Dakpa I keep my sister, kpoyo I lose my sister.
Dakpa I keep my sister, kpoyo I lose my sister.
The termites listen. Their hearing embraces all sound, even the smallest. They hear the future. They chew the present away as the dark devours the moon.
I don’t mind if you want to consult the termites first, old man. Ask them: Should I help this hard-eyed child?
I’ll wait.
You probably think I’m funny, with my skinny body, my big ankle-bones, the spots on my legs where bites have festered and left sores. Sickly, you’ll sigh, and weak. You’ll think of my sister Minisare who could carry a young tree across her back. Tall and lively she was, and when the chance came to work at the D.C.’s house, when a relative of my mother’s who cooked there said, Send one of your girls, it was Minisare my mother wanted to send, not me. But Minisare refused. Let the white man clean his own dirt, she said.
That’s how I came to work at the D.C.’s house, to wear a cotton dress and collect chits my mother could spend at the company store. I carried water to the house, so you see I’m strong even though I’m little. I swept his room. He keeps his wife and children in there, framed and pegged to the wall.
When Ture went to the sky he stole a thunderbolt, and when I went to the D.C.’s house I stole an eyeglass.
It was lying on the table in his bedroom, a flat disc like a stone from the river. He’d forgotten to take it with him to the Site. I squinted through it, then dropped it into the pocket of my dress, chain and all. Afterwards, I told the head cook I’d broken it.
The cook slapped me hard, but I didn’t care. I took the eyeglass home, and that night, secret by the fire, I gave it to my sister. It shone in her hand like a snail-track. It was beautiful like her, and strange like her, and she gripped it and kissed me so hard I winced. We could hear my father groaning from his bed: my mother was laying hot stones along his back to ease the pain. The pain of working since dawn at the Site, digging for the D.C. I wasn’t like him, I thought; I was a thief. Reckless and clever as Ture.
Ture climbed to the sky on a spiderweb. When he got there, the clouds were locked. “Hey!” he shouted, pounding on their shining undersides. Rain fell hard, but the clouds didn’t open. Ture began to sing, and his magical barkcloth hummed along with him in the rain.
Door in the clouds, open-o
See the fresh meat I’m bringing-o
Sweet as the oil of termites-o
Cooked by my wife Nanzagbe-o!
Then the clouds opened, and that’s how Ture got in and stole the thunderbolt, bringing fire back to earth after all the coals had gone out. In our time, although you should always try to keep your own embers alight, you can be sure of finding a coal at a neighbor’s house to start your fire. My mother used to send me out with the coal-pot if our fire died, and I’d sing at the edge of a neighbor’s place: “Door in the clouds, open-o!” Minisare taught me that there were other ways. “Here!” she whispered, commanding. “Watch!” She held the eyeglass on a stick.
I squatted beside her. The world was full of Sunday-morning quiet, the diggers sleeping, voices coming faint from the church. Sweat dripped down my neck. Minisare glared with terrible concentration at the pile of dry grass she’d made on the ground.
The eyeglass glittered, fixed in the twisted wood.
Sun filled the forest. I yawned.
Then something tickled my nose: the smell of burning.
“See!” Minisare breathed.
I stared. A thread of smoke uncurled in the air, and a tiny flame cracked its knuckles in the grass.
Sorcery, then.
For a long time I waited for something to happen: for the D.C. to shrivel and fade, for the Site to collapse, for the diggers to stop their pounding. But it seems the eyeglass was only a minor magic, for nothing stopped, as you know, you can hear the roar of the diggers even here. That endless roar, and the thunder of flying-machines rolling overhead, manned by slave-soldiers from a foreign land. People say the noise chased the game from the forest, once, but then the animals got used to it. We’re used to it, too. Show me a child who can’t read lips.
Nothing changed at all—except my sister.
At first, it seemed only a stranger form of her usual stubbornness. She wouldn’t go to the farm. When I went home at night, I heard my mother complaining: “Why did I marry from the west? This is their blood showing, this worthless girl!”
She said this because my father’s people came from the western forest: my grandfather had gotten trapped on our side during the Breaking of the Clans. When I got close to the fire I saw her slapping her palms together as if in grief, and Minisare plaiting a mat.
