The Butterfly Heart (9 page)

Chitimukulu knows me from the time I cleared the snakes before the Ukusefya Pa Ng’wena ceremony, the one where we remember our journey from the Kola kingdom. He is a good man and there is kindness in his eyes. But when his people do wrong against others, he is very stern. He stands tall like the great tree he is named after and there is no wind, good or bad, that could blow him over. I will put my trust in him and hope that the girl does not get impatient while she waits. She wants everything to happen as soon as the words are out of her mouth. It is because she is young. She needs to learn that it does not always happen that way. Not here in Zambia, not anywhere in the world. Here we think for a long time and then we do the right thing, not the fast thing.

In
the bright light of the morning, talking to Fred’s great-granny didn’t seem like such a good idea. How would you start a conversation like that with a renowned witch? And anyway, what was I going to ask her to do? I remember reading somewhere that if you ask for intervention from a witch, you have to ask for something specific otherwise you leave her with too many choices. A witch with choices, they say, is not a good thing.

I spoke to Fred about it, and you’d have to know Fred to understand his response. He believes in so many things that he finds it hard to keep track of them all. He believes, for example, that if you turn around twice in front of a door, good things will happen to you when you open it. Or that if you put the tea in your mug before the milk, the milk will sulk and that’s when it curdles. Or that your bed has to face the sunrise otherwise you might not wake up at all. And thousands of things like that. He lives his life by little rules, most of which make no sense.

So at breaktime I told Fred I had to talk to him and we went down to the bottom of the playground to the fallen tree. No one else goes there because a girl in Grade Four once saw a snake there and ran screaming up to the gate. It’s the best tree for sitting on because the trunk is so thick. Sister Leonisa says it was struck by lightning one afternoon after two girls in the school wrote rude things about her on the chalkboard. With the things she says, she is almost as bad as Madillo and Fred. When she told us that story, I asked her whether the two girls had been sitting under the tree when it was hit (just to see how far she would take it) and her answer was, “No, they weren’t. But they might have been – and then they would have been sorry.” Sister Leonisa may be a nun, but sometimes she has a strange attitude when it comes to things like hope and love.

“Fred, I’m thinking of asking your great-granny to solve this Winifred thing,” I said.

He shook his head. “Bul-Boo, you’d better be very, very careful asking her. She’s old now – perhaps the oldest person in Zambia – and while her powers are getting stronger and stronger every year, her memory isn’t. She could just forget that it was you who asked her to put a curse on the old man and think instead that the old man asked her to put a spell on you. Then you could find yourself turned into a chameleon, and that wouldn’t help Winifred at all.”

“A
chameleon
? Why a chameleon?”

“That’s her favourite creature, and she was saying the other day that there don’t seem to be many around any more. She wants one for the garden, so she’d probably put you in a box and then bring you out now and again.”

So suddenly I’m going to be a chameleon locked up in a box? And his great famous witch granny has a bad memory?

“I’m not listening any more. You told us she was the greatest, most powerful witch ever, but I don’t believe she’s even a witch – whatever a witch is when it’s at home. You just made it all up. This is a stupid conversation anyway.”

Fred looked at me and said, in his most solemn voice, “You should believe me, Bul-Boo. All I am saying is that her memory is not as good as it was and she gets confused. She’s old. Dad says that even when he was small she was close to a hundred. Old people are entitled to lose their memories, even witches. You’re a non-believer, anyway, so I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to ask her anything at all. She’ll know you don’t believe in her and then you’d be lucky to get away with becoming a chameleon – she might just decide to teach you a lesson and turn you into a dung-beetle. How about that? You’d spend the rest of your life rolling balls of dung around, then feasting on them.”

That’s the other thing about Fred: he finds himself very funny. While he was telling me this he was creeping about on the ground pretending to be a dung-beetle. Snuffling and slurping, which, as I told him, made him look more like a warthog. I knew I had lost him then. And even though I didn’t believe anything he was saying, asking his great-granny for help was starting to look like even more of a bad idea.

When Fred had finished being a dung-beetle he started scratching in the dirt with a pen that had lost its ink and humming the Zambian national anthem. But he’s still my favourite friend who’s a boy, even if he makes up bad stories and pretends they are real.

