Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [16]
Alone in her room, except for me, my mother talks to the stones. Yes, she does, and often. But first she gathers them up in her hands and throws them in the air like a celebration. She holds out her right hand and catches some, leaving others to fall. She counts them two by two. One, two. One, two. This is how she goes. And sometimes: one. She puts the single stone at the end of the line. She casts and counts and casts and counts. Two rows of stones. The road to life and the road to death. All the time she murmurs soft sounds. I know these sounds by heart. The cadence of her voice, the rhythm and sequence of the vowels, the placing of the consonants. Though not the words they make.
On Green Mango Day mama beckons me over. ‘See this here, Mariama,’ she says. ‘Here again on the road to life,’ I push my face in close. A small, plain stone the colour of sand. ‘Maybe a brother for you. What do you say?’ She lets her hand rest on my hair. I like it. I stay. But I have nothing to say. I don’t care for the look of the stone so much. She takes her hand away, folds it up in her lap with the other one. Now she’s talking to the stones. Telling them this week’s news. The important things that have happened to us.
Oh, she saw her clothes float away down the river. It was in a dream: a rainbow-coloured river of clothes. The brown hen hatched a deformed chick. It had no eyes. It died. A burial two houses away. My bellyache.
I’m happy. A little guilty. But the pleasure of hearing her tell the stones about me is sweeter.
Searching the stones for patterns and combinations, the answers to questions. What does she want? I don’t know, cannot imagine. Because I have everything I want right here. Right here. My sisters will be back soon. Now I’m sleeping with my head resting on her thigh. The sound of her chanting, like a lullaby.
In our room late at night she made snuff. Good snuff, they said. She ground the tobacco leaves, mixed the brown dust with cloves and lubi from palm nuts. The cloves were what made it special. One time I stole some of her snuff. Took a pinch in my fingers, and then swallowed it quickly when she walked back into the room. My head spun. Not like when we used to dance. I felt sick and nearly fainted. Oh, so this is what snuff is, I thought. What person would want that?
But people did. Every week or so we carried a jar of snuff to Madam Bah who sold it to the customers who visited her shop. She sat there, arm resting on the window frame of her front room, merchandise piled up behind her, outlined against the darkness. Matches, cigarettes. She opened up the tins and sold them one by one. ‘One stick or two? Tuppence each.’ Baking soda. Balls of black soap. Imported needles. On the table next to her, a wooden cabinet with a dented fly-screen. Inside, squares of deep-fried dough under muslin and sugar cane and snuff. Not a real shop. But the closest we had.
Madam Bah was an only wife but it didn’t seem to bother her at all. And she was the only woman who didn’t have a vegetable garden where she had to go weeding and watering garden eggs and yams all day. Madam Bah bought all her food in the market or from other women. Also she was the only person we called madam. Sometimes I thought this was because she was a shopkeeper. So she deserved to be called madam. Then I thought it was maybe because Ma Bah sounded funny. She travelled and brought Dutch Wax prints, Brillian, shirting, beads and ‘shine shine’ trinkets from far off places. Whenever word was that Madam Bah had come back from a trip my father’s wives stood in line to see what she had brought.
So here we come. With our snuff to sell. I stand with my nose over the window-sill shop counter. But first my mother wants to see a piece of Dutch Wax. And Madam Bah does not get up, but rocks back on her stool and stretches her arm out to reach the cloth. My mother slides her palm over the slippery surface of the cloth. She asks questions. The width? Yes, and the length? Good quality? Top quality, nods Madam