Golden Boy (15 page)

Kweli continues, “And now you know what I do, hmm?”

I'm not entirely sure, really, because Kweli doesn't seem to be rich enough to collect art for fun, but I take a guess anyway, since he's waiting for my answer.

“You . . . collect carvings? You . . . sell them?”

The old man laughs, making me feel even more stupid than I already do. Why would a blind man collect art?

“No, silly boy! I make them.”

I know that my mouth is hanging open and I'm glad he can't see me.

“But . . . you're . . . I mean . . .” I stammer off into silence, not sure how to finish without sounding insulting.

“You mean, how can I be a sculptor when I'm blind?”

I nod, and then mentally kick myself because, of course, he can't see me.

“
Ndiyo, Bwana,
that's what I was thinking.”

I sound like an idiot.

“Many people have the same question,” Kweli answers, stepping forward into the lean-to. He reaches out and runs his fingers along the twisting, almost life-size body of one of his sculpture people. He is quiet for so long that I think he might be finished speaking to me. I wonder if I should maybe slip away and let him have some time alone, but then he continues, almost as if he's talking to himself.

“The answer has two parts. One part is that I was not always blind. My father was a Makonde sculptor as well, and he taught me as a child how to shape the
mpingo
blackwood and make it tell my story. I had been carving for six or seven years before I went blind.” He pauses again. I'm fascinated, willing him to go on.

“I was angry for a long time after that.” His voice is soft. “And yet, I suppose I was lucky. I could have been a painter and lost everything, but no, I was a sculptor. Once I got past my anger, I learned that I could still shape the blackwood. The difference was, I could no longer make it tell my story; I had to listen to the wood and shape it slowly into the story it already held. I feel the sculpture now, in my hands, even though I cannot see it with my eyes.” He turns to me with a sad smile. “Some say my sculptures are even better now than when I was younger. But I don't know if that's true. All I know is that I'm grateful I didn't have to lose my art when I lost my sight. I don't think I could have survived losing both.”

I'm stunned by his story, hearing the softness in his voice, watching his fingers slowly trace the outline of a man screaming in rage at the sky. Then he lets his hand drop and I realize that, on the statue he has been touching, the man has no eyes.

“So!” says Kweli, with such force that I jump. “That's my story, and that is enough of that. Now, let's get to work. I have a lot to do today.”

I learn quickly that working for Kweli isn't going to be easy. He tends to shout when he wants something and he expects you to run to get him what he needs.

He needs water from the well.

He needs the hatchet from the bench.

Not that hatchet,
punguani,
the little one.

Once, I left the broom on the ground between chores and Kweli tripped over it walking to the house. He screamed at me like I'd killed his cattle. It makes sense, with his being blind, that everything has to stay in its place, but I had my hands up in front of my face in case he started in on me with his fists—he was that angry. Luckily he didn't hit me; I just learned some new vocabulary.

As we sit by the fire that evening, sharing another pot of stew in the dusk, I think about what a day it's been. My clothes are stiff with sweat and dust, cracking when I move. My leg muscles ache from all the fetching, and I have blisters in the crooks of my thumbs from sweeping up all the wood chips Kweli produced as he hacked at the log under the tarp. But for all that, I feel content as I chew on the spiced green banana in my bowl. Kweli worked me like a regular boy. This is maybe the first day in my entire life that I've worked just as hard as anyone else, and the feeling is almost as warm in my belly as the stew. Today, I was normal. And with my extra precautions, my arm is still healing and I didn't even get burnt.

Kweli's voice snaps me out of my thoughts.

“So, boy, what did you learn today?”

“Bwana?”

“You saw me work. What did you learn?”

“Umm,” I stall.
I didn't know there was going to be a test!
I quickly think over what I saw him do. “You used the hatchet to break big chunks off the log . . . You started at the top and then worked your way down—”

“No, no.” Kweli is waving his hand at me. “That's what I
did.
That's not what you
learned.
Think about it and then let me know.” With that he gets up and walks inside the house.

What's that supposed to mean?
I learned that I can do a full day's work, just like a normal person,
I want to shout after him, but I don't. Kweli is the one person who, because he can't see at all, doesn't see me as odd. I'm not about to mess that up just because I'm frustrated by his stupid question. Still, I'd better come up with some answer.

I think over the day again, this time not just on the things that I did, but on everything that was going on: how I would jump at the sounds of people passing by on the road before I remembered the wall, the dogfight up the street near noon, the heat of the sun, the clear taste of the water from the tap in Kweli's wall, the sight of Kweli working.

