Walking with Abel (37 page)

B
ack at the camp the Diakayatés prepared for their own return journey. Hairatou pounded millet and shined castiron pots with her feet. Kajita Pain-in-the-Ass and Bobo took a daylong roundtrip hike to harvest chunks of chalk with which to whiten the calabashes they used to carry buttermilk for sale. They softened the chalk with precious well water and shaped that pliable goo into cylinders and laid them on three gunnysacks to dry.

The day before departure Fanta went to Konkorno to bargain with horsecart drivers about the price of a ride to Ballé. It was high noon. Harsh light rendered granaries in sharp contrast of ivory and indigo. Dogs lay in the pooled circular shadows under the granaries’ raised walls, lolling tongues crusted with sand. Women curtsied and called out asking Fanta for milk and men who weren’t harvesting the drought-stricken millet invited her to drink homemade beer in mango-shaded yards. Already they were slightly drunk and merry. Fanta walked tall and straight past such men and pursed her lips and pursed her lips again at the sight of their neatly fenced pigsties. She ended up agreeing with a bald and toothless old man who slurred his speech from drink or heat or simply exhaustion with so many years of hardship that he would send his son to fetch the Diakayatés the next morning. On the walk back to camp she said:

“I’m afraid of these people, Anna Bâ.”

That night a young man from Konkorno stopped by the camp. His name was Seri Koulibali and he spoke fluent Fulfulde. He told the Diakayatés where to find wild dogs and rabbits to hunt. He told them where to find wild honey to sweeten the evening meal. He told stories of his misfortunes—millet fields scorched by drought one year, drowned and washed away by heavy rains the next. Four children, two wives, two months in a debtors’ jail. Next year, he said, he would hire himself out to a gold mine in Côte d’Ivoire.

“I have a friend in Côte d’Ivoire,” said Allaye. “We should call him and go together.”

“Next time you speak to your friend in Côte d’Ivoire,” said Oumarou, “pass me the phone. I’ll tell him what’s what.”

He changed the subject.

“Seri’s father and I were good friends. We helped each other out. I know Seri since he was a little child, like Amadou.”

“True,” Seri said. “My family has always had a good relationship with Fulani in the bush. I can’t speak for the rest of the village. But for me, I trust them. They come to take tea, to charge their phones in my house, even though we are not the same religion.”

“What’s your religion?” I asked.

“Oh, the whole village is Christian.”

“Christian?” Fanta was stunned. “Christian?”

“Of course. You hear that drumming? Tomorrow is Sunday and the people of the village are celebrating Mass.”

The nomads fell quiet. Seri’s revelation challenged their understanding of the world’s order more acutely than my rendition of the Big Bang theory or the history of early human migration over the Levantine Corridor, or the French airplanes fighting a mechanized war in the Sahara. The villagers of Konkorno did not worship idols, did not make human sacrifices, did not summon malevolent spirits to harm Fulani in the night. They believed in the oneness of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, and it was that God they celebrated with their lush drum pattern that now blossomed on the wind, the rhythm of hoes striking dirt, of emerald cuckoos somersaulting from baobab branches, of mango harvest, a rhythm that did not exhort a searching but asserted an ebullient sense of place, a rhythm that seemed more fitted to a jungle than to this austere arid land.

“La ilaha il Allah!”
Fanta said at last.

Gano lit a cigarette and offered one to Seri. Oumarou, forever on a quest for health formulas, said:

“Smoking isn’t good for you. But if you smoke cigarettes but drink a lot of milk, it’s good for you.”

This was familiar territory. He went on:

“Here we are not supposed to drink alcohol. But in heaven there are four rivers. A river of milk, a river of honey, a river of water, and a river of alcohol. I’ll drink from all the rivers and all of them will taste very good. Milk in heaven tastes exactly like milk here in life.

“Also in heaven I will get a hundred women and all of them will like me, and I will have sex with all of them. You can spend time with all of them and they don’t become jealous. It’s different from here. Here if you have sex with everybody you’ll get sick. If you have sex with everybody you’ll spend all your money. If you have sex with everybody, even if you pray, when you die you’ll go to hell. But in heaven everyone is very clean and no one gets ill. Everyone is the same age: young. In heaven, I will be as young as Allaye, and Fanta here, she will be as young as Hairatou or Djamba. May God bring us all to heaven.”

“Amen, amen, amen.”

Darkness fell abruptly. Across the sky the Milky Way snaked so thick it seemed to bulge. Shooting stars tore off, flamed down. The cooking fire died. In the dust near the adults little Amadou drew cows with his right forefinger. First the vertical lines of their bodies. The horns from the top of each line like the cross-stroke of a capital T. In the middle of each line a fat wishful circle of a hump. When he had populated with cows all the dust within his reach he held his fists above each drawing in turn and milked, and milked.

A
ll along the way from Hayré stretched herds of cattle and goats and sheep. Families camped under roadside thorn trees on bags of belongings with their carts still hitched, waiting to be permitted into the pastures of Ballé. And more nomads were coming, from Sin, from Madiama, from Tombonka, from Won, from Tominian. Acolytes who walked on foot among their herds and rode in carts with chickens and baby goats and infants and guineafowl in their laps and sat astride donkeys and called to one another: “How was your journey?” “Are your cows healthy?” “Was there grass where you were?” and the music they played on their cassette players and cellphones blurred into a dissonant signifier of constant motion. Go on, go on, past cucumber stands and past freshly caught minnows Bozo fishermen dumped in tall shimmering drifts on the ground and past long-stemmed lotuses and long-legged cattle egrets. Herders young and old and most of them male, though Yerourou Sankari, who rainy-seasoned near Madiama, had dispatched his two teenage daughters with his cows because his sons were still too young to cowboy. And the closer these vagrants drew to the Bani the greener became the land, the taller the grass around the irregular rectangles of the year’s poor millet.

