Ancestor Stones Read online

  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 b
e 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.

  Later we pass a bus with a broken axle, sliding sideways like a crab caught on the edge of the surf. We leave it far behind as we roll on past shanty towns of scrap metal and tin into the unknown. And there we arrive coated in dust, like we have been rolled in flour and readied for frying. And when I blow my nose the snot comes out red and thick.

  At night the cockroaches drop from the ceiling of the rented room. And in the morning we find them lying upside down under the beds. And I sweep them out and wonder, do they fall from the ceiling already dead? Or do they faint trying to walk upside down and bash their brains out on the floor? Behind thin cotton curtains six other cots are partitioned off like separate states. They are empty. The town keeps nocturnal hours.

  In the early hours of the morning the bursts of music, the shouts and the coarse laughter steal into my dreams. I lie wedged between my brother and my mother, our bodies stuck together with sweat.

  By day Yaya and I stand on the town’s main street and watch rickshaws and carts bumping along the road. A truck full of men — shirtless, carrying picks and shovels — roars past, nearly knocking us down. Once in a while a shiny car glides by, scraping its suspension on the rutted road. We run alongside and try to peer through the dark glass. Try to imagine who could possess a vehicle such as that.

  Eventually we stop and stand still, dizzy at the sight of so much. The people hurry past us heaving bundles, sacks and crates. People here rarely smile or greet each other. After a while I begin to notice that most of the people here are men. We walk past queues of them, arms and legs covered in cracked red mud like elephants’ skin, waiting outside the Syrian diamond traders’ shops. We press our noses against the windows, see men hand over leather pouches, dealers weigh little pieces of grey grit on tiny brass scales.

  The view from our window looks out over pits that line the river like sores on a leper’s mouth. Men in loincloths wade up to their thighs through the rusty shallows, other men dig at the sticky mud with shovels, on the banks of the river more men sift the mud and water in round trays. A vaporous sunlight glazes their shiny black ant bodies and a sour wind drifts across the houses.

  One carat equals ten pounds. Two carats equals twenty pounds. A full three carats equals one hundred and ten pounds. Enough to buy a fleet of bicycles, marry, build a house of baked bricks with a zinc roof.

  Our mother’s bride price equalled the price of a one carat diamond. Cash only. On top of which she received a cow which was hers for the milking. Non-returnable. Two country cloths and four double lengths of waxed cotton, one dozen sticks of salt at two shillings each, cowries, rice, cocoa beans, gold and one umbrella, distributed to guests and family: all were listed by the court and added to the debt. To be repaid in full.

  Our mother knew enough to know that the people who made money in the gold rush were not the miners, but the ones who sell buckets and spades. And so she buys a three-legged stand and sets herself up in business selling eggs on the roadside.

  We buy our eggs for two pennies each, boil them and sell them for five pennies each. A perfect plan except that firewood is not free. Here the trees have all been pulled down to make way for the mines and railways. Firewood sells for fifteen pence a bundle in town, twelve pence a bundle on the road out of town. A dozen eggs equals twentyfour pence, plus fifteen pence firewood equals thirty-nine pence.

  Twenty-one pence profit per dozen. And living costs and everything on top.

  Not all the eggs are good. Some contain the pale foetuses of baby chicks, others are watery and grey. Each time this happens our profits are reduced. The eggs must be conserved. We do not eat them for lunch. We do not eat anything. We nibble kola nuts to ward off the hunger and thirst just like the men in the pits. And mother sends me on the long trek to buy firewood out of town.

  And at the end of more long days than we can bear it is enough. And the end when it comes is marked only by an egg slipping through fumbling fingers and fracturing on the ground. I laugh, because for some reason I think it’s funny. And because we have been fooling around Yaya laughs with me. And so I laugh all the harder to encourage him, and just because I want to. The giggles rise i
n my chest like bubbles of air under water. I don’t notice the way Yaya’s laugh hovers and bursts. Only vaguely do I hear the sound, like a whistling in the air.

  My mother slaps me hard across the face.

  I have forgotten what was so funny. It isn’t funny any more. I bend down to try to scoop the egg up. It stares back up at me like a sorry eye, quivering with glutinous tears.

  ‘Leave it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I say as many times and as quickly as I can. And again: ‘I’m sorry.’ Because I am: deeply, desperately, suddenly. Frightened faces, Yaya’s and mine. No pride, no urge to sulk or seek refuge in swaggers.

  ‘And you think that’s enough,’ my mother says, ‘just like that? You say you’re sorry?’

  ‘But I am sorry.’ My mother looks at me. Her face is empty.

  ‘Well Serah, sometimes sorry isn’t enough.’

  A gecko, hanging in the crevice between the ceiling and the wall, turns its head and blinks as if in disbelief.

  The next morning a line of ants trails across the floor, up the legs of the bed, across the mattress, up the wall and through the window, carrying away grains of sleep and dead skin.

  My mother, curled up on her rented cot, weeps. I clutch her and cry too. I hurt her hurt. I grieve her grief. Yaya sits on the end of the bed, leans over and places his head on her legs, curls up there awkwardly grasping her calves. And the bad feeling settles itself over us like a blanket.

  Hours later I sit up straight and watch my mother as she sleeps. She sleeps on her side with one arm bent beneath her head, the other stiff and straight, trapped under her body. Thinner now, the bones have crept to the surface. A web of cracks in her heels, outlined with dirt. In the dark cups beneath her eyes, a sheen of sweat and oil.

  Behind her shoulder is a tiny, keloid scar with points like a star. I reach out and touch it, feel the slipperiness with my forefinger. When I was very little I used to like to stroke it while I sucked my thumb, when it was still my turn to be carried on her back. Once she told me a shooting star had fallen out of the sky and landed there. Another time she said a firefly had settled on her and forgotten to put itself out first. The last time I had asked her, a few days before, she told me it was nothing: just a spark from a lively fire.