The
windows of the bus carry the soil of my land. I do not know the world beyond this red earth and the trees that spread their branches wide like umbrellas. I do not know the lands that my grandmother spoke of, the Kola kingdom to the south of us, the kingdom that ends at the sea. The pictures I have seen of the sea make my stomach feel empty. There is no end to the water, it carries on until there is nowhere to go. My grandmother told me that it ends in the middle of the earth, where the water is so black that nothing can be seen. That creatures live there who do not know the air. I do not want to go there if I cannot see the end of it.

I know the water inside Zambia, the lakes that are quiet except when the rains come, the brown rivers that cover the crocodiles’ heads. I know where you need to look for their eyes because the water can’t hide those.

A woman sat next to me on the bus, she looked tired and her body seemed weak. She spoke to me of her first-born child, who is in prison for stealing. She was going to visit him. She told me she thought he would die there because he had the thin body of the prison disease. She had no food to take him and I had nothing to give her. Her face had already seen his death.

At Kasama I saw Chitimukulu. He has grown older and his walk has become slow, but his thoughts are not yet old. He told me that sometimes we have to do wrong to do right. That if something crosses our path and it is placing pain in the heart of a child, we must help that child. I will do that.

My
ma doesn’t walk straight any more. Her back is bent and her eyes look at the floor. When she talks to me it’s as if she doesn’t want me to hear. It’s because of what’s happening, I know that. She doesn’t know how to tell my uncle to take this thing away, to chase the old man out of the house. To send him back to the tavern so he can drink till he is dead. That is what I want: I want him to die so he can’t look at me any more. I want him to disappear so I can be Winifred again. So I can go to school without feeling this big weight dragging behind me.

Bul-Boo says they’ll help, but she does not know life like I know it. It all went wrong when Dad became sick. He died so slowly. Every day a little bit more of him went. I think it should be called the melting disease, because that’s what happened to him: he melted like a candle, a bit each day until there was nothing left. When he got too weak to stand he would lie in the bed looking at you with eyes that were too big for his head. I could see all the bones in his body. I hadn’t even known there were so many.

My mother told me that maybe he would get better, but I knew he wouldn’t.

Then he was gone and my uncle came. He didn’t come here when Dad was sick, but sometimes I saw him near the house. Waiting. He only came when there was death in our house and Ma was weak. He is loud and his voice is ugly. I know it’s wrong to say, but I do not mind if they both die, him and his friend. There will be no hole left in this earth when they go. But there is a hole left in my body without my dad. I don’t think it will ever be filled.

I know that I cannot be married unless my mother’s brother permits it. But my mother has no brothers left now, she is alone. That is why my uncle thinks he can do this, he has no one to fear.

I wish I could wake up tomorrow morning and know that all this has gone away. I want to feel free to go to school and laugh and play with Bul-Boo and Madillo, or walk with them and Fred, listening to Madillo and her funny counting. I want to be free from these thoughts of this old man, but I can’t. I want Sister Leonisa to look at me and ask me questions, but she doesn’t any more – even though I am the only one who knows all the answers. Bul-Boo knows most of them and Madillo does too – except that the answers she gives sometimes are wrong in a funny kind of way. Like when Sister asked why Zambia was called a landlocked country. Madillo told her that it wasn’t in fact landlocked because you could follow the Zambezi river all the way to the sea, and if you made a small boat out of tree bark and put it into the river, it would, one day, get to the sea. So that’s not locked at all. Which is true. But there is no part of Zambia that touches the sea.

I wish that was all I had to think about right now.

As
we walked past Fred’s house on the way back from school today, I could feel someone watching us. There’s a line of bushes at the end of his garden that is very thick. If someone stands behind them, it’s hard to see who it is. (Unless it’s Fred’s dad, who is so big he could hardly hide anywhere.)

Madillo was way behind me, so I couldn’t ask if she’d noticed, and as I couldn’t see anything I just carried on walking. Then I heard my name: “Bul-Boo, Bul-Boo, Bul-Boo.” A whispering voice. I looked and saw a very small hand waving through the bushes. It blended into the branches and looked as if it was growing. Only Fred’s great-granny has a hand that small. Even his little brother, the one Madillo thinks is a hermaphrodite, has bigger hands than she does.

I felt a small lump of terror inside me as I remembered Fred’s words. I was not ready to experience life as a dung-beetle. Not even as a chameleon, although I love them and their funny dinosaur ways. I love the way they change colour to suit where they are. I’ve always wanted to be able to do that, although not necessarily as a chameleon. The voice got louder. “Come here, little girl. It is me … Nokokulu … grandmother of Fred’s father. I want to tell you something.”