Walking with Abel (34 page)

To be sure, the Sahel sang back. With the whistle of rose-ringed parakeets, the gurgle of turtledoves. With the high twitter of red-headed lovebirds, the squeal of Senegal parrots whose apple chests swelled like externalized hearts. With the moaning of cattle and the hollow flutter of a bright blue moth wrestling out of a cage of brambles. With the ultrasonic clicking of insects and fish, pitched too high for the walkers to hear. The bush was full of such old sounds—as old as Abel, older still. They measured the heartbeat of the world, and the world was clamorous.

the calf its bleat

the crow its caw

the tongue the tremor

—H
ASSEN
S
AKER

The women quieted when a donkey cart overtook them; the driver, legs dangling from the singletree, was talking on his cellphone. They stepped off the road for men on motorscooters to pass. They paused to rest, to douse their necks with water from a bottle, to take off their flipflops and loads for a minute and squat, then hoist them up again. They greeted rimaibe women who lugged on their heads firewood, gunnysacks of grain, doum palm fruit. They tossed no coins at the group of preteen boys in blue homespun who announced their recent circumcision with the jangle of wooden rattles and begged passersby for celebration money. They walked for hours and the sun swung down from above and began to soften slowly into the bush behind them.

And the land unscrolled, unscrolled, as if the Earth spun underfoot like a circus ball and the women on it walked in place, fixed against a fixed blue sky.

T
hat day in Djenné by a water pump near Pygmée’s house, next to the severed head of a black bull, two boys stood holding a pied crow chick by its wings.

Gano called out to the boys. “Hey, wait, stop, stop! Show me that bird!”

The bird was maybe a few weeks old, still downy around the neck. Sticky droplets of blood were drying on the upperwing coverts. Gano told the boys to hold it still and pulled back its eyelids. First the left eye. No Koranic calligraphy there, just worried and moist darkness. Then the right. Nothing there, either. Gano walked away, disappointed. “Probably because it’s still young. It hasn’t had the time to grow wise. The writing hasn’t yet developed.”

T
he rain brought scorpions, fever, dysentery. It filled the fens with diseased water. It ushered forth mosquitoes. In Djenné my Fulfulde teacher, Monsieur Koulibaly, fell ill with malaria. I battled the abdominal pain and headaches of typhoid. On the plateau outside Ballé, Saadou’s daughter-in-law Kajata, who may or may not have put a spell on her husband’s bull to stop him from marrying a second time, had developed an abscess around one of her black misshapen teeth. She responded with hesitation to my advice to gargle with salt to bring down the abscess: to let even saltwater pass her lips meant to break Ramadan fast. Her daughter Hiretou ran a mysterious fever. One of Oumarou’s cows, a yellow roan yearling, began to have loose and bloody stools.

For a few days Oumarou watched the cow closely. When the animal began to shiver he knew it would die. But no Fulani liked a cow to die in vain, and the old man decided to slaughter and jerk it. He shared cuts of beef with everyone on the plateau, even the Bozo who sold tea and sugar at their homestead by the river. Such is the tradition in cultures of scarcity. I remembered it from my own childhood, when a rare treat—a jar of olives, a cheese—was shared with friends, family, anyone who stepped into the kitchen. I remembered slicing to lace-thin wafers a stick of salami that came in a box of German humanitarian aid, and not drinking for hours to retain the aftertaste of the single slice I got to have myself.

Even so, it took a full day to cook what Oumarou’s family had kept of the beef. Hairatou and Allaye took turns tending the fire. When Hairatou was not turning the meat over the coals, she cut with a broadsword bite-size pieces from a femur and chewed. Allaye nibbled on a rib. Hairatou, Allaye, and Hassan were not observing the Ramadan fast. Hairatou, because she was still young, and because someone had to reheat the rice or millet and feed the young children in the camp, and it would have been cruel to request that of a fasting woman, though married women all across the bourgou did it. Hassan was not fasting because he was herding cattle, a job too exhausting to do on an empty stomach and with a mouth sandpapered with thirst. Allaye was old enough and was performing no hard work, but perhaps, Oumarou suggested, he didn’t fast because in his mind he was still a child. And Fanta explained: “Everyone does what God tells him.” When his parents weren’t there to listen, Allaye explained that it was no use fasting because every night he broke the laws of chastity with Hajja.

The siblings grilled the meat unevenly. Some of it was smoked, some charred, some bloody. They ate the liver raw. Even the most thoroughly cooked bits gave off a slight tang of rot.

Oumarou did not know what had caused the cow to bleed and shiver. “Illness,” he said. Eating the meat of a sick cow was not taboo, though it was wise to avoid beef under two circumstances: if the butcher had placed his foot on the head of the cow while he was skinning it, even if that cow had been perfectly healthy; and if the cow had died of blackleg, an acute bacterial infection that caused necrosis. Blackleg meat smelled sour and looked unusually dark. Still, such meat could be made edible if you studded it with thorns before cooking it. There was no cure for the meat of an improperly skinned cow.