The cart ride from Konkorno to the riverside plateau took half a day. The land was luminescent green and absolutely empty of animals. Sita and Saadou made camp in the same spots as before. Oumarou ordered the women to pile their bags much closer to the water. He was eager to leave, to continue on toward Doundéré, to move on, to move. To see again the reserved Sita Louchéré and the babbling Isiaka and to see his cows eat and jump, eat and jump in hippo grass fens. He watched Ousman stake the calf rope north of the thorn tree where the women had arranged their bundles and calabashes and watched the women build a hearth and then, just after the early afternoon prayer, he and Sita Dangéré and several elders from other Fulani families marched to the little Bozo outpost by the river to negotiate the price of transit with the
dioro
of Ballé.

He was gone less than an hour when the world changed color. Just the slightest paling of the light, the barest diffusion of shadows. The air turned titanium and the sky dimmed as if someone had wedged a lens of tinted glass between heaven and earth. The weavers in the thorn tree hushed. Only through a pinprick hole in a piece of paper could you see it: the moon’s dark disk chipping off the bottom eighth of the sun. Just a nailclip. Just for a minute. The Fulani noticed it acutely.

“It’s suddenly dark, what happened?” asked Bobo. And Saadou strolled into the camp very quickly and frowned and said: “Is it day or night? Why is it dark?”

“It’s because someone important died today,” Fanta said. “When my father died forty years ago the day became dark.”

That year, on the thirtieth of June, the path of totality passed over the Sahel. Over Gao the sun disappeared completely for seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds, the third-longest observed solar eclipse in almost fifteen centuries. That was the last year of a five-year famine, one of the worst in living memory to strike the West African savannah, though not as bad as the famine of the nineteen eighties, during which Oumarou lost most of his cattle. That later famine the Fulani called simply the Hunger.

Saadou nodded and sat down. It was probably Kumba’s uncle, he said. He had died that morning a few hours’ walk north of Ballé. He had been ninety-seven years old, blind for years, almost completely deaf. May God protect his soul, his children, and his animals. Already other women who had arrived on the plateau that day were assembling in their vibrant clothes beside Kumba’s hearth, sitting on Kumba’s mat in sympathy. In a few minutes they would rise and lift their hands palms-forward in farewell and walk over to see Bobo and mourn with her for baby Afo. Then they would rise again and continue their colorful and morbid rounds, saying hello and praying for all the dead who had gone since their last meeting.

—

Oumarou returned to the campsite past sundown. The negotiations had been difficult and the price disadvantageous but the
dioro
did invite the cattlemen to bring their animals to the plateau that same night and promised to allow the herds and the herders who wanted to continue to the bourgou to swim across the Bani in four days. The rest of the families would cross by pirogue a few days after that. The nomads would advance toward the bourgou’s waterlogged green heart but they would move no farther than a mile inland until the
dioro
in Senossa gave his consent for cattle to pass through his land, and yet another
dioro
, in Ouro Ali, permitted Fulani cows on the dry hummock between Dakabalal and Doundéré.

It was very late when cattle began to reach the river. Scores, hundreds, thousands. They came unseen in the night. Only the horizon line in the west undulated where their moving contour rippled under the immense starry cosmos. Only the beams of the cowboys’ flashlights, the ceaseless tramping of hooves, the potent smell of chewed grass, the authoritative sonorous bellowing. Hassan arrived with Oumarou’s herd and the animals shuffled into a tired circle in this new and unfamiliar spot and urinated long and noisily into the short grass they had not yet trampled or eaten and afterward they lay down in it and sighed heavily and finally fell asleep. From my mat I could feel their body heat, and the steady and endless thrum of the hoof-falls of the multitudes of other cows still coming. I lay awake and felt that invisible herd swell. The last thing I saw that night, after everyone else in the camp had gone to sleep and only the distant campfires of newcome cowboys were still bleeding into the midnight fog, was Oumarou sitting on a goatskin mat alone, erect, transfixed, like some protective deity quarried out of ancient stone. He sat there long and long watching the animals walk onto the plateau through the chill and the dew.

—

The cows kept coming all night. At cold and damp predawn the camping ground was white with milling animals, and still more were flowing in past dry rice paddies in the east. They glutted the plateau. Like runnels of milk, pouring, pouring into one breathtaking primordial tide of cowness. Their moaning the grounding base note to all the other sounds of daybreak savannah: the parrots, the roosters, the red-eyed rock pigeons cooing in the brush, the lonesome cries of a kingfisher, the goats and the goatherds, the hammering into the ground of wooden spokes for calf ropes. The muffled chomping of broadswords into the limestone of the wooded cliff where the elders were digging a new grave. A small one, for an infant. He had come in the night by donkey cart, with his mother and two siblings. Just a tad feverish, though it may have been the sun on his skin. The family fell asleep under a large acacia tree to the victorious mooing of cattle, and in the morning the baby didn’t wake up.

Fanta and Kumba helped wash him for burial. His father was still en route to the plateau and so other men prayed over his tiny body and put it in the ground on its side facing Mecca and threw thorn tree branches on top and weighed them down with bits of mudbrick to keep wild dogs from digging up the remains. Next to eight other graves recently so covered. Next to the graves of Oumarou’s father, Hashem al Hajj, and children, Adama and Fanta. Next to one of Saadou’s grandsons, the son of Hassan and Kajata.

Across the river, in Kotimi Genepo’s heavenly orchard, there was another fresh grave. Kotimi’s grandson Soumana, the toddler with the distended stomach and the navel hernia, had died during the rainy season. An owl killed him, maybe that owl I once had seen fly out of the palm fronds of Kotimi’s oasis. It gave the child malaria and took his soul.