A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (24 page)

· 32 ·

Paying the Hairdresser

J
ACOB LIKED THE
way he felt, lifting the ax, the wood splitting perfectly, the motion of it, the rending sound when he knew he had hit the log perfectly, the living smell of wood, the assurance of his arms. He reflected on the journey to Ilorin with Pastor. The whole time he had hoped for his sponsor’s failure because he did not wish to move or to be cast out again to wander. The journey was not difficult, but it caused heaviness inside until he could hardly mount the horse the reverend had hired for his use. He coaxed himself to reach for Jesus, God’s very son, slaughtered like a goat, but risen into new life, present by his side, closer than a brother. By the time they reached Ilorin, a boulder had lodged where his stomach should be. He had heard one English woman speak of homesickness and wondered if he had caught it. Then when Pastor was denied by the emir, he felt immediately better. His stomach became his own again. His hands opened to take food. Every mile they passed in returning to Ogbomoso, his legs were lighter.

Stacking the wood also provided joy. Lodging the pieces one upon the other so that they formed a pyramid.

At some point he began to imagine Mrs. Bowman and Abike returning as he worked. The sun stood at midafternoon. He was surprised by their delay. He ran an arm across his brow and as he did, Mrs. Bowman appeared at the compound gate. She stood like a deer observing a hunter, exposed, hoping not to be seen.

He had wakened one night and the first image in his mind was Pastor’s wife, her eyes when he pressed her thumb. She had entered him with her eyes. Now she stepped toward him sideways as if she protected something, her center, her heart. In a moment she seemed to be running, her hat in her hands. She stood before him, holding her stomach. Where was the girl?

“Jacob,” she said. A smile came into her face. Her chest rose and fell. The night he had pulled her from the fire, she had been warm in his arms, her body smelling of salt and medicinal herbs.

“Yes mah.”

She paused as if she had forgotten her thought. She looked toward the kitchen, took out a handkerchief and wiped her brow. At last she brought her eyes to his, but the smile was gone. He felt his arms would fly up to grasp her if she did not speak of Abike.

“What mah?” When before had Pastor’s wife not been able to speak?

“Abike,” she said, as if it were a word whose meaning was lost to her. “Her hair. Plaited. Go fetch her presently.”

She pulled three cowry strings from her basket but held them against her chest. He pressed his eyes against hers until she handed him the strings. What was she saying this time, without words?

He washed in a grass booth built against the stable. He poured water over his head. Why was he unsettled? For a moment he thought he might weep. He elbowed the stable wall so that the force of his own arm ran back through him.

Abike was just there at the hairdresser’s shop, beneath the tree, chatting with some other girls. Seeing him, she stood and stepped back, as if she needed an invitation. It was as if they had not been together all of these weeks, the way she acted shy and unknown. She held on to the scarf she had been wearing, now untied. He felt proprietary paying for her hair and was immensely grateful for the errand.

“Come,” he said, and the girl advanced, holding the scarf, which she kept running through her hands. He loved the way she walked, her posture delicate but determined, the motion of her hips. They strolled slowly. By his greater height he could look down upon the becoming weave on her head. The hairdresser had made several parts from Abike’s forehead across her crown and down to the back of her neck. These rows were separated into squares and a plait turned within each square so that they made a neat curl out, the last plaits at her neck like feathers against her skin.

“Thank you for collecting me,” Abike said when they were near the compound. He thought her voice more lovely in their seclusion.

“You are welcome.”

They entered the compound and separated like two seeds sprung from a pod. Jacob thought how he would be required to send a delegation to the girl’s family with the proposal. How would he stand a chance? His joy was suddenly checked and he wished to run after Abike, make her promise him, though he had never spoken with her about marriage at all. Even the look of
yes
in her face would defend him against Mrs. Bowman’s eyes.

He wondered how an American arranged for a wife. Could he ask Pastor?

In the night by his fire, Jacob turned an okra pod in his hand. His friend Tunji, ever ready with food, had brought a basket full from the market. “Where can it be from, in the dry season?” Jacob had said. “From heaven,” Tunji had said. Turning the fruit, Jacob considered Wole’s head—what would the Americans say? Wole’s soul. He considered Abike. Could she already know about his slave years? Perhaps she only pitied him. His past would surely be a stumbling block for the mother, unless he found enough money. The girl would not be able to go about like a European woman, making up her own mind, if that was what they did.

