A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (26 page)

Part
Four

THE GOLDEN KEY

· 37 ·

Oddities

B
Y THE TIME
Henry arrived in Ijaye, men from Moore’s congregation had carried the reverend to Abeokuta to be nursed at the Anglican mission. Henry spent two days in the town, letting the horse rest, doing some repairs on his old house. The fellow he had hired to look after it was proving reliable enough, but no one cared for a house as well as the man who made it. He joined a group of traders for the return journey. Now that it was the dry season and the roads were firm, they might be required to camp only once. The Oba River could now be forded by foot. They spent a night near a drying creek, more like a swampy pit. In the evening, he felt a sting at his wrist and slapped at the mosquito. It left a bloody smear.

Henry rode first to the new house. He would only look to see the progress and greet Jacob. He wouldn’t even dismount before going to check on Emma. But he found the roof framing exposed as a skeleton except for the lower rounds and no one on the premises. Everything was extremely neat. For a moment, Henry wondered if the rapture had come and he had been left behind. Not even a leaf stirred, but he heard a susurration. He bellowed against it. “What has the blasted man done? The job was laid out!”

Had something happened?

He turned the borrowed horse, switched its rump, and made straight to the compound. In the same instant, he saw Emma at the kitchen—she appeared perfectly fine—and he saw Jacob, off to the left, propped against a tree, leisurely reading a book. It seemed he recognized something. They had been together in a way he had not comprehended before; some exchange had been made. He was outside their knowledge. They had thought him a boy, stupid. He dismounted and aimed himself at Jacob, who seemed to him now filled with a terrible sluggishness. “What are you doing here when my house stands naked in the compound? He pointed back in the direction he had come. “Why aren’t you doing as I told you? Where are the workers? Have I spent six months teaching you and when I go off, trusting you, I come back to find you taking your rest?”

The man rose and looked beyond him. He shook his head and set the book down calmly, as if it were a photograph of a sweetheart he had taken to study before his execution. And then he ran off, loping down the hill, straight through the Africa room, and out of the compound.

Henry learned the story of the windstorm from Emma. Immediately he felt deep remorse for assuming the worst about Jacob, who was a loyal friend and a good worker. Then he resented feeling guilty. He had been called away and traveled unnecessarily and found nothing but damage and financial setback when he returned. He felt a thumb-sized wizard enter his head and go about knocking over every good thing he had ever done. He fumed. And then the specter of his bony death rose before him and hung like a dark shroud, heavy and weightless. He was chilled, as if some old crime had come up and embraced him. He needed a whiskey, just enough to calm his nerves.

In the morning, he saw Jacob back at his fire. He watched the boy lace his hands through his brother’s arm. When he approached the pair, the boy looked at him in a manner close to scorn.
What a cad I’ve been
, Henry thought.
Even Abike must consider me half-crazed.
But he could not find the humility to throw himself on Jacob’s mercy. He apologized indirectly by asking for help. “Mrs. Bowman tells me you expect new thatch today. Can we get some women to help us lay it?” Jacob agreed, though it seemed with smothered rage.
I’ll deal with his mood later
, Henry counseled himself,
and Emma’s too
. Since his outburst she had held herself aloof from him, as a college girl might tend to a country bumpkin. She probably had that very concept in her head. Well, she would need him soon enough. A chicken dared to cross his path and he kicked at it, but the bird was faster than his boot.

He and Jacob worked twelve-hour days, completing the roof, hanging doors, carrying out last details of house building. In the evenings, Emma would not share his lamplight. Jacob ignored him. With one kind word, he might repair the damage, but nothing in his life had taught him to back down. One afternoon he took off his boots to wash his feet and thought:
I should wash Jacob’s feet.
He contemplated the notion for a moment, and the beauty of the gesture nearly brought him to tears. Then his feeling made him agitated. He put his boots back on and went to the new house and worked by lamplight. There was a house to finish, and it had to be done now. He thought he was happier working alone. Indeed, he considered that such a state of mind as his was necessary for all great accomplishment. Michelangelo did not worry about children as he painted. Leonardo da Vinci did not make up to his wife in the midst of inventing. Columbus did not sail for the New World wondering if his crew was disappointed with his temper. Moses did not consult his servants on the exodus. Whether Moses took a bit of laudanum to calm his nerves, Henry could not say.

