Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [41]
My eyes started smarting and my throat burned.
“It works, that stuff.”
“Yes,” I wheezed.
“Sleep well, then.”
“Good night.”
Then the generator was switched off and the night expanded with insect life, the muted sound of drums from the village across the Chabija, the calling of nightjars and a solitary scops owl, “Prrrp! Prrrp!” I sat up on the bed and stared through the grille of the window at the river. A solitary islander had set up house on the patch of island in front of K’s house. He was crouched over a fire that he had built to keep the hippos off his maize. I pulled my legs up, put my chin on my knees, and watched the barely moving shape of the man as he nudged his fire to keep it alive. Rain gusted lightly off the escarpment, breathed over the river, and misted the gauze on my window. The islander lowered some sort of shelter over himself and the fire—a large sheet of plastic, I thought—and the flames lit the edge of his face orange. When the hippos rose near the tip of the island three or four times and shouted at him, the islander banged on a large tin disk.
I lay down, but could not sleep. Sometime after midnight I heard fishermen in their dugout slapping the water with their paddles to chase fish into their nets. I went to the window and saw the long, low shapes of two canoes slipping through the velvety black water. The fishermen were both standing and, in unison, their paddles came down and the cracking sound that followed was not unlike gunshot. The islander called something to the fishermen, who shouted back. Shortly after that, the watchman stirred. I heard him up at the gate coughing thickly and then relieving himself noisily on the broad-leaved canna lilies. K got up, his bare feet scuffling on the bare veranda floor. He was talking steadily under his breath to the dogs. Finally, just before dawn, feeling stiff with sleeplessness, I got up to put the kettle on. K was already showered and dressed. He was sipping on a cup of hot water and honey.
“Sleep okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “Very comfortable, thank you.”
I made tea and took the tray down to the river to watch the dawn. The islander had let his fire die to a smoky column and had curled up next to it to sleep. K’s three dogs stationed themselves on the edge of the lawn and whinged. The watchman sounded the gong, a persistent clanging on a plow disk, to warn the laborers that they had half an hour before the day’s work started. In a short time, a column of Africans filed up from the staff houses and into their places at the workshop, on the bananas, and at the nursery.
“I am going for a walk,” K shouted to me from the kitchen. “Want to come?”
Cow Bones I
Bobo on K’s farm with Dispatch
IN A NARROW SWATHE around the circumference of K’s farm, the land had been scoured of all undergrowth and freshly mown, so that it resembled cultivated, protected parkland. The sun was just beginning to rise as we set out and the night’s light rain had washed the air fresh and had released into it the scent of wild plants and the round, tinny smell of freshly hatched termites. An emerald spotted dove lamented, “My mother is dead. My father is dead. My sister is dead. And my heart goes dum-dum-dum-dum.” The dogs forayed into the bush, occasionally yelping back to us their discoveries.
Then Dispatch came crashing back to K with something large and white in his mouth and dropped it at our feet.
“Oh look, a bone,” I said. “Maybe a cow?”
K stood looking down at it for a long time, turning it over and over with his toe. Then he bent down and picked it up, weighing the thing in his hand. He ran his nose up the length of it, his eyes closed. Then he made a sound like a laugh, except it was too choking and bitter to be any sign of amusement, and he said, “Okay, I heard you.”
“What?”
“I’m talking to the Almighty,” K told me. There were tears in his