It was amazing to watch, really, and I spent a lot of the day spying on him even when I was doing other things like sweeping the courtyard, getting water, and tidying up. He started off the day running his hands over the log, brushing his fingers over the dents and cuts he had already made, memorizing everything. Then, with a force and precision that was terrifying, he picked up the hatchet and began to chop. He would find a spot with his left hand and then raise his right arm high above his head and slam the hatchet down next to his left, again and again. I had visions of him missing, even once, and chopping off his hand, but his aim never wavered, and the rhythmic biting and ripping sounds of the hatchet became a backdrop for my day to the point that I only noticed when it changed tempo or he took a break.

I wondered why he wouldn't take a smaller risk and only tap the wood with the hatchet, so one time when he was in the outhouse, I snuck over and tested my theory on a piece of scrap wood. I soon found out why Kweli has muscles like he does: Blackwood is as hard as iron. I tapped at it with the hatchet, and the metal blade just slid off, nearly costing
me
a finger. There wasn't even a scratch on it. It was only when I raised the hatchet high over my head, with two hands, and brought it slamming down that the scrap wood split in half, the pieces flying in opposite directions. I don't know how he can control the cut when he's putting that much force behind it, but I decided I'd tested my luck enough and quickly returned the hatchet to where he'd left it. I only just managed to pick up my two halves and toss them on the scrap heap before Kweli came back. He didn't say anything to me then, but there was a secretive little smile on his face, and I wondered if he somehow knew what I did.

He spent most of the day working at the log, chopping great hunks off the wood with long, fluid sweeps of the blade. By late afternoon, the wood no longer looked like a log, but more like a crocodile—all twisting jagged edges and flat bits covered in choppy scales. It still didn't look like a statue, really, but it was definitely different. At that point, Kweli had paused. He had set the hatchet aside, stretched out his shoulders, and taken a long drink of water. Well, really, he had told
me
to put the hatchet away, sweep up his mess so he had space to stretch, and get him a drink of water. Then he ran his hands over the wood one more time, memorizing it again in its new form. Then it was
Boy! Get me a carving blade!
and he was at it again, this time with a smaller, much sharper piece of metal. And he spent the rest of the day with that, chip, chip, chipping away at the scales of the crocodile.

I look up from the fire. I'm still not entirely sure what I'll say, but now at least I've thought about it. I rub my bowl with ashes. The ash brushes away the last crumbs of
ugali
and cleans away the grease of the sauce. It also turns my fingers black. I look like some funny animal, with white fingers that turn black at the tips. I sigh and head inside. Nesting the bowl inside the others stacked on the table, I turn to the lump in the darkness that is Kweli. I can tell from the lack of snoring that he's still awake. I take a deep breath.

“I learned that it takes a long time to make a statue. I learned that blackwood is very hard, harder than any wood I've worked with before. I learned that you have to have the area neat and that you memorize your work with your fingers. I learned that different blades work the wood differently. And I learned that you don't make something perfect all in one go. You start with rough shapes and then make them smoother and smoother.”

In the silence, I hear Kweli turn over to face the wall.

“Bwana?”

“What, boy?”

“That's what I learned.”

“I heard you.”

“Oh.”

“Now go to sleep.”

I turn away, dejected for some reason I can't quite name. Then I hear the rough voice come out of the darkness again.

“Tomorrow you'll learn more.”

I smile.

The next morning
we're sitting together in the backyard, eating breakfast, when Kweli hands me a piece of wood and a carving knife.

“Carve me a dog,” he says, and heaves himself to his feet and is gone.

I watch his retreating form for a moment, then look down at the wood and the knife that he thrust at me. I grip them awkwardly, like a man holds a newborn. From his workstation under the tarp, I hear the
tch-tch-tch
of Kweli starting into the crocodile again with the little hatchet.

“Boy!” he barks from across the yard. “Go get the whetstone and sharpen this blade for me! It's too dull!”

I jump to my feet and leave the wood and the knife on my stool. It seems I'll still have to do chores today. In a way, I'm glad. It gives me a chance to think about how I'm going to carve my dog.

I've made dogs before, for Kito, but five-year-olds are easy to please. You can put a block in front of them and say,
Look, it's a house,
and they'll smile and nod and play with it for the rest of the day. I know Kweli won't be so easy to convince, even though he's blind.

As I move through the chores of the day, I think about all the dogs I've seen—the way they run, the way they growl and fight, the way they flop in the sun and sleep like they're dead. Should I make my dog standing up? Should he sit? Should he sleep? Will Kweli ever stop giving me chores so I can go work on him?

The answer to that last question seems to be no, and the day drags its dusty body across us, crushing me with the weight of a hundred tiny tasks. It's not until late afternoon, the hottest part of the day, when Kweli decides to take a nap in the shade of the tree, that I get a chance to work on my dog.

