The Tomorrow-Tamer Page 8

  “I have to tell you one thing, Danso,” I said at last. “The fact that you’ve shown Him as an African doesn’t seem so very important one way or another.”

  Danso set down his glass and ran one finger lightly over the painting.

  “Perhaps not,” he admitted reluctantly. “But could anyone be shown as everything? How to get past the paint, Will?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Danso laughed and began slouching out to the kitchen to get another beer.

  “We will invent new colours, man,” he cried. “But for this we may need a little time.”

  I was paid for the work I had done, but the mission was never built. Brother Lemon did not obtain another site, and in a few months, his health–as they say–broke down. He returned whence he had come, and I have not heard anything about the Angel of Philadelphia Mission from that day to this.

  Somewhere, perhaps, he is still preaching, heaven and hell pouring from his apocalyptic eyes, and around his head that aureole, hair the colour of light. Whenever Danso mentions him, however, it is always as the magician, the pedlar who bought souls cheap, and sold dear his cabbalistic word. But I can no longer think of Brother Lemon as either Paul or Elymas, apostle or sorcerer.

  I bought Danso’s picture. Sometimes, when I am able to see through black and white, until they merge and cease to be separate or apart, I look at those damaged creatures clustering so despairingly hopeful around the Son of Man, and it seems to me that Brother Lemon, after all, is one of them.

  THE TOMORROW-TAMER

  The dust rose like clouds of red locusts around the small stampeding hooves of taggle-furred goats and the frantic wings of chickens with all their feathers awry. Behind them the children darted, their bodies velvety with dust, like a flash and tumble of brown butterflies in the sun.

  The young man laughed aloud to see them, and began to lope after them. Past the palms where the tapsters got wine, and the sacred grove that belonged to Owura, god of the river. Past the shrine where Nana Ayensu poured libation to the dead and guardian grandsires. Past the thicket of ghosts, where the graves were, where every leaf and flower had fed on someone’s kin, and the wind was the thin whisper-speech of ancestral spirits. Past the deserted huts, clay walls runnelled by rain, where rats and demons dwelt in unholy brotherhood. Past the old men drowsing in doorways, dreaming of women, perhaps, or death. Past the good huts with their brown baked walls strong against any threatening night-thing, the slithering snake carrying in its secret sac the end of life, or red-eyed Sasabonsam, huge and hairy, older than time and always hungry.

  The young man stopped where the children stopped, outside Danquah’s. The shop was mud and wattle, like the huts, but it bore a painted sign, green and orange. Only Danquah could read it, but he was always telling people what it said. Hail Mary Chop-Bar & General Merchant. Danquah had gone to a mission school once, long ago. He was not really of the village, but he had lived here for many years.

  Danquah was unloading a case of beer, delivered yesterday by a lorry named God Helps Those, which journeyed fortnightly over the bush trail into Owurasu. He placed each bottle in precisely the right place on the shelf, and stood off to admire the effect. He was the only one who could afford to drink bottled beer, except for funerals, maybe, when people made a show, but he liked to see the bright labels in a row and the bottle-tops winking a gilt promise of forgetfulness. Danquah regarded Owurasu as a mudhole. But he had inherited the shop, and as no one in the village had the money to buy it and no one outside had the inclination, he was fixed here for ever.

  He turned when the children flocked in. He was annoyed at them, because he happened to have taken his shirt off and was also without the old newspaper which he habitually carried.

  The children chuckled surreptitiously, hands over mouths, for the fat on Danquah’s chest made him look as though the breasts of a young girl had been stuck incongruously on his scarred and ageing body.

  “A man cannot even go about his work,” Danquah grumbled, “without a whole pack of forest monkeys gibbering in his doorway. Well, what is it?”

  The children bubbled their news, like a pot of soup boiling over, fragments cast here and there, a froth of confusion.

  Attah the ferryman–away, away downriver (half a mile)–had told them, and he got the word from a clerk who got it from the mouth of a government man. A bridge was going to be built, and it was not to be at Atware, where the ferry was, but–where do you think? At Owurasu! This very place. And it was to be the biggest bridge any man had ever seen–big, really big, and high–look, like this (as high as a five-year-old’s arms).

