One Man Dancing

by Patricia Keeney

  History is moderately interesting. His ancestors, the prim teacher tells them, were connected to the Masai of Kenya, to Ethiopians and even to Nubians.

  Samuel and Charles — an aristocracy of two — stay to themselves at breaks but this day are surrounded by some of the bigger boys. The two stand frozen, trapped in fierce sunlight through whose rays they can barely make out the figures laughing and leaping towards them, backwards, forwards, menacingly. Shrinking the circle. Closing in. Taunting and brandishing sticks. It has happened before to this privileged pair and today there will be no escaping the taunts, their schoolmate’s eyes saying clearly “you are not like us.”

  Samuel is the first to go down in a circle of sticks. As he is tripped, Charles sees blood. He runs for the shelter of high reeds concealing three wooden toilets. But there too, he is surrounded. “Does the chief’s son have to piss?” He can hear Samuel crying.

  In a moment, they’re on him. With sticks and kicks. His face is cut. Blood runs. “Oh look,” they shout. “The fancy dancer has pissed himself. Didn’t your bitch mother teach you not to do that? Special people should know better.”

  Stiff with shock and rage, Charles slowly stands. Twisted now into knots of hatred, his mind slams against hard walls that won’t let him move.

  The attackers run off. Charles and Samuel walk slowly home to their incredulous parents.

  No one is ever punished for the incident.

  Now hating school, the pair decide one morning to miss it entirely. Truants in the bush, sweating out noon heat. Lying in what shade they can find, alerted by the desultory snarl of a nearby animal. Wary of snakes that curl in the underbrush. Spied on by monkeys.

  At the end of the day, Charles arrives home. His teacher is already there talking to Father about educating him elsewhere. Charles knows his parents want to defend him but they cannot refuse to send their own son to the village school. Kanyunya knows that he himself is better educated than most of these so-called teachers.

  When the teacher leaves, Charles is sent to his room.

  Nothing is said. Then he hears Mother slamming her hands on the wall. The air filling up with her soft sobs.

  Father realizes that his son is now paying for conflicts he himself has with those under his jurisdiction: families on the questionable side of a law, families whose children he might have imprisoned. Charles understands now that Father cannot help him.

  The physical attacks on the two friends continue. Walking home from school one day, they find themselves trapped on a bridge. Tied up and dangled over the railing by their ankles. Yanked up and down. Down and up. Tormented by ten bullying boys.

  “Your mother’s a fat cow. Your father’s a thief. If you don’t give us some money, we will make both of you crooked cows with broken noses. And drop you into the swamp.”

  Charles feels blood rush to his head. He feels his shins scraping. He thinks he can see into the murk and imagines being devoured there. Terrible tales will be told of his disappearance.

  Bitterly, Charles and Samuel agree to comply with the blackmailers. They are hoisted back and warned not to tell anyone, “Or you will die next time.”

  The two friends run. Shame scalding their eyes.

  That night, Charles commits his first crime.

  He cannot turn back.

  He peers out the window into the moonlight and thinks of Father holding court. Parties. Feasts. When life was a fearless dance of royal drums.

  His eye roams further to the reed fence, eerily shining. At the far edge of the compound he makes out the small police desk and the jail. Will he be sent to jail he wonders? Surely his father would not do that. His father who rules over roads and housing in eight villages, who rules over children and criminal cases.

  Charles knows the inmates of the local prison are brought from their cells every morning to help harvest and plant bananas and yams. Is Charles now to join them in lonely exile beyond the compound walls? If caught will he too be squeezed, six to a cubicle? No air. No light. Nothing to lie on.

  If caught, will his crime be announced by a blast of drums? Every passing second might be the one that thunders his doom, sending villagers with machetes to hack him to pieces. Could Father allow this? Would he have time to stop it? In the darkness would Father even be able to see that the intruder was his own son?

