The Tomorrow-Tamer (25 page)

“I am going to let Bonsu choose the bell,” he said. “I think it is only right that he should.”

Tetteh got to his feet silently.

“Where are you going?” Quarshie asked. “I was hoping you would stay in Gyakrom.”

“Not me,” Tetteh replied. “I am going back to the city. I still must follow my Luck, although at this moment he seems to be gone, now that I have lost forever my diamond man.”
The Paradise Chop-Bar was beginning to fill with mid-day customers as Tetteh finished.

“Did you ever hear what happened to Hardacre?” Daniel asked.

From his pocket Tetteh drew a crumpled letter and handed it over.

“Your friend the Englishman stayed on in Gyakrom for one lengthy month,” the letter began. “The sickness forced it. Malaria and diarrhoea made him quite uncomfortable and also worried. He seemed grateful for my prayers and even more for my paludrine and aspirin. When he was somewhat recovered, we tried to cheer him the best we could. Opoku kindly drummed for him, and Bonsu offered to get out his
kukuo
for one more time, but Mr. Hardacre said indeed no, the grove was full of mosquitoes at night and he did not think he could survive another fever. We thought he did not have much manners, in the ways he spoke. He complained of the food, saying he grew tired of cassava and yam. It was, of course, unfortunate that he picked up both guinea-worm and roundworm, but to hear him you would think no one had ever before had these little creatures inside them. Bonsu tried several of his worm cures, but they were unhappily not so effective. Oftentimes Mr. Hardacre would wander down to the swamp and stare at it for as much as one hour. Then he would return to tell us what a menace it was for our health, with mosquitoes breeding there in fertile abundance. He also had many rude things to say about no proper drains being in Gyakrom, and what could we expect but all these worms, and so on. We tried to tell him about the Gyakrom Drain And Swamp Committee, newly-formed with your father as the head. Very certainly, something is going to be done–it is just a question for all of us to reach agreement on what we ought to be doing, and when
to start, and other problems. But this was not good enough for Mr. Hardacre. Everything must be done this minute. A restless man. He had once been planning, I know, to go north into the desert, where he had heard that some of the Moshi people still live in their ancient ways. But something must have made him change his mind, for when he left he said he would return at once to England and did not mean to travel so very much in future. We have our handsome iron bell, a solemn note yet joyful, and for this we give thanks. I have promised your mother that I will urge you to come home and settle down in a peaceful life. I do urge this, but I fear you have hardened your heart. Yours faithfully, Timothy Quarshie (Rev.).”

Daniel handed back the letter with a laugh.

“Please, no laughter,” Tetteh said. “I was losing at that time my hopeful wealth, Daniel, and even worse, losing my Luck, for never since has he made appearance. When I think of that clever man Quarshie and that snakely Bonsu–”

He broke off, and a pensive look came into his eyes. “Daniel–lend me your pen.”

He scribbled for a few minutes on the back of the letter. Then he handed the paper to Daniel. There, in Tetteh's scrawl, appeared these words:

 

ARE YOU A FOOT SUFFERER?

TRY BONSU CORN CURE

Best All-African Remedy

Working like Magic

for corns, bunions,

callouses, tender feet,

sore ankles, etc., etc.

TETTEH LUCK CO. INC. SOLE DISTRIBUTORS

 

“What do you think?” he asked anxiously.

“Good,” Daniel smiled. “It looks good.”

Tetteh snatched up the paper and began to dash out of the chop-bar. Then he stopped, came back to the table and picked up his glass. Raising it, he drained the last of the beer in a toast to the unseen presence.

“I thank you, Uncle,” Tetteh said gravely, “and I welcome you back.”

Daniel watched him go, the boy from Gyakrom, rushing away in a burst of sunflowers to seek his fortune in the city streets.

