Dust (9 page)

Musty-earthy:
The Flowers of Kenya
.

Fingers run across book spines.

Tactile familiarity.

A gap, an uneven bump; the rhythm is off.

Some books are missing. She looks. Crusty clove and fecund green smells: the engineering and agriculture books—Odidi’s preferences. Ajany pulls out a large gray
History of Art
and turns to the first blank
page. There “Hugh Bolton” has scrawled his name in semi-cursive script. Most of the books had once belonged to Hugh Bolton. Odidi had nicknamed Hugh Bolton “Someone Else.” “Whose books are these?” Odidi asked his parents one day. Akai-ma had snarled, “Someone else’s.”

Someone Else
. As Ajany’s hand hovers over the book, her mind replays a humid evening when the family sat in this room. In the armchair, Baba gripped the edges of the Dhouay-Rheims Bible as his lips moved, spelling out words letter by letter, unease furrowing his face, as if he were memorizing a damning verdict in an alien language.

It had been a good time for Ajany to show off her improved reading skills. Drawing in breath, she spelled out: “H-U-G-H, Hugg, Huff … Baba, what’s a Hug-g B-Bolton?”

Nyipir’s head had almost jumped out of his neck. In one move, he dropped the Bible, surged up, strode over, and snatched the book from Ajany’s hands, snapping it shut. In a shredding tone he said, “Brush your teeth. Go to sleep. It’s late. You, too, Odidi.”

Ajany had run out of the room, down the steps, and into the living room and thrown herself behind a settee. Odidi found her there. He crawled in next to her, let her weep into his shoulder. “I c-can’t never get the spellings right,” she mourned.

Odidi had said, “ ’Jany, ’Jany, don’t cry.”

She had wept until she fell asleep in her brother’s arms.

Now.

Ajany rustles book pages, sitting cross-legged between a gramophone and a Lamu chest, next to which lie three elephant tusks and moth-eaten sheepskin rugs. In the room, four
leso
s in a heap, a curved horn on which fat white cows with slanted eyes are painted in brown, gold, and white, Ethiopian Orthodox art, wood etchings, and landscape watercolors. A twenty-by-forty-centimeter painting titled
The Last of the Quaggas
. On the eastern wall, a still-flaking depiction of a green robed Saint George conversing with a resigned gold-sashed, golden-fire-sworded Archangel Uriel with only a quarter of his grandeur intact, victim of the brown dirt trails of termite nests.

A creak and grumble from one of two massive water tanks sitting on platforms and posts inside the roof. They had leaked for years, creating
a grooved, reliable wide tear line that sustained the life of small things. Ajany disturbs a small cloud of insects as she wanders out. She falters outside Odidi’s room.

Odidi
.

Crossing time, she trudges in, looks around, glimpsing shadows of brother that slice into her heart, her stomach. No tears. Ajany sits on Odidi’s low acacia-wood bed, rearranging its grimy, thin floral cover. Dust of spaces. In the wall recesses that served as his cupboard, emptiness. Ajany folds herself into his old bed and curls into a ball, hands clinging to feet, as she remembers the things that make a brother: Voice. Deep-seeing eyes. His music—old fashioned Afro-rumba. Franklin Boukaka, Fundi Konde, Mzee Ngala. Addiction to water songs—a liturgy of flowing, bubbliness. Even the camels listened to him. Rockdrill laughter, excavating terror; salt in soup; no sugar in tea made from rangeland herbs. Sign of the cross before converting a try—Shifta the Winger’s trademark. Soaring out of bed to meet the sun, shaking his sister awake and making her join him in watching sunspots grow and grow. Whistling. Odidi lying on warmed-up stones to witness the evening’s departure. Large arms—wings, really—that engulfed fear. Words suggesting Obarogo and then vanquishing the bogeyman in the same breath. Heartbeats.
This is my brother
. And then, in dreams, she has returned to Wuoth Ogik and Odidi is shouting from
akwap a emoit
—the land of antagonists—that she hurry to watch the advent of a moonlit indigo night.

The Kalacha dusk will soon descend in colors borrowed from another country’s autumn. Cattle will low their way home, bells clanging; white Galla goat kids in the
boma
will raise a chorus in answer to Galgalu’s whistling. Barking herd dogs; bleating fat-tailed, black-faced sheep. Nyipir will watch his animals return, greeting them by name, observing marks, bumps, limps, and moods. He will stroke the head and trained, curved horns of his elegant red dance-ox. When she wakes up, hours later, after remembering where she is, Ajany will join Galgalu in the milking shed.

What endures?

Heat of fresh milk.

A kid butts Ajany’s leg. She shoos it away.

What endures?

Galgalu.

What endures?

Fear of lunacy.

But not if she dies first.

Ajany glances at Odidi’s coffin.

Nightfall endures.

And when, later, flames sputter inside Galgalu’s cracked hurricane lamp, an orange glow appears, the same as that which had assured two desert children that light confounds darkness. That is how they wait for Akai-ma to return home.

5

THE NEW DAY
’
S MORNING LIGHT DRIPS AND ENGRAVES HUMPS
into surfaces. Nyipir stares at his gnarled hands, hands that scrub his face four times a day, and have done so for forty years. Galgalu leaves to pasture the ranch animals. Enshrouding the land a mantle of silence that is vast, feral, and resplendent under naked blue skies in a season that is drier than a dead chameleon’s hide. The stillness is interspersed with the buzz-drone of blue flies.

Nyipir now wipes the coffin lid until it shines, and he greets his son: “You look well.” Slurred words. Nyipir imagines his son’s rock crypt. “I’ll build you a home big and strong … as you are.” New lines on his face: “You’re safe now.”

