The Tomorrow-Tamer (10 page)

When he had gone, I turned and there was Danso, lean as a leopard, draped in the doorway.

“Yes,” he said, “I heard. At least he's a step further than the slavers. They didn't admit we had souls.”

“It's not that simple, Danso–”

“I didn't say it was simple,” Danso corrected. “It must be quite a procedure–to tear the soul out of a living body, and throw the inconvenient flesh away like fruit rind.”

“He doesn't want to live in that area,” I tried ineffectually to explain, “because in some way the people there are a threat to him, to everything he is–”

“Good,” Danso said. “That makes it even.”

 

I saw neither Danso nor Brother Lemon for several weeks. The plans for the mission were still in abeyance, and for the moment I almost forgot about them. Then one evening Danso ambled in, carrying a large wrapped canvas.

“What's this?” I asked.

He grinned. “My church picture. The one I have done for Brother Lemon.”

I reached out, but Danso pulled it away.

“No, Will. I want Brother Lemon to be here. You ask him to come over.”

“Not without seeing the picture,” I said. “How do I know what monstrosity you've painted?”

“No–I swear it–you don't need to worry.”

I was not entirely convinced, but I phoned Brother Lemon. Somewhat reluctantly he agreed, and within twenty minutes we heard the Buick scrunching on the gravel drive.

He looked worn out. His unsuccessful haggling with the municipal authorities seemed to have exhausted him. He had been briefly ill with malaria despite his up-to-date preventive drugs. I couldn't help remembering how he had looked that first morning at the airport, confidently stepping onto the alien soil of his chosen Thessalonica, to take up his ordained role.

“Here you are, Mr. Lemon,” Danso said. “I painted a whole lot of stars and candlesticks and other junk in the first version, then I threw it away and did this one instead.”

He unwrapped the painting and set it up against a wall. It was a picture of the Nazarene. Danso had not portrayed any emaciated mauve-veined ever sorrowful Jesus. This man had the body of a fisherman or a carpenter. He was well built. He had strong wrists and arms. His eyes were capable of laughter. Danso had shown Him with a group of beggars, sore-fouled, their mouths twisted in perpetual leers of pain.

Danso was looking at me questioningly.

“It's the best you've done yet,” I said.

He nodded and turned to Brother Lemon. The evangelist's eyes were fixed on the picture. He did not seem able to look away. For a moment I thought he had caught the essential feeling of the thing, but then he blinked and withdrew his gaze. His tall frame sagged as though he had been struck and–yes–hurt. The old gods he could fight. He could grapple with and overcome every obstacle, even his own pity. But this was a threat he had never anticipated. He spoke in a low voice.

“Do many–do all of you–see Him like that?”

He didn't wait for an answer. He did not look at Danso or myself as he left the house. We heard the orchid Buick pull away.

Danso and I did not talk much. We drank beer and looked at the picture.

“I have to tell you one thing, Danso,” I said at last. “The fact that you've shown Him as an African doesn't seem so very important one way or another.”

Danso set down his glass and ran one finger lightly over the painting.

“Perhaps not,” he admitted reluctantly. “But could anyone be shown as everything? How to get past the paint, Will?”

“I don't know.”

Danso laughed and began slouching out to the kitchen to get another beer.

“We will invent new colours, man,” he cried. “But for this we may need a little time.”

I was paid for the work I had done, but the mission was never built. Brother Lemon did not obtain another site, and in a few months, his health–as they say–broke down. He returned whence he had come, and I have not heard anything about the Angel of Philadelphia Mission from that day to this.

Somewhere, perhaps, he is still preaching, heaven and hell pouring from his apocalyptic eyes, and around his head that aureole, hair the colour of light. Whenever Danso mentions him, however, it is always as the magician, the pedlar who bought souls cheap, and sold dear his cabbalistic word. But I can no longer think of Brother Lemon as either Paul or Elymas, apostle or sorcerer.

I bought Danso's picture. Sometimes, when I am able to see through black and white, until they merge and cease to be separate or apart, I look at those damaged creatures clustering so despairingly hopeful around the Son of Man, and it seems to me that Brother Lemon, after all, is one of them.