 

THE VOICES OF ADAMO

H
is mother was warmth and coolness. Warmth at daybreak when the children, sleeping like clustered toads in the dank hut corner, wakened hungry and straggled outside to find always that she was up before them and had the cocoyam cooking in the black iron pot. Warmth when the rain came at night, when the thunder howled its unknowable threats and the children shivered with chill and fear. Coolness in the heat of the day, when Adamo's legs were tired from trying to keep up with the older ones, cool shadow in her arms and her vast body bending over him. Before Adamo knew anything he knew this, his mother's sun and shade.

She gathered firewood and the children beside her gleaned twigs. When she went to hoe the cassava patch, Adamo and the others learned to walk through the fern-thick forest lightly, slipping around the thorns that would tear flesh, placing their feet so. She showed her young how to remain motionless in the snake's presence–not the tight containment of panic, for a brittle branch may snap, but a silent infolding of muscles like a leaf bud.

Afternoons, the girls stayed with their mother to tend the fire and pound the dried yam in the big wooden bowls. But Adamo and his brothers swam in the tepid slime-edged river or climbed the nut palms at the edge of the sacred grove or watched Ofei the blacksmith at his smoky forge turning a new machete.

The days flowed slowly as the river, and when Adamo was no longer a young child, his father taught him what he must know to wrench existence from the forest and yet not turn to vengeance the spirit that animated all things–the tree he felled, the plant he harvested, the antelope whose life he must take to feed his own. The forbidden acts and words were many, and the words and acts of appeasement were many, but Adamo dared not forget, for an offender endangered not only himself but the entire village, and that was the worst any person could do.

“A man is a leaf,” Adamo's father would say in his stern and quiet voice. “The leaf grows for a while, then falls, but the tree lives for ever. One leaf is nothing. The tree is all.”

Regularly, meticulously, the offerings of mashed yam or eggs were made to the gods of river and forest. The invocations entered into Adamo, for he would speak one day with the same calm voice as his father's.

“Here is food from our hands. Receive this food and eat. Stand behind us with a good standing. Let the women bear children. Let the yams grow. Let nothing evil befall.”

Adamo's father was strong. He knew always what to do. His own father and his mother had been dead for many years, but they were with him. He heard their guiding voices in the night wind. He poured palm wine on their graves, and they drank. They had never left him. When Adamo's mother and father died, they would not leave him, either.

Sometimes it was not enough, and the feared thing happened. Adamo's youngest sister was taken by the crocodile. When the mother turned at the cry, she saw only the blood swirling like flames on the water. Adamo's brother Kwadwo died of a fever, although his wrists and forehead had been bound with costly medicinal charms from Yao the fetish priest. These deaths they mourned each with a terrible stone in the heart, wondering who had been the one to cause by some offence such retribution.

So Adamo learned fear, but the fears were not the greater part. As long as the laws were kept, the palms and the dark river and the red earth were to Adamo like his own brothers, who would not forsake him.

 

When Adamo was fifteen, a sickness struck the village. That it was smallpox meant nothing to him. But because he was the youngest of her four remaining sons, his mother was determined that Adamo must go until the sickness was over. She had a friend in a village not so far away. He did not want to go, but when his father said it would be best, Adamo went.

His mother's friend welcomed him into her family. Adamo stayed on and on, at first unquestioning, then with a faint anxiety, finally desperate to return home. But always the answer was the same.

“We have heard nothing, Adamo. You are doing good work here–stay.”

Sunrise gave way to mid-day, and mid-day to sunset. Adamo had no notion that he had lived in this other village for a year. But one day when he went to wash himself in the river, he heard his mother's voice. The voice, gentle and persistent, spoke inside his head.

Adamo–where are you? Adamo–where are we?

That night he put his machete and his cloth and the knife which his father had given him into a bundle and walked out, without a word, along the bush trail that led back to his village.

The thorn bushes and liana vines by day were green nets that could snare only an unwatchful traveller, but at night they changed, became formless and yet solid, a heaviness of dark before the eyes. Anything a pace away seemed nonexistent, as though the world stopped where the foot fell. Adamo had no light. A man needs a light, not so much against the outer darkness, as to be sure that he himself is really there. With his bare feet, Adamo could feel the path. He stumbled over tree roots, slipped on the decay of last year's growth, grasped at branches and found his hands held ferns, insubstantial as spider-webs. But although he feared, he never doubted that he would reach his village, for his mother's voice drew him on.

