Walking with Abel (20 page)

On the morning of the feast Allaye and Yaya and other young men their age cut a tawny yearling out of Sita Dangéré’s herd and led it to the slaughter. Sita and his sons had agreed the night before to sacrifice this specific bull, though the young men made a show of picking it and seeking the formal approval of Boucary, who, as Allaye’s older brother, represented his elders. Boucary nodded a self-important assent and the boys walked the bull a few hundred yards north of the camp to spare the women the trauma of watching the slaughter and stopped at a dip in the land around a fen’s bend. Cattle egrets tiptoed in water filmy and bubbly with frog eggs. Black kites stood motionless and low in the sky in anticipation of a feast, and farther north four Dakabalal donkeys bent into their reflections and drank. Pied crows stood on the donkeys’ backs and surveyed the land, Napoleonic. The boys crowded around the bull and waited for someone to come and slaughter it.

By midday no marabout or butcher had shown up. Perhaps they had forgotten the invitation. Or found the place too far to reach, or the customary pay—the neck, maybe some organ meat—too insignificant. The boys in the groom’s wedding party, nauseated and agog with anticipation of meat, laid the bull gently on its left side and prepared to kill and dress it themselves. But who would do the killing? For any of them to slit the bull’s throat would have signified his subservience to the rest of his age set. At last the set’s leader stepped forward. His name was Adama and he was a striking twenty-year-old who during the dry season pastured his animals near Somena. His impeccable complexion and clean boubou and new leather hat bespoke a particular wealth in milk and cattle. Not even the slavish act of slaughtering a bull for someone else’s wedding could diminish Adama’s standing among his peers.

Blood pulsed from the animal’s neck and its legs sprinted along the wilting grass, miming one last feeble run through the bourgou. When it quit moving, the rest of the men pounced to skin and dress it with their dull short swords—

“Hey, you dumbass, don’t take the meat with the hide!”

“Cut here!”

“Pull harder!”

“Why don’t
you
do it if you’re so smart?”

“Stand the other way!”

—and when they loosed the organs, the bull’s heart was still beating and the men hushed when they saw it.

And hushed again when they got to the testes.

“
Wallahi!
So tiny?”

The wedding guests were all young men. Three boys in their late teens arrived on foot from Somena, wearing identical knee-high soccer socks in black and white stripe and identical Elvis Presley sunglasses with giant white plastic frames. One of them carried a cassette deck on a rope halter around his neck. More came by motorcycle. A few came from Senossa and some from the outskirts of Djenné. They juggled their staffs and their swords and smoked one another’s Liberté Blondes cigarettes and put them out in the fen and drank its rancid water. Several boomboxes were blasting at once and some men also played music on their cellphones: go on, go on, go on, go on, go on! They were dressed in their usual billowing nomad blues though some wore jerseys that said
LIVERPOOL
and
BARACK OBAMA—YES WE CAN!
and
MICHAEL JACKSON
and
ETIHAD AIRWAYS
and they inquired about the roads their friends had journeyed and about their families and animals and they constructed a grill out of some dry mud and sticks. They shared the earthy pink lobes of a kola nut, and hawked bitter orange spittle with numbed gums, relishing the nut’s sweet aftertaste in the back of the throat, its mild high. Kites swooped down from the sky for bits of rumen. Higher still, an invisible French bomber went to war.

By midafternoon most of the meat was cooked medium rare and the young men loaded it onto a tarp and carried it away from the grill and divided it among themselves. They added no spice or salt and the meat was cooked unevenly. It was the first beef most had tasted in months, even a year. Boucary in his extravagant blanket-hat was wielding a whole femur and was taking bites out of its pink flesh. He had severed the bull’s tail from the hide and wrested off its hairy skin, which he spent much of the afternoon stretching onto the wooden handle of his sword. Someone’s younger brother darted to the tarp and made off with two ribs and carried them to the grill, where a dancing and ecstatic crowd of teenage boys clubbed one another with bones and slapped one another with bloody offal. Hassan, Oumarou’s youngest son, usually taciturn and serious, whooped the loudest.

