by Peter Meinke
Then one afternoon Andrew had come running in with a great announcement. “I’ve found just the place for you,” he yelled from below her balcony, “and it’s free, too!”
He had discovered a large abandoned house outside of Os-hogbo, near the Oshun River. Years ago many people in the house had died of the plague, and the natives believed it to be inhabited by evil spirits. But the chief of that district paid a man and his wife to guard the house, and they lived in a little hut on the same property. Andrew was sure that if Manu would speak to the chief Sally could live in the house for nothing, they could fix it up for her. It was the perfect place for an archaeologist as there were many shrines, both active and abandoned, in the area around the river.
Gradually it was all arranged. Near the end of the second year of her stay Sally moved into the Oshogbo house. It was a three-story affair with an ornately carved roof and a porch on the second floor as well as the first. A dirt road around three miles long joined it to the main highway leading into Oshogbo, and it was less than an hour’s drive from Ibadan and Oyo. The three friends painted it and fixed the windows, and chased away the family of monkeys living on the third floor. They stocked it with food from the University commissary, and Andrew brought over what looked like a five-year supply of bandages and other medical provisions, and a ten-year supply of candles.
For a short while Andrew and Manu stayed with Sally, Andrew sleeping in a room on the first floor and Manu and Sally sharing the master bedroom on the second. They swam (and washed) in the slow-flowing river, explored the territory and the neighboring shrines, and in the evening danced by candlelight in the large and empty main room on the ground floor. It was a good time, but when the men left to return to their studies Sally looked around at her house and felt exultant. She thought that she always knew that people were essentially alone, and she liked it that way. She remembered being puzzled by movies and books in which men were punished by being placed in solitary confinement. “That wouldn’t bother me at all,” she said to a large green and orange lizard. “I would prefer it.” And she raised her arms and whirled around the room, the bracelet picking up the candlelight and refracting it on the ceiling and walls as she danced.
A few days after Manu and Andrew left, Sally heard activity in the courtyard. A man and a woman were erecting a series of bamboo poles near the native hut. These must be the caretakers who were not in evidence when she moved in: Sally hurried down to greet them. The woman turned slowly around and bowed her head. She was a large woman, a head taller than Sally, and her hands and feet were stained a dark blue. Her name was Vida; she and her husband Ayi had gone into Oshogbo when Andrew’s car appeared and had just today decided it was safe to return. By now Sally could speak some Yoruba, and Vida knew a little English from three years in a government school, so they were able to communicate without difficulty. Ayi was a farmer who worked a small plot of land about two miles from the house. He planted mostly yams, but also grew corn and beans and sometimes melons. Ayi even owned several kola trees and sold kola nuts as his main cash crop.
Vida brought in some money by making the traditional Yoruba cloth called adire, which accounted for her blue hands and feet. One reason she and Ayi stayed on a place thought by most to be haunted was the great profusion of the elu plant on the property. Vida would take the fresh green leaves and pound them into a blackish pulp, making a high pile of dye balls about the size of tennis balls. Sally was fascinated by the whole process of dyeing and soon was helping Vida regularly with her work. Andrew or Manu would arrive for a visit and find her tying or folding the lengths of white cotton that Vida would then dip in the large dye pots half buried in the ground. Around the courtyard lengths of the beautiful indigo blue fabric with their intricate designs were drying on the bamboo poles.
“I love doing this,” she told Andrew. “I could do this forever. I can already tie the osubamba design.” She pointed to some drying panels with large white circles surrounded by many small ones. “Big moons and little moons.”
“Pretty nice,” said Andrew, “but I’m not sure how I’ll like you with blue hands and feet.” The adire dye was very hard to get off; the ground by Vida’s hut was stained a permanent blue.
Sally tried to get Ayi and Vida to move into the house with her, but they would have none of it. They thought Sally blessed by the gods to be able to live in the house unscathed. In fact, it was clear they saw their roles as handservants to her. Ayi brought her food from the farm, Vida cooked it; once every four days they would clean the first floor of the house, though it scarcely needed it. They wouldn’t go upstairs, and they wouldn’t enter the house if Sally weren’t in it. They had set ideas as to what kind of work was appropriate for her. It was fine for Sally to work hard tying and folding the adire designs and helping with the dyeing process in general, but they didn’t like her to carry things, to cook, to sweep, to pound the yams and cassava for the foofoo which was their staple meal. In a very short time a peaceable and efficient routine was established.
