A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (25 page)

· 34 ·

Caesar

H
ENRY BENT TO
check the worthiness of the house wall at its base. Finding not a break anywhere, he stood and something cracked, like a branch. He looked up. Then he heard the horse cry, though the sound was more like a whale being slaughtered, a sound bad enough to clean a whole village of ghosts. He turned to see that Caesar had backed into a hole near the clay pit. No doubt he had broken his leg. To a one, the laborers ran to the other side of the property while the horse kept up the awful mewing. One woman lost a basin of water and it splattered orange mud onto Emma’s white dress. “Heavens!” his wife said.

Caesar tried to right himself, scrabbling with the other legs, throwing his sad head over and over to the right, but there was no good in it. Henry kept his eye on the animal. He heard Emma gathering Abike and the boy. “Where are you, Jacob?” he said.

“Here sah.”

“You know where I keep the rifle. Go get it.”

Henry had seen an injured horse drag itself over a man and lame him too. Nevertheless, ownership of such an animal meant you had to be ready to kill it if the time came. Right now he had to get the rope off the saddle. Caesar ceased his struggle, watching Henry come up. The poor horse had shifted to the one good hind leg, the bloodied one hanging odd-angled. He showed his yellow teeth and tried to snap, but Henry thought it wasn’t meant for him. It was for the pain. He winced to see how the animal’s eyes were wild, but there was no fire for them, nothing to draw on. Henry lifted the rope from the saddle horn. He wanted to keep Caesar still and tried slipping the noose over his head. But the horse didn’t want any part of it. Henry sensed the animal had found the barest ledge, the place with the least pain, and he wanted to stay there. “I’m mighty sorry,” he said, running his hand down the horse’s neck.

He watched Emma lead Wole away with the girl, Duro following with his wife’s chair.

Jacob came at a run and the poor horse tried to pull back, then whinnied and cried.

“Have you checked it?”

“It is ready.”

Henry put the muzzle to the horse’s head, just behind the eye, and pulled. The sound was cannonlike in his ears as the animal fell. When he looked at the sky, he saw a large gray cloud tipped in yellow.

“Ask some men to take care of it,” he said to Jacob.

“They will want to make chop.”

“I can’t help them. Just take care of it.”

“Yes sah.”

It was hard business. Caesar had been ragged, but Henry had grown to like him. The animal had been as good as he could be.

Henry walked to the back of the yard and retched. It seemed the day had grown suddenly cool. He listened for something. The crack when he had heard it sure enough seemed to come from above. Now he smelled fire and started in some direction that might be its source.

“Where are you going, master?” Jacob said.

“Don’t call me that. I’m a mere steward. I’m going where the road goes, following the will of God.”

“I will come.”

“As you like.” The road was red dirt, the sides sloping away to make gullies. “Gaining heaven won’t be so hard for you,” Henry said. “You never did what I did, killing Indians and Mexicans, taking pleasures when I ought to have been praying for my soul. You’re the one who was wronged.”

“But I have also sinned.”

Henry almost laughed. He clutched at the air in front of him. Jacob caught his arm.

“Sorry sah. It is only the horse. I will find you another one. Come.”

Jacob led them to the blind man’s mat.

This is good
, Henry thought.
I can breathe now.

They told the man what had happened.

“Ah,” the man said. “It was the horse’s time. All animals have a set life.” He bit a piece of kola nut and handed it to Henry. “You have helped the horse. You must not concern yourself.” His head bobbed a little as he talked.

Henry wanted to ask if it wasn’t bad luck—shooting a lamed horse in the yard of your new house—but it would seem heathen to do so.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

When Henry got back to the new compound, he felt sure he’d see a bloody outline in the ground, but there was no such thing and he thanked the good Lord for Jacob and his management. It did worry him to think the hired men might be eating the horse the next day in whatever stew their women brought, but then he considered that in such a way the animal might be useful to him one last time and if it gave them strength, so be it.

That night in the courtyard, after Emma was asleep, he tried to pray. “Let me empty my brain of my own thought that I might be filled only with your desire,” he said aloud. But as soon as he said it, he was filled with his own thought: other directions he might move if not Ilorin; Saro, for example, or Offa. Now how was he going to buy a new horse? He tried not to see the Niger River but it was there even so, winding in grand muddy ochers, green stalky reeds alongshore. How hard to diminish his thought when it was so large and purposeful. And then he was back to the poor dead horse and the shattered bone.