  “A bridge, eh?” Danquah looked reflectively at his shelves, stacked with jars of mauve and yellow sweets, bottles of jaundice bitters, a perfume called Bint el Sudan, the newly-arranged beer, two small battery torches which the village boys eyed with envy but could not afford. What would the strangers’ needs be? From the past, isolated images floated slowly to the surface of his mind, like weed shreds in the sluggish river. Highland Queen whisky. De Reszke cigarettes. Chivers marmalade. He turned to the young man.

  “Remember, a year ago, when those men from the coast came here, and walked all around with sticks, and dug holes near the river? Everyone said they were lunatics, but I said something would come of it, didn’t I? No one listened to me, of course. Do you think it’s true, this news?”

  The boy grinned and shrugged. Danquah felt irritated at himself, that he had asked. An elder would not have asked a boy’s opinion. In any event, the young man clearly had no opinion.

  “How do I know?” the boy said. “I will ask my father, who will ask Nana Ayensu.”

  “I will ask Nana Ayensu myself,” Danquah snapped, resenting the implication that the boy’s father had greater access to the chief than he did, although in fact this was the case.

  The young man’s broad blank face suddenly frowned, as though the news had at last found a response in him, an excitement over an unknown thing.

  “Strangers would come here to live?”

  “Of course, idiot,” Danquah muttered. “Do you think a bridge builds itself?”

  Danquah put on his pink rayon shirt and his metal-rimmed spectacles so he could think better. But his face remained impassive. The boy chewed thoughtfully on a twig, hoisted his sagging loincloth, gazed at a shelf piled with patterned tradecloth and long yellow slabs of soap. He watched the sugar ants trailing in amber procession across the termite-riddled counter and down again to the packed-earth floor.

  Only the children did not hesitate to show their agitation. Shrilling like cicadas, they swarmed and swirled off and away, bearing their tidings to all the world.

  Danquah maintained a surly silence. The young man was not surprised, for the villagers regarded Danquah as a harmless madman. The storekeeper had no kin here, and if he had relatives elsewhere, he never mentioned them. He was not son or father, nephew or uncle. He lived by himself in the back of his shop. He cooked his own meals and sat alone on his stoep in the evenings, wearing food-smirched trousers and yellow shoes. He drank the costly beer and held aloft his ragged newspaper, bellowing the printed words to the toads that slept always in clusters in the corners, or crying sadly and drunkenly, while the village boys peered and tittered without pity.

  The young man walked home, his bare feet making light crescent prints in the dust. He was about seventeen, and his name was Kofi. He was no one in particular, no one you would notice.

  Outside the hut, one of his sisters was pounding dried cassava into kokonte meal, raising the big wooden pestle and bringing it down with an unvaried rhythm into the mortar. She glanced up.

  “I saw Akua today, and she asked me something.” Her voice was a teasing singsong.

  Kofi pretended to frown. “What is that to me?”

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  He knew she would soon tell him. He yawned and stretched, languidly, then squatted on his heels and closed his eyes, miming sleep. He thought of Akua as she
had looked this morning, early, coming back from the river with the water jar on her head, and walking carefully, because the vessel was heavy, but managing also to sway her plump buttocks a little more than was absolutely necessary.

  “She wants to know if you are a boy or a man,” his sister said.

  His thighs itched and he could feel the slow full sweetness of his amiable lust. He jumped to his feet and leapt over the mortar, clumsy-graceful as a young goat. He sang softly, so his mother inside the hut would not hear.

  “Do you ask a question,

  Akua, Akua?

  In a grove dwells an oracle,

  Oh Akua–

  Come to the grove when the village sleeps–”

  The pestle thudded with his sister’s laughter. He leaned close to her.

  “Don’t speak of it, will you?”

  She promised, and he sat cross-legged on the ground, and drummed on the earth with his outspread hands, and sang in the cool heat of the late afternoon. Then he remembered the important news, and put on a solemn face, and went in the hut to see his father.

