Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [18]
All around, suspicious eyes peer out at me from huts as I stumble by. Frightened kids take a step back into the safety of their mothers' arms. Men, all of them naked too but for their nambas, stop what they're doing (which is nothing, of course) and watch.
The first building we come to is a dusty shack known as a nakamal, or tribal meeting house, on the porch of which someone has mysteriously left a sack of screwdrivers.
“Cash, this is our chiff.”
“What is? Oh—this!”
Wizened and wrinkly, with a foaming froth of sepia-gray hair on his head and two smaller froths at his jowls, it's the oldest person I've ever seen in my life! Little more than a loose arrangement of bones tied together at the neck, he has a craggy tobacco-yellowed smile and an arced spine crushed by the years into an unyielding parabola. Because of this, he crouches. Out of respect, I crouch too. Around here they call the chief Bigman. Yeremanu. A word meaning “what he says goes.” Everyone defers to him, and therefore so must I. Chiefs are thought to possess great magic powers, so you don't want to get on the wrong side of one—say, by mistaking him for a bag of tools, for instance.
“Hello there, I'm Cash. How lovely to meet you,” I beam, reluctant to shake his hand lest it turn to dust. “This is an honor for me.”
Off to one side, Tom translates.
“How old is he, the chief?”
“One hundred seven years old.”
“One hundred seven??”
“'Es.”
While my facial expression may say I'm impressed, privately I'm thinking, jeez, what a bitter curse longevity is. I never, ever want to live as long as this, or to look like him if I do. If I am not dead by the age of ninety I want to be stuffed in a box and cremated anyway. To hell with the formalities. Then, after a small celebration for grieving friends, my ashes—and I've made an express provision for this in my will—are to be taken to Yorkshire in the north of England and flung in my sister-in-law's face. She knows why.
After an awkward moment of introspection, the conversation with the chiff draws to a close. “Anyway, nice to have met you.” I smile.
And the smile is returned warmly. Lovely man.
“How come the chief lives to one hundred seven?”
“Because we eat food and we live long,” Tom says, walking away.
“The secret to longevity is in the food?”
“'Es. Come, I show you the garden.”
Visiting Yakel Village is like stopping off at Bedrock and saying hello to the Flintstones, except that Yakel is ten times more primitive. There are no cars—not even ones with holes in the bottom that you move with your feet. The houses are ramshackle huts like thatched tents made of braided sticks, cane, coconut leaves, and mud. And your waste disposal isn't a hog sitting under the sink with its mouth open. Though that's only because they don't have sinks.
Five families live here altogether, according to Tom. Roughly 140 people per family. Each man in the tribe has up to nine children, and, believe me, it shows. There are little kids everywhere, and they're free-range, running about as they please, climbing trees, idly sitting on the ground picking nits out of their mother's hair, or, in some cases, brandishing giant machetes as long as my arm, with which they expertly slice the skin off wild grapefruit, while coyly examining me from the corner of their eye, showing curiosity without wanting to appear to. Where there aren't children there are chickens, piglets, and stray dogs. The dogs are just rib cages with legs, snuffling for scraps between the huts, and, when they find none—because if there were scraps, the kids, chickens, or piglets would surely have snapped them up by now—they flop down exhausted in a dusty corner, looking like there's only a fifty-fifty chance they'll ever get back up again.
We emerge from the cover of trees onto a sward of parched grass.
“Come—see this.” Tom directs me to one of the larger huts. “This is our kitchen.”
Inside, it's dark. A dying fire coughs sparks that only by some miracle don't set the straw