Ancestor Stones (20 page)

Every time I heard the rumble of wheels I slipped away to stare. The other girls thought I had a sick mind. I didn't care. I was driven by the need to know. But the state of the bodies made it impossible
to tell. In the end I never knew whether Ma Cook was among them. Or whether Kassila had dragged her down to the bottom to keep her there with him.

The coroner's report said it was an accident. The change in the wind had shifted the tides and so the position of the sandbank. The boatman had failed to navigate the dangerous new currents. Despite a life working on boats, he never learned to swim and had perished along with the rest. The account was assembled from the stories of the survivors, among them Marie.

And for three Fridays in a row there was no fish for lunch. Just boiled yams and roasted plantains.

The villagers gathered on the beach, on the cusp of darkness. Above me, on the broken boards and the few upright poles of the old jetty, seagulls alighted one by one. The beach was no more than forty yards long, a steeply curved semicircle of sand in the embrace of a row of fishermen's huts. People holding long tapers, silhouetted against the deepening blue of the sky, made their way to the water's edge. A ram bleated shrilly as it was led down. Food for Kassila. An hour later all I could see were a few bobbing lights on the water. And all I could hear was the final song as it faded and rose in time with the motion of the waves.

In the morning scarcely a sign that anything had happened: some bloodstains in the sand and the butt of a candle rolling in the waves.

Nothing in the coroner's report contradicted what everyone already knew. Kassila had caused the boat to capsize. The coroner was only able to tell them how he had used his powers to alter the currents. He could not tell them the reason.

But nothing happens for nothing.

And I knew. And Marie knew — we knew the reason. She had been spared and Ma Cook had perished. What other proof did we need?

I waited for Ma Cook to appear in my dreams. After a while I began to will it. But Ma Cook refused to appease me. From time to time I would become absorbed in the task of solving a maths problem or I would be weeding between the rows of wild greens in
the garden, only to find myself looking up in answer to the silent call of my name. Or I would glimpse a fleeting movement out of the corner of my eye, turn and find whoever had been coming was gone. Ma Cook's spirit was taunting me, playing spiteful games. I walked all the way to Tihun and lit a candle for her in the church there. And I did that every week through the whole of Lent.

For a while Marie slept alone in our bed. The time came when we shared again. I lay in bed and listened to the wind. I could feel her breath faintly on the back of my neck, and the cough that for weeks after the accident wracked her body with spasms and caused the bed to judder. I wanted to reach behind and pull her close to me, but my arms could not reach across the space between our bodies. Ma Cook had wedged herself in between us, I imagined her there lying on her back and giggling to herself.

After heaven and earth Kuru made people. He called his angel and told him to separate the people into black and white. The angel did so. Then Kuru told the angel to bring all sorts of tools. When these were gathered in a pile in front of him, Kuru gave to the black people the plough, the hoe, the hammer and the anvil. And he sent them to live in the hills and the forests to be farmers and blacksmiths. They hoed the land and planted crops, and built themselves houses from earth and thatched them with palm leaves. To the white people he gave a compass, a ruler and a sextant. They built ships and sailed the seas. They traded and grew wealthy. Then Kuru saw that he had divided the gifts unfairly. So he gave the black people something that nobody else had. He gave them the power of divination.

The black people could have used their gift to make themselves rich, but they didn't. Instead they talked to the spirits and the ones who had gone before. They sought their advice and consulted them on what to do. This was the way they lived their lives.

I learned that story before I left the village to go to school. And I wondered at the meaning of it. Everything in those days was education, education. We wanted to learn the Europeans' ways. At first I thought the story was supposed to act as an encouragement to
learn. And a warning not to be like the foolish black people who failed to use their gift to make themselves rich.

But now I don't think that at all. Now I think maybe we were so keen to copy others that in so doing we forgot who we were.

On the wall of the room in which Father Bernard held our catechism classes was a sampler by some of the senior girls. It was only a few years old, but already it had yellowed in parts and bleached in others. It was the air, you see. It caused everything to rot. The First Commandment read: ‘I am the Lord your God. You shall not have strange Gods before me.'