  His father was drinking palm wine sorrowfully. The younger children were crawling about like little lizards, and Kofi’s mother was pulling out yams and red peppers and groundnuts and pieces of fish from bowls and pots stacked in a corner. She said “Ha–ei–” or “True, true–” to everything the old man said, but she was not really listening–her mind was on the evening meal.

  Kofi dutifully went to greet his grandmother. She was brittle and small and fleshless as the empty shell of a tortoise. She rarely spoke, and then only to recite in her tenuous bird voice her genealogy, or to complain of chill. Being blind, she liked to run her fingers over the faces of her grandchildren. Kofi smiled so that she could touch his smile. She murmured to him, but it was the name of one of his dead brothers.

  “And when I think of the distance we walked,” Kofi’s father was saying, “to clear the new patch for the cocoyam, and now it turns out to be no good, and the yams are half the size they should be, and I ask myself why I should be afflicted in this way, because I have no enemies, unless you want to count Donkor, and he went away ten years ago, so it couldn’t be him, and if it is a question of libation, who has been more generous than I, always making sure the gods drank before the planting–”

  He went on in this vein for some time, and Kofi waited. Finally his father looked up.

  “The government men will build a bridge at Owurasu,” Kofi said. “So I heard.”

  His father snorted.

  “Nana Ayensu told me this morning. He heard it from Attah, but he did not believe it. Everyone knows the ferryman’s tongue has diarrhoea. Garrulity is an affliction of the soul.”

  “It is not true, then?”

  “How could it be true? We have always used the Atware ferry. There will be no bridge.”

  Kofi got out his adze and machete and went outside to sharpen them. Tomorrow he and his father would begin clearing the fallow patch beside the big baobab tree, for the second planting of cassava. Kofi could clear quickly with his machete, slicing through underbrush and greenfeather ferns. But he took no pride in the fact, for every young man did the same.

  He was sorry that there would be no bridge. Who knows what excitement might have come to Owurasu? But he knew nothing of such things. Perhaps it was better this way.

  A week later, three white men and a clerk arrived, followed by a lorry full of tents and supplies, several cooks, a mechanic and four carpenters.

  “Oh, my lord,” groaned Gerald Wain, the Contractor’s Superintendent, climbing out of the Land-Rover and stretching his travel-stiffened limbs, “is this the place? Eighteen months–it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  The silence in the village broke into turbulence. The women who had been filling the water vessels at the river began to squeal and shriek. They giggled and wailed, not knowing which was called for. They milled together, clambered up the clay bank, hitched up their long cloths and surged down the path that led back to the village, leaving the unfilled vessels behind.

  The young men were returning from the farms, running all together, shouting hoarsely. The men of Owurasu, the fathers and elders, had gathered outside the chief’s dwelling and were waiting for Nana Ayensu to appear.

  At the Hail Mary Danquah found two fly-specked pink paper roses and set them in an empty jam jar on his counter. He whipped out an assortment of bottles–gin, a powerful red liquid known as Steel wine, the beer with their gleaming tops, and several sweet purple Doko-Doko which the villagers could afford only when the cocoa crop was sold. Then he opened wide his door. In the centre of the village, under the sacred fire tree, Nana Ayensu and the elders met the new arrivals. The leader of the white men was not young, and he had a skin red as fresh-bled meat. Red was the favoured colour of witches and priests of witchcraft, as everyone knew, so many remarks were passed, especially when some of the children, creeping close, claimed to have seen through the sweat-drenched shirt a chest and belly hairy as the Sasabonsam’s. The other two white men were young and pale. They smoked many cigarettes and threw them away still burning, and the children scrambled for them.

  Badu, the clerk-interpreter, was an African, but to the people of Owurasu he was just as strange as the white men, and even less to be trusted, for he was a coast man. He wore white clothes and pointed shoes and a hat like an infant umbrella. The fact that he could speak their language did not make the villagers any less suspicious.