 

THE TOMORROW-TAMER

T
he dust rose like clouds of red locusts around the small stampeding hooves of taggle-furred goats and the frantic wings of chickens with all their feathers awry. Behind them the children darted, their bodies velvety with dust, like a flash and tumble of brown butterflies in the sun.

The young man laughed aloud to see them, and began to lope after them. Past the palms where the tapsters got wine, and the sacred grove that belonged to Owura, god of the river. Past the shrine where Nana Ayensu poured libation to the dead and guardian grandsires. Past the thicket of ghosts, where the graves were, where every leaf and flower had fed on someone's kin, and the wind was the thin whisper-speech of ancestral spirits. Past the deserted huts, clay walls runnelled by rain, where rats and demons dwelt in unholy brotherhood. Past the old men drowsing in doorways, dreaming of women, perhaps, or death. Past the good huts with their brown baked walls strong against any threatening night-thing, the slithering snake carrying in its secret sac the end of life, or red-eyed Sasabonsam, huge and hairy, older than time and always hungry.

The young man stopped where the children stopped,
outside Danquah's. The shop was mud and wattle, like the huts, but it bore a painted sign, green and orange. Only Danquah could read it, but he was always telling people what it said.
Hail Mary Chop-Bar & General Merchant.
Danquah had gone to a mission school once, long ago. He was not really of the village, but he had lived here for many years.

Danquah was unloading a case of beer, delivered yesterday by a lorry named
God Helps Those
, which journeyed fortnightly over the bush trail into Owurasu. He placed each bottle in precisely the right place on the shelf, and stood off to admire the effect. He was the only one who could afford to drink bottled beer, except for funerals, maybe, when people made a show, but he liked to see the bright labels in a row and the bottle-tops winking a gilt promise of forgetfulness. Danquah regarded Owurasu as a mudhole. But he had inherited the shop, and as no one in the village had the money to buy it and no one outside had the inclination, he was fixed here for ever.

He turned when the children flocked in. He was annoyed at them, because he happened to have taken his shirt off and was also without the old newspaper which he habitually carried.

The children chuckled surreptitiously, hands over mouths, for the fat on Danquah's chest made him look as though the breasts of a young girl had been stuck incongruously on his scarred and ageing body.

“A man cannot even go about his work,” Danquah grumbled, “without a whole pack of forest monkeys gibbering in his doorway. Well, what is it?”

The children bubbled their news, like a pot of soup boiling over, fragments cast here and there, a froth of confusion.

Attah the ferryman–away, away downriver (half a mile)–had told them, and he got the word from a clerk who
got it from the mouth of a government man. A bridge was going to be built, and it was not to be at Atware, where the ferry was, but–where do you think? At Owurasu! This very place. And it was to be the biggest bridge any man had ever seen–big, really big, and high–look, like this (as high as a five-year-old's arms).

“A bridge, eh?” Danquah looked reflectively at his shelves, stacked with jars of mauve and yellow sweets, bottles of jaundice bitters, a perfume called
Bint el Sudan
, the newly-arranged beer, two small battery torches which the village boys eyed with envy but could not afford. What would the strangers' needs be? From the past, isolated images floated slowly to the surface of his mind, like weed shreds in the sluggish river. Highland Queen whisky. De Reszke cigarettes. Chivers marmalade. He turned to the young man.

“Remember, a year ago, when those men from the coast came here, and walked all around with sticks, and dug holes near the river? Everyone said they were lunatics, but I said something would come of it, didn't I? No one listened to me, of course. Do you think it's true, this news?”

The boy grinned and shrugged. Danquah felt irritated at himself, that he had asked. An elder would not have asked a boy's opinion. In any event, the young man clearly had no opinion.

“How do I know?” the boy said. “I will ask my father, who will ask Nana Ayensu.”

“I will ask Nana Ayensu myself,” Danquah snapped, resenting the implication that the boy's father had greater access to the chief than he did, although in fact this was the case.

