The Tomorrow-Tamer (12 page)

 

The next week the big machines came rolling and roaring into Owurasu. Lorries brought gangs of skilled labourers, more Europeans and more cooks. The tractor drivers laughed curses at the gaping villagers and pretended to run them down until they shrieked and fled in humiliation like girls or mice.

Gong-gong beat in Owurasu that night, and the drums did not stop their rumble until dawn. The village was in an uproar. What would the machines do? Who were these men? So many and so alien. Low-born coast men, northern desert men with their tribal marks burned in long gashes onto their cheeks and foreheads, crazy shouting city men with no shame. What would become of the village? No one knew.

Nana Ayensu visited the shrine where the carved and blackened state stools of dead chiefs were kept and where the ancestral spirits resided.

“Grandsires, we greet you. Stand behind us with a good standing. Protect us from the evils we know and from the evils we do not know. We are addressing you, and you will understand.”

Danquah sat at the counter of the
Hail Mary
with a hurricane lamp at his elbow. He was laboriously scrawling a letter to his cousin in the city, asking him to arrange for four cases of gin and ten of beer, together with fifty cartons of cigarettes, to be sent on the next mammy-lorry to Owurasu.

Okomfo Ofori scattered sacred
summe
leaves to drive away spirits of evil, and looked again into his consecrated vessel. But this time he could see only the weeping faces of his father and his mother, half a century dead.

When morning came, the big machines began to uproot the coconut palms in the holy grove beside the river. The village boys, who had been clearing the coarse grass from the river bank, one by one laid down their machetes and watched in horrified fascination as the bulldozers assaulted the slender trees. Everyone had thought of the river's being invaded by strangers. But it had never occurred to anyone that Owura's grove would be destroyed.

Kofi watched and listened. Under the noise of the engines he could hear the moaning of Owura's brown waters. Now would come the time of tribulation; the plague and the river-blindness would strike now. The bulldozer rammed another tree, and it toppled, its trunk snapping like a broken spine. Kofi felt as though his own bones were being broken, his own body assaulted, his heart invaded by the massive blade. Then he saw someone approaching from the village.

Okomfo Ofori was the river's priest, and there was nothing he did not know. Except this day, this death. Kofi stared, shocked. The old priest was running like a child, and his face was wet with his tears.

At the work site, the Superintendent listened wearily while the old man struggled to put his anguish into words.

“What's he saying, Badu? If it isn't one damn thing, it's another–what's the trouble now?”

“He says the grove belongs to the gods,” Badu explained.

“All right,” Wain sighed. “Ask him how much he wants. It's a racket, if you ask me. Will ten pounds do it? It can be entered under Local Labour.”

The village boys looked towards Kofi, who stood unmoving, his machete dangling uselessly from his hand.

“What does it mean? What will happen?”

He heard their questioning voices and saw the question in their eyes. Then he turned upon them in a kind of fury.

“Why do you ask me? I know nothing, nothing, nothing!”

He dropped his machete and ran, not knowing where he was going, not seeing the paths he took.

His mother was a woman vast as mountains. Her blue cloth, faded and tinged with a sediment of brown from many washings in river water, tugged and pulled around her heavy breasts and hips. She reached out a hand to the head of her crouched son.

So the grove was lost, and although the pleas were made to gods and grandsires, the village felt lost, too, depleted and vulnerable. But the retribution did not come. Owura did not rise. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

In the days following, Kofi did not go to the bridge work. He built the new hut, and when the gifts were given and taken, Akua made a groundnut stew and half the villagers were invited to share this first meal. Kofi, drinking palm wine and eating the food as though he could never get enough, was drawn into his new wife's smile and lapped around with laughter.

After a week, the young men of Owurasu went back to work for the bridgemen.

 

The approaches were cleared and the steamy river air was filled with the chunking of the pile-driver and the whirr of the concrete-mixer, as the piers and anchor blocks went in.

To the villagers, the river bank no longer seemed bald without the grove. Kofi could scarcely remember how the palms had looked when they lived there. Gradually he forgot
that he had been afraid of the machines. Even the Europeans no longer looked strange. At first he had found it difficult to tell them apart, but now he recognized each.

