A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (22 page)

· 27 ·

Fire

C
ATHERINE WAS CALLING.
“Where are you, Emma?” She was hiding under the bed; that was where she was. Likely her sister knew, but the game made her pretend not to know. Catherine must look all through the house, circling the table in Papa’s library, tiptoeing into the dining room, looking behind the neat stuffed chairs of the sewing room, climbing the stair, opening Mama’s wardrobe, and finally their own rooms. Emma smelled ash in the floor boards.

“Sister?” Catherine was getting closer. This was the part that so thrilled Emma she could hardly keep still. How would her sister find her? Kneeling to tug her slipper? Emma pulled her legs up under her skirt. Oh! Catherine was leaping on the bed. The great furniture groaned as if it might break. Emma was scrambling to get out.
Hurry. Hurry!

Someone picked her up. She wasn’t under the bed at all.

She had dreamed! Henry was home. How swift he was, but why? At the doorway, he pressed her head to lower it and they tumbled onto the piazza. Her feet felt the cool clay.

“Come,” he said, pulling her fast, and they were into the courtyard. It was not Henry but Jacob. Such an odd cast of light and voices above them. She wrenched her hand away, bringing it to her throat; she must find her shawl. Turning, she saw men on the roof, yellow flames. They heaved against the fire with branches, pulling out wads of thatch where they could. The fire had caught in a corner of the house they had not occupied.

“Where is my husband?” she cried.

“He is not returned.”

“Wole and Abike?” Emma’s voice seemed hot.

“There.” He pointed to the piazza behind them. Abike had her arms around the boy.

Emma pulled her hair close to her face. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the fire leap and a man tumble from the roof. The charred thatch broke his fall, and he limped toward them. “How long has it been going?” she said, her hands crossed over her chest.

“Only now,” Jacob said. He snapped his fingers to show how brief a time.

“Were you up?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Where did these men come from?”

“They saw the flame from the other side.”

She had mistaken someone’s call for Catherine’s voice in the dream. Her head felt wobbly and large, and she remembered the laudanum.

“How did it start?”

“A spark from a near fire,” the fallen man said, using his arms to show a bit of flame going up to lodge higher.

“Is that what you think?” She was looking to Jacob.

“It could be,” he said.

“My writing box!” she said, veering back to her room.

“No mah, wait.” Jacob held her arm. She pulled, but he would not let go.

The fire was out, but the men watched it a good while to be sure. Near dawn they began to leave. Ashes had fallen on Henry’s vocabulary work in the corner of the piazza, but nothing of theirs was lost. Still, the look of their work—covered now in soot—depressed Emma deeply. “We should try to sleep,” she said to Jacob. Wole had his thumb in his mouth, a habit she had never seen him indulge. “I don’t mind if someone brings mats from my room. I feel safer out here than under that roof.”

She settled under the odan with Abike, though when she closed her eyes the yellow fire still leapt, like a burning bird.

When Emma woke, she judged it to be midmorning. The girl’s mat was rolled and propped against the tree. A dank sooty smell filled the air, and Emma saw the ugly black section of burned roof. When she walked into her room, it was just as she had left it except that the bed was made, the floor swept, and a pitcher of water waited for her on the washstand. Her writing box sat sturdy and neat beside the bed. She pulled the curtain and peeled off every piece of clothing, tied up loose ends of hair, and soaped herself. Halfway through her toilet, she felt a darkness in her center. Henry. The force of his absence hit her full on. She stared at her white thighs, her breasts, full and dipping, her abdomen like a moon.

In her underclothes, she held the box on her lap and hugged it to her. She fingered the scallop, then opened the lid and took out the carving. She ran it over the planes of her face. “Can you bring someone back to me?” she said.

Emma came out to find a crowd in the outer compound. She remembered the people at the church service, how they said, “Shango speaks. First with lightning.”
Or fire
, she thought. Everything seemed hazy and unreal. Now all she wanted was Henry’s return. She wove her way over to Jacob.

“Good morning,” she said, one hand on her midsection.

“Good morning mah,” he said.

He seemed subdued, and she imagined he disliked Henry’s absence. It wasn’t a good thing to explain when there was no explaining. “Why are they here?” she said.

“To clean and repair. The king has sent them.”

“Is it possible we are the cause of the fire?”

“Yes.”

“Someone could be against us.”

Jacob lowered his head and ran his hand back and forth across his neck. For a moment she thought he was going to tell her that they had to leave. He would not catch her eye even when he spoke.

“By rebuilding, the king expresses his wish for the
oyinbo
to stay. These people will mend everything.”

He will not answer directly
, she thought.

Jacob swept his arm out and across the space in front of him to indicate the Baale’s largeness and ownership. “If someone has lit the fire, he will not try again.”

Emma’s hand drifted toward his, but she stopped herself. How she longed for Henry to take care of her.

· 28 ·

Escape

H
ENRY DETESTED
E
MMA’S
pressing on him. She knew it and did it anyway; that was what made it so blasted infuriating. When had she become the head of the marriage and the mission or even the parlor? When they had met, he thought how different she was from her mother; she could come to Africa and stir her tea with a twig, eat
fufu
and sauce. But now he saw the common thread running through the fabric. She paid fierce attention to pillows and was forever scolding him for scattering the bedclothes when he sat to pull on his boots.

There she came this morning talking of settling in Ogbomoso, speaking of God’s signs. She played the king card—
but you will do as the king says
—and grabbed him. He feared he might hit her. He was more afraid after the scene, knowing how close he was. She could have fallen, her head split like that young man who fell from the tree, or the baby could have miscarried. He saddled Caesar and took right off. No word to Jacob nor anyone. He passed fields where farmers fired brush. Smoke was dense and he enjoyed drawing it in, the smell fundamental and damaging. “Jesus forgive me; I’m taking a day off,” he said. Under the forest canopy, he urged Caesar forward. In the way he had been doing for years, he flattened a hand against his abdomen. Only the usual tenderness.

He rode up the hill at a trot. Caesar’s clip-clopping raised his spirits. Ahead, two basins of fruit were set near the path. The sellers, he surmised, were resting in shade, out of view. Close by were the handmade amulets—
aale
they called them—that would make a thief think twice. The one used here was fashioned from a kako seed pod with a palm frond turned around it:
The thief will be turned in on himself.
Henry stopped, and sure enough a woman came straight out of the woods. She waited on him to buy
akara
and three bananas, hardly as big as his finger. He rode on, passing fragments of an old wall. An anthill encroached upon it so that the structure looked in the shade almost like a cathedral with an extended nave. Henry touched his scabbard, the rifle in it. He felt an ancient tide. Greenery ten times the volume of Georgia smilax sagged from the trees. Turning downhill, he maneuvered around a rock splashed colorful with lichen and moss. Here the dry season met its limit. An updraft brought a sudden cool from his left. A creek. The horse picked up his feet, expectant. Caesar was a tad knock-kneed and his barrel swung low, which was how it came to be that Henry could afford him. But so far the animal had proven competent.

Henry ate his lunch, boots off, sitting at the creek, his feet in the water with Caesar’s, who stood and drank and then stood, head to breeze, his mane lightly lifting. Into Henry’s reverie stepped a lone man bearing firewood. The man did not turn his head but called out the customary
E kaasan
, good afternoon. Henry replied the same, thinking the man must get into town right often as he was unsurprised to find an
oyinbo
in his forest. Henry mused on the past weeks. “I expect to have no abiding place,” he had said to Jacob one day after hours of preaching, “but to go from place to place, breaking up the ground, sowing for others to reap.” His natural thrill and his spiritual punishment seemed one and the same—wanderlust and exile. It was often hard for him to tell which was which. “Ah!” Jacob had said, sounding sympathetic, though Henry was not sure whom the sympathy was for.

It was true what Emma said; they had only begun in Ogbomoso. People were attentive, but they weren’t serious enough. They liked the story of Jesus, but they wanted to lay it alongside their own stories. “You cannot take several paths,” he said over and over, “and arrive at your destination.” “There are many paths for one man’s feet,” they said, “one for market, one for palm tree tapping, one for farm.” “Not to arrive at God,” he countered. “You arrive at God only through Christ Jesus.” They shook their heads in apparent understanding, but what they really meant was,
We agree with you and with ourselves
. That was how it was with the Yoruba. They wanted it both ways. What Henry loved about the Mohamedan mind was its exclusivity, the devotion to one way. If only he could turn it the right way.

Henry swatted at the air in front of his face. Often it seemed a wandering army marched down from the far field of his vision. Troops wound in flimsy columns, their lines wobbling. For a moment the army would disappear, but then it reappeared, coming down over his eyeball, serpentine but constant, dots of black and white. It was a phantom; there was no army. He supposed his eyes were ruined from the African sun.

Finished with lunch, he knelt at the creek, threw water on his face, and wiped back his hair. Without thinking, he reached for an unusual stone, sparkling in the stream, and plucked it for Emma. She studied such gifts as if they were fragments of heaven. But he remembered his annoyance and shot the stone downstream. It skipped four times before sinking.