When he lifts the hoe to dig, old scars tingle in his hands, burning a silent man from the inside out. Nyipir hits the ground to the tune of one-word thoughts:
Akai!
Her name is a snuffle. And then it is noon, and her name—
Akai
—is a hard, salt tear ball stuck in the back of Nyipir’s throat.

Within that day, sporadic howls, and Galgalu crashes into the courtyard without the livestock. A jarring
“Wo d’abeela, halale …”

An elderly keeper of ritual turned necromancer, a
d’abeela
, had turned his turban on him—a death curse. Galgalu flings the rusty G3 rifle to the ground, and turns to see if the rabid elder has followed him.

“What? Where?” Nyipir wields the hoe, fight-ready, thinking of his buried arsenal inside the cattle
boma
, of how to reach it, how to distribute arms.

Ajany runs into view. Galgalu stretches out his right thumb to squeeze his tears. He blows his nose with his other hand; the sounds are interrupted by his muddled words:
“Aya! D’abeela … wo d’abeela.…”

“Who?” Nyipir shouts.

This is what had happened:

All had been well at the western pastures when Galgalu had blown air into his cupped hands—a whistling
—fuulido
—to summon a bird, a white, long-tailed honeyguide. It appeared. He followed it. As he scrambled through the scrub, he heard bees buzzing. He was reaching for the honeycomb when he heard a piercing cry, thought it was an eagle, and swung around to look. There, standing behind him, was a
d’abeela
.

The disenchanted priest had been prowling the land looking for people upon whom he would incant malice and whom he could afflict with the miserable bile that broiled in his soul. God had abandoned him. He would show God that he was not too old to taint favored souls. Too old! All his five sons had participated in the decision to replace him, as if he were already dead. So he had escaped the boundaries of his vast home, wandered farther, and turned his stiff white turban so its seams were at the front rather than on the left, where they should always be. The gesture was the ritual, the performed curse. So fearful that not even the dying named it, so rare, it had not been seen in five generations. So potent, nothing existed that could halt its malevolent intention. The
d’abeela
had happened upon a honey-seeking fool.

Incessant flies buzz. Kites soar. Ajany’s eyes fixate on Galgalu’s fallen rifle. “Where are the animals?” she murmurs.

“The animals?” Nyipir repeats to Galgalu.

Galgalu uses his chin to point westward.

Nyipir shouts to Ajany, “Bring your gun.”

“Where is it?” Her heart is screaming.

“Galgalu’s room.”

She pivots, runs toward the adobe hut.

Inside the three-roomed shelter with assorted pictures papering the wall, a sepia photo of Akai-ma, and a Sellotaped copy of the Oganda family photograph, an Ethiopian calendar featuring Orthodox saints, three folding chairs, a slightly raised bed. This had been one of Ajany’s childhood sanctuaries. Here she could hide from everything and Galgalu would pretend not to know where she was.

Ajany now crawls under the bed, looks around, retrieves a rifle stored in a broken wooden box.

Baba had called her aside on the day she turned thirteen. “Choose one,” he had said.

She had looked at the weaponry. “Which one?”

“The one you like.”

She had chosen the prettiest one, an AK-47 with a Type 4B receiver. Baba weighed the rifle, winked at her, and handed it to her. “Now you’re ready for your wars.”

Ajany had spent three school holidays taking the rifle apart according to the lessons Baba had condensed for her.

Depress magazine catch. Remove magazine. Pull charge handle to rear. Is chamber empty? Press forward retainer button at rear of cover to remove it. Spring assembly forward. Lift, withdraw out of bolt carrier. Pull carrier assembly all the way to rear. Pull away. Push bolt, rotate bolt to clear raceway, pull forward and free. Click, click, and click
.

Shooting lessons. Baba taught her how to aim and not move her shoulder back when a cartridge fired.

She lifts the rifle to her shoulder.

Afterward, Odidi had taken over the lessons. She remembers his hands on her shoulders, leveling her. Looking through the sights, she sees his body in the morgue. A bullet’s trajectory, and an incomplete statement:
Cause of Death
.

Ajany returns the gun to its hiding place, then races out of the hut, her body damp, mind whirling, and hands trembling.

The ranch gate swings wide.

Baba’s gone.

Galgalu the honey seeker sobs in a crouch. Because his soul has been profaned, because when he first saw the
d’abeela
he thought his father had returned to accuse him of all he had not done.

Ajany hunkers down next to him.

Galgalu’s horrified eyes—life’s layers shorn off.

She touches his shoulders, lifts the amethyst necklace from her neck, and slips it over his head. She touches the stone. Galgalu’s fingers close around it. Then, head on knee, Ajany listens to the land. They wait.

In the dusk of that bad day, Isaiah William Bolton arrived with a dust devil under the guardianship of a red-orange sunset that colored the twisted acacia tortilis gold. He showed up on the trail of nonstop weaverbird song, his athletic build drooped, and he reeked of fresh leather, cow dung, cow sweat, and cow saliva. He was unshaven and mottled. His haversack was stained, and his boots were red with dust. He had wrapped his jacket around his head: sun protection. Gray-edged curls were plastered on his forehead, and his lips were caked with white. He had croaked a call, “Is this Wot Ogyek?”

At the horizon, a train of camels, a line of sedate movement. Burbling of water, a brook’s language.

Passages.

A scorpion crosses Isaiah’s path from left to right, changes its mind, and heads for Isaiah’s foot. Isaiah jumps backward.
Ultima Thule
, he thinks. Totters. Tries again, “Er … hello, I’m here for Mr. Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda.”

Returning from the
boma
where he has secured the animals, Nyipir hears the precise pronunciation of Odidi’s name. He wipes his hands on his shirt, picks up his herding stick, and crosses the space, his right hand outstretched in greeting. Ajany, who is leaning against Odidi’s coffin, listens in.