The Diakayatés’ iftar meal after the slaughter was a feast of rice with meat stew. That night Hairatou and Fanta suffered from cramps and diarrhea. The following morning Oumarou became violently sick. All day he staggered miserably between his hut and the nearest jackalberry thicket. There, out of everyone’s sight—because a Fulani adult could not publicly display discomfort or need or perform any function of the body—he retched and retched. Finally, he just stayed in the thicket. He was too weak to walk. He was too sick to be among family. The day was gray and the low sky pressed warm moisture into the plateau, pressed the wind westward, suffocated the land. Golden weavers streamed in scarves in and out of Oumarou’s unattended hut.

Allaye paced around his father in broad and worried circles. He brewed strong sweet tea and infused it with drops of Chinese-made potion of camphoric oil and menthol, panacea of the globalized Sahel. He covered the old man with a thin cotton blanket and took it off again. He cycled back to camp to fetch more tea and sugar. There Hairatou squatted by the hearth, near tears.

“Every year!” she whispered. “Every year when we come here he gets sick. Every year. Always his stomach. And every year we cry because we think he’s dying.”

Her eyes were on the shrubs behind which Oumarou was convalescing. Whenever she would see Allaye walk toward camp she would spring up, attentive, squinting, trying to discern from her brother’s walk: what news?

“It’s the meat,” said her mother, and set to steep in hot water a handful of kinkéliba leaves,
Combretum micranthum
, West African superfood, a mild antibiotic, painkiller, and antipyretic that tasted like loam. “Sit, Hairatou. You are making me nervous.”

By nightfall Oumarou felt well enough to return to camp. He sneaked extra iftar dates to Hashem, his favorite grandson. He urged his family toward another dinner of blighted meat sauce and
toh
—“Dive in, dive in”—but he himself did not eat. Gano offered to drive him to the hospital in Djenné.

“Djenné?” the old man said. “Forget it. My hospital is my cows. When I’m sick, all I need is a fat, healthy cow that has eaten a lot of grass. If I drink her milk, that’s my medicine.”

A fat cow gave so much milk two people could not drink it all in one sitting. Her milk tasted differently. You could taste the fresh grass in it.

Another good medicine was cow urine. You caught it with the cupped palm of your hand straight out of the cow’s urethral sphincter and drank it warm and foaming. Cow urine was good for stomachache, worms, small abrasions, and minor burns, and it increased your appetite. It was very potent and extremely salty. But if you drank a lot of it you could die, and small children were not allowed to drink it at all. For small children, the best medicine was goat milk drawn from the teat directly into the sick child’s mouth.

Oumarou incanted the ancient list of cowboy remedies on one of the reed mats Fanta had woven, with his feet tucked in. Ashy and thin, a shadow of a man. Bats zigzagged overhead. Mosquitoes whined. The empty bottle of pesticide beat against the thorn tree, keeping hollow, sepulchral time. He pulled up the bottom loop of his turban over the stubbly chin, covered his mouth. Only his bloodshot eyes showed.

“Tomorrow I’m going to herd my cows. That’s where I’m going. No hospitals.”

Kajata’s abscess by now had swelled her left cheek and all of her neck, but when Gano proposed to take her to the hospital, her in-laws refused to let her go.

“I don’t think it’s really necessary,” said Saadou.

“If they take her to a doctor the doctor will want to do surgery, and I heard that last year two women died after such surgeries,” said Kumba.

“A bush doctor won’t do surgery,” said Fanta. “If we hear about a good bush doctor nearby, we’ll take her there.”

Kajata’s only son, a two-year-old, had died on the plateau that spring. It was then that Fanta had walked from Doundéré to pay condolences to the young woman. An owl had taken the child, the elders had said. Hassan and Saadou had buried him on the bluff near the graves of Oumarou’s father and children.

Some people said that many years ago that bluff had been the site of a small hamlet, maybe a village. That the bones of many others lay in its eroding sandstone. Each with a story of staying and going.

—

Heat lightning in the west. After dinner the cows woke and walked through camp, defecating and pissing and clattering dishes and eating leftover
toh
out of the pot and butting one another above my mat. Allaye ambled around with his music on, also restless. Then the wind grew stiff and cold, the cows left, and night quieted into dawn.

At some point late that night, in salmon moonrise, a chestnut cow calved out on pasture. Oumarou named the calf Mallé: Piebald.

A
loud and fierce sunup. Frogs orchestral. From the indigo west white egrets flew toward the plateau in tattered skeins on their daily migration. From his mat under the thorn tree, Oumarou sent Allaye to the bush near Gagna, where his eldest son, Boucary, camped with his wife and livestock. Boucary, the luckless shepherd, had lost a goat. Oumarou wanted Allaye to help him find it.

Allaye had been plucking his eyebrows in his handheld mirror. He let go of the mirror, stood up, picked up a staff, donned his hat of canvas and cowhide, raised both his palms in a simple and general farewell, turned up the love song screeching on his cellphone, and headed toward the Bani. Because he herded only goats, not cows, Boucary did not migrate from the bourgou. His wife, Hawa, kept impeccably neat their spacious wainscoted year-round hut with an indoor hearth. Allaye would reach his brother’s camp by the midafternoon prayer. If he indeed went there. If he didn’t hop on a westbound bus to Bamako instead.