Minisare plaited with tense, quick movements. She’d split the reeds into narrow strands. Firelight streaked them. “You’ll ruin your eyes,” I said.
She only jerked the reeds harder.
“Her eyes!” my mother said. “If that’s all she ruins, I’ll consider it a blessing. What she needs is a husband—one with hard hands.”
The words chilled me, and later I told Minisare: “You should help our mother on the farm.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I have to do something else.”
“Something else? What else?”
The darkness was soft, complete, I couldn’t see her at all.
“Out in the forest,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
On Sunday, when I’d washed the dress and spread it out to dry, I followed my sister deep into the forest. Walking before me along the path she was still my own Minisare, cool, long-striding, pushing the grass and branches aside with the ease of a swimmer. Several of the neighbors’ children trailed us, chattering in high voices. We entered a sunny space where the growth had been cleared as if for a farm. A jumble of objects littered the short grass: pots, blankets, barkcloth, cooking-stones. It was like a house shaken inside-out.
She turned to us, the little children and me. “Now,” she smiled, pointing. “You fetch grass. You find me some nice long, hollow canes. The rest of you run to the charcoal-burners and beg whatever you can. Pai-te, stay with me. I want you to check my stitches.”
Her eyes were red. She hadn’t washed her face. Her hair needed rebraiding. But her energy was the same as ever, her laugh as the children scattered, her taut jaw as we leaned together over the patchwork she wanted me to see, a swollen thing like a dead calf.
“What do you think?” she asked. “You’re good at stitching—will these hold?”
“What is this thing?”
“I’ll put oil on it afterward, of course, to keep off the rain. I think the oil will help the stitches too, it’ll keep the air from getting through.”
“Minisare.” I put my hand on her arm. “Tell me. What is it?”
She looked at me. And I saw for the first time what my mother saw, what other people saw when they whispered about my sister: the chameleon-eye. One of her eyes was a spirit-eye, flecked with cloud, the whole forest trapped in it. Ghosts hung in the trees.
I only saw it for a moment.
“I can’t tell you yet,” she said.
“You said you’d tell me.”
She shook her head. “I said I’d show you.”
I looked at the stitches. She’d put pieces of leather and barkcloth together, goat-hair blankets, near-transparent bits of bladder.
There were also scraps of cotton. “Where did you get these?” I demanded.
Her face went stubborn, closed. “Just tell me about the stitches.”
I sighed. “They’re fine.”
“Thank you.”
She stood up, the chain I’d given her swinging at her skirt. In place of the eyeglass it held an ugly iron spike.
Minisare speaks of iron.
She weeps for the lost arts. There were smiths among us, once. They made leaping knives, the sight of which killed hope. The women plucked gold from the rivers and the smiths fashioned it into bangles, hot metal dashing into the mold like a young snake. Now smithwork is against the law, like carving, like drum-talk, like kingship, like the intricate and half-remembered varieties of marriage. You can find old pieces of iron in the forest, native iron it’s called, black lumps like tree-gum chewed up and spat in the weeds.
Minisare talked all the time when she was at home, sometimes so fast she stuttered. She spoke of going to visit our father’s people on the other side of the line.
“You’ll never get there,” I said. “They’ll put you in prison.”
She laughed and cuffed my shoulder, throwing me off balance: her arms were heavier than she knew. Heavy with muscle, and ornaments too: wires strung with chunks of iron, battered metal cuffs, strings dangling bags full of something that clacked whenever she moved. She wore iron sticks in her hair and she kept a coil of string there for emergencies and her face was strong and preoccupied and filthy. But she could still sing in a voice as gentle and blue as the mushroom season:
House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers,
Strangers are eating oil there.
And sometimes, though less often now, she looked at me and smiled. “Little one,” she’d say, and stroke my cheek with a bruised fingernail.
My mother’s rages brought the neighbors running. “Look at you!” she screamed. “A brute, a beggar, a sick dog covered in filth from the white man’s rubbish pits.”
She ran at Minisare, one hand still clutching a lighted tobacco twist, a whorl of dried stuff like a smoky flower. She tried to pull off Minisare’s strange ornaments, and Minisare let her try. After a while my mother gave up and sat down on the ground. Minisare walked away toward her place in the forest, leaving deep footprints. When she came back she wore a burn down the length of her arm.