I remember because I memorised all Ten Commandments in preparation for my First Communion. And also because I wondered for a long time whether I had broken it.
Before me
— you shall not have strange Gods
before me
. It did not say
as well as me
. Still. I worried too that I had committed a mortal sin in wishing ill upon Ma Cook. I confessed to Father Bernard. I was very much afraid. But Father Bernard assured me Ma Cook died as the result of an accident. Nobody's fault. Not the boat boy's. Not mine. Whatever the
moriman
would have me believe, Kassila did not exist. The sea god was nothing more than a story told by superstitious folk. I received no punishment save a dozen Hail Marys for going to the market without permission.

Ma Cook's spirit continued to flit in and out of the corners of rooms like a bat. Sometimes she brushed my face or played with my hair and that made me cross. I would put my hands on my hips and shout at her, daring her to come out. But of course she never did.

At my First Communion ten months later I drank the blood of Christ. And ate his flesh. The class in Idaho had sent me a box in the post. Inside was a framed print of the Virgin. Also a second-hand white dress with a label inside which read: ‘Ages 8–9'. And although I was much older than this it fitted me anyway. I wore white shoes and white nylon stockings that twisted and stuck to my thighs in the heat. The last item in the box was a gilt St Christopher medal on a chain, which I slipped over my head and wore under my dress. After the ceremony all of us who had taken our First
Communion drank orange squash and ate rice bread together with Father Bernard and the nuns.

You loved that St Christopher medal when you were a baby. You used to play with it. The way it glistened and twinkled when you held it up, rotating backwards and forwards on the chain. Once you broke the chain, but we managed to fix it. I wore it for many years before and after that. The patron saint of storms, of lightning, of mariners and travellers. I thought he would easily be a match for Kassila. Then one day the Pope decided St Christopher wasn't a saint any more. Just like that. Now suddenly nobody knew for sure whether he had waded across the river carrying the Christ child upon his shoulders. Or if he had existed at all. It was just a legend, they said. And they stopped believing in him.

But what is a legend if not a story so great it has survived the retelling of countless generations?

I was on the ferry crossing from the peninsula to the city. By that time I could have afforded the first-class lounge easily, but the soft drinks were warm and the stink of the latrines filtered in through the air-conditioning system. So instead I stood on the lower deck and leaned over the barrier. The surface of the water was dark and greasy. I stared past the floating slick and my own reflection, deep down into what was below. And as I did so my medal fell out of the neck of my dress and dangled over the railing where its reflection caught in the water, flashing like a beacon.

And there, suddenly. There he was. Kassila! Rushing up out of the darkness. His hand was outstretched, great talons reaching for me. He wore a suit of tarpon scales, a crown of spines, coils of hair like jellyfish tentacles and a beard of bubbles. I knew what he had come for.

I slipped the St Christopher medal from my neck and threw it over the railing. It hung for a moment in the air before it hit the waves and began to spin slowly through the water. For a few seconds more I followed the shape, distorted now, as it drifted downwards. I imagined myself falling in after it, head first, plummeting
down into the green. Sinking into the billowing darkness. The cool waters closing above me, shutting out all the heat and light and noise.

Then I saw Kassila seize the flimsy chain in his huge hand. He twisted his great body and spiralled back down below.

And only the tip of his tail cut through the surface of the water.

They wanted water. So much water! The headwoman organised us to fetch it from the stream and we carried it up in buckets on our heads. They were using up all the water from the stream near the work site. The water we brought was for them, for baths and washing. That was the first time I saw inside the compound. A boil had welled up under my eye, tight and shiny, close to bursting. I set my bucket down and felt it with my fingertips. I saw a man looking at me, who turned away when I looked back. After that they didn't want me to carry water again.