Akua bought a new cloth and an iron cooking-pot. On one memorable day, Kofi came home from the
Hail Mary
with a pocket torch. It was green and handsome, with silver on its end and silver on the place one touched to make the light come on. Kofi flicked the switch and in the tiny bulb a faint glow appeared. Akua clapped her hands in pleasure.

“Such a thing. It is yours, Kofi?”

“Mine. I paid for it.”

The glow trembled, for the battery was almost worn out from the village boys' handling. Kofi turned it off hastily. Danquah had forgotten to tell him and so he did not know that the power could be replaced.

At the bridge, Kofi's work had changed. Now he helped in the pouring of concrete as the blocks were made. He unloaded steel. He carried tools. He was everywhere. Sweat poured from him. His muscles grew tough as liana vines. He talked with the ironworkers, some of whom spoke his tongue. They were brash, easy-laughing, rough-spoken men, men of the city. Their leader was a man by the name of Emmanuel, a man with a mighty chest, hugely strong. Emmanuel wore a green felt hat enlivened with the white and lightly dancing feathers of the egrets that rode the cattle on the grasslands of the coast. He spoke often to Kofi, telling of the places he had been, the things he had seen.

“The money goes, but who cares? That's an ironworker's life–to make money and spend it. Someday I will have a car–you'll see. Ahh–it'll be blue, like the sea, with silver all over it. Buick–Jaguar–you don't know those names. Learn them, hear me? I'm telling them to you. Wait until you see me on the
high steel. Then you'll know what an ironworker does. Listen–I'll tell you something–only men like me can be ironworkers, did you know that? Why? Because I know I won't fall. If you think you might fall, then you do. But not me. I'll never fall, I tell you that.”

Kofi listened, his mouth open, not understanding what Emmanuel was talking about, but understanding the power of the man, the fearlessness. More and more Kofi was drawn to the company of the bridgeman in the evenings at the
Hail Mary
. Akua would click her tongue disapprovingly.

“Kofi–why do you go there so much?”

“I am going,” he would reply, not looking into her eyes. “It is not for you to say.”

He still went each evening to see his father and his mother. His father was morose, despite the money, and had taken to quoting proverbs extensively.

“Man is not a palm-nut that he should be self-centred. At the word of the elder, the young bends the knee. If you live in an evil town, the shame is yours.”

He would continue interminably, and Kofi would feel uneasy, not certain why his father was offended, not knowing where his own offence lay. But after he had returned to his own hut and had filled himself with bean soup and
kokonte
, he would feel better and would be off again to the
Hail Mary
.

One evening Kofi's father sent the women and younger children away and began to speak with his son. The old man frowned, trying to weave into some pattern the vast and spreading spider-web of his anxieties.

“The things which are growing from the river–we did not know the bridge would be like this, a defiance. And these madmen who go about our village–how many girls are
pregnant by them already? And what will the children be like? Children of no known spirit–”

Kofi said nothing at all. He listened silently, and then he turned and walked out of the hut. It was only when he was halfway to the
Hail Mary
that he realized he had forgotten to greet or say farewell to the grandmother who sat, blind and small, in the darkened hut, repeating in her far-off voice the names of the dead.

At the
Hail Mary
, Kofi went over to Emmanuel, who was drinking beer and talking with Danquah. Danquah no longer complained about the village. These days he said that he had always known something wonderful would happen here; he had prayed and now his prayers had been answered. Emmanuel nodded and laughed, shrugging his shoulders rhythmically to the highlife music bellowed by the gramophone, a recent investment of Danquah's. Kofi put one hand on Emmanuel's arm, touching the crimson sheen of the ironworker's shirt.

“I am one of the bridgemen,” he said. “Say it is true.”

Emmanuel clapped him on the shoulder.

“Sure,” he said. “You are a bridgeman, bush boy. Why not?”

He winked at Danquah, who stifled a guffaw. But Kofi did not notice.