“You have to stop,” I said. But she couldn’t stop. Even at night she couldn’t rest: she worked on her mat because her fingers would not lie still. I found her plaiting by moonlight and she turned her head to look at me, the souls of the dead awake in her spirit-eye. Sometimes I couldn’t find her at all: she was prowling at the Site, risking the guards, or sneaking off to see the old witch-woman of the lake. She begged me to come with her. The witch was teaching her the old drum-language, she said. She seized my hand and tapped out a crazy rhythm.
“No!”
I snatched my hand away.
Minisare stared, gaunt in the firelight, her beauty in chains.
“But it’s important,” she whispered. She took my hand.
My eyes grew hotter and hotter, until the tears came. She didn’t notice. She kept on tapping, insistent, my palm the drum’s belly, my fingers its liver and heart.
Do you know what the world looks like through the D.C.’s eyeglass?
I do. It’s a blurred place; you can’t tell the real things from the shadows.
People call you the Old Man of the Wood. You were a carver, once, but life in the mines made you bitter, and now you live alone. Still, I know you’ve heard of Minisare. Stories like hers travel everywhere, noisy and eager as the drone of the diggers. Stories like hers fall over the world like rain. Minisare, the girl who cooked iron. The girl who could carry a young tree. Big stories, and all of them true. But the small stories are also true. There’s the story of how I went to the Site every day to deliver the D.C.’s lunch. The story of how he gave me a chit as a tip, and I grasped that soft scrap of paper and shouted out as the cook had taught me: “Thank you Commissioner Sir!” The story of how he seized me in the bedroom one cold morning, his enormous thumbs making my hipbones crack.
This story is also true. My head struck the wall, knocking down two frames. The D.C.’s wife stared up from one of them, pale, trussed in cotton up to her chin. The D.C. muttered. He didn’t touch me twice. I twisted and scrambled, I dashed from the room on all fours. Out on the road, I tore off the cotton dress.
I ran. I ran through the cutting grass without feeling anything. When I jumped in the river all the tiny cuts on my legs sang out in pain. I sank to the bottom, through water brown and clotted like a huge fungus. Then I kicked my way to the surface and came out gasping.
House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers, strangers are eating oil there. That’s a true story, too. What comes up from under the ground of the Site, but oil? Stones, you say; but the D.C. wants them, the D.C. eats them like groundnuts. They are as delicious as oil in the world beyond the glass.
The D.C. eats children. I learned this for myself.
Here is a truth for you: I stole the D.C.’s eyeglass, but the D.C. stole my sister. When I came up from under the river I ran sobbing into the forest, fleeing toward Minisare, craving her strength. The branches of her clearing rang with sound. Children bounced up and down on the bags she’d sewn, each blast of air adding heat to the fire. My sister stood beyond the flames, blurred by the heat as if by tears, and her arm bulged black as she struck a piece of iron.
“Minisare!” I cried.
She did not answer me. A leather mask hid her face, a visor pulled over her eyes like a heavy scab.
“Minisare!”
I ran to her, and then I saw what she had made, out there in the forest. I saw the iron. I saw the beast.
The creature moved. It shook. Its bowels rumbled. It had no eyes. Its whole body bristled with claws of every size. They were made of old knives, hoes, ragged sheets of iron, sharpened sticks. Its bloated hind parts breathed an obscene white wind.
“Minisare,” I breathed. And my sister shook her head. She shook her head at me. She motioned me away with one iron-ringed arm. She had no time to spare. The beast absorbed all of her attention: this beast that stank of smoke, of the D.C., of the Site. My hand tingled, as if she were drumming on it, and I thought of the way she tapped without listening to my words, without seeing my tears. I knew then that her strength was no longer for me, but for something else. She had gone through the glass and left me here, on the other side.
That night Ture came to me in a dream.
He was strutting around the Site with his belly stuck out. His elephant-skin bag hung heavy on his shoulder. I crawled on the ground, hiding under a banana-leaf, and whispered: “Ture!”
“Oho!” he grinned. “Pai-te, are you there?”
