Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [41]
Something is happening and we are awake to see it. Not going to miss it, not going to sleep through it like all the other somethings that happened after we had already gone to bed. Nobody will say to us: ‘Oh, you were already asleep by then,’ when they tell the story in the coming days. We are awake. Whatever it is we’ll be the ones to tell the other children in the morning.
We hurry in the direction of our house, a pair of busybodies, to spy from the safety of our bedroom window and discover what business has brought these good folk to us in the middle of the night.
They are ahead of us. Passing our father’s new house now. The smell of wet plaster carries on the breeze. The house is finished. Today the carpenter came and hung the doors: heavy, wooden doors decorated with carvings of monitor lizards — our family tana. The carvings are not good. The lizards look like pigs.
The people march on. We follow behind them at a discreet distance. Hearts thumping, scared breathing, not wanting to be seen. What if it is the poro spirit come to town? Then we should run and hide, our mother warned us one day chasing us back from the fields, ‘Or he’ll catch you and take you away. And I’ll never see you again.’ I giggled so hard as I tried to run I ended up with a stitch in my side. Then her face grew solemn. She once lost a brother that way. A little brother who had been sitting in the road when the spirit came to town. Caught unawares, by the time they heard the sound of the tortoiseshell the spirit and his dancers were already close. She was on the verandah and ran inside. The women slammed closed the windows and doors. It was too late to fetch him in. They thought he would be all right; in those days they left the very little ones. But when they came out he was gone. Into the sacred bush.
My breathing comes faster, my toes curl under me, as though my feet are afraid to touch the ground. I reach out and touch Yaya’s arm.
Then again perhaps they have come from a celebration. Perhaps there will be dancing, a bou bou or a masquerade.
But then they would be singing. And they definitely are not singing. And nobody is improvising steps or clicking their fingers. The sound of their voices falls somewhere between a shout and a murmur.
The crowd slows. A short distance from our own house now. We are nearly home.
And now they are upon it.
They stop. In front of our house.
In front of our own house.
And we stop too.
And the first thing I feel is guilty. Guilty. A mental checklist of offences committed and undetected. As though the appearance of dozens of people in the dead of night might be something we have brought upon ourselves. For practising swear words when we are alone. For holding spitting competitions. For someone’s doves we accidentally set free; they flew up into the branches of an orange tree and broadcast their freedom with thunderous coos. We didn’t try to catch them. We ran away.
Then she is there standing in the frame of the door, struggling to make herself decent. Eyes small with sleep, bare shoulders luminous in the moonlight. When they see her the crowd quiets and lets one do the talking. And we stand still, trying to catch the words that flutter past like dark moths. And then we see all of them, our mother now among them. She is at the head of the crowd, but she is not leading them. Nobody lays a hand on her. I sense the invisible will that propels her forward. They move away down the street. And we run for the safety of our own house and our own beds because we know — we just know — that this is something of which we should not be part.
And he wasn’t with them. I’m sure of it. Maybe he was hiding. Or had fled before he was brought in front of the court. Those people were his supporters, come to clear his name.
The sequence of things is difficult. But that must surely have come first. The people from the village came to beg. They had come to plead. But running beneath the words, the forms of deference: