Ancestor Stones (13 page)

We have been gone no time at all. No time at all. And yet in that time everything has changed. Something is happening in the village. Something mars the silence, rumbles beneath the stillness. It takes a moment to realise it.

Far away the sound of voices raised and bare feet pounding the ground and the flicker of torches. People! People purposefully marching. People we have never seen before.

Something is happening and we are awake to see it. Not going to miss it, not going to sleep through it like all the other somethings that happened after we had already gone to bed. Nobody will say to us: ‘Oh, you were already asleep by then,' when they tell the story in the coming days. We are awake. Whatever it is we'll be the ones to tell the other children in the morning.

We hurry in the direction of our house, a pair of busybodies, to spy from the safety of our bedroom window and discover what business has brought these good folk to us in the middle of the night.

They are ahead of us. Passing our father's new house now. The smell of wet plaster carries on the breeze. The house is finished. Today the carpenter came and hung the doors: heavy, wooden doors decorated with carvings of monitor lizards — our family
tana
. The carvings are not good. The lizards look like pigs.

The people march on. We follow behind them at a discreet distance. Hearts thumping, scared breathing, not wanting to be seen. What if it is the
poro
spirit come to town? Then we should run and hide, our mother warned us one day chasing us back from the fields, ‘Or he'll catch you and take you away. And I'll never see you again.' I giggled so hard as I tried to run I ended up with a stitch in my side. Then her face grew solemn. She once lost a brother that way. A little brother who had been sitting in the road when the spirit came to town. Caught unawares, by the time they heard the sound of the tortoiseshell the spirit and his dancers were already close. She was on the verandah and ran inside. The women slammed closed the windows and doors. It was too late to fetch him in. They thought he would be all right; in those days they left the very little ones. But when they came out he was gone. Into the sacred bush.

My breathing comes faster, my toes curl under me, as though my feet are afraid to touch the ground. I reach out and touch Yaya's arm.

Then again perhaps they have come from a celebration. Perhaps there will be dancing, a
bou bou
or a masquerade.

But then they would be singing. And they definitely are not singing. And nobody is improvising steps or clicking their fingers. The sound of their voices falls somewhere between a shout and a murmur.

The crowd slows. A short distance from our own house now. We are nearly home.

And now they are upon it.

They stop. In front of our house.

In front of our own house.

And we stop too.

And the first thing I feel is guilty. Guilty. A mental checklist of offences committed and undetected. As though the appearance of dozens of people in the dead of night might be something we have brought upon ourselves. For practising swear words when we are alone. For holding spitting competitions. For someone's doves we accidentally set free; they flew up into the branches of an orange tree and broadcast their freedom with thunderous coos. We didn't try to catch them. We ran away.

Then she is there standing in the frame of the door, struggling to make herself decent. Eyes small with sleep, bare shoulders luminous in the moonlight. When they see her the crowd quiets and lets one do the talking. And we stand still, trying to catch the words that flutter past like dark moths. And then we see all of them, our mother now among them. She is at the head of the crowd, but she is not leading them. Nobody lays a hand on her. I sense the invisible will that propels her forward. They move away down the street. And we run for the safety of our own house and our own beds because we know — we just know — that this is something of which we should not be part.

And he wasn't with them. I'm sure of it. Maybe he was hiding. Or had fled before he was brought in front of the court. Those people were his supporters, come to clear his name.

The sequence of things is difficult. But that must surely have come first. The people from the village came to beg. They had
come to plead. But running beneath the words, the forms of deference: an insistence. They would be heard. My father would hear them. An insistence, not yet a defiance.

That's all I remember of that time.

Then came the court case.

The boy who was under the table was Soulay, younger son of Ya Koloneh. That was how it worked in those days. I mean, there are different ways of learning. You had to observe the way things were done. The boys who were chosen learned at the feet of the elders.

The elders met in the
barrit
. It was in the middle of the village right next to the well, where the women met. A round building with a tall, conical, thatch roof the shape of a witch's hat, open sided so that people going about their tasks could stop by at any time to hear what village business was being discussed there by the elders.

Whenever something important was happening we children would try to see inside. Sometimes we managed to shove our faces in between the elbows of men sitting on the periphery wall. Most times they drove us away, swatting us like flies with a long switch.

I remember playing this game. Even when it was my own mother who had been shamed and brought before the elders.

Soulay was older. He had a way about him, I remember. A way of holding his head so that it rocked back on his skinny shoulders. He used to hunch them up around his chin, so his head looked like an egg in an egg cup. His smile occupied the entire lower half of his face and showed all his teeth at once. And he could pop his cheeks louder than anyone. And spit the farthest. And once a line of ducklings followed him around for weeks, thinking he was their mother.

We met at the
karanthe
behind the mosque, feverish with curiosity. Nothing this exciting had happened since Salifu Kamara got stuck up the breadfruit tree. He'd climbed up with a long stick to get at the fruit. I don't know, but somehow he dislocated his shoulder. Everyone heard him hollering. The men ran and fetched a fishing net, urged him to leap. It took ages for him to work up the
courage. Each time he seemed about to go he'd stop, shout down more instructions. To the right. To the left.

When he did jump the net wasn't taut enough. Pa Kamara slammed into the ground with such a thud the earth trembled. He broke his leg. They carried him away in the net all the way to the Kroo bone-setter in Mabass.

For ages afterwards we played that game with an old
lappa
: Pa Kamara jumping from the breadfruit tree.

That day in the
karanthe
we were as eager as the other children to hear Soulay tell his story. It makes me ashamed now to think about it. I didn't understand, I didn't understand the consequences — for her, for Yaya, for me.

She does not call his name. She denies she is faithless. And yet, when they bring out a powerful
sassa
, one from the village of the accused man — she falters.

We don't care about the accusations. We don't understand them anyway. It is the gory details we crave. What did the
sassa
look like? We want hair, horns, hoofs. And there must be something red in colour we can tell ourselves is blood. Sacrificial blood. Palm oil or betel nut. Dead things and red things.

Soulay enacts my mother's terror for us, shivering and quivering as she backed away. We watch him with glassy eyes, breathing hotly through open mouths. No shuffling. No sniffing. No nose picking or scab scratching. And afterwards we ponder the information with delighted disgust and sated bloodlust.

She refused to call the man's name.

Now she claims her confession was falsely given. The elders looked at each other and around. One peered through empty spectacle frames. Another swatted himself with an animal tail, encased at the anus point in an ivory handle. Together they looked down at her — this woman neck deep in woman trouble. How could it be so?

An afternoon, when the new house was nearly completed, my father called her and told her he wanted to bathe. She replied she would fetch water. But he shook his head. No, he said, down to the river. The two of them, together. Her husband never bathed in the
stream. That was the place for children and unmarried men, men without wives and daughters.

It was the hour before darkness. The river was quiet. She agreed to his request. What else to do? In the water he stretched out, swimming off into the deep. He called to her to follow. She was nervous; reassured by his voice. A game, perhaps? His manner suggested playfulness and appealed to the part of her that was curious and eager as one who had never been favoured.

Imagine her:

Fingers pull at the sodden knot of her
lappa
, she lets it unwind and float on the surface of the water.

At first she thinks little of the firmness of his grip, the finger digging into the flesh of her arms. Her nervousness, the current. Together they swim to the other side, far from the houses. A tenth wife. Alone with this man, who is her husband. Confused. Growing less hopeful that this behaviour is the manifestation of a sudden ardour.

Can't swim. Naked. And in deep water. Points her toes downwards like a dancer — and still can't feel the bottom. Just reeds tickling her toes like a water spirit's fingers. A leaping in her guts, panic straining to be freed. And only his grip — painful on her upper arm — keeps her from taking in gulps of water. Meanwhile darkness steals across the water.

