Walking with Abel (9 page)

B
efore dinner, a thanksgiving. Fanta washed her feet and hands and face from a plastic kettle and veiled herself with one of her pagnes and spread another pagne printed with yellow and green fish in the middle of the swept circle before the hut. She shucked off her flipflops and stepped onto the cloth with bare feet and prayed. Her prayers a murmur, her supplications minimalist, concise, as all her other movements. Oumarou performed his ablutions from a large empty can into which once upon a time a worker at a factory in China had packed one kilo of Manvita tomato paste, but the paste had been gone even before the Diakayatés had found the can on one of their itineraries many seasons ago and collected it and taken it for use as part of their housewares. The old cowboy prayed behind the hut on a sheet of black plastic, discreetly and in silence. At the western edge of the campsite a fire of manure and leaves smoked among the cows to keep mosquitoes away, and near that fire Ousman prayed on a blue plastic prayer mat woven with a faded black ogive of a stylized mihrab. Hassan and Hairatou were still too young to pray.

Outside the hut where Moussa lay sick his teenage sisters and girl cousins laughed among themselves and pounded something in two wooden mortars.
Pah-dum
,
pah-dum
. The pulse of the Sahel. A long smear of cookingfire smoke stretched from Dakabalal and mixed with the mist rising from the rotting marsh, and above the savannah the replicant smear of a single cloud concealed a pale sunset. In the violet afterglow of the day, Hairatou hummed a chromatic song and ladled out two basins of millet
toh
porridge and two small bowls of pounded baobab leaf dipping sauce. She stacked the bowls into the basins and carried the food to the mats outside the hut. Then the sun died and with it all the day’s loud noises and then the quieter sounds of Hairatou’s singing, of calves suckling, of hens digging straw nests, until only the startled squawks of glossy starlings losing their balance in acacia spines interrupted the hushed evening. The family ate. There was a flashlight in the camp but the Diakayatés never turned it on for dinner. Out of prerequisite modesty, the Fulani preferred to eat their dinner by feel.

A little later Salimata came to the campsite with her daughters-in-law and some grandchildren bearing half a calabash of fresh warm milk. The women and the children sat and lay down on two straw mats and some of Oumarou’s grandnephews came also and sat and knelt around the old man on mats and on the ground. Hairatou brought coal for the brazier and Ousman brewed two kettles of strong sweet green tea. With a delicious moaning the cows knelt in the dust one by one. The evening smelled like burning grass, a winter smell that the harmattan hung between the land and the sky. There was no light apart from the cold diamond luster of stars and the fens around the camp bled darkly into the black.

They told stories. They told of naughty bulls that had trampled farmers’ millet and of policemen who had arrested them for transgressions as meaningless as carrying a short sheathed sword and Fanta told stories of heaven and hell and brotherly love and sacrifice. Oumarou said the world had to be very big indeed that it could encompass so many stories and so many people to whom such stories belonged. Someone switched on a flashlight and the shaky white beam picked out the sleeping cows and the people squatted by the brazier and the sleepy children who sat still and upright in their blankets. I lay on my back. Meteors were falling everywhere. When my turn came to tell a story Fanta told me to talk about the sky.

I said the universe was very old and vast and that its origins were difficult to explain because it seemed to have appeared out of an infinitely dense and hot nothingness that nearly fourteen billion years ago had exploded and ushered forth new worlds and galaxies. I said that compared with the unfathomable size of the universe our planet was a round blue bead so tiny it was almost invisible. That the Earth traveled on annular migrations around the sun and that its migrations coincided exactly with the yearly migrations of the Fulani and determined them. That the sun was itself a star that shone off to the side of the massive and ever-expanding group of celestial bodies and gas and debris, a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its lateral disk that very moment adumbrated right above our heads.

I said our sun and our planet and the other seven planets that orbited our sun migrated as well, around the Milky Way, but their migration was much slower and took two hundred and forty million years to complete. It was hard to comprehend such a tremendous span of time. I said the cosmos was so vast that much of it was hard to comprehend but that there were scientists and apparatuses in space trying to learn more about it.

Here I stopped. None of my hosts ever had met a scientist. None of them ever had been to school. None could read or write. Some of the younger men had spent a few weeks memorizing Koranic verses in a madrassa. The Koran proposed that in the beginning heaven and earth had been of a piece until they were cloven asunder and the sky became “as smoke.” In my prejudice, I waited for the Diakayatés to laugh, to refute my pagan cosmogony, my heathen blabber.

