Ancestor Stones (11 page)

I was eating a pear. I remember the taste of it. The pear was overripe, oozing juice and yet sucking the saliva out of my mouth at the same time. It tasted faintly of medicine. I was sitting on the wall outside our house. Pa Yamba had been in my mother's room for a long time. I knew my mother was dying because I had seen Saffie, the youngest of my father's wives, come back from the forest carrying a basket full of the red fruits that grow on the Christmas bush. The fruit was inedible, though birds loved it. For humans they had only one use. When you dropped the fruits in water and left them there for a while they turned the water black and we used them for dyeing things. For dyeing our garments after a death.

I was there when Pa Yamba came out of my mother's room. I saw the line of his lips, pressed together, not quite straight, a small upward curve of satisfaction. And the glow that shone out of those stagnant eyes. And the renewed sureness of his step, the impact of his heel on the dirt. The confidence of power regained. I knew just by looking at him that day that he had used my mother for his own ends.

There are some things I learned early on. When I was a child, even before I realised I had to make my own luck, one thing I worked out for myself was never to let people discover the things
you knew. Keep them to yourself, because then you had the power and they did not. People will always talk loosely; they forget who is listening. In the same way I learned you must never ask a question. Because then people will guess there is something you wish to know. Keep quiet. And listen.

They said she confessed before she died.

And there was more.

So much more.

Ya Isatta's unborn children. My mother had eaten them. And it was she who had been the cause of the flu that left all our chickens lying lifeless in the dust one morning. Even lime and pepper would not revive them. The small whirlwind that spoiled the rows of trees grown from the new kind of coffee bean — that was caused by her dabbling. Pa Yamba had extracted all of these things from her before she died.

Ya Isatta said they should bring back the red water. That was the way, a long time ago, they used to discover who was up to no good. By making them drink it and the ones who proved to be witches died and that was that. And she demanded to know who would compensate her for her lost children. She said it before she saw me standing there. Afterwards she gave a kind of grunt, a noise halfway between a sniff and a snort. And then she took a great big breath, far more air than she needed. And she pushed it out through her nostrils noisily, her lips pursed together and her mouth turned down.

That moment I wished it were all true. I wished my mother had killed Ya Isatta's children. I wished Ya Isatta would carry on inhaling until she sucked her own nose into her face, followed by her lips and her teeth and everything. I imagined her face disappearing like muddy water swirling down a hole until there was just a black space where her head should have been.

Those foolish women with their okra mouths, they did not dare talk that way in front of my father.

She was buried the same day. Finda told me my father took over the arrangements himself, making sure Finda bathed and anointed the body with the proper care, hiring readers to recite verses at the
burial. Afterwards at the graveside, she said, he took some crumbs of the newly dug soil and placed them on his tongue. And he mourned her as though she had been a man, for forty whole days instead of seven.

Still, a man marries expecting to lose a wife or two. Wives pass on all the time bringing new lives into the world. Nobody dresses up all in black, just the hem of a
lappa
trailed in black dye. Relatives arrive to stay in her house, lay claim to her gowns, her cooking pots, her jewellery, even her little guitar which none could play but someone could sell.

And when the week is over everything is gone. Only her children are there still to be disposed of.

Ibrahim and Idrissa, they were the lucky ones. Not so long after my mother died men appeared in the village, one a white man. They set up a table in the middle of the village next to the
barrie
. The
potho
sat behind it. The other one — a Koranko, so told the short scars that marked his cheekbones — stood next to him. The
potho
said he was the Queen's representative, recruiting soldiers to fight in a war to save the Empire. The Empire to which every one of us belonged. The pair were travelling throughout the country enlisting fighters. They had orders from the Queen that each village must nominate at least six men to the cause.

A distance from the houses more men were cutting down bamboo poles and binding them with ropes, laying palm leaves on top. In the evening we watched the same men stripped to the waist, torsos glowing in the red evening light, marching up and down in rows and swinging their arms under the command of the Koranko whose name was Saj Majoh.

Saj Majoh acted as translator for the white man. Under his command the recruits ran, jumped, lifted up logs, until he was satisfied they had the strength to become soldiers. In the evening he told the men who gathered around that they would be given as much food as they could eat and taught to march, to fire a gun and to read and write. He told them that in addition to all of this they would be paid three silver shillings every single week.

My brothers promised they would write as soon as they learned how. Nobody thought to ask how I would read their letters. They marched away, pounding the ground with such force they caused the earth to shake, singing a newly learned song at the tops of their voices. All the shouting and stamping disturbed the bats hanging in the branches of the cotton tree who loosened their claws, unfolded their wings and swirled up into the sky above the brigade of men, trailing them like an omen.

Ibrahim and Idrissa were being sent away to fight in a war, but still it made me envious to watch them go, and sad to think I was left all alone. The question nobody cared to answer was who would take care of me. My mother's family had left without taking me with them for they were poor and thought I would be better cared for in my father's house. Finda was just a servant, I was not her responsibility. Besides, I had seen how she acted around the sugar cane seller, standing with her hands on her hips, her back arched so her breasts and bottom jutted, denouncing the quality of his produce in a too, too loud voice. And I had seen the way he stood, resting on one leg with his chin pointed at her as though he relished the insults.

You know that fountain at the crossroads in the middle of town? Three pools of water and a fountain. Well, the pools are empty and the fountain doesn't work, and now the concrete is all cracked. Built for a big conference twenty years ago. All those heads of state flew in. I remember. I remember standing outside the brand new hotel, watching them arrive one by one in black limousines. The presidents and generals sitting in the back, waiting while their drivers climbed out and walked round to open the door for them. Then the driver had to close the door and walk all the way back around, start up the car and drive out. They could have just reached for the door handle. I didn't think of that then. We were so impressed. The cars were all backed up. It took some of those big men twenty minutes just to get inside the hotel. And that fountain never worked properly from the start. It was painted in the colours of the national flag. The pools of water were supposed to trickle into each other.