  Charles sways softly, raising his arms and pushing the air with flat hands. He imagines Mother sitting there, smiling and shuffling her feet, watching him dance with her serious eyes and her special smile.

  It is almost morning and his father will soon come to shake them awake. Charles moves into his parents’ bedroom. They are both sound asleep. He can hear their regular breathing and just barely make out their bodies, rolled comfortably around each other. Touching their dreams. Quick as cloud over moon, Charles insinuates a hand into Father’s trouser pocket. Finds coins. They would not be missed.

  On another night too, they are not missed.

  And another.

  And another.

  Charles has become an expert thief at the age of ten, a stealthy burglar, lifting only small amounts of money at a time so as to avoid detection. No one ever knows. Except Samuel. And the village boys who eagerly take the money from him. Charles’ life as a criminal continues, unnoticed at home.

  Eventually, he tries his techniques upon a series of unsuspecting official guests who, when they finally discover that they are literally out-of-pocket, feel the matter is too minor (not to say politically delicate) to pursue with Kanyunya.

  Then a white man comes to visit, to sleep in the guest house. Having heard his pockets jingling, Charles enters the man’s room along a shaft of moonlight, looking carefully, trying to think clearly. Is this man more important than others? Must be. His money is also in bills. Should Charles leave some in the pocket? But why? Here is a chance to buy greater good will with the bullies. Maybe this is the haul that will end his torment.

  Unfortunately, Father — informed of the robbery by his guest — must take action. He knows it could only have been his son.

  Mother and daughter retreat to their part of the house. This is clearly going to be men’s business. Charles is called in.

  “You have been taking money. Am I right?” he demands. “Answer me.”

  “Yes Father.”

  “You are nothing but a common thief.” Ordering Charles to drop his trousers, Father swings into his rhythmic punishment. Ten slashes with a wicked little whip that whistles through the air before it strikes his son’s tender buttocks with fury.

  “They made me do it,” Charles screams.

  “They?” says Father.

  The same question Father now insists be answered at the school. ‘Who are they?’

  The story rolls out. A bunch of boys from the poorest families wandered into the tea terrace of a hotel and ordered a whole cake for themselves. The suspicious owner, striding purposefully towards them, demanded to know where their money came from and whose it really was. This caused the boys to rise up, toppling over wicker chairs and parasols in their wake, race down the road and disappear into the swamp.

  It was the owner who reported the incident to the school. But the school never responded.

  Now Kanyunya opts for a public hearing, his authority so unchallenged that even his officials, thinking he has gone mad, say nothing.

  He publicly accuses the offending boys of blackmail and violence, insisting they admit it openly. One by one, the deeply frightened miscreants stand to take their punishment. Charles watches, flinching at each whistle of the whip. Until it is his turn again.

  But Kanyunya too is punished for all these misdeeds. Less that a week later, a letter arrives giving him official notice that he and his family are being transferred.

  Only Charles is delighted. He sees in this the hand of fate cooperating with the power of righteous action. Like an ani
mal from a trap, he will spring free.

  But Charles’ life will change only in stages. There are not enough places at the new school in the new town. His parents and Debra will, therefore, go first. Charles will finish the term at the old school, staying with Samuel’s family.

  During this time, the two boys return regularly to the empty house that was Charles’ home. The rooms now are only shells. His mother’s favourite chair and cooking pots, his bed — all were loaded on trucks and carted away. His life has gone somewhere else.

  Father’s old desk has been left for the new Sub-County Chief who will not arrive till the end of term. Charles stares at the large green ink blotter, cornered in leather and scrawled with figures. He wills Father’s special symbols to speak to him, longs for a secret sign. Opening a drawer at one end of the desk, he runs his hand inside while Samuel watches in awe. Charles strikes metal. Cold and hard. He gasps and pulls. Then yanks the drawer quickly to full length and stares down at a gleaming black pistol.

  Did Father forget it? Or was Charles supposed to find it?

