Walking with Abel (38 page)

A
llaye arrived in midmorning with Oumarou’s goats. He tethered the nannies next to the hearth, inquired after his parents’ health and the health of the cows, then turned around and walked back to Konkorno where he had made an appointment with a Bwa bush doctor. The bush doctor had promised him a special love potion that would make him irresistible to women. The plan was to sneak the potion into a girl’s tea. After drinking the tea, should the girl touch Allaye’s hand, she would fall in love with him immediately. Such a potion was well worth a daylong roundtrip to Hayré and back. Allaye’s unremitting pursuit of love, the out-and-out force of it, made my heart leap and catch at once.

“How much did you pay that bush doctor?” Gano asked.

“Five thousand francs,” said Allaye—about ten dollars.

“
Wallahi
, I don’t believe in this potion.”

“Why do you believe in kola nut magic that makes a woman a virgin again, but not in Allaye’s love potion from Konkorno?” I asked.

“Because the kola nut magic is true!”

He thought about it.

“Even if this potion is real it’s not as good as in the past. Because now everyone wants money, and they sell magic for cheap. You tell me, Anna Bâ: what can you get from cheap magic?”

That evening I carried the Diakayatés’ wash from the river to camp and all of a sudden, so heaped with another family’s clothes in which each faded fold trapped the intimacy and old surety of their love, I felt drenchingly lonely, bereft of an innermost knowledge of the other. For years my beloved and I had danced around that kind of closeness. “This almost feels like domesticity,” he had said once, in a supermarket, and smiled—and right away we had recoiled, set off to separate aisles. Now, clutching my hosts’ clothes a year after our parting, I realized that our love had never held any prospect of an old and lasting kinship because we had let it exist only in the moment: in this one gratifying phone call, this one idyllic rendezvous. It had allowed for no plans, no tomorrow—and so, for no history, nothing that ever could linger in a stack of laundry.

I lifted the clothes to my face and breathed.

I
n canted early sun the cows of Oumarou and Sita Dangéré swarmed in a single herd on the hardpan in the middle of the plateau. Before them stood al Hajj Saadou, Oumarou’s younger brother, Sita’s uncle. He cupped his palms and brought them together and looked into them, remembering. He prayed.

He prayed that the animals’ journey across the river would be safe. That they would not drown or hurt the strong young men who would lead them through the water. That on the other bank they would stay out of harm’s way and out of the unharvested fields of anxious, jumpy farmers. Already downstream in the village of Taga a dozen rimaibe villagers had attacked a group of returning nomads with clubs and hoes and one had to be taken to the hospital in Djenné. The previous year a daylong land war between herders and farmers near the Burkina border killed thirty men, mostly Fulani.

He prayed that there would be plenty of hippo grass in the bourgou when the cows finally arrived near Doundéré. That the dry season would be kind to the animals. That he, Saadou, who would spend the dry season on this plateau across the river from Ballé, would live to see these cows and their owners again.

He spat into his palms three times and dropped his hands and looked at Oumarou. The cows had been blessed. Oumarou raised his staff in the air.

Jot!

The herd moved downstream upon a white clay road chinked with thousands of crescent hoof tracks. After four days on the green plateau the animals were finally sated and their large erect humps swayed regally and slowly. Walking behind the herd Oumarou watched with pleasure their slight metronomic oscillation. Watched his sons and grandnephews drive the animals to the river crossing downstream, where the bloated Bani stretched muddy and rapid a mile wide between the two banks. The young men glamorous beyond imagination. Entitled, arrogant, handsome, fast and fluid like shadows. They told the cows they were switching pasturelands:
jet jet jet jet jet!
and to keep in line:
shht
, girl—die, die!
Shht
, bitch! and to keep moving:
jot jot jot jot!
They walked past nipple rows of harvested millet, dried-up rice paddies, briers, reeds. They let other cows join their herd until it grew to several hundred head. Each hoof-fall exploded in a plume of fine bleached dust. As they approached the crossing the cowboys set the animals to a trot and the herds and their herders disappeared in a tall and near-solid cloud of atomized sand and in that white pall they poured onto the open grassy slope man and beast, the cows febrile and lowing terribly and the young men whitefaced and sweating and stripping off their swords and their blue boubous as they drove the herds at a canter straight into the roiling muck of the Bani.

They plunged in. The men armed with clubs and naked except for cutoff tricot undershorts yelped and hissed and ululated the cows into the water, and swam with the cows and ahead of them, and whacked their hides with staves and open palms, and the cows whirled in tight crazed circles in the sucking silty mud near the shore at first and finally stretched out centrifugally into several frenzied and roaring wedges. Bozo fishers in pirogues that carried other Fulani men and sheep and goats and the clothes of the swimmers paddled their lopsided and bleating Noah’s Arks with furious strokes behind the cows to cut them off from the east bank where more herders shook their clubs and hands at the river and yelled “Go! Go in God’s name, go!” and the paddlers stabbed the water with oars wildly and the animals thrashed and pushed one another in the mudcolored churn of cows and men, and pushed one another under in a wet demented stampede, and climbed one another and their drivers, who kept on swimming across the relentless torrent because this very crossing, this ancient and phantasmagorical baptism, this manic race determined their masculinity and prowess: determined everything.