Sally liked walking to the cloth market outside of Os-hogbo, where Vida would sell their work and buy the raffia string and the white cotton they used. One afternoon on the way back from the market she met a woman with a sick child. “She’s burning up with fever,” Sally said, her hand on the child’s dry forehead. She brought them home with her and treated the child as best she could—she had learned a lot from Andrew—giving clear directions to the mother for continued treatment. A few weeks later the woman returned and left two large water pots on the porch. As the year progressed there were more of these incidents. Sometimes women from the small neighboring villages would bring their children to the house. They were afraid of the large hospital in Oshogbo, though they would go there if Sally told them to, and they would never stay in her house.
“They think you’re a priestess of Oshun,” Manu told her, looking at the pots, carvings, little brass figures, and river-worn stones that were collecting on her porch. “Oshun is the Venus of Yoruba, almost as light-skinned as you; if she feels like it she can cause or cure dysentery, stomachache, stuff like that. She was one of the wives of Shango, you know, very famous for her lovemaking.”
Sally smiled. “Well, let’s see if I qualify,” and they went upstairs.
Manu had studied the art of divination and he taught the rudiments of it to Sally, using sixteen kola nuts which could be thrown or arranged in any number of combinations. In college Sally had learned to do the I Ching, and this was similar; she memorized the verses and chants for the different combinations with great ease. “You’re a born diviner, a babalawo,” he told her. “It’s in your bones.”
Sally believed in it, in her own way. She thought it as good a way of regulating one’s life as any other. She remembered reading about one of those English archaeologists with the hyphenated names like Pritchard-Evans or Evans-Pritchard, who lived with a tribe somewhere that made its decisions by poisoning chickens with a poison called benje and then deciphering the circular patterns in which the chickens ran as they died. The Englishman had lived this way himself for a year and claimed it was about as efficient as trying to reason things out (Shall I go to market today? Shall I plant my vegetables? Should I marry Alice when I return?).
* * *
In this way, time had gone placidly by, like the Oshun River flowing by her house. Tonight, holding Jim’s letter in her hand and looking back on her ten years in Africa, Sally had difficulty remembering what happened when. Andrew was dead, she knew that; he had gone back to England and then died. And she hadn’t seen Manu for a long time: he had returned to his village in the north to become chief. He told Sally that she could be one of his wives any time she wanted. She thanked him and thought she’d rather not. “You could be one of my husbands, though.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
But it had been several years since she had a visit from Manu. Now her house was truly like a shrine, surrounded on all sides with the artifacts of Yoruba life and religion. The monk
eys had moved back in to the third floor and were her pets. At night they would look out the windows when the young men stood before the house, silent in the moonlight; occasionally the door would open and one would enter . . .
The University had long since severed its connection with Sally, so she had been totally surprised a month before when its mail truck came bouncing down their road with a thick letter from Jim and one from her father. Her mother had died, they wanted her to come home; her mother had left her $10,000. It seemed strange to her that she had parents; they had never captured her imagination, one way or the other. Jim hadn’t married; he had been engaged (engaged! Sally could barely understand the word) several times, but it had never worked out. He was a disappointed man. He wanted to see Sally again. When she opened the mail her hand trembled; she didn’t know how she felt. After reading the letters she took out her sixteen cowry shells and began to arrange them, searching for an attitude. She loved the small brightly colored shells that someone had left for her to do her divinations with. She would hold them in her hands for hours, their smooth, highly polished surfaces somehow comforting her, joining her with the hypnotic rhythms of the sea. But the shells had said nothing but “Wait,” and so she hadn’t answered the letters.
And now Jim’s second letter had arrived today. He and her father were at the University and would be coming to get her tomorrow. They were terribly worried, they had heard awful stories, they feared for her life. Sally smiled as she read this.
The moon was caught in the branches of the God-tree, the three-forked tree leaning over the river which flowed silently and irresistibly toward the great ocean. She walked upstairs to her room and stood for some time looking at her face in the mirror. She piled her long hair on top of her head. She was wearing one of her osubamba cloths around her waist; multicolored beads which the women had left for her hung between her naked breasts, and the bracelet felt cool and solid on her arm. Then she took out the narrow file she had borrowed from Vida and began filing her front teeth into the traditional M-shaped gap of Yoruba women.
Previous winners of
THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION
David Walton, Evening Out
Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up
Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups
Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight
Mary Hood, How Far She Went
François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Molly Giles, Rough Translations
Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes
Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News
Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst
Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures
Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats
Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order
Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts
Antonya Nelson, The Expendables
Nancy Zafris, The People I Know
Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble
Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps
T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft
Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure
Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire
Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket
Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America