· 35 ·

Epistle

Feb. 20,
1855

Ijaye

Dear Mother,

Joyous news! The little boy, Wole, who lives with us and is my best pupil, has come to know Jesus. All the time he has been in our care he has worn the blue beads of paganism around his waist and we allowed him to keep them, for the poor child had lost his mother and his village. Only our assistant, his one relation, remained to him. But when I asked him last week if he would like to take the beads off and invite Jesus into his heart, he agreed. You cannot imagine what happiness I feel in this small life, brought to the threshold of salvation.

I pray you will share my news with the church, urging them to send money to the mission board to support our work. And wherever you go, ask any of like mind to do the same, that we may carry on in the light of the gospel.

Just this week, we had a setback in our economy. My husband is building a house, which we must have for we are living in a borrowed one. It is quite modest but good enough and will help us prosper physically so that we might do the work of the Lord. Yet in the midst of building, our horse stepped into a hole and broke a leg. The poor animal had to be shot. It was quite shocking to all of us. The dear boy I just told you of was there, and the young girl who is my handmaid. I swept them up and we removed ourselves to our present house, but we still heard the gun. Both children trembled and wept, though I sought to comfort them and in the end we were all weeping.

Pray for my dear husband. He works without ceasing.

Emma was uncertain how much more she could commit to the page. She believed if she were in her mother’s presence, she might say to her things she never had before. But letters could be waylaid, opened, and read.

It will cost us twenty dollars at least to replace the horse, longer to recover from the sorrow. In Africa, we feel so deeply what joys we find, and deeply as well, anything lost. I know you hold us in your hearts, as we do you.

And finally, dear mother, if you have not done so already, I ask you to place a proper stone at Uncle Eli’s grave, that I might visit him when I return home. As soon as we can, we will start a garden with the seed you sent.

Remember me to Papa.

With great affection,

Your Emma

She felt better for writing as much as she had. There were things that would never be written, nor spoken. Emma sat on the trunk to pull on her boots, and then she opened it almost without thought until she understood she was looking to see that the rifle was returned to its place, but again it wasn’t there.

· 36 ·

After an Onslaught

J
ACOB FOUND A
place in the creek where a log had fallen, creating a secluded sandbar. He and Wole went there on Saturdays to bathe and wash their clothes and the boy played. They were returning to the compound when he observed Pastor headed his way.

“Word has come Rev. Moore is ill. I must travel to Ijaye,” he said.

“I am ready,” Jacob said.

“No. I’ve got a horse and two men from the king to go with me. I’m trusting you to stay here and oversee the building. Roofing needs to be done. You’ll look after my wife.”

Nothing puzzles God
, Jacob thought. Here was the reverend, giving him supervision over building and leaving his wife again, the deerlike wife with the dark eyes.

They walked back to the compound. “We’ve been over the plans. Tell the workers you will pay them in four days. That way you establish authority. After the first payment, tell them the same amount will follow four days hence. Mrs. Bowman has the funds.”

Monday the workers were surprised the
oyinbo
was absent, but they went to work without delay, and the second day the same. They labored in a current of kind conversation until the last hour when a man began a ballad about a poor tailor who lost his wife to a palm wine tapper. When they finished the final round of bricklaying, the men laid off and rested in the shade. Wives showed up, made fires, and cooked their husbands’ dinners, and Jacob longed for the same for himself.

Midmorning of the third day a flat-faced man with bloodshot eyes wanted to bargain. “I return to my farm tomorrow,” he said. “Pay me now.”

“You will be paid tomorrow. You must work until then to collect,” Jacob said.

“Pay me this evening for three days. I go to my farm.”

“It cannot be done,” Jacob said. He imagined the strings of cowries in their cool piles, how they were laid out like necklaces for separate women.

“You are not the
oyinbo
. I do not take instruction from you.” The man spat. “When the
oyinbo
returns I will come for my pay.”

Jacob stood in the sun, watching the man’s back as he walked away. He glanced at the other workers. They were erecting the bamboo frame for the roof. No one laughed at him. In a moment, he was on the roof working with them.

Mrs. Bowman arrived under a large black umbrella, Abike and Wole with her. Twice she walked around the house, Jacob watching the umbrella pass, seeing her ungloved hand emerge from beneath it to stroke the exterior wall, hearing her voice come up to him.