Once upon a time huge festivals accompanied annual river crossings. They celebrated the end of the rainy season and the return of the fattened herds to the Inner Niger Delta, and feted the biggest cow, the bravest cowherd. Girls hennaed their hands and feet in dark geometric patterns for the occasion and wore gold hoop earrings and stacks of gold bangles and wove silver and gold coins and heavy amber beads into their cornrows. To the young cattle drivers who caught their fancy they handed kola nut with its sensual analeptic lobes that held the power to tame hunger and restore peace and repair hymens and bless unions and bind friends and lovers. And the boys so honored announced in public the names of the girls who had lavished them with such provocative attention, and sang praise songs to their favorite cows. Elders picked the fattest cow among all the herds and declared the champion of the crossing among all the men and such champion received even more attention from the girls, more kola nut, and firewood for his evening fires, and a large blanket handwoven in primary colors for the comfort of his sleep during the impending cold months. In return he slaughtered a bull large enough to feed everyone. Along the shores at each crossing point fires burned through the night for many nights and people drank milk by the gourdful, and men bragged about their rainy-season feats real and invented, and griots recounted heroisms of crossings past and esteemed the cowherds whose families employed them and ridiculed the rest, and young unwed couples stole away into the dark bush to make love by starlight.

But that was a long time ago, when the whole world was covered in grass for the cows, when the Fulani drank only milk and never touched millet or rice, when rain came on schedule and plentiful, when griots came to every celebration poor and went away rich. Before the land had become scalpeled with farms and fast paved roads and before the sky had become scalpeled with warplanes, before electric beams of flashlights interfered with the night and greed for modern things seduced the hearts of Fulani youth. In Mali the only festival that in recent memory still celebrated the cattle’s return was the Traversée des Animaux held at Diafarabé, on the Niger River. Since the war had begun in the country’s north that festival, too, had been abandoned.

—

The cows flowed across the Bani in frenetic corkscrewed queues. A bull strayed from a herd in the middle of the river, swam downstream, fought his way back. A dead cow floated north, all four legs extended sideways. Then another. A fisherman’s pirogue dragged it to shore. The Bozo believed it halal to eat drowned animals; they would butcher it later. On the shore, Oumarou and Sita and Saadou and other Fulani clicked their tongues at the lost animals and their unfortunate driver, a boy they did not know well.

“That fucking idiot!”

“He’s supposed to be swimming among the cows, not next to them.”

“Now he’s swimming on his own and his cows are dying one by one!”

Allaye and Hassan swam with Oumarou’s herd in neat, practiced strokes. They were head bulls. Competent and composed. They swam before the cows and when some animals scrambled in the water they took turns diving and doubling back and resurfacing at the cows’ dewlaps and grabbing them by the horns and humps and urging them to keep swimming. A chestnut cow struggled, legs up in the air for a beat, two, five, ten, too long, then recovered. The brothers steered the herd to a small grassy island two hundred yards offshore to give the animals some time to rest, to catch their breath. Only when the boys and most of the animals had crossed the island and plunged into the water once more on the other side did Saadou realize that the chestnut had never made it upslope. Her legs had buckled and she was falling on the grass, rasping, dying.

“A sword,” he yelled, “a sword, quickly! Somebody kill it, kill it with a sword!”

On the shore Oumarou teetered on his feet. He slumped down on trampled muddy grass. He said absolutely nothing. He watched a grandnephew draw his sword. He watched men drag the chestnut out of the water. He watched Saadou verify that the cut had been properly performed, severing the arteries on both sides but leaving the spinal cord undamaged. He waited for someone else to tell him this really was his cow. Or that it wasn’t. Now he had lost three cows since the beginning of the rainy season and he had only one new calf, Piebald. It stood on the other bank, an uncertain motley dot, waiting for its mother. In his shock Oumarou had forgotten to notice that the rest of the herd had crossed the river safely.

Now Saadou stood over his brother.

“Oumarou,” he said. “The final destination of this cow is here. Go back to camp.” And Oumarou stood up without a word and staggered away, weaving up the path, drunk with sadness.

—

The cow had died in the river, the domain of the Bozo. To show respect, as was the custom, Saadou asked the fisherpeople to skin and butcher it, in return for the neck and some stomach and a chunk of the liver. The hide and most of the rest of the meat he sold to them at a tenth the market price because they refused to pay more. The money and the head and the remaining meat and the hump he carried back to Oumarou, because a Fulani elder never shared his cow’s hump with anyone.