin hung loose and scarred. Otherwise, he was a handsome man. His cheekbones were high and prominent, his features well-shaped. He wore a headband of leather, bound with amulets and charms. His bracelets, too, were fetish-pieces–cords, knotted with lumps of nufa medicine, links of iron chain, snippets of red cloth, and the bones of small animals. His cloth, draped around him in the traditional style, was yellow velvet, brown-patterned to resemble a leopard’s pad-marks.
“I am Faru,” he said in an expressionless voice. “Why have they brought you to me?”
The villagers explained, and after the oracle’s fee had been discussed at length and finally agreed upon, the priest led them inside, still looking dubiously at Moses.
The oracle’s room was lighted with a kerosene lamp of white china sprinkled with enamelled violets. On a wall hung an old afona, a sword, with a double-bulbed handle and a broad cutlass blade that was now thick with rust. On the same wall was a string of Muslim prayer beads, red and black, and nearby an ebony cross, with its Saviour dying in a gilt agony. On the bare unswept floor stood two figures, male and female, crudely carved in a pale wood and smeared with cockerel’s blood and the hard dried yolk of sacrificial eggs.
Moses, looking at the conglomeration of symbols, felt queasy and apprehensive. He remembered hearing once about the fetish grove at Elmina, where a crucifix and baptismal bowl were said to be used in the rites of the god Nana Ntona, who had centuries before been Saint Anthony when the Portuguese built a chapel there. Moses had found a sour amusement in that transformation–history’s barb, however slight, against the slavers. But this assimilation was different. The presence of the crucifix bothered him, here in this fotid room with the eye of Faru the priest winking goldenly.
Against the far wall stood a long table, containing at one end a kuduo, an ornate jar with twisted handles, cast in brass a long time ago and now encrusted with dirt and verdigris. In the centre of the table rested a mahogany box, perhaps two and a half feet long, in a
ppearance not unlike a child’s coffin. The lid of the box was tightly shut.
The villagers squatted on their haunches, looking around the room with nervous reverence. Moses stubbornly remained standing, ignoring the chair that the oracle’s priest pointed out to him.
In a deep resonant voice, Faru addressed the oracle, explaining the predicament. A moment’s silence. The villagers leaned forward expectantly, and even Moses breathed softly and slowly as he listened. Then from the box came a sound.
A tiny cough, as though a butterfly had cleared its throat. The voice that followed was small and tenuous, entirely different in pitch and emphasis from the voice of Faru.
“Listen while I speak.” The voice quivered, stopped to cough, then resumed. “The stranger is a good man. Some men would have run away and refused to pay at all, and what could you do about it, Kobla Oware? You must take what the stranger has offered you and be satisfied. If you do so, and if you give my priest twenty shillings and also three bottles of palm wine so he may pour libation to me, then your good heart will be remembered. Your wife will at last conceive and you will be mocked at no more.”
Moses had heard ventriloquism in England, but never a performance like this one. The oracle’s priest was facing them squarely. His mouth was clamped shut and his jaw rigid, not a flicker of movement. He was–it had to be admitted–a master.
Kobla Oware, the childless one, sat perfectly still. Not wanting to see the look of tremulous exultation that changed and lightened the villager’s dour face, Moses looked away and as he did so he found himself staring straight into the tiger eye of the priest. Moses glared angrily, but the priest’s gaze never faltered. Then, as Moses handed Kobla Oware the money for the dead goat, he could feel the ravenous eye slipping away from himself, losing interest, coming to rest on the notes in the villager’s hand.
Faru joked and laughed with the village men as he led them out of the room. Moses, who had just deposited his share of the oracle’s fee in the brass kuduo, was about to follow when something stopped him.
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