Adamo–where are you? Adamo–where are we?

When the dawn birds had only begun, he came to the village. The huts were there; the street stood dusty and pale in the daybreak. A few monkeys, crying like children, were perched on the forge of Ofei the blacksmith. The palm branches in the sacred grove lifted and swayed in the faint wind of morning, and beyond the village the brown river moaned as it had done eternally.

That was all. Otherwise, silence. Adamo stood at the edge of the forest, looking at his village and knowing, without thinking it, that no one was there.

Then he heard a voice high and quavering as a bird's–an old woman's voice. Soon she came out of one of the huts, walking stooped over, a mud-coloured cloth around her waist, but none around her breasts, for the parts that had once proclaimed her womanhood and had made milk for her children
now hung flat and leathery, not worth covering any more. Adamo recognized her.

“Grandmother–” he said, for although she was not his grandmother, it made little difference.

The old woman stopped and peered around, as though she had been momentarily expecting a voice, but now that it had come she was confused and did not know how to reply. Then she saw him.

“It is–” she hesitated. “Man or spirit, I cannot tell.”

He told her his name, and although she pretended to recognize him, he felt sure she did not. He asked her then about his family, scarcely knowing whether he could believe her or not, for her mind was light, almost departed. But she answered clearly enough.

“They are gone,” she said, in the strangely gloating way the old have, as though the whole course of events could have been avoided had the young paid heed. “They are either dead or gone. There was a sickness–a long time ago, I think, although I cannot remember so well. Many people died. I do not know who died. There were too many to remember. The others left. Went away. My own family was all dead, but the others tried to persuade me to go with them. I wouldn't go. No, I wouldn't go. Go away, I told them, go away and see what happens. I will stay where I belong, in my village. So they went. I never thought they would really go. But they did.”

Now Adamo began to shiver as though a chill had made each of his muscles work against the others. He questioned her patiently, precisely, saying over and over the names of his mother and his father.

“I am not sure,” the old woman said. “I think–wait–that would be Afua, the daughter of Bona Ampadu?”

“That is the woman. My mother.”

“I think”–the old woman struggled to remember–“I think she died. She and her husband. And–was it?–two daughters and four sons.”

“Three sons,” Adamo said dully. “If they died, it was three sons. I am the other.”

“At least you have come back,” the old woman said pettishly. “Not like those cowards who ran away. I told them, but of course they would not listen. If we die elsewhere, I said, how are the spirits of our ancestors ever to find us? Tell me that, I said. But they would not listen.”

Adamo, staring at her, did not believe. He could not believe that the spirits of all the dead any longer remained in this place, as the old woman hoped. It seemed to him that the living who had gone from the village had taken with them the ancestral spirits, for their own protection. Whether his parents were alive or dead, they were gone–they had somehow been taken away. The village to him now was deserted as it could not have been had it been empty only of tangible life. The chain that linked endlessly into the past had been broken.

Adamo stood looking at the huts, at the old woman, seeing nothing. Then he turned and ran through the village until he reached his father's hut. He entered and lay down on the floor, not violently but quietly, like a man settling himself for sleep. He was determined to die because he could not think what else to do. Dead, he might find his people.

When the third morning came, his rigid limbs stirred stiffly, his head turned, his nostrils dilated because he smelled food. A betrayal, although she had meant it well. The old woman had crept up to the hut door in the night and left a bowl of goat milk and a dish of fried plantains. Adamo, sobbing despair at his body, rose shakily from the hut floor and bolted the food.

So his belly committed him to life. He went to the river and washed. Then he talked to the old woman and spent the rest of the day gathering firewood for her. When he had accumulated a large pile of dry branches, she assured him it would be enough, for she would not live long. Adamo took both her withered hands in his, looked one last time into the vague and watery eyes that were nonetheless the eyes of one of his people, and walked back into the forest.