Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  Festus Ankrah seems stuck for words.

  “You say,” he says at length.

  “I do,” the teacher says, and stepping now towards Festus Ankrah, “so let us try to leave as friends.”

  Festus Ankrah takes a step back himself.

  The teacher says, “What is it?”

  “The way you talk,” Festus Ankrah says—hesitates—“what you say, but don’t. It makes me fear that something very wrong has happened here.”

  The teacher says, “That is nonsense. Now you sound like the people we have talked about. The ones who blame your nephew,” and Festus Ankrah, seeing the shadow of a smile pass across the teacher’s face, knows he’s been outsmarted.

  Without another word he turns and makes his way towards the car.

  The teacher watches him go, then walks to the edge of the lawn, now long and mixed with stray plants.

  Hands in his pockets, shoulders squared, he looks over the valley, remembering how from up here he and Nana Oforiwaa had sometimes watched the storms approaching from a distance. First the smell, then the diagonal sheets of rain, then the darkness coming from all around.

  Though on the day that Nana Oforiwaa died the sky had started clear. The sky had been beautiful, completely unaware of what it soon would become.

  THURSDAY MORNING.

  Eating a meal of bread and jam and coffee at the small table under the window, Festus Ankrah faces the prospect of defeat. Why is he here? Why has he stayed? His nephew is gone. Nobody here can help him find the boy. Would they, even if they could?

  He thinks: What do I know? What could I ever know? How much more than the daily acts of being me, not some other me; what more can I claim as my own?

  Nothing? Or something yet?

  He waits for the answers to come.

  Something in between.

  To have seen a place, lived a little in a place, know the shape of the land and the smell of the air, to have the same things inside you as somebody else—is this not also knowledge? Is this not also sharing?

  He thinks of what he can do. What clues has his nephew left him?

  Then he remembers the Presbyterian church and the reading room next door—the only place he can recall his nephew mentioning specifically from the days they’d lived together. They used to meet there—his nephew and Celeste, where all the children of the school used to get away to meet, on the pretext of needing to consult a book that wasn’t available in the school’s library.

  He sets out to find it, and later that afternoon does.

  To an outsider there is nothing grand about the church. But he tries to imagine it as people would in whose lives it is part of the daily geography: the prefabricated concrete fence, gray with rain and moss, the neat enclosed yard, the tall blunt steeple nudging the sky, with its clock face like a child’s wristwatch.

  And then the rain strikes, and he realizes how caught up in his own thoughts he must have been not to see it coming.

  At the first gust people scatter, heading for cover. People are shouting, calling each other toward shelter, laughing at their helplessness in the rain, at the rain itself, but no one calls to Festus Ankrah, and nor does he expect it.

  Still, he too starts running in the direction of the plantation and the hill down which he’d come on his way earlier in the afternoon—not because it would make a difference to him now, but so the people do not see him walking and know why.

  When he reaches the plantation he stops running. The sand has turned to mud, but the stones and gravel keep the path firm, and he makes his way slowly up the steep hill, the steam now rising from him, rivulets about his feet and the deafening sound all around as the rain pounds on the trees and bows the palms and gathers and flows down the fleshy stems from the reservoirs of the banana leaves.

  He’s heard it said, but now he knows for himself the suddenness of the weather in the hills. He’d seen the clouds come over, hard, blue-edged, then the sky turn to milk, though still he thought there’d be an hour or so in it. But with hardly a warning the storm had come in—just a single gust of wet choking air before it hit.

  So now I know, he thinks—how easy it is for somebody to be caught in such a storm, to lose their footing on a muddy river bank, to fall down the side of a hill, to strike a rock with their head and drown.

  By now the rain is streaming over him, warm to the skin as long as he moves. He can feel the suck and release of the soles of his feet against the leather of his shoes as his feet lift from the ground.