  He and Samuel decide that this is Father’s gift to him. Armed, they will now really be safe. Indeed, the gun has the desired effect. Whenever they are threatened, he produces the weapon and the other boys scatter. Charles begins to understand authority. What it is like to be feared.

  In recognition of his new-found status, school gossip elevates the notoriety of the Sub-County Chief’s son from that of petty thief to fearful killer, Samuel being the whole of his trusty gang.

  Such is the power of an empty gun.

  When a place in the new school is finally found, Charles makes plans to leave. Samuel will travel with him and return after two weeks.

  At the end of the ten-hour ride they discover new liberty in a harsh and isolated semi-desert. A new village. A new school. Overnight, Charles becomes a model student. Boyhood heaven is all before him.

  Until Shakespeare comes along.

  At twelve, trying to memorize Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, makes him hot and irritable. Charles fights the complicated language of the text, the concept of suicide, and he can make no sense at all of Denmark or castles as he sits sweating under a broiling sun.

  Mother, by this time, has created a new spirit church for not only the family but for their friends and the women of the community. It is a simple pavilion on a public square. In this flat cool place Charles finds space to breathe.

  He comes here to be alone, reinforced by the sturdiness of poles and roof beams, carved into unique shapes. Hidden behind thick walls, he peers out into a stream of light, feeling like some ancestor guardian who can see but not be seen. Sometimes he stands in the vast dim circle, turning slowly, a huge bird with large shady wings hovering against the sun. Protected.

  Deeply lost in this reverie, one day he is suddenly aware of another presence in the pavilion with him — Debra, whose task it is to keep the place clean. Startled to find him there, she brandishes a broom at him, “Get out. Get out with your dirty feet. Go dance somewhwere else.”

  “I’m studying,” he says.

  But Debra takes her duty seriously. She wants to become a keeper of sacred places. One day she will care for the ekyanzi, the ceremonial bowls and the transforming milk they will hold. Even now she holds forth knowledgeably on their omuheina, the magic designs that decorate each one.

  “Take your fantasies out of here,” she threatens. “This is a holy place.”

  But Charles, intoxicated by his own visions of ease and completely undeterred by the protests of a mere sister, yanks the broom out of her hand. In doing so, he scrapes it against the roof. “Don’t tell me what to do. You are not Mother yet,” he snaps at her.

  Suddenly they hear a commotion above them. A rustling menace of hornets that are nesting in the spaces between the walls and the eaves. Now dislodged and angry. “See what you have done,” Debra screams, “You have disturbed the mother hornet. The mother is upset. She will sting us.”

  An aroused advance guard of hornets, fat and annoyed, traces a track deliberately above them. Droning louder and deeper and closer. “I’ll get her,” says Debra, instantly grabbing a ceremonial spear off the wall and swinging wildly at the giant hornet. But Charles has already stepped in the same direction. As he throws up his arms to shield his face, his finger is sliced by the sharply angled point. Pulsing freely into open air, blood spurts from his mutilated finger hanging by a thread of skin thin as an ivory disc.

  Debra begins to scream hysterically. Panicked, she scrambles out through the gap and onto the roof, causing her badly aimed weapon to lodge in a particularly grizzled old pole, where it thrums angrily.

  Now the world is truly aroused, Mother’s spirit church becoming a frenzy of hornets and flying implements, anarchy in motion. At its centre stands Charles still as a pole, staring down at his dangling finger.

  Dizzy with shock, he is disconnected from his own pain. He sways on his feet, his mouth opening and closing, silent as a fish. Then it all hits at once — the cause, the result, the searing sickening sensation. The howl that rips out of him terrifies Debra who watches, stupefied. Panic takes hold. Charles breaks into a run, blood pouring, finger flapping. Howling. Forgetting to breathe. Vigorously wailing after his hurt hand, loud as a parade, Charles and Debra streak home.