I pick up the knife and the piece of wood from my stool where it has sat abandoned all day and sit just inside the doorway. There I'm covered by the shadow of the house but I can still feel the breeze from the yard. I turn the piece of wood over in my hands. It's more square than circular, though it's more like a rectangle than anything else. It's not blackwood, but some pale, soft wood that I can dent with my thumbnail if I press hard. I guess Kweli doesn't think I have the skill to make a
mpingo
dog. He's right, of course.

I close my eyes and rub my fingers over the wood, trying to sense the dog inside like Kweli does. But that only makes me feel foolish, so I open them again quickly and pick up the knife.

Well, here goes,
I think, and push the knife against the wood with no clear plan.

Immediately the knife bites out an irregular chunk, breaking off one corner in the process. I curse myself silently so as not to wake the old chore-finder under the tree.

Punguani!
Slow down! You're ruining it and you've barely even started.

I take a deep breath, put the knife down, and look at my mutilated little piece of wood again. Well, the loss of that corner will make it nearly impossible to make a standing dog, unless he's laughably short. So it'll be a sitting dog. This time, I lay the knife very gently on the block and inch the blade toward me.

I'm rewarded by a thin curl of wood falling into my lap. I grin. I can't help it. I have no dog yet, just a block of wood with one chunk and one slice gone out of it, but even if I stop now I have something to tell Kweli I learned.

I hardly notice the time passing as I sit on the stoop and carve. I'm only mildly aware that I've had to shift my legs twice to keep them out of the moving sun and that the sounds of the small hatchet are again filling the middle distance. I don't even look up. My knuckles ache from gripping the knife so tightly, and every now and again sweat drips off my nose onto the blade and I have to flick it away. I hunch my shoulders and bite my lower lip, and slowly, slowly, a curved back and two pointy ears are freed from the block. A round chest follows, and a blocky muzzle and feet. My dog.

I stare at him with a fondness that a part of me realizes is ridiculous. I flex my cramped fingers, and I'm just bending over to work on the details when Kweli hollers across the yard that it's time to come for dinner. I push my dog into my pocket and go over to the tap in the wall to fill a bucket with the water that we'll use to cook the cornmeal into
ugali.

When I join him by the fire, Kweli says abruptly, “There's a woman named Eshe who lives a few streets away.”

“Bwana?”
I ask, confused.

“She has a mobile phone,” Kweli goes on, “and she lets people use it for a fee. When you decide you want to let your family know where you are, you can take your money to Eshe, and she will help you make a call. Just walk to the right for three blocks when you go out my door, then left for a block, and ask anyone on the street which one is Eshe's house. Everyone knows her.”

So he didn't believe me about my family knowing where I am. Still, that information is good to know. Even though I don't plan on going anywhere near Eshe, I feel safer knowing that Kweli wants me to tell my family where I am.

“Asante, Bwana,”
I mumble, stirring the ingredients together. “I'll keep that in mind.”

Once the meal's ready, I plow through my
ugali,
shoving handfuls of the cornmeal porridge into my mouth so quickly I burn my tongue, waiting for the question. Finally, it comes:

“So, boy. What have you learned?”

“I learned that you gave me a soft wood, so I have to keep the knife at an angle. I learned that if you break something a little, you can still work with it, but you have to change your plan, and”—I pause for dramatic effect—“I learned how to carve a sitting dog.”

“Ha! Very well then, let's have this dog of yours.” He holds out his hand.

“Well . . . it's not entirely finished yet, but here's what I have so far.” I try to keep the pride out of my voice as I put the dog into his hand.

“Hmmm,” he says, and runs his fingers over it. Suddenly, in his hands, I see every ragged edge, every skipped detail. I see how blocky the head and feet are, how out of proportion the head is to the chest. I see that I could have made the fur wavy with cuts; that, had I curved the tail the other way, it would've been more realistic. A vision of the beautiful, smooth, complex statues Kweli creates flashes through my mind. I realize, as I watch him, that I haven't created anything special after all. My dog is just a badly cut piece of wood. I bury my face in my hands and brace myself for the criticism that is sure to come.

I wait.

And wait.

Finally, I look up. My dog is sitting on the ground, and Kweli has gone into the house. I clench my fists. My dog was too poorly done for him to even waste words criticizing it. I stand up and, with a savage kick, send the dog flying into the far corner of the courtyard.
Stupid dog! Stay there!
I shout at it in my mind.

I rub a piece of charcoal around my bowl without paying any attention to whether it's getting clean or not, and then stomp into the house. I slam my bowl on the counter and barrel across the house toward my sleeping mat—and smash right into Kweli.

The impact nearly sends both of us to the floor.

“Goodness, boy! Watch where you're going!”