 

The dry
harmattan
wind came down from the northern deserts and across the forest country, parching the lips and throats of fishermen who cast their moon-shaped nets into the Owura river, and villagers bent double as they worked with their hoes in the patches of yam and cassava, and labourers on the sun-hot metal of the bridge.

More than a year had passed, and the bridge had assumed its shape. The towers were completed, and the main cables sang in the scorching wind.

Kofi, now a mechanic's helper, scurried up and down the catwalks. He wore only a loincloth and he had a rag tied around his forehead as slight insulation against the fiery sun. He had picked up from the mechanics and ironworkers some of the highlife songs, and now as he worked he sang of the silk-clad women of the city.

Badu, immaculate in white shirt and white drill trousers, called to him.

“Hey, you, Kofi!”

Kofi trotted over to him.

“The bridge will be completed soon,” Badu said. “Do you want to stay on as a painter? We will not need so many men. But you have worked well. Shall I put your name down?”

“Of course,” Kofi said promptly. “Am I not a bridgeman?”

Badu gave him a quizzical glance.

“What will you do when the bridge is finished? What will you do when we leave?”

Kofi looked at him blankly.

“You will be leaving? Emmanuel, he will be leaving?”

“Naturally,” Badu said. “Did you think we would stay for ever?”

Kofi did not reply. He merely walked away. But Badu, watching him go, felt uneasily that something somewhere was disjointed, but he could not exactly put his finger on it.

To the people of Owurasu, the bridge was now different. It had grown and emerged and was an entity. And so another anxiety arose. Where the elders had once been concerned only over the unseemly disturbance of Owura's waters and grove,
now they wondered how the forest and river would feel about the presence of this new being.

The forest was alive, and everywhere spirit acted upon spirit, not axe upon wood, nor herb upon wound, nor man upon steel. But what sort of spirit dwelt in the bridge? They did not know. Was it of beneficent or malicious intent? If a being existed, and you did not know whether it meant you good or ill, nor what it required of you, how could you possibly have peace of mind?

A series of calamities enforced the villagers' apprehension. Two of the pirogues drifted away and were found, rock-battered and waterlogged, some distance downriver. A young child fell prey to the crocodile that dwelt under the river bank. Worst of all, three of the best fishermen, who worked downstream near the rapids where the waterflies flourished, developed river-blindness.

When the council of elders met, Kofi was told to attend. He was not surprised, for he had now been the spokesman of the village youth for some time. Nana Ayensu spoke.

“The bridge is beside us, and we live beside this bridge, but we do not know it. How are we to discover its nature?”

Danquah, who was there by reason of his wealth, flatly stated that the bridge had brought good fortune to the village. Business was brisk; money flowed. He could not see why anyone should be worried.

Kofi's father leapt to his feet, quavering with rage. The bridge might have brought good fortune to Danquah, but it had brought ill fortune to everyone else.

“What of my son, spending all his time in the company of strangers? What of Inkumsah's child, buried in the river mud until his limbs rot soft enough for the crocodile to consume? What of–”

“Kobla, Kobla, be calm,” Nana Ayensu soothed. “Remember the river.”

“The river itself will not be calm,” Kofi's father cried. “You will see–Owura will not suffer this thing to remain.”

Okomfo Ofori and Opoku the linguist were nodding their heads. They agreed with Kobla. Kofi looked from face to face, the wise and wizened faces of his father, his uncles, his chief and his priest.

“Something is dwelling in it–something strong as Owura himself.”

Silence. All of them were staring at him. Only then did Kofi realize the enormity of his utterance. He was terrified at what he had done. He could not look up. The strength was drained from his body. And yet–the belief swelled and grew and put forth the leaf. The being within the bridge was powerful, perhaps as powerful as Owura, and he, Kofi, was a man of the bridge. He knew then what was meant to happen. The other bridgemen might go, might desert, might falter, but he would not falter. He would tend the bridge as long as he lived. He would be its priest.

 

When the paint began to appear on the bridge, the people of Owurasu gathered in little groups on the river bank and watched. The men shook their heads and lifted their shoulders questioningly. The women chirped like starlings.