“Ture, it isn’t safe here!” I whispered, shrinking under the leaf in terror as machines buzzed overhead. “The D.C. will find you and put you in prison!”
His smile was so wide it cracked his face like an egg. “Ha! Ha!” he roared, slapping his skinny thighs.
Just then a little dog trotted by, almost under his feet, and he stumbled over it. The dog gave a yelp of pain.
Ture’s eyes widened. “Ah!” he said, delighted. “Music!” He took his feathered hat out of his elephant-skin bag and put it on his head. Then he began to leap and trip over the dog, always finding his footing at the last moment, and when the dog cried out he sang with it in a high voice:
I am he who looks up
I look down, all men die.
Ture has stumbled-o,
Ture is dancing!
As Ture danced, the D.C. strode toward us, his eyeglass tight in his eye, and a fire came out of it and scorched the earth all around him. I screamed to warn Ture, but Ture only laughed more uproariously than ever and cried: “Do you think I’m afraid of my friend the D.C.? I’ve taught him all he knows!” And he sang:
House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers,
Strangers are eating oil there.
Then he stopped dancing and looked at me sadly. The D.C. stood beside him. And Minisare in her rough jewelry came and stood on the other side, and all three looked down at me with eyes like salt.
“Once,” said Ture, “you fought with your sister. You were very young, and you bit her finger. Is that blood in you still, or have you spat it out?”
“I don’t know,” I sobbed.
Ture beamed. “Music!” he cried, adjusting the set of his hat. And then he kicked sand in my eyes and woke me up.
The next Sunday evening I took my mother’s digging stick and went behind the house to the termite mound. I broke off two branches, one from the dakpa tree, the other from the kpoyo tree. I dug two holes in the mound with the digging stick and put one branch in each. The sky was pale red, the ants drowsy in the cold grass.
“Dakpa,” I said. “Dakpa I keep my sister. If I keep my sister, eat dakpa. Kpoyo I lose my sister. If I lose my sister, eat kpoyo.”
I went to help my mother with the evening meal. Children laughed somewhere, at someone else’s place, and the piping sound came toward us in broken pieces. A sound like a whistle to call the birds. In the morning, when it was just daylight, I woke up and crept out to the termite mound. The termites had been listening to the future, and they had eaten some of both branches. I took the two branches out and measured them on the ground. I thought the dakpa branch was shorter. I still think the dakpa branch was shorter. I woke my mother and told her: “Minisare must be married.”
We came for her two weeks later.
My mother had agreed at once that we must find Minisare a husband. “Haven’t I been saying so?” she cried. My father was uncertain: he worried that her madness was too well known, and no one would take her. “That’s why we must do it now,” I countered, “before it gets worse.” He hung his head, then shrugged, and that day he began to look for a groom. And he found one: the man who now strode beside my mother, snapping off twigs when they touched him. A noisy crowd followed: relatives, neighbors, friends and trading partners, and then the hangers-on looking for Sunday excitement and hoping to smell food.
I knew, you see, that she would not hear me if I went alone.
My mother gasped and clutched my arm as we entered the clearing. “Don’t be afraid,” I told her, tense as wood. The groom looked startled, the strange scene piercing the layers of drunkenness he wore like a cloak. Minisare’s fire was ashes today, the stones of her forge a ruin. Only her familiar, the clawed beast, gave off heat. Minisare was flinging charcoal into its anus. The children helping her cheered and skittered toward the crowd when they saw their elders.
“Look!” crowed a little boy. “Look what we made!”
The noise of the crowd swelled to a groan. My father stepped forward, his face gray. His crooked back gleamed with sweat. “Minisare,” he said sternly. “Minisare, come with us. We have brought you a husband.”
A foolish plan. I see this now. But I believed the termites, who had eaten dakpa, who had said I would keep my sister.
Minisare pushed up her leather visor and flashed her spirit-eye. Then she tore the beast’s skin wide, stepped into its body and closed the skin up again.
People were running, screaming.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” my mother sobbed. “It’s too late, it’s too late now to save her.”
She shrank to the ground. Minisare’s groom shambled away in panic, crashing into trees, fleeing his demon-bride. And I stood lost, the air thickening around me, until my father seized my arm.
“They’ve gone to fetch the soldiers,” he panted.