“You watch where . . .” I start, and then trail off, flushing with shame at my rudeness. I keep forgetting that he's blind. “Sorry,
Bwana,
” I end, lamely.

“Well, all right, but be a little more careful in the future. You nearly knocked me over.”

I mumble something incoherent, wishing he would leave me alone.

“I came in here to get this,” he says, and pushes something at me. I take it. Some distant part of my brain registers that it's wood.

“Tomorrow,” says Kweli, “make a cat.”

The next morning, at breakfast, I'm savoring the feeling of safety that a full belly and a tall wall give me, thinking about how I'm going to carve my cat, when Kweli ruins everything by saying, “I need to go into Mwenge today. Why don't you come with me and I can show you around? Then, on the way back, we can stop in at Eshe's house and you can make your phone call.”

I feel like I've swallowed a mouthful of river water, I'm so suddenly cold.
No!
I don't trust the city; don't know if people here will hunt me or hurt me. By now Alasiri could have caught the Sunday train and be looking for me here. The last thing I want to do is to take that kind of a chance. Also, if I go into town with Kweli, someone will be sure to say something to him about my unusual looks, and that will be the end of my staying here.

“Um . . .” I start, but then don't know where to go from there. The silence stretches as I race to think of something to say. Kweli tips his head to one side, like a bird.

“Then again,” he says after a beat, “I suppose if you want to get a head start on your cat, you could stay here. Today I'm just setting up and running a few errands; Friday will be the day I need to work in my shop. I could head in alone today and then, on Friday, you could come in with me and help out.”

“Oh, yes!” I say right away, without thinking it through. “That's a good idea,
Bwana.
”

“Very well,” says Kweli, and he gets up to gather his things. I shuffle around awkwardly, not sure what to do with myself. Kweli pauses in the doorway. “And Habo?”

“Yes?”

“While I'm gone, please think about when you'll be willing to talk to your family.”

I mumble something incoherent. Kweli gets his long stick from where it's leaning on the wall and opens the gate. Before I close it behind him, I can see why. He rests the top of the pole on his shoulder and has the bottom part pushing along the ground ahead of him. He keeps one hand on the stick as he walks and sways it from side to side, showing that the path ahead of him is clear. The stick leaves a curved line in the dust like a snake track as he walks away from home and into town unassisted. I feel a pang of guilt for not going with him, but I close the gate firmly.

Once Kweli's gone, I try to focus on starting my cat, but I find that I can't get the problem of Friday out of my head, or the question of my family.
There's no point in calling them until you know for sure what you're doing,
I remind myself, but the words feel hollow.

I end up putting the cat wood to one side and hunting around the far corner of the compound until I find my dog again. I sit just outside the front door, aimlessly carving swirls into my dog's fur, trying to think of how I'll manage to convince Kweli that I should stay behind on Friday, too.

Why,
why
did I agree to help him?

I'm jolted out of my reverie by a sound: the scraping of a key in the gate.

That was fast. Did he forget something?

It's only as I see the gate crack open that a chilling thought occurs to me:
What if it's not Kweli?
It feels like I'm watching the door swing open in slow motion as that thought sinks in, and then I drop my dog and my knife and race into the house. Questions pelt the inside of my skull like hail.

Who is it?

Where can I hide?

How do they have a key?

Where are they less likely to look?

I scramble inside and crouch down on my sleeping mat just to the right of the doorway, listening to the metal door in the outside wall creak open and closed on its rusty hinges.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!
This is a terrible hiding place: I have no cover and no ability to hide anyplace else, because by now the person will have walked into the compound and be able to see into the house through the open door I'm crouching behind. I can't run across their line of sight and, unless the person coming in is as blind as Kweli, they're going to see me if they come in the house.

“Great-Uncle!” I hear a voice call out. “Great-Uncle, are you there?”

I cower farther into the shadows of the corner. Great. Kweli has a family. I suppose this shouldn't surprise me, but it does. I've pictured Kweli in my mind as if he was one of his own statues: tall and proud and standing alone, unconnected to anything around him.

The voice is young and high: a girl or a very young boy. On some level I'm deeply grateful that the voice is not older, not male, and therefore could not possibly be Alasiri come to hunt me out of my hiding place again, but I'm not comforted very much. This person, whoever they are, may not be a danger to me in the same way that Alasiri is, but they're related to Kweli, and if they see me they'll tell him what I really am.

I hear a soft clatter from the courtyard. A voice mumbles, “This doesn't look like Great-Uncle's work.”

My dog! My knife!

I start to sweat. Through my own stupidity, I am again hiding from someone who is holding a knife. The voice changes. Less welcoming now; wary.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

No,
I think desperately.
No one's here. Go away.