  Steadily he makes his way on through the rain. The gradient of the hill is now in the muscles of his thighs, and the back of his throat is raw and tastes of copper, and he concentrates on maintaining the rhythm of his walking so as not to think of either.

  At last he nears the bungalows that separate the plantation from the road. He can see it fifty paces above, with a fine mist of raindrops dancing on the macadam. When he gets there he will turn left, and by that route return back to the hotel. This is what he is thinking when a voice calls out to him.

  “This way.”

  It is a woman’s voice, an old voice.

  He stops, and when he stops the rhythm of his walking is broken, and it feels as if he can go no further. He looks to where the voice has come from. He stands beside a balcony, closed on three sides with the fourth open to the alleyway. In the dim light cast by the fire lit in an old liter tin, he can see the shapes of people. He approaches, and as he does, his eyes adjust, and he sees that it is only one person—an old woman, sitting on a concrete bench built into the back wall.

  “I am saying you should come this way from the rain.”

  He hesitates. He thinks: I can be in my room in twenty minutes—but already he is climbing up the stairs. As he does it occurs to him that he is not doing this for himself at all, but for the woman, whose voice seems to want his presence. He thinks how absurd it is—it is merely an offer of kindness, the tone of asking a formality—and how absurd he is. And how he really wanted to say no, but somehow feels a responsibility to a stranger who seeks to give him shelter.

  As he approaches he sees that the woman is not alone. She is seated, and a child stands against her knees, and a dog the size of a sack of potatoes lies with its back to the burning tin, warming itself, asleep.

  The woman nods at him.

  The bench is L-shaped, and Festus Ankrah takes a seat facing the woman and the child. The woman, watching him sit, gestures to a piece of cloth on the balcony wall.

  “Use that,” she says. As Festus Ankrah turns to take the cloth, she nudges the fire in the tin closer with her foot so that he can share its warmth.

  He dries as much of the water as he can from his skin and clothes and hair, looking up from time to time toward the woman. He wants to catch her eye so that she can see he is grateful, to acknowledge her kindness. But she has turned her body and is looking away, and seems to be caught up in her own thoughts.

  He draws the cloth around himself. It is heavy, and under it he begins to feel dry, and he waits to feel the heat of the fire. The truth is it is good to be out of the rain.

  Then the woman moves, and Festus Ankrah thinks she will turn to him, but she does not, and she begins addressing herself to the child. She whispers in his ear, and the child smiles, and she strokes his head, and looks out the side of the portico beyond Festus Ankrah.

  The sound of the heavy rain carries on around them.

  The dog, finding the heat gone, turns its head, moves closer to the fire, looks lazily for a moment at Festus Ankrah, then closes its eyes.

  “Thank you for your kindness,” Festus Ankrah says at last.

  He sees the shape of the woman’s face turning toward him.

  “I am thanking you,” he says, speaking a little slower.

  “It is just kindness,” the woman says.

  “Nonetheless,” he says.

  “To keep a stranger dry in the rain is not difficult,” she says.

  It is a dry voice, drained of intonation, tired, Fe
stus Ankrah thinks, with harshness near its surface.

  The evening has begun to gather in now, and he tries to see his watch in the light of the flames. The light is too weak. He stretches his legs out and feels the warmth of the tin in his shins. He sits back and lets the heat rise into him.

  He looks at the woman’s face, mostly covered in shadow, though the light catches her eyes. He sees momentarily an absence in them that makes him uneasy. The gratitude he feels dissipates at the thought of being in the presence of somebody who might not be in full control of their faculties. He feels stupid for having responded to the asking in her voice. He wishes now that he’d kept on walking. Perhaps he will start again soon.

  He has already considered the conversation with the woman over when she speaks again.

  “Kindness becomes easier with age,” she says, and it is as if by saying it the harshness goes out of her voice, and there is kindness in it.

  Festus Ankrah turns toward her again.

  “I have found it the opposite,” he says cautiously, but the woman evidently has said her piece, and does not respond.