  “The stranger is like a child,” Nana Ayensu said, “but the voice of an enemy is like the tail of a scorpion–it carries a sting.”

  The clerk, a small man, slight and nervous as a duiker, sidled up to weighty Opoku, the chief’s spokesman, and attempted to look him in the eye. But when the clerk began to speak his eyes flickered away to the gnarled branches of the old tree.

  “The wise men from the coast,” Badu bawled in a voice larger than himself, “the government men who are greater than any chief–they have said that a bridge is to be built here, an honour for your small village. Workmen will be brought in for the skilled jobs, but we will need local men as well. The bungalows and labourers’ quarters will be started at once, so we can use your young men in that work. Our tents will be over there on the hill. Those who want to work can apply to me. They will be paid for what they do. See to it that they are there tomorrow morning early. In this job we waste no time.”

  The men of Owurasu stood mutely with expressionless faces. As for the women, they felt only shame for the clerk’s mother, whoever she might be, that she had taught her son so few manners.

  Badu, brushing the dust from his white sleeves, caught their soft deploring voices and looked defiant. These people were bush–they knew nothing of the world of streets and shops. But because they had once thrown their spears all along the coast, they still scorned his people, calling them cowards and eaters of fish-heads. He felt, as well, a dismal sense of embarrassment at the backwardness of rural communities, now painfully exposed to the engineers’ eyes. He turned abruptly away and spoke in rapid stuttering English to the Superintendent.

  With a swoosh and a rattle, the strangers drove off towards the river, scattering goats and chickens and children from the path, and filling the staring villagers’ nostrils with dust. Then–pandemonium. What was happening? What was expected of them? No one knew. Everyone shouted at once. The women and girls fluttered and chattered like parrots startled into flame-winged flight. But the faces of the men were sombre.

  Kofi came as close as he dared to the place where Nana Ayensu and the elders stood. Kofi’s father was speaking. He was a small and wiry man. He plucked at his yellow and black cloth, twirling one end of it across his shoulder, pulling it down, flinging it back again. His body twitched in anger.

  “Can they order us about like slaves? We have men who have not forgotten their grandfathers were warriors–”

  Nana Ayensu merely flapped a desolate hand. “Compose yourself, Kobla. Remember that those of our spiri
t are meant to model their behaviour on that of the river. We are supposed to be calm.”

  Nana Ayensu was a portly man, well-fleshed. His bearing was dignified, especially when he wore his best kente cloth, as he did now, having hastily donned it upon being informed of the strangers’ approach. He was, however, sweating a great deal–the little rivers formed under the gold and leather amulets of his headband, and trickled down his forehead and nose.

  “Calm,” he repeated, like an incantation. “But what do they intend to do with our young men? Will there be the big machines? I saw them once, when I visited my sister in the city. They are very large, and they feed on earth, opening their jaws–thus. Jaws that consume earth could consume a man. If harm comes to our young men, it is upon my head. But he said they would be paid, and Owurasu is not rich–”

  Okomfo Ofori was leaning on his thornwood stick, waiting his turn to speak. He was older than the others. The wrinkled skin of his face was hard and cracked, as though he had been sun-dried like an animal hide. He had lived a long time in the forest and on the river. He was the priest of the river, and there was nothing he did not know. Watching him covertly, Kofi felt afraid.

  “We do not know whether Owura will suffer his river to be disturbed,” Okomfo Ofori said. “If he will not, then I think the fish will die from the river, and the oil palms will wither, and the yams will shrink and dwindle in the planting places, and plague will come, and river-blindness will come, and the snake will inhabit our huts because the people are dead, and the strangler vine will cover our dwelling places. For our life comes from the river, and if the god’s hand is turned against us, what will avail the hands of men?”

  Kofi, remembering that he had casually, without thought, wished the bridge to come, felt weak with fear. He wanted to hide himself, but who can hide from his own fear and from the eyes of a god?

  That night, Kofi’s father told him they were to go to the sacred grove beside the river. Without a word or question, the boy shook off sleep and followed his father.