Imagine him:

A husband who feels his age. Righteous, yes. Indignant, somewhat. He wishes he'd never been told the rumours. If she had been one of the more senior wives, and discreet, the other wives might have made arrangements. Now it was already too late. And there was the man himself to consider. It went beyond what was obvious.

And so he pulls her out of sight into the darkness under the mangroves. He confronts her with what he knows, repeats the talk. She had been seen. They had been overheard. And he demands a confession, there and then. And she, with her toes pointed down and her chin tilted up, grabbing breaths as fast as she can. She confesses.

The court imposed a fine for woman damage.

The elders of the court saw this was a time to be firm, to teach a lesson to those young men who could not afford wives of their own. But they were too quick to make an example of the Cement Man.

And my father — he overplayed his hand, he underestimated his tenth wife.

We went with her. At first we moved around. We stayed with my mother's mother in her house in the town, a house built on stilts. The house of treats, where a pot of tea warmed on the sideboard all day long, where my grandmother let us play with her hair and sleep in her bed at night and gave us little sips of condensed milk. More than once our mother left us for a few days.

All the time I waited to go home. I have forgotten now the moment when the consciousness flowered. It happened out of sight, like a night bloom. Closed one day and open the next. We were never going home. I was a child. It was not for me to ask. No. You overhear a little thing here, another thing there. And some things you pick up when you are a child, you only really understand when you become an adult.

At some point I came to understand all of it: the travelling, the boarding, the buying and selling; all of this was so my mother could pay her bride price back. To free herself from our father.

A long time later I was standing underneath the cold neon light in a supermarket. Around me people were opening boxes of eggs, checking the shells for cracks. In my hand I held a box of half a dozen. A fat man with a beard dressed in blue one-piece overalls like a giant romper-suit swung into me. The carton spun upwards into the air, the eggs exited six ways. The fat man tried to catch them. He was surprisingly quick and snatched an egg out of the air. The shell broke in his hand. We were both left standing there. Bright yellow yolk and transparent mucous slid from his fingers. I found some tissues in my bag. We stared at the mess on the floor.

‘Leave it,' he said. ‘They'll get it.' Waved his wiped-clean hand. Stepped around the mess.

We deliberately both walked away from it and from each other
in opposing directions. And as I walked away I felt a shiver, a sensation of hot and cold, of some strange suppressed panic.

I travelled away, in a direction I didn't want to go, backwards in time. For a long while the memory was gone. Only the feeling was left.

Back then we travelled east with a hot-metal smell in our nostrils, crouched on the floor of a mammy wagon, playing with tiny metal ball bearings, racing them up and down the floor. Yaya and I, we want to stand up and feel the hot, gummy wind in our faces, sit on the sides of the lorries like the young lorry boys lizardeyed in sunglasses, who perch with their backs to the cab, and sometimes crane over to talk to the driver through the open window. And never fall or have to steady themselves with undignified abruptness. Even when the truck drives over a pothole. Or lurches to a stop and the women all clutch at their leaping bosoms, and at the same time check the damp wads of cash strapped below their breasts. I want to stand up and reach up to catch the passing branches who nod their approval as we speed by.

I have never even seen a truck before, but I am fearless. In a very short time we two newly superior beings snigger at the foot travellers who drop their loads and flee into the bush at the approach of her stampeding wheels and roaring engine.

At the roadside a man is selling watermelons. The truck stops and people climb down. Some of the young men light cigarettes. The woman next to us asks me to mind her bundles and trots off into the bush, hitching up her skirt as she goes. The men wander beside the road, turn their backs, as though moved to contemplate the way we have just come. I walk over to look at the fruit stacked in a pyramid taller than I am. My mother comes up behind me and buys a melon from the vendor who breaks it open for us, pushing the point of his knife into the skin and forcing the flesh apart. And we eat slices of it with our faces turned to the wind, the pale pink juice drying sticky on our chins. And save the smooth black seeds and flick them out of the moving truck one by one.