The men slept in tents instead of houses. And mostly washed themselves out of doors. All except one who came and went, who wore long trousers but spoke with a woman's voice and bathed in another tent some distance from the camp. The chief assigned three dozen men to work for them. They began collecting the mud from the bottom of the river bed. We used to creep up to watch them, two or three of us hiding behind the big boulders. The white men stood on the shelf of the river bank and watched the men from the village digging, loading pans with gravel and rocks which other men carried on their heads and dumped into wooden boxes running with water. That was where all the water was going. There were times the one with the woman's voice called for a bucket of earth to be brought over, which he spread out on a canvas cloth, inspecting the mud and rocks, crushing some and weighing the powder on a set of brass scales.

What they were looking for nobody knew, but the day they
found it — what a commotion! I was washing clothes at the stream. Ever since the men had arrived the water flowing downstream from where the work was going on was too muddy to use, so we had to walk much further upstream to a place where the water was still clear. When I heard the shouts I crept along the waterside and crouched down below the river bank.

The men in charge were behaving like children. Hugging each other, punching arms and slapping backs. The one with the woman's voice, who I now realised had breasts, they did not slap and hit, but carried on their shoulders singing a song: ‘For she's a jolly good fellow.' Then they set her down and spun her around between themselves, dancing like crazy people. All the time watched by the men who did the digging, who were silent, while they waited to be told what to do next.

The white men gave everybody the rest of the day off. As they made their way back along the path to the encampment, I followed them, staying parallel to their position, blending myself into the shapes of the trees, stepping from shadow to shadow, treading lightly so as not to disturb the leaves on the forest floor. It was easy. They made a great deal of noise as they went. The path was narrow and they walked in single file. I recognised the one at the back as the same man who had sent me away that first time.

He was carrying a heavy bag on his shoulders. It caused him to walk at a slower pace than his companions. I watched as the gap between them widened. For a moment he stopped, set down his bag, and wiped his brow with a cloth. Then he blew his nose on the cloth, folded it up and carefully replaced it in his pocket. At that moment I stepped out on to the path behind him, treading on a small twig to catch his attention. Naturally, he swung round, startled to see me there.

We faced each other. He did not recognise me. The boil was gone. I told you I had been washing clothes. I had stripped to enter the water, keeping just a cloth tied around my waist. Now I was wearing only this same cloth. I saw his eyes drop from my face and move down my body, like a slow dribble of sweat. I stepped forward and picked up the bag. It was heavy, but I did not let that
show. I placed it on my head. And in that way I walked in front of him, all the way to the camp and back inside.

The tents were taken down, replaced by low buildings with zinc roofs. I had a job in the camp. I worked for the man, who was called Blue by his companions or Mr Blue, like the colour. In the mornings I boiled coffee and eggs for him. He would sit outside the door in front of a table that afterwards I folded and put away, on a chair that did the same. At first I went back to the village every evening, but after some time Mr Blue said this did not suit him. And so I slept on a mat at the door of the hut. In the evenings I heated water for him to bathe and in time I learned how to pour the whisky he liked to drink and how to wash his clothes and tidy them away in his trunk. In the mornings he sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, with nothing to do but watch me work.

He did not ask me my name. Instead he told me he would call me Josephine. He said I looked like Josephine Baker. I did not know who he meant. Only that it was easier for him to remember.

I liked my new job. Mr Blue had so many possessions. His brown leather belt with a brass buckle I kept polished with animal fat. The same with his boots, of which he had two pairs. I rinsed the dead bristles from his shaving brush, and wiped the bar of soap, set them both back out on a towel the way he showed me. I plucked the hairs from his comb. Long, transparent hairs the colour of sand.

Papers covered in something I thought looked like centipede tracks. Writing. How could I have known? I had never been taught to read or sent to school. A Thermos flask that kept coffee hot the whole day long. Maps. Magazines. Books. Other things I had never laid eyes on before, whose purpose I could not imagine. On the green felt table-top: an instrument made of brass, with numbers and letters and an arrow that swung around towards the same point, wherever you directed it. A glass you could hold in your hand that made everything bigger. I stared through it at the hairs on the back of my hand, at a silverfish crawling out of his trunk. I could even see the lice swarming along the vane of a chicken feather.