“To think it’s part my own work,” she said, as if the mud she had pressed with her feet had crept into her blood, as if all of her life she had been waiting to build an African house. She was softer now with her round center and it seemed she praised him, if indirectly, and some part of him leaned toward the dark disk of umbrella below him.

By the time she left with Abike and Wole, the women were binding thatch into bundles. They handed these to men perched on the roof’s frame who bound them to crossbeams, starting at the lowest point of the roof. They had almost completed the first round when a windstorm rose. At first it sounded like rain. Jacob looked toward
Oke’ lerin
hill to see a yellow cloud, a wing of driving sand. Trees bent and the air cracked. The sound picked up like a waterfall. Men slid from the roof. Women lowered their heads and tried to hold the fronds. But they were torn from their hands. One frond hit a man in the thigh, and the fellow limped away as if he’d been shot. Cloth laid out to dry took flight like huge blue birds falling into the sky. The sand became a thousand tiny knives. Jacob took shelter within the walls of Pastor’s new house, sitting in a corner, his face down.

When the storm subsided, he came out to see fronds snapped and scattered like a fallen tribe after an onslaught. People emerged from their houses, shaking sand from their wrappers and their hair. A stunned silence reigned. Jacob sat with his back against the front of the house. After a bit, some of the workers came back. They tidied the yard, making a pile of the broken thatch. Looking for a moment at the incomplete house before returning to the mistress for her to tell him what to do next, her deep eyes on him, feeling the sting of humiliation, not that he had failed—he could not have bent the wind back—but feeling nonetheless that now she would tell him what to do, wishing it were otherwise, that he were telling her how he had finished the top rung of thatching, considering how satisfactory was the making of houses with thatch laid in rounds like the bricks, wondering if they could make up the time so Pastor would not be impatient, hoping they could even if he had to follow Mrs. Bowman’s instructions, imagining Abike listening as he was told what to do when he had known what to do and did not need the
oyinbo
woman’s advice, but still he would have to take it, thinking on his master’s displeasure when he returned if the roof was not complete, how Rev. Bowman would demand an explanation, how he would have to hurry like a dog being run over by a horse to tell the story, all the while feeling still he had failed after the man—his sponsor, his friend—told him he had proven himself, Jacob was stung by a memory of being beaten as a boy. He had been in charge of a younger child, also a slave, who had become ill and died on the road. There was nothing Jacob could have done. Yet the boy’s owner had come and beaten him, lashing his legs and breaking the skin into red ribbons.

“Can you find more thatch?” Pastor’s wife said when he found her. She ran her fingers over a white airy cloth. She called it lace.

“Yes.”

“Duro tells me many roofs were lost to the storm. Will it cost more?” She held her hand at her brow against the sun so her eyes were in shadow.

“It may be.”

“What do you think we must do?” She lifted her head so he could see her eyes. They did not press against him. They seemed almost green and translucent.

“I will find it,” he said. Jacob felt the ground firm up. But even roaming out of town he collected only enough thatch to lay one more round. He commissioned men to go farther out and cut fresh fronds and paid them out of his own pocket. It might be three days before they had enough. The mistress seemed oddly at ease, as if the storm had shaken all the sternness out of her. She told of how she had been in the courtyard when the wind came. “I ran to put my box in the trunk and we scurried to collect Pastor’s papers. I kept saying, ‘Don’t worry about the order; just stow everything in the trunk.’ We were all in the bedroom. Duro and Abike pushed the wardrobe in front of the door. It was so dark we could hardly see. Duro stood by the wardrobe and the children sat with me on the trunk, and it sounded like a train!” It seemed to amuse her, the storm and her success, and Jacob blazed in a mix of anger and envy when all he wished was to get a job done.

They spent evenings sorting notes and papers. Mrs. Bowman lit the lamp and the two of them sat at the parlor table. Wole lay nearby with a book on his mat. Abike sat close with her sewing, or she just sat until she began to doze in her chair, and then she went to her room and his eyes followed her. But Mrs. Bowman seemed not to tire. She was completely happy.

“Now let’s work on this batch,” she said, pulling out a handful of stray note cards. A moment later, she pulled up a sleeve, indicating the inside of her wrist. “Right there,” she said, “an ant has bitten me. Well, it’s not so bad.” She hit the pink spot. It shattered him, the way she showed him the inside of her arm, the way she drew up her sleeve. She was defiant, and the act transformed her. This power in her seemed self-derived, and his anger gave way to admiration. If she could own herself, he could too.