  But Mother is entertaining a group of women — chatting about Charles with several, including his new teacher — when she hears the unearthly cries. A servant enters trembling with terror, sobbing for her to rush out.

  In the glaring day, Kekinoni sees blood everywhere. And Charles about to faint. Shouting orders at those around her, she takes command, gathers up her gangly boy and runs to the infirmary with him sprawled and moaning in her arms.

  Shock sets in, numbing him. Suna ambles into his mind and he falls asleep watching her graze and chew, her horns almost scraping the ground.

  “Where is the doctor?” demands Kekinoni of the attendants. Everyone looks awkward, knowing that the only medic in the village is out back indulging his own hopeless addiction to strong gin. While she is grimly examining this filthy ramshackle excuse for a clinic, the doctor himself bursts through the dispensary doors — drunk and roaring.

  He sobers enough to staunch the bleeding, rubs disinfectant on the wound and wraps it. When Charles screams, the doctor barks at him to be quiet. At this, Kekinoni yells back and the two shout at each other even louder. Charles, suddenly awake, is in both physical and mental agony. He feels guilty. He knows he has caused this battle scene, caused Mother to be badly treated by this awful man. Comfort lifts away from him like a vulture from a stripped carcass.

  The doctor’s voice drops to understanding. He speaks to Charles. “I had to put the stinging solution on the wound or you would die of infection,” he tells his patient in a pathetic attempt to make amends, adding absent-mindedly, “You should really have stitches.” Charles’ imagination cannot conceive of anything worse that sticking needles into the torment of his poor hand. He is not a piece of ripped sacking that some needle and string can repair. The doctor winds more bandages around and around his finger.

  Then Charles throws up.

  “Oh God,” yells the doctor. “Look at this stinking mess.”

  “It’s your fault,” Kekinoni lashes out. “You’ve terrified him.”

  A moment later, Kanyunya himself is at the dispensary door. “I’ve called for the ambulance. If it’s not here in ten minutes, we’ll drive the official car.”

  “Where are we going?” asks Kekinoni.

  “The missionary hospital, St. Jude’s.”

  “But it is five hours away,” protests Kekinoni.

  “Yes,” Father snaps. “It is the only way to save his finger.”

  It is midnight when they arrive in the official car and Charles rouses, as the car snakes its way through the hospital grounds. He hears the rush of water. In h
is reverie, they have arrived in a holy place an infinite river of wellness swirling him away.

  “They have everything to make you better,” says Kanyunya softly.

  Charles drifts off again while disembodied human parts jostle in his head: red hearts like angry fists, spidery grey nervous systems, small pink figures hunched over with cramp or irritated by rashes.

  “Will they put my finger back on?” he whispers.

  “Yes, Kiti, yes.”

  The next time Charles opens his eyes, he is lying on glistening sheets covering a narrow bed that tilts him up slightly so that he is almost level with the face of a smiling white man, Dr. Scharf, an intelligent and sensitive professional — with a particular talent for calming the hysterical. He chats easily, asking questions to distract the boy. What are his favourite games? What does he like to eat? His sister’s name?

  There is comfort in this, a safe, secure feeling in the quiet gleaming room. Charles relaxes and lets all the anxiety drain out. Kekinoni stares quietly now at her boy, her son: a shrine she will always pray to.

  Between waking and sleeping over forty-eight hours, Charles struggles to understand the hospital while the doctor administers sedatives that release him into a state of cooperation and agreement. Charles’ entire being relaxes in its new home. This pure white place.

  He is taken to surgery and put out with chloroform. A professional anaesthetist covers his face with a mask. Dr. Scharf talks Charles through to peaceful unconsciousness. Kanyunya listens for any sign of danger that might send their son out of reach forever. Indeed, after the procedure is complete and the finger re-attached, Charles stays unconscious long enough for his parents to believe him dead. They have never seen anyone put to sleep before. Kanyunya, trance-like, murmurs again and again, “My daughter has killed my son, my daughter has killed my son.”