He moved to higher ground. No sound as heat gathered. His thought moved to Ilorin. He had visited once on his first tour and was tantalized by caravans coming in from the desert, where they journeyed to some Saharan crossroads and traded with men from northern Africa. Ilorin was wedded in his imagination with date palms and blue pools of water. If these considerations were immaterial to the gospel, Henry brought ballast to the vision through his conjecture that the northern people were superior and through their wealth influenced the kings’ courts. If the Mohamedans were brought to Jesus, all of Africa could be won. What a triumph for the One who loved him and gave him a second chance. Emma knew his calling. And hadn’t he made large concessions to her, giving her freedom to develop her interests? Of course he would look out for the child. What more did she want?

Much more, apparently. Right this morning: He was doing as he said he would, working on the vocabulary. They both knew how important the book was. His name would be at the center of all discussions of Africa. Every note he finished put them closer to the goal. And there she came telling him about God’s signs. It made him feel whipped when she took such tones. Let her have a night alone to eat dinner on china and silver, enjoy herself.

Late in the day he bivouacked on a rocky shelf at the crest of a hill. He wanted to exercise the rifle and looked forward to what he might get. But he found nothing big enough to shoot at, only ground squirrel, and he claimed two with a slingshot. Not bad, he said to himself. He still wanted to practice with the firearm and found target in the large fruit of a tree. He took several shots, hoping some villager might come to see who was trespassing. It pleased him to be interrogated by local men, to discourse with them on hunting and battle lore, country and cattle. And then he would take up God talk, which was an easy thing in Africa. Every man was a theologian. But no one showed up.

He sharpened his clasp knife on a granite stone to make a clean cut, then slit the squirrels’ bellies stem to stern before peeling back the skin. Then gutting. Whittling the green-sap branch. He took his time. He felt easy. His mind was clear as a Texas sky. When he pierced the pink whorled bodies longwise on the sticks, he prayed. He prayed for the meat, for the brown sweet crackle of the skin over the fire, the tender bits near the bone, the haunches, the heart. He prayed for God’s direction and for the brethren at the mission board in Richmond who supported his work. He prayed that people in Georgia might open their hearts and their purses to support the mission. He prayed for his unborn child.

He found slips of paper in his pocket and read them by the firelight, as a person reads a love letter memorized for years and still in hope.

“Baba Olodumare,” he prayed in Yoruba—but to his own God. “We’re short on money. I need some help.” He prayed it more truly than most prayers, as he might ask his own father. He had evaded Emma’s recent questions about finances. “I’ve set funds aside.” It was true, but not as much as he implied. In his day-by-day life, it irritated him no end how he must think on such trivia as money and physical need.

Henry didn’t have paper to roll a cigarette, but he had a plug of tobacco, which he bit off for a chew. He took a drink of whiskey and felt the area of his spleen. For once, it was not a bit tender. With the courage of a well man, he pulled a small notebook out of his haversack, turned to the first unmarked page, and wrote across the top:
Possible Causes for Spleen and Liver Disease.
Beneath the heading he allowed a line for each cause he had considered, with extra space beneath it, thinking he might come back and make further notation.

African fever

Chronic ague—the malaria

General strain, poor diet

Stagnant air

Poison?

Personal strife

God’s own hand, for chastisement and to teach humility

He had run out of thought when some animal called, and he took it to be a night heron. It seemed time to turn in. He closed the notebook.

Henry broke camp early. What came to him in his devotional was
Forgive your brother
. He thought the sentiment might extend to wives, and he was sorry he had parted with the pretty stone in the creek. He thought of Emma’s arms in moonlight. She was his anchor, even if she did act as though things were due her. He was eager to be home but had to take care with Caesar descending the hill. At one point he seemed to get turned around, and he missed the creek where he had seen the man the day before. From the canteen, he shared what water he had with the horse, and when he broke out of the forest into a cassava farm, he was closer by town than he had thought.

And then he came home to the remains of fire. He had run to find Emma and embraced her, and she had relaxed into his arms. But then she had stiffened as if remembering a grudge, and when Duro brought dinner, she seemed to turn chilly. She began to treat him as a royal stranger. He had been prepared to ask forgiveness, but her unyielding made it impossible.

He thanked Jacob for rescuing his family. “One day, I will repay you.”

“No sah. I was only doing my job. But if you can sit down, still yourself”—he pressed the air down—“it will be better.”

“Still myself? I’ll do what I can.”

“Yes sah.”

A day or two later, he saw Emma making her bath and experienced a deep remorse. But when he sought to touch her, she rebuffed him. If she was going to be stubborn, he might as well make a quick trip to Ilorin. It might be his only opportunity before the rains and the baby.