Oumarou spoke.

He said he had heard that stars were distant suns. He said the roundness of the Earth was news to him. He said it was a well-known fact that things moved within the sky’s enormity because every thirteen or fourteen days a new constellation rose—twenty-six, all in all, in a year, though he did not remember all of their names. He said we were four days away from the ascent of the next constellation. He said it was obvious that the world was in motion, since a Fulani proverb said, “Our shadows move, our animals move on the Earth that moves, so why should I myself not move?” He had not heard about the heliocentric makeup of our solar system but conceded that it made sense.

“Good story,” he said.

The women rocked on their haunches back and forth in approval and clicked their tongues and said they liked the name, the Milky Way. They said they never had heard of it, but, looking up now, they could see the resemblance. None of them remembered the Fulani creation myth that had preceded Islam. But it remained within them, interwoven in their stardust-laced bones. It went like this:

In the beginning there was nothing. Then there was a huge drop of milk.

—

A cow lowed and shifted in its sleep and the nocturnal grass released the day’s memories: manure, daydreams, footfalls, whistles of a herder. The Vermeer girl, Mentou, no longer sick, had nestled against my hip and fell asleep and snored lightly.

“Good story,” Oumarou repeated. “Go on.”

I said I had grown up in the north of our planet, far from the sun, in a cold land that neither I nor any other who lived there had been allowed to leave. I talked about evening gatherings during which my parents and their friends would talk about adult things I couldn’t understand and I would drift off to the cadence of their conversations, like Mentou. About the sanctity of familiar closeness on such evenings, the trust created and savored, its powers against depravity.

Fanta wrinkled her nose and said, “Families in cities aren’t as strong. Cities are too divided. Besides,” she added, “cities are dirty.”

Soon everyone went to bed and the women corralled the young children one by one, first calling their names and then rousing them from their blankets by hand and half lifting, half dragging their small limp bodies to their huts. The grown-ups prayed one final time. A perfect crescent swung into the sky: a calabash for milking, the horns of a zebu cow. Then Fanta sat on my mat and took my hand and held it until I began to doze off so very much like the little girl I once had been and then she slipped a folded pagne under my head and covered me with an old polyester blanket. The blanket and the pagne smelled like sour milk. I slept.

A
round midnight the cows lowed softly and rose as one. Against the deep sparkled blueblack of the western sky the darker cows stood in full silhouette. On the hides of the piebalds just the chestnut or black patches were visible and the paler spots dissolved into the starry heavens, like constellations. Of the yellow cattle I could see the horns only. Limbs of a bow, lyre arms, arms forever extended either in the gesture of letting go or the anticipation of an embrace.

They urinated long and loud into the dust and some shuddered with only the skin on their thurls and some whipped themselves once or twice with their tails and they headed to pasture. They went on nightherd on their own because they had been grazing in this pasture during the dry season forever and had the route memorized. The older cows led the way. In the morning Ousman would go to pick them up a few miles west of the camp and bring them back and milk them and it would be a new day.

Oumarou came out of his hut with his turban off and his head bare and his chin uncovered, and for a few minutes stood watching the animals go.

On the way back to the hut he paused over my mat.

“Anna Bâ?” he called in a semiwhisper. “Are you warm?”

I was too sleepy to answer. At some point during the night I heard bells. I didn’t quite wake and half dreamed of a thousand silver goats flowing to pasture.

A
cow is the first to smell when something is bad or wrong or rotten. If a cow smells something it will stop and raise its muzzle and warn its herders. If a wild dog runs through the bush and pisses on a tree a cow will smell that wild dog three days later even during the rainy season and will not stop near the tree because cows are afraid of wild dogs. But snakes are afraid of cows because cows stomp them dead. When the rainy season begins and vipers and adders come out of their pits the safest place to sleep is among the cows.

A cow is the best weapon against the genii that live in the bush. Genii enter people and make them aggressive and make them talk gibberish, but they are afraid of cattle. Once upon a time the hillock on the Bani River where Oumarou had buried his father and two children among doum palms and scrub brush had been the home of a powerful genie. No man or woman could walk on that hillock. But after the Fulani made the fields below it a regular stop on their cycle of transhumance and cows began to graze around the hillock by the thousand, the genie left.

Cows are no use against scorpions, however.