When I didn’t move, he slapped me. “Run, Pai-te.”
When I still didn’t move, he ran away without me. The children had scaled the trees, their cries snagged in the branches.
Everywhere people were crashing away through the undergrowth, and the shadows of the great flying-machines closed over us, and all the trees rattled their arms, and the side of Minisare’s monster split like a wound, and Minisare leaned out and shouted: “Pai-te, run! They’re going to start firing!”
She saw that I wasn’t moving. She put a leg out of the monster’s side.
Death striped the forest, clots of molten blood.
When her foot touched the ground, something leapt up in my throat.
“No!” I shouted, waving frantically. “No! Just go! I’m all right!”
My pulse beat under my jaw, so strong it almost made me sob, a voice singing: Door in the clouds, open-o! I knew that voice: it was Minisare’s blood talking to me, the blood I had swallowed long ago and forgotten.
“Go!” I shouted.
By this time, there was too much noise for her to hear me. But she understood. Show me a child who can’t read lips.
She looked at me from her creature’s side, her eyes human now, lonely and radiant. Then she closed the skin, and the beast spun its claws and sank into the ground.
Dakpa I keep my sister, kpoyo I lose my sister.
That is how heroes are made. At night mothers say: “I’ll tell you of Minisare, who stole a lamp from heaven.” They whisper into their husbands’ hair: “Wait until Minisare returns.” They say she’s gone underground, across the lines, to unite the clans. They say she’s stamping the dust somewhere, her iron anklets jangling, her face masked, and everywhere she steps a puff of smoke flies up. Each smoke-cloud puts out teeth. Someday the mines will collapse, and Minisare will burst from the ruins with an army of iron dogs.
And that is also how villains are made. I sat quiet under my mother’s shouts as she ordered me to go back to the D.C.’s house. When she ran out of breath I curled up on my mat, Minisare’s unfinished mat. I stroked the strands of unwoven straw as my mother mourned by the fire. “Minisare was like me,” she often tells me now: “You are your father’s child.” I don’t mind these words. I know that grief is all my mother has in the place where Minisare used to be, and that all the love she had for Minisare must now be lavished on this grief which she carries about like a stillborn child. Also, she’s telling the truth about my sister for the first time. The neighbors comfort her while she weeps and tells the truth. Minisare was everything, everything worth having on this earth: defiance, honor, dawn, tomorrow. She was the rain.
And Ture, traitor, thief, where is he? He’s hiding behind this story, trying to coax it toward him. He wants to make it his own. Or no, he’s not here, he went out of the tale at the same moment as my sister, the moment our history became too small to tempt him. For Ture has no interest in the small. He stumbles over them, sings along with their cries and then moves on. Some people say that he’s living with the D.C., that the two of them drink from the same bottle, that the D.C. hides him and uses his power. This may be true. Foolish, clever Ture has always delighted in fire, in iron, in risk, in grand schemes leading to glory or despair. His language is song, not story. He is dancing in the mines and among the flying-machines. He will not remember me.
But I stole the D.C.’s eyeglass. I have that. Wherever my sister is, she’s warm, she has light to keep demons and leopards away, she’s not afraid. And I’ll do more. I have done more. I went to the witch-woman of the lake and squirmed under the thatch of her sinking roof and asked her to teach me drum. The darkness smelled of snails and her hand was as stiff and rough as a hunk of dried fish when I tapped out the rhythm Minisare taught me. A gurgle came out of the gloom: the witch-woman was laughing. She knotted her fingers in my hair and pulled me to her and told me secrets.
I dream of learning more, of teaching others. I dream of you, old man. They say you made drums in secret, in the old days. I dream you’ll make me a drum. I dream of a clearing on a dark night, and the drum-voice spreading out, crossing the line between the clans.
Ask the termites. They never lie. Come, give me your hand, and I’ll prove it to you. I’ll pass you the words my sister drummed into my hand. Forgive me, the drum-beats say. Do you feel it? That’s a true story, too, a small story that’s slowly growing bigger: I keep my sister.
Wait while I play you the rest of her message, a gift without weight or outline, invisible until you make it happen, like fire.
Pai-te, it says. Yes, it says my name, my actual name.
Watch your step, it says. I’m coming back for you.