  The child standing against the woman stirs. He cannot be much more than three or four. His arms are propped against the woman’s legs. His face is quiet and it has an expression of drugged contentment. His eyebrows rise like two gentle hills, and the milk of his eyes is as white as linoleum.

  Noticing that the child’s attention is fixed on him, Festus Ankrah smiles. Caught in his observations, the child retreats into the woman’s embrace. Her fingers move across his chest at the pressure of his movement as if they have a life, an intuition of their own, and Festus Ankrah looks away.

  “You are not old,” the woman says.

  “These days I am very old,” Festus Ankrah replies before he can reconsider the wisdom of exposing something true about himself in the company of a stranger, just because it is true.

  “No, I have seen you in the town,” the old woman says, and there is wiliness now in her voice, “I know who you are.”

  That the woman has knowledge of him surprises and unsettles Festus Ankrah.

  The woman smiles. The child moves in her embrace and she leans forward. Festus Ankrah can see her clearly now, her head, smooth as a coffee bean, covered in a black scarf only a few shades darker than her skin. Her cheekbones stand out through the loose skin under her eye sockets like solid balls of meat, and her mouth is as wide as a scythe, and seems to cut her face in two.

  “All I say is you are not old,” she says.

  When she talks it is as if her mouth peels back to let her teeth and gums speak. Her face moves in expressions of wonder and concentration, as if she were telling a story to a child, or confiding a wonderful secret. “As for me,” she says—her hand falls onto her chest—“me, I know my full account, before my God I do. Everything now is in its place, everything now is over; the shape of everything—it has all happened—this tree is now forever, rain is now forever, ground is now forever,” and she pats the stone bench with the flat of her palms. “Nothing now that happens gets added to the past. It makes a person free. Everything just …” and she brings her palms together, and opens her fingers like a flower, “—unfolds.” Then she brings her fingers to her mouth, and her laughter is like the laughter of an embarrassed girl, coy and uncertain.

  Then Festus Ankrah is no longer afraid. This woman is mad, he thinks to himself, she can do him no harm, and how little it would cost him to give her her moment, and not turn on her, as he has on others who have shown him less kindness.

  “Do you know something?” he says. “Do you know something you want to tell to me?”

  To be able to ask the question fills him with a sense of control and strength he has not expected.

  “I know.”

  “What is it?” Festus Ankrah asks.

  The old woman does not respond.

  The child, seeming to sense the change in Festus Ankrah’s tone, becomes restless, and turns towards the woman, who in a single quick movement, lifts him into her arms and lays him across her lap.

  They sit a few moments in silence in the rain.

  Then the old woman says, “When a child does what he is not supposed to do, he suffers what he is not supposed to suffer.”

  Festus Ankrah finds himself unable to respond, though he knows the proverb.

  The woman looks at him, and for a moment there is knowingness in her eyes that unsettles him. Her mouth creases in a shrewd smile. Then the whole expression unknits.

  “To look a person in the eye who does not know themselves,” she says, “you leave your own image in them. And children do not know themselves. They are all the same child in that.”

  Then she looks down to the child in her arms, who has fallen asleep, and she places her hand over his eyes, and cannot be made to say another word.

  IT IS NIGHT on the Akwapim Ridge. Night lies over the fields, holding them close. Night holds the towns and the churches and the steeples in its soft fist. The bells of the churches are muffled in darkness, the taxis huddle in their ranks like birds. In the houses and the shacks, in the villages and the boarding houses and seminaries and under the trees in the open, the people are asleep, the only light is the moon’s exclaiming O, and the stars, like sand scattered on a dark mirror.

  Waking the owner of the hotel gives Festus Ankrah some satisfaction. For more than a minute he stands on the step of his house, set a small distance from the hotel, pounding heavily on the door with his fist. A light comes on, the sound of footsteps approaching the door.

  “What do you want?” the voice says.

  “Open your door,” Festus Ankrah replies.