One evening the moon came full, offering pale light, and Henry went to the parlor to collect his journal. He wished to describe a granite boulder he had examined between Ijaye and Ogbomoso. Emma’s letter opener lay on the table, seeming to catch light from the doorway, and it drew his gaze. He was a man who studied oddities, but he had never seen wood so fetched by moonlight. He picked the thing up and it felt warm, which was odder still. Direct sun might create such an effect but not moonlight. He passed his hand over it, and the glow seemed to brighten. It spooked him. All this time, he had observed Africans worshipping queer carvings and he had never seen a one that made an impression on him. He was seized with the notion that this one had taken on power. His chest felt hollow. “What kind of wood is this?” he wondered aloud. He called to Emma, forgetting his anger. “Look here,” he said, pointing to the implement. They gazed at it for a moment. “This pagan relic has no place in a Christian home,” he said, picking it up. Emma laid a hand on him.

“Where are you going with that?”

“I’m throwing it out.”

“You’ll do no such thing. That carving is mine. You may be the husband, but you are not the owner—” She paused. “You do not own that.”

He handed it to her and retreated onto the piazza. His hand shook all night and he never got to describing the boulder.

· 38 ·

A Matter of Trees

F
OR
E
MMA, THOSE
evenings with Jacob—sorting the Yoruba notes, Wole and Abike in the room, Duro sitting at the door, constant as Jesus—were a moment of Eden in which the human family is perfect. How odd that it required her husband’s absence to make it so. She was late in her seventh month, almost two years married, twenty-two months in Africa. Wisps of lavender veins showed up in the pale skin of her breasts. They seemed to sing like happy birds every morning as she dressed, pressing her light clothing against them. The feeling was delicious all through her. She kept Henry at a distance, but she could not stay angry. There were too many sources of joy. She wrote them out, humming to herself.

Wole came today with the most lively drawing of Caesar. In the image, he had set himself, not Henry, on the horse. He wanted me to keep his treasure in my box and of course I obliged him. I surprised myself yesterday, toting a bucket of water. It seemed quite easy. I seem stronger in every way and not the least anxious about my time. I should write to the board recommending that any woman bound for Africa build up her strength before coming: in riding, walking, lifting, rifling. I wonder what the good reverends would think.

When Emma woke the first morning in the new house, shutters open, sunlight spilling across the bed, she felt she was in a storybook. She stretched herself as she walked out through the bedroom door, thrilled by its height. Though she knew the place already, she took a stroll in the yard, running her hand in a circle about her large middle. Wole came to join her, taking her hand. There was the encompassing wall with a lovely portico at the front of the compound where she envisioned a climbing morning glory. In the distance she could see the Ilorin Gate, the northern portal of the town. In the other direction, southward, was the borrowed compound they had just left, and yet half a mile farther on was the Baale’s palace. Emma and the boy walked around to the backyard, toward the kitchen with the extra room where Duro, Jacob, and the child were sleeping until their house could be built. “Have you had breakfast?” she said.

“Yes mah,” the boy answered.

At the back of the property stood a thatched shed. She peered into it. Leftover wood and unused brick and the hammock. The privy stood nearby. Some honeysuckle there, she deliberated.

During lulls in unpacking, Emma made sketches for a garden. The rains would come and she had Uncle Eli’s seed: cucumber, radish, onion, squash, zinnia—and pole bean seed from the Hathaways. Once in her sketching, she thought she heard the old man’s voice:
You find a place.
His face came to her with great clarity. “I’ve found one,” she said.

The Iyalode came to call, bringing English tea as a housewarming gift. Emma was amazed at the woman’s capacities. At night she slipped into bed against Henry, lying on her side, resting her hand in that hollow beneath his ribs.

One Wednesday evening a group gathered at the edge of the new compound, and Henry spoke on Lazarus. “
Eyin ore mi
,” he said, “my friends. Until we know the Savior, we are all dead, shut up in tombs. But when we open our hearts—” Here he opened his jacket front as if opening a gate. “When we open our hearts and Jesus comes in, he awakens us into new life. You will know it because you will cry with joy.”

Emma watched passersby, several of whom came and sat with them as they sang. She thought hungrily about the chicken stew Duro was preparing for the evening meal. Her eyes lingered on Jacob. The next thing she knew, two vultures flew into the branches of a nearby baobab. They perched wretchedly among the copper-colored leaves, their squawking raw and ugly.

Later a report came that a great strangeness had occurred: A melee of cattle had crushed a girl in the borough where the
oyinbo
had erected his house. The strangeness lay in the cattle’s stampede. Cattle from the north did not act so. It was hard enough to make them move when you beat them. Two days later, the district chief arrived at the house. He and Henry sat on the piazza. Emma observed them through the window.

“I am sorry to hear about the girl,” Henry said. “How old was she? Please tell the mother—” Emma observed him testing his midsection. He seemed at pains.

“A sacrifice must be made to the
orisha
of the tree,” the chief said. He pointed, Emma thought, toward the baobab. “You have offended it since you held your meeting here. The leaf is falling. An omen was placed by the vulture.”

Henry looked up as if he had forgotten the chief and was occupied in another train of thought. “The tree?” he said.