This is what I think about luck. Luck is like adjoining pools of water, each flowing into the other. One pool might be dry, the next pool overflowing. It's the same with luck. Some people have everything. Other people have nothing. The people who have plenty just seem to get it all, all the luck that ought by rights to belong to someone else. That's the way it was with me. Always the luck just seems to drain out of my pool and into somebody else's.

The first time I had this thought I was floating on the water in a canoe. I was on my back staring at the sky with my eyes shut, the sun a vast orange ball against a black sky. I squeezed my eyelids harder shut and watched the colours change: bursts of blue, then violet, then red, like fireworks.

Somewhere Ya Isatta was calling my name. I could not have heard her from where I was, but I knew it anyway. I knew she would be calling me to run with a message, or fetch her a cup of water, or help her search for her head-tie or prayer beads because that was all she ever did, all she ever had done since she moved into my mother's house.

When I opened my eyes the world had turned black and white, blurred, like a charcoal drawing somebody had tried to rub out. Sketched trees and mangroves, branches overhanging me black against the sky, and the grey, twisted trunk of the tree the canoe was tied to.

I sat up and stared at the water. I saw my own reflection and gazed at it for a second before the movement of the canoe in the water caused my face to wrinkle suddenly. The sun glared down on the water, but here and there, where the shadows of the trees fell, it was possible to see right down into the yellowish depths to the mud and weed growing on the bottom. A shoal of tiny fish darted past, zigzagging, flashing as their scales reflected the sunlight. I watched them go. In less than a day the fishing season would start again.

The canoe floated upstream of the dam the men had built across the water. The dam was built every year during the dry season when the water was low. When the rains came the stream swelled and the level of the water above the dam rose. The fish spawned
and grew fat, trapped behind the wall of logs. On the last day the men set their traps: long, conical baskets pushed into the dam wall at intervals. They stuffed the ends with rice and the fish swam down to feed and were trapped. In the morning, at the same time as the women prepared to enter the water with their nets, the men would come down and heft the baskets out of the water. Baskets brimming with fish. Fish for the evening meal. Fried fish for breakfast. Fish for smoking in giant kilns. Fish for the days of hunger, when the river was barren as the desert.

As I stared into the water I thought about my mother. I thought about the way Pa Yamba had tricked her when she was dying and I thought of all the people who chose to believe the lies because it suited them that way. I thought about her life, now overshadowed by the manner of her death. I thought about all these things. And as I sat there — just like that, I thought of a way to turn my luck around.

I crawled out of the boat and made my way through the tangle of trees to the edge of the dam. The ground was muddy. I nearly caught my foot on roots many times. Tiny crabs hanging from the branches dropped down and clung to my clothing. I worried about the water snakes that liked to disguise themselves among the roots of trees. I pulled my
lappa
up and knotted it up around my chest and I slid into the water on the other side of the dam. I waded in until the water came up to my chest.

It wasn't easy. Especially with the first one. I was hampered by the water and my feet slid in the mud. So then I found a piece of wood and pushed it in between the edge of the basket and the logs, and in that way I levered the basket out. The water came gushing through the hole I had made, and with it dozens of the fish caught behind the logs.

Thrashing carp and smooth, whiskered catfish, curled eels, snapping tigerfish and snouted barbs; fish spotted, striped, scaly, smooth. Water and fish poured over me and almost knocked me over. I put out my hand and touched them as they swam past, stroking their sleek bodies with my fingertips. The next moment they were gone. I stood there breathing for a while, waiting to see if
anybody who happened to be down by the river had noticed. But all was quiet except for the faint hum of insects and the sound of water pouring through the hole in the dam.

The rest came easily. And by the time I reached the other side the dam was beginning to break up. Small logs dislodged themselves and floated downstream after the traps and the fish. I pushed at the remaining heavy logs and they felt light. I thought probably it was too dangerous to swim back the way I had come, so I made my way up the opposite bank and crossed further upstream where the water was deeper but the river was narrower. And I walked back home through the rice fields and allowed my clothes to dry on the way.

Of course they all thought it was her. My mother — come back for revenge. Whatever else they did or did not believe, there was not a soul in the village who dared defy a ghost. And Pa Yamba made an offering to try to appease her. I laughed inside, especially when Ya Isatta began to tell me how much like my mother I was, trying to flatter me. I just bowed my head modestly and thanked her, never looking at her directly. But I could feel the big yell growing in my chest, bursting to come out. How I wanted to throw back my head and open my mouth wide and shout at her, shout at them all and tell them it was me. It was me. It was me who let the fish out.

But I knew better than that. Life hadn't been fair to me. I kept quiet. And that day I learned how to turn my luck around.

My mother? I haven't thought about her in a long time.

My mother left.

Tried to alter her destiny. Looking back it was a brave thing to do, I suppose. Foolish, maybe. I don't know. Who did she think she was?

She was Saffie. The tenth wife. Imagine it.

A tenth wife has no status. Not much better than a servant. But sometimes it is the lowliest people who have the most courage — because they're the ones with the least to lose.

There are things I remember. I don't know if any of it makes sense. Some questions were never answered. And there were other things I made myself forget.

Well, let me see. Where do you want me to start?

My mother used to tell me how she first met Ya Namina. My mother was a young girl standing at the side of the path when Ya Namina and her entourage passed by on their way back to Rofathane. She had been at court with her husband and was returning without him. My mother was carrying a pot of water and she stepped off the side of the road to allow this woman past. Whoever she was, my mother could see she was important. Everybody around her was laden while she walked ahead unburdened.