A Long Way Gone_ Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah [28]
Kanei had a long and calm face, and unlike Musa he was skinny and had short, really dark hair that he took great care of every morning, or whenever we stopped at a river or a stream. He would rub water on his head and take his time to carefully arrange his hair. “Are you meeting a girl somewhere?” Alhaji would ask, giggling. Kanei, with his soft yet authoritative voice, always seemed to know what to say and how to handle certain situations better than the rest of us.
Whenever Alhaji spoke, he used elaborate gestures. It was as if he wanted his already long hands to extend toward whomever he was talking to. He and Jumah were friends. They walked next to each other. Jumah was always nodding his head, agreeing to whatever the lanky Alhaji said to him as we walked. Jumah used his head to gesture, rather than his hands. Whenever he spoke, he waved his head left to right. He kept his hands crossed behind his back most of the time, like an old man.
Saidu and Moriba were almost as quiet as I. They always sat next to each other, away from the group. Saidu breathed hard as we walked. His ears were large, and when he was listening, they stood up like a deer’s. Moriba always told him that he must have extra hearing ability. Moriba mostly played with his hands, examining the lines on his palm and rubbing his fingers as he whispered to himself.
I barely spoke.
I knew Alhaji, Kanei, and Musa from my former secondary school. We never talked much about our past, especially our families. The few conversations we had that weren’t related to our journey were mostly about soccer and school before we resumed our silence.
The pains we felt from our feet subsided on the fourth night. We went for a walk around the hut, and during our stroll I found out that the hut was only about half a mile from the main village; at night we could see smoke rising from the tiny village’s cooking huts.
We stayed in the hut for a week. Our host brought us water and food every morning and night. He had the whitest teeth that I had ever seen, and he was shirtless all the time. Sometimes when he came to check on us in the morning, he had chewing sap in his mouth. I asked him one morning for his name. He laughed softly. “It is not necessary. This way we will all be safe.”
The following night, our host decided to take us to a part of the Atlantic Ocean that was nearby. As we walked, he engaged us in conversation. We learned that he was Sherbro, one of the many tribes in Sierra Leone. When he heard the stories of how we had walked from Mattru Jong, he couldn’t believe us. He said he had heard about the war but still had difficulty believing that people could do the things that he had heard they did. Our host had been born in the main village and never left. Traders came to his village with clothing items, rice, and other cooking ingredients to exchange for salt and fish, so he didn’t need to go anywhere. If I had to guess, I would say he was in his early twenties. He said he was going to get married the next month and was looking forward to it. I asked why his hut was removed from the village. He explained that it was his fishing hut, where he kept his nets and other fishing items and where he dried fish during the rainy season.
When we got to the ocean, we walked to an inlet where the sea wasn’t rough. We sat on the banks. “Put you foot nah de wahter, make de salt wahter soakam.” He also said the salt water was good for healing the pain and preventing tetanus. Our host sat aside, looking at us, and each time I looked at him he was smiling and his white teeth stood out against his dark face. The dry breeze from inland coupled with the cool ocean air was perfectly soothing. I wanted to know his name so badly, but I restrained myself.
“You boys must come here every night to put your feet in the ocean. This way you will be healed in less than a week,” he said.
He looked in the sky, where the stars were beginning to be covered