The young man's broad blank face suddenly frowned, as though the news had at last found a response in him, an excitement over an unknown thing.

“Strangers would come here to live?”

“Of course, idiot,” Danquah muttered. “Do you think a bridge builds itself?”

Danquah put on his pink rayon shirt and his metal-rimmed spectacles so he could think better. But his face remained impassive. The boy chewed thoughtfully on a twig, hoisted his sagging loincloth, gazed at a shelf piled with patterned tradecloth and long yellow slabs of soap. He watched the sugar ants trailing in amber procession across the termite-riddled counter and down again to the packed-earth floor.

Only the children did not hesitate to show their agitation. Shrilling like cicadas, they swarmed and swirled off and away, bearing their tidings to all the world.

Danquah maintained a surly silence. The young man was not surprised, for the villagers regarded Danquah as a harmless madman. The storekeeper had no kin here, and if he had relatives elsewhere, he never mentioned them. He was not son or father, nephew or uncle. He lived by himself in the back of his shop. He cooked his own meals and sat alone on his stoep in the evenings, wearing food-smirched trousers and yellow shoes. He drank the costly beer and held aloft his ragged newspaper, bellowing the printed words to the toads that slept always in clusters in the corners, or crying sadly and drunkenly, while the village boys peered and tittered without pity.

The young man walked home, his bare feet making light crescent prints in the dust. He was about seventeen, and his name was Kofi. He was no one in particular, no one you would notice.

Outside the hut, one of his sisters was pounding dried cassava into
kokonte
meal, raising the big wooden pestle and bringing it down with an unvaried rhythm into the mortar. She glanced up.

“I saw Akua today, and she asked me something.” Her voice was a teasing singsong.

Kofi pretended to frown. “What is that to me?”

“Don't you want to know?”

He knew she would soon tell him. He yawned and stretched, languidly, then squatted on his heels and closed his eyes, miming sleep. He thought of Akua as she had looked this morning, early, coming back from the river with the water jar on her head, and walking carefully, because the vessel was heavy, but managing also to sway her plump buttocks a little more than was absolutely necessary.

“She wants to know if you are a boy or a man,” his sister said.

His thighs itched and he could feel the slow full sweetness of his amiable lust. He jumped to his feet and leapt over the mortar, clumsy-graceful as a young goat. He sang softly, so his mother inside the hut would not hear.

 

“Do you ask a question,

Akua, Akua?

In a grove dwells an oracle,

Oh Akua–

Come to the grove when the village sleeps–”

 

The pestle thudded with his sister's laughter. He leaned close to her.

“Don't speak of it, will you?”

She promised, and he sat cross-legged on the ground, and drummed on the earth with his outspread hands, and sang in the cool heat of the late afternoon. Then he remembered the important news, and put on a solemn face, and went in the hut to see his father.

His father was drinking palm wine sorrowfully. The younger children were crawling about like little lizards, and Kofi's mother was pulling out yams and red peppers and groundnuts and pieces of fish from bowls and pots stacked in a corner. She said “Ha–ei–” or “True, true–” to everything the old man said, but she was not really listening–her mind was on the evening meal.

Kofi dutifully went to greet his grandmother. She was brittle and small and fleshless as the empty shell of a tortoise. She rarely spoke, and then only to recite in her tenuous bird voice her genealogy, or to complain of chill. Being blind, she liked to run her fingers over the faces of her grandchildren. Kofi smiled so that she could touch his smile. She murmured to him, but it was the name of one of his dead brothers.

“And when I think of the distance we walked,” Kofi's father was saying, “to clear the new patch for the cocoyam, and now it turns out to be no good, and the yams are half the size they should be, and I ask myself why I should be afflicted in this way, because I have no enemies, unless you want to count Donkor, and he went away ten years ago, so it couldn't be him, and if it is a question of libation, who has been more generous than I, always making sure the gods drank before the planting–”

He went on in this vein for some time, and Kofi waited. Finally his father looked up.

“The government men will build a bridge at Owurasu,” Kofi said. “So I heard.”