After they had finished their portion of the meat the party guests retreated in waves to drink cool
chobbal
of pounded millet and sour milk and hot pepper and well water in Boucary’s hut. A toddler came by in bright oversize plastic sandals that squeaked with each step. They had been made for larger, industrialized toddlers, presumably to encourage them to walk. In the bush, they could fit a seven-year-old. A seven-year-old in the bush would be herding cattle on his own.

A man walked in carrying on his hip a naked baby boy, a son or brother or nephew. He sat down and lit a cigarette and with the index finger of his free hand gently and absentmindedly flipped the baby’s penis until it was tumescent. The erection put the baby immediately to sleep. The men laughed. It was very hot in the hut. The baby snored lightly, clutching in his sweaty baby hand a piece of gummed red meat.

Young Mentou perched on a waterjug by the door to study the men in silence. A blue plastic pitcher sat upside down on the cracked plastic plate that covered the jug.

Yaya said: “Give me some water, or else I won’t marry you.”

Mentou turned and reached for the pitcher and lifted the plate. Then she thought about it, pouted, let go of the plate, put the pitcher back, and left the hut without a word.

Allaye the groom could not attend his own wedding party. After his friends and brothers had chosen the sacrificial bull, he took the rest of his father’s cattle to pasture. He would eat his portion of the ribs and offal with his dinner. Kajita, his bride, was hiding from the sun in Oumarou and Fanta’s hut. She sat on the edge of the couple’s pallet of wrist-thick beams draped with six layers of reed and thatch mats and gossiped with Hairatou in giggly whispers and ate her wedding beef and laughed from the taste of it on her tongue. The vaulted entryway framed, in middle distance, a murder of pied crows picking apart the carcass of Afo’s dead calf.

—

The guests left in late afternoon. They had to round up and milk their herds. The music and the dancing ceased and the family circulated through the camp slow and satiated. Oumarou had eaten his hump alone in the privacy of his hut and now he reclined on a gunnysack his family used as a mat, a prayer rug, and dry manure storage and dispensed truisms his family knew by heart. “Three things make a person have good blood: milk, honey, and the meat of a fat cow that has never had malaria.” “A real Fulani doesn’t weigh more than fifty kilos.” “The best oil is butter. After that, fish oil. After that, peanut oil. Then shea butter.” He would eat beef twice more this year, and neither occasion would be joyful.

Darkness came and the Big Dipper hung from a thorn tree, empty and dry. Cows stood to shit, then lay down again. In the morning a waxing crescent would mimic their stately horns. One cow rose again and stood guard to the camp. The Diakayatés were drinking evening tea. The conversation turned to weddings.

It cost sixty dollars to marry a woman from the border with Burkina Faso but three times as much to marry a woman from the bourgou. Those amounts did not include the two or three years of engagement during which the groom’s father had to buy his son’s future bride presents for Eid al Fitr and Eid al Adha each year: two or three sets of clothes, shoes, shea butter for her skin, the cost of braiding her hair.

“You spend many years courting a woman, you spend a lot of money,” said Oumarou. “That’s why bourgou men can be thirty years old and not yet married.”

“Marrying a rimaibe woman is cheaper,” said Ousman. The bride price for a rimaibe girl was ten dollars. His own wife was from the bourgou, as was Fanta.

Mama moved hot coals about the brazier with her bare fingertips and looked at me. She knew that I, like her, was divorced. I had told her nothing of my heartache.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “One day you’ll meet someone and you’ll also marry.”

“And you too, Mama.”

“We’ll all dance at your wedding.”

“Thank you. Oumarou, would you slaughter a bull for my wedding?”

“Sure! We’ll slaughter Anna Bâ!”

Everyone laughed. You slaughtered a bull when your son got married, not an adopted strange woman.

