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By Root 644 0

my cloth and let it float on the surface. A tree, ebonised by time and the water, lay partly submerged. The roots reached up into the air like a giant’s hand. I knotted the soap in a corner of the cloth and suspended it from a limb. The water was cool, unexpectedly so. I shivered, raising tiny goosebumps on my skin, took a deep breath and plunged below the surface, coming up for air twenty yards on, where the river parted around an island of mangrove. I kicked out down the narrower of the tributaries, turned on to my back and floated for a few minutes with my eyes closed, feeling the faint warmth of a new sun on my face. I swam back to retrieve the cloth. I bathed, lathering my body, watched the bubbles swirl away. And after wards, I climbed up on to the bank where I shook the river water out of my hair. I would tell Aunt Serah I no longer needed hot water in the mornings, I made up my mind to bathe in the river for the remaining days of my stay.

Wrapped in my sodden cloth I walked back to the village, passing the women on their way down to work in their gardens. Isatu, who gave birth to twins a few months ago, pressed an avocado into my hand and I walked on, tearing away the papery skin, biting into it like an apple. The scent of fruit, of damp earth, the ‘touk touk touk’ of a tinker bird, the women with their babies bound to their backs — there is nothing here that could not be a hundred years old, that could not have been exactly the same on the day Asana arrived here as a girl riding on her father’s shoulders.

On my way through the village people called out little courtesies to one another and to me: ‘Did you sleep well?’ And I replied: ‘Thanto Kuru.’ I was no longer a stranger. I knew just where into all of this I fitted. Because in this small world everybody had a place, meaning they all knew how they came to be here. A story of which every detail was cherished. And I had mine.

An hour later I left the house and set off in the opposite direction, past the last house in the village, down to the flat grassland on the edge of the forest. There I found Alpha, alone and kneeling in the dirt, surrounded by seedlings in black plastic bags. He was planting them, one by one, in a row in the ground, concentrating so hard he didn’t hear me come up behind him. The sun was still low in the sky, my shadow trailed behind me. I stood behind Alpha for a few moments, watching him. When I saw him reach for the next seedling, I bent down and passed it to him. He took it without turning around and I wondered if he had known I was there all along.

‘After tomorrow maybe we’ll be finished planting out,’ he said as he pressed the mud down around the roots. ‘It shouldn’t be too long until the rains come. Maybe two weeks, three weeks. We must keep them watered until then.’

I knelt down a few feet away, picked up a trowel and began digging, copying Alpha’s actions.

‘Am I doing this right?’

‘Yes, Abie. That is quite all right.’

With my hands I moulded the earth into a miniature moat around the plant, feeling the dirt burying itself under my fingernails, then I poured water into it. The first three rows of trees had been staked, to save them from marauding porcupines and some kind of cane rat called a cutting grass. Alpha had supervised as the men set wire traps around the perimeter.

‘I’m thinking we’ll plant cassava as a cover crop. We can dry and store some of it.’

‘Good idea.’

We had left the old plantation as it was and begun a new one on the other side of the village. The trees that lived on in the forest had survived the fire, but neglect had taken its toll. Their beans were a long way past their best. So we took cuttings and began to raise seedlings.

In the meantime a certain giddiness had come over my aunts as if the time spent remembering the girls and women they once had been had invigorated the spirits. They’d lifted the past from their own shoulders and handed it to me. I didn’t see it as a burden, not at all. Rather a treasure trove of memories, of lives lived and lessons learned, of terrors faced and pleasures tasted.