As the fire died, he lit a lamp and entered the room where the boy slept. The room had been made with a mud bench built against the entire length of one wall. Even in the heat, it was cooling to lie on his side, his back to the room’s wall, his side against the bench. He would put such a structure in his own home.

At one end of the bench, Jacob had his altar. Here was his Bible, given to him in Sierra Leone. His name was written in it. Here also a remnant of the wall from his village. Also, a picture of Jesus the size of his hand. He kept a fresh kola nut in a bowl before the picture. Jacob made his prayers here. The dark years of servitude fell away. In his mind, he burned their residue to nothing. He dwelled on green things. The palm tree, the feather he had given Abike, green river grass beneath the water’s surface.

He placed the candle and the okra pod at the altar and his thought became prayer. He prayed for the girl. Then he prayed for Rev. Bowman. These
oyinbo
people wore too much sickness. The fever found their body. Then it throttled their heads, making them crazy on and off. He would be sorry for the reverend to be like that. The man must stay well and make a good house. He would help him. Then he could build his own house. Ha! A former slave owning a house. His need blossomed within him as if need and the fulfilment of it were the same thing. In God, perhaps they were.

In the morning, Jacob made an excuse to call in the courtyard. He tried to catch Abike’s eye and gain some idea of her thinking. But she was already sewing, her head bent over and the headdress covering her plaits. If only she would raise her head and look at him, her face might confirm something for him. Instead it was Mrs. Bowman’s face reaching for him.

· 33 ·

Turnings

A
RELIGION OF
shade
would win converts, Emma thought, her vision listing toward the blue haze beneath the tree. It was late afternoon. She sat in the courtyard, waiting out the heat with Henry. In a bit, Duro brought a lamp and they dined on a simple meal of hominy. After dinner, Henry smoked. And then as the night settled around them, her husband recited Ecclesiastes 3,
To everything there is a season
. When Emma finally went to the room to sleep, she counted to a thousand. At last, she felt the creak and sway of the mattress as Henry settled in. Later she woke and Henry was out of bed again. The moon was up, casting a gray light. Some awkward form filled the corner of the room. But it was only a chair covered with her shawl. “What makes me frightened?” she said aloud. She lit a candle, then grew impatient. Henry must be out in the compound. She pulled on her boots but not the dressing gown; it was too hot. The candle lit the corridor. Out in the compound, she found cooler air.
We should be sleeping here
, she thought. The curtain of Jacob’s room glowed. Surely Henry was not there, but she moved toward it anyway. Tapping on the outer wall, she heard Wole answer and drew the curtain just a bit. The boy had been looking at a book. The native oil lamp was his. Jacob lay on his back asleep with an arm over his head. His neck was tilted up, his throat exposed and large in the soft glow. How vagrant and solid he was, as a Greek god might be at rest. She forced her eyes away.

“Yes mah?” Wole said. She remembered her gown and stepped back from the door. Just as she did, Jacob’s voice erupted.

“Yes, master?”

“It’s Mrs. Bowman,” she said. She imagined him rousing, pulling his cloth about him, coming toward her. In a moment, he pressed the curtain aside but did not step out.

“Yes mah.”

“Mr. Bowman,” she said. “Do you know where he is?” She slipped back again, meaning to pull him out into the night.

But he stayed where he was, his look odd, as if she were fully naked. She stepped back again, meaning to be less exposed. But of course she held the candle. The light moved with her. Dimly she knew she had taken this chance on purpose, moving about in her nightdress.

“The compound,” Jacob said.

“What compound?” She cinched her gown in front of her, aware of her extended belly against the cotton fabric.

“The Baale has given land to Pastor. Near the Ilorin Gate.”

Emma felt hot in her head. For the briefest moment, she thought of Henry with an African woman. “What is he doing there?”

“He is looking at the moonlight falling. Where your new house will be laid. We have already begun.” And when she didn’t answer, he said, “He is making a gift to you.”

His gaze seemed to press like the flat of his hand against her.

“Don’t tell the reverend I spoke with you,” she said, and turned, trembling for the risks she took, her impure heart. Had she been mistaken? She had thought Jacob shared at least an affection for her, a secret running beneath their lives like an underground spring.

The next day, Emma called off her class, and Duro took her to the new site while Jacob and Henry were preaching in town. It was a fine place, near the northern gate of the city. The first low round of the perimeter wall was already up, eighteen inches thick. She had seen the process before—the balls of mud, one laid next to the other and patted into shape, followed by trimming away any excess and then plumbing with every round to check the straightness. Henry must be letting this layer dry before the next was laid. Her feelings turned strongly in favor of her husband.

Henry told her three days later, after dinner. “I’m building an Ogbomoso house,” he said. “The Baale gave me land.” He had washed his hair that morning and looked refreshed, his back and shoulders straight and purposeful.

“How marvelous,” she said. “Thank you.” And then, wanting to be sure he understood that she meant
he
was marvelous, she added, “You cannot fail.”

“The site needs further clearing,” he said, his eyes momentarily at odds, as if he were embarrassed by his generosity. “I’d like for you to mark the trees you wish to keep.”

She threw her arms around his neck, feeling the babe in her womb in their embrace. They went over the layout together and she kept touching his wrist, tight and strong.

“I’m using the same plan as in Ijaye,” Henry said, “with a few improvements, more windows for better air flow. We’ll have a room in the house for the girl and build living quarters for the others in the back. I’ve planned a kitchen garden.” Emma thought of the seed packet in her mother’s letter as he showed her the little area. “We’ll use a hedgerow in front to make a courtyard.”

“I’d like to keep an Africa room,” she said. “We’ll plant trees for an arbor.”

“I don’t see why not,” he said.

“Can we afford all of this?” she said.

“The Baale is letting me trade wood from the property for the labor. Jacob and I will do a great deal of it ourselves. It means less preaching. I figure we have another six weeks before the rains.”

In the mornings, Duro carried her hammock chair and Wole toted the writing box as they trekked to the new compound. Emma held school in the shade, and after school she wrote letters or made small sketches in her journal. Palm trees were a favorite item in her drawing. She thought she had also captured in one sketch the very essence of a Yoruba goat. One morning it seemed they were in for a shower, but the clouds dispersed and light fell beautifully through the trees.

“Look mah,” Wole said. “God has come.”

She contemplated her pupil. He remembered from the day with the prism, when he had asked if the light in it was God. “God is the light in our hearts,” she said.

The boy didn’t seem ready to give up the light he could see. Yet it seemed a propitious moment.

“Your blue beads, Wole,” Emma said. “I wonder if you would like to give them to me so the light of Jesus can come into your heart?” He seemed perplexed and ready to pull away from her. “I can put them in the writing box,” she said, knowing it might be too much for him to throw them away. He wasn’t an adult, after all, but a child.

He turned sideways and sucked his lower lip into his mouth. His hands went to his head and he seemed to be in deep consideration of himself.

“Yes mah,” he said.

“I will have to cut them. But I will tie them again.”

“Yes,” he said.

Emma’s joy was enormous. Wasn’t this her life?

Back at the compound, she and Wole followed through on her design. When she opened her writing box again, to place the beads there, she was reminded of Uncle Eli, and it seemed she had finished exactly half of something.

The house walls went up, layer by layer. Once dry, a mud plaster would be applied. Roofing with thatch would come last. Meanwhile, the men dug more clay for the kitchen and for a second house, the one for Jacob, Wole, and Duro. Women hauled water in calabashes from a nearby creek. Emma could hardly believe it the day she took her stockings off and exposed her feet to the daylight so that she might join the other women in a clay pit, treading mortar.

“Be careful mah,” Jacob said. His concern was as delightful as a wand of cool air.

When they broke for food, she turned from Duro’s boiled eggs to the women’s bean cakes and bananas. At night she saw how her arms and legs grew stronger. She wore her loose dresses with only a soft belt beneath her chest and over her stomach. By her calculations, her progress was at seven months.

Henry worked with the best of the men. His skin was darker than ever, and Emma thought how brilliantly his design shone as the rooms went in. The day they laid in the plank floors, he did a little jig and the baby in her seemed for all the world to clap.

One evening Henry examined her biceps as she changed into her nightgown.

“Your arms are as strong as Abike’s.”

She hardly knew what to say. “Yes. I’m working steadily.”

He pulled her close, taking her face in his hands, and pulled out the pins that held her hair.