Marriages in the bourgou were arranged. They followed years of elaborate inquiries by the parents of both the bride and the groom and years of betrothal and were intended to be failproof. Nor did Islam condone dissolution of marriage. Why, then, did some Fulani get divorced? Fanta and Mama laughed some more. Oumarou said:

“People get married but their ideas about life are not the same. So they separate. Sometimes it’s the woman who decides to get divorced, sometimes the man.”

“But it’s always the woman’s fault,” added Ousman.

“Anna Bâ, Anna Bâ, don’t ask them!” Mama tossed her chin, squinted. “They don’t know anything. They don’t live with people, they live in the bush with the animals.” She seemed to speak not only of her stepfather and stepbrother but also of all the cowboys unseen now in the night. “But I’ll tell you. All the problems in life are because of men.”

Distant flashlights drew sudden arcs in the black, catching batwings, silvering them. Children lay asleep all around and Mentou was cuddled against my knee. She was naked except for a short pagne and her herniated bellybutton pushed into my shin. The protrusion looked somehow indecent. I covered her with my headscarf and rested my hand on her back. Such a skinny girl. A little heart beating inside, warming her, warming me. I felt that we were helping each other breathe.

By the door of Oumarou’s hut the newlywed Allaye squatted in the blue light of his cellphone screen. Some young men crowded around him and looked at the screen and moaned quietly and clicked their tongues. There were no women nearby. I thought the men were watching porn. I stood up and shuffled over to take a look. They were looking at photographs of cows, fat cows with enormous udders and tall humps standing in bright shoulder-high grass.

A
bdoul Aziz Diallo, the Fulani anthropologist, said:

“An old man told me that in the Sahel the world belongs to three things: the frog, the cow, and the Fulani. When you hear the frogs crying in the river, in less than a week you will also hear the lowing of the cows. When you hear the lowing of the cows you will also hear the laughter of Fulani women. When the frog stops crying, you will stop hearing the lowing of the cows, and the laughter of the women. The Sahel will be silent until the next rainy season.”

Frogs had come to the evaporating marshes of the bourgou but the rest of the land was bone-dry and nothing to laugh about. Everything in the bush was hungry and everything survived and nothing complained. In a way the Hoping already had begun. At night the pearly lightning bolt of the Milky Way dripped shooting stars from the sky and charged what was left of the frog-ridden water with its light and from my sleeping mat it looked as though the meteors that fell down simultaneously bubbled up from the marshes. I imagined each egg in the lumpy buildup of frog roe a tiny star.

Homer said that we ride into the future straddling the horse of time backward, our eyes on the past. Oumarou walked into his future on foot, and his eyes were pinned to the sky. He was looking for the West African trade.

The West African trade was a wedge of weather five hundred miles long that pushed northwest out of the equatorial Atlantic Ocean in mid-February and slammed into the coast around Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire at some point in March. By late April an occasional sprinkle usually would bless the Sahel and sizzle in the hot-season dust. The Fulani called such fine rain Mango Rain or Rain of the Trees and the Birds because it did not revive the pasturelands, nor did it herald more immediate precipitation, but it sweetened the mangoes ripening on riverbanks and cajoled some new leaves and allowed passerines to bathe for a few minutes in globules of rainwater. By the second week of June, if all went well, the downpour would begin in earnest, delivering to the bourgou the cooler temperatures, the first smooth lancelike shoots of millet, the migration of the herds. By October, the weakened monsoon would circle back south, completing its annual cycle of rebirth.

The rain’s journey was millions of years old. As far as geological time went, its magnitude and its schedule never had remained set for long. Deposits of eolian hematite dust from the Sahara in the Mediterranean Sea and marine sediment core in the Gulf of Guinea and pollen in West African rivers and lakes show fluctuations in the monsoon’s patterns over time. Millennial oscillations. Stingy sifts of mist to tease the land and then nothing—for years and years. Or deluges on a biblical scale, recurrent Geneses.