  The door opens. The hotel owner stands naked but for a towel around his waist. As the hotel owner strains to see, the creases of his squinting eyes knot the whole lower half of his face, drawing his top lip from his teeth like a snarl.

  Festus Ankrah smells of wet clothes and fire smoke. The hotel owner stares at him, says nothing.

  He is going, Festus Ankrah tells him. First thing in the morning. No breakfast, just the bill. And something inside him laughs like a child as he leaves the hotel owner standing on his step and walks back out into the night.

  Back in his room he begins to pack his bags, and when he is finished starts to straighten up the room.

  But once he has moved the beds and furniture back into place he finds he cannot stop. With water from the barrel in the bathroom, soap from his basin, he cleans the tables, the bedframe, the window sill where the mosquito coils have burnt into black ash. He gets down on his knees and sweeps dust with his facecloth, wrings it out and shines the floor.

  It is ridiculous, he knows—the pleasure he takes from removing by himself the signs of his habitation in this place; but he takes it nonetheless.

  And as he works into the still early hours of the morning, his mind begins for the first time since the discovery of his nephew’s disappearance to turn to other things. Loose strings of memory, unrecalled for many years, and unrelated, fire behind his eyes—a conversation in the street, a young person who exists now only in his head, something said in an immigrant bar on another continent, in another life—so quickly, though, that all he is sure of is the act of memory itself, while the thing remembered is lost.

  How fast it has all been, he thinks. The passing of all that time. The endlessness of experience, of things happening. Endless because it never stops, though it’s over the moment it’s happened, too fast to store, pitting the body, pitting the pits of the body. Like trying to catch the rain—that’s what it is.

  When he finishes cleaning the room he undresses and lies on the bed with his hands on his stomach. He feels the rhythm of his body moving in the palms of his hands.

  For the first time in almost a month he feels the ability to endure what he cannot control.

  The muscles know it first.

  An easing in the neck’s stiffness, in the weariness of the heavy frame. The ache of constant vigilance leaving its ghost in the joints.
Nothing is true that the body does not feel, nothing is true that isn’t verifiable in the flesh. So that when the knowledge comes the flesh is where the body knows.

  And then he sleeps, and later wakes, and he senses without having to open his eyes, the square of dull light at the window.

  He tastes a sourness in his mouth—cigarettes and food and not enough sleep.

  He draws comfort from the physicality of his own body, these things that are truly his. The pain in his muscles and joints, the cramps of his digestive tract.

  In the hotel lobby Festus Ankrah recognizes the boy behind the counter as the same who signed him in on the evening of his arrival. He does not wait for the boy to count the money he hands over in two envelopes. He slings his bag over his shoulder, and leaves the hotel for the last time.

  The boy lifts his eyes to see him pass through the door, his lips moving silently as he counts the notes.

  No car waits for Festus Ankrah to take him to the taxi station. He walks the shortcut through the grass to the edge of the town, avoiding the turn-off to the school. Is there something to regret in spending time in this place without having established the smallest connection of sympathy, of kindness? If so, he cannot find the place inside himself in which he feels it so.

  Arriving at the station he walks past the taxi rank where cars for hire will take you single-drop down the escarpment to Accra. He heads for the tro-tros. The noise surrounds him—of baggage carriers, and hawkers, drivers and touts. He throws his bag to the baggage boy on the roof of the car, then takes his seat in the back of the tro-tro, and stares down the steel tube through the window. A child’s shoe hangs from the mirror, flags and stickers are arranged on the dash. He waits for the car to fill.

  A large woman with chickens in a reed bag squeezes herself into the seat in front of him, sweat lining the creases of her flesh. A man takes two sleeping children onto his lap. Three boys take the front bench, talking loudly. The driver saunters over to his cab and leans against his door, while his tout takes his place in the open sliding door, slaps the top of the tro-tro with his open palm, and shouts out in his clattering, treble voice, “Accra-cra-cra-cra-craaaaa!”