“Yes,” the chief said.

“The living God has not done damage to the baobab,” Henry said. “The leaves fall because we have had no rain, though I wish we would.”

“The mother will also require some payment,” the chief went on.

“I would like to speak with the mother,” Henry said. He seemed to be finding himself again. “She may prefer a God who does not crush little girls to make a point. There is no payment sufficient for a child—” Again Henry stopped. He looked away and when he turned back his face was wet.

The chief’s cap was like a smashed turret of a castle. “Your words are distressing to us,” he said.

Distressing.
That was how Emma took his Yoruba, and she wondered that he could not see that her husband was distressed. Then she wondered about Jesus. Had His death been necessary in order for God to make a point? Wasn’t that what she had believed? It didn’t seem a clear and shining idea at the moment.

* * *

“I
’LL CALL ON
the Baale,” Henry said later, stern again, as if it had embarrassed him to cry. “It’s his intention for us to settle and work here. One chief won’t stand in our way.”

Drums sounded in the distance.

“I’m afraid,” Emma said.

“There’s no reason,” he said.

“Yet I am,” she said.

“Have you ever been frightened in a dark room?”

Jacob came to the parlor door. Emma gazed at him, beyond Henry, where Henry could not see him. “Yes,” she said.

“If someone brought a lantern and showed you that nothing was there, were you still afraid?”

Yes
, she thought. “I suppose not,” she said, her eyes in flight between the two men.

How exacting this country was, how hard to proceed, how difficult to be a woman, to find peace.

· 39 ·

Keep Running

H
ENRY CLEANED HIS
boots and rubbed them with lard. He was behind on the vocabulary. There wasn’t yet so much as an Africa room for regular preaching on the Sabbath. His wife expanded by the day but not their funds. His servant was still at arm’s length. He woke in the new house one night to hear voices coming from outside the window. It froze him.

“You’ve put a lot of weight on her shoulders.”

“Why do you speak as if I intended it?”

“Intentional or not, she has too much to carry.”

“She seems to be bearing up well. Her body gains strength while mine diminishes. You’d think the baby she’s carrying was feeding from me.”

“You sound awfully self-pitying.”

“Look at her and look at me. She shines like a girl in love.”

Henry thought to reach for Emma but hated to wake her. Besides, what would he say? “Do you hear those voices on the piazza?” He pulled up the cover.

“You can’t hide from yourself. It plagues you, the lack of converts. The people you think of as yours were baptized by someone else: Jacob, Duro, even Abike. You feel yourself to be a eunuch.”

“You come around when I’m weak. You’re nothing more than a forked-tongue devil, tempting me to nervousness.”

That was himself outside.

“You were spooked by that old man’s carving.”

“I like a mystery.”

“Tell yourself what you wish. It’s you who torment yourself. You’re the one who impales himself on the sword, who keeps picking at yesterday’s wounds. Maybe you can trace your errors back to the day of creation. Maybe you’re Adam. The whole story is about you. All I said was your wife bears too much weight. Why is it, by the way, you keep running, from her and everyone else?”

“Silence, will you! I’m not running but following God’s will.” Were the voices in his head?

“If you’re so fine and dandy, why do you keep a personal supply of laudanum stashed as a boy keeps his pictures of girls?”

“There’s no crime in medical treatment; my wife, as you say, has enough to worry on.”

“It’s your own thought I’m speaking. And why do you hide the rifle?”

“You are not my true thought. Beginnings have to be made. I had hoped for more by now, but even the Yoruba know that our time is not God’s time. If I give myself as an instrument, God cannot fail, though I may not see the harvest. I came to lay the foundation. What’s the firearm got to do with it?”

Henry thought maybe he was dreaming and tried to press out of the vapors, but it was too hard and he could make no headway.

“Soon you will talk about hacking away at stone for a foundation, as if it were your job to build a church out of the very rock of the earth. You expose your vanity in your choice of images. You have always thought Emma lucky to be courted by you. You’ve always loved your own beauty. But you’ll be out of cowries soon, and then how handsome will you be? You had better swallow your pride and ask for a loan from Hathaway. Emma needs flour, not yam.”

“I have other ways of making do. I can sell the saddle.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to? I see around that, and so does your servant Jacob, by the way. The Hausa can make saddles aplenty. You’ve not got much of a store in that particular item. The help you need is within reach. You get it like other men when they have to. Ask a friend. Humble yourself. But you don’t believe you’ve achieved anything unless you suffer. You behold your past as a cathedral of sin and carry it on your back every day. If you’re so serious about paying up, whip yourself into shape. Draw the sting to the surface. Do it so you can attend to your wife and the people who depend on you.”

“Your language is poetic, but I stopped listening to you a while back. Leave me alone so I can sleep.”