The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)
Page 22
16
“The Goatkeeper’s Harvest” © Tobi Ogundiran
Originally Published in The Dark (Issue 64, September 2020)
The wind shrieks its displeasure as it rattles the house, rattles it like a child in the throes of a tantrum, and we, little gnats in this container of brick and mud, tumble from our huddle by the table. The awful shriek reaches a peak of fury, and within it I hear the abominable voices of Eleran’s children.
Ebun buries her face in my breasts, breath hot and moist against my skin. “I’m scared, Mama.”
I’m scared too. I’m scared of the wind and what it means, the dark and what it brings. I’m scared for the last bit of wood in the oven and how quickly it burns, the smoke thick in the air like an oppressive blanket, smothering us and smelling strangely of goat.
We all hear the sound: the frantic scratching of nails (or hooves?) on wood. Ebun stiffens against me, Teju’s eyes grow wide in his skull, and as one we swivel towards the door.
“It’s me. Open quickly!”
Ebun has squirmed out my arms and is bolting for the door before I recognize the voice.
“No! Stop her!” I yell.
Teju dives for Ebun as she races past him, tackling her to the ground in a tangle of limbs and bellows.
“Quickly!” says the voice. “I’ve brought help, like I promised. Open the door, we don’t have much time.”
Ebun is sobbing in the corner. I want to sob too, will give anything to curl up in a ball and join her. But I’m her mother, and what is a mother’s job if not to protect her children, to put on a brave face and make them feel as safe as possible?
I turn to the door, forcing a cheer I’m lacking into my voice. “Hello, Yomi. Are the elders with you?”
“Yes! Now open the door.” More scratches on the wood. Frantic. Mad.
“Use the key, Yomi.”
Silence. Even the wind has quieted somewhat, as though it too were listening in. “What?”
I look up at the charm dangling over the lintel, a small cylindrical bundle dark with dried blood. So long as it’s there, we’re safe. It doesn’t matter how hard the wind rattles the house, how awful those screams sound, the things out there cannot get inaffectation unless I open the door. Unless I invite them in.
“The key,” I gasp, heart thrumming in my ears. “You said never to open the door for anyone—especially anyone who sounds like you. You have a key, Yomi.”
“Oh yes, that’s true!” says the voice. (Is it Yomi? Please let it be Yomi.) “And I’m happy you remember all I’ve told you. But I’ve lost my key—”
A deep, demonic wail drowns out his voice. Ebun screams and buries her head in her laps and Teju rushes over to comfort her. My hand reaches for the bolt. That is Yomi out there and I can’t leave him alone. Yomi is still talking, voice warping into something else, strained from terror, from desperation—or is it all an act, a clever ruse? I never know what they can do, the children of Eleran, but Yomi told me explicitly to never ever open—
The door bulges in its frame and I leap back as Yomi starts screaming. “OPEN THE DOOR! PLEASE! THEY’RE—!”
The thunder of hooves drown out his voice and I can’t tell if it’s the wind still screaming or him.
* * *
“Do you think that was Yomi?” Teju asks.
We’re crowded in the upstairs bedroom, that little room the kids shared before Teju decided he was now a man and couldn’t share a room with a girl. He doesn’t look much of a man now, his worried eyes searching mine for answers, for reassurance. How will I tell him that I don’t have the answers? That I also need reassurance? That I wish someone were here to make it all go away. That I wish I hadn’t killed that goat.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Ebun is curled beneath the covers, thumb in mouth as she sleeps off her fright while Teju and I hunch protectively over her. Her baby face is crinkled, as though the terrors of the night have followed into her dreams. And is it me or does her halo of hair seem flatter, shinier? I shake my head, rub my eyes. The wind no longer rocks the house in attack, but the silence is even worse, unnatural. And then there are the boarded-up windows which plunge the house into perpetual darkness, which doesn’t allow us to see outside, see them. The house feels like a coffin.
“That wasn’t Yomi,” Teju says, trying for bravery. For conviction.
We sit there listening to Ebun breathe, watching the lantern grow dim.
* * *
I’m in the large barn, tying freshly harvested yam tubers in neat rows for storage. It’s hard work. I’m caked in dirt, and my forearms bear deep bloody grooves where unruly yam stalks scratched me. The things terrified me as a child, the way they grew like the antennae of some chitinous alien creature, purplish and twitching. Now they are nothing more than nuisance to be clipped off the tubers before they are stored away.
Old hinges squeak in protest as the barn swings open, followed by a blast of hot air from the blazing noonday. The cool barn, specially built with adobe and oak to preserve the tubers as long as possible, is being eroded by hot air. I expect to hear the squeak of hinges as the barn door shuts, but it never comes; the doors are left open for the hot afternoon air to rush in. And I know it’s Teju and his ne’er-do-well friends up to some mischief as usual. The hurried scuffle of feet on the wood-shaving covered floor confirms my suspicions, and I take a deep breath to yell at them when I hear the bleat.
“Ah ah—”
I drop what I’m doing and hurry through endless rows of yams towards the sounds—bleating and more hurried scuffle on the wood shavings—turning round the bend to find five munching goats.
The goats, skinny beyond comprehension, have somehow managed to unravel the rope binding a stack of tubers—the fraying end of the rope where they gnawed at it lies limp like a ripped artery. For a moment I stand, grossly stupefied, staring at the animals as they go to town on the tubers, jostling each other around, crunching into the yams, jaws shifting in that weird animal side-to-side way as they masticated.
In all my years in this town I’ve never seen a goat. Oke-Aanu is a town of farmers and potters and carpenters. But no one keeps livestock, not even birds; if you want meat you hop in the truck and travel two hours to Maraba where the mallams try to cheat you out of as much money as they can for one kilo of stale meat. And yet here are five black goats, munching with abandon on my hard-earned harvest. A harvest which is unusually dismal on account of that strange rot.
“Shoo!” I scream, flapping my arms. “Go away! Away!”
It’s as if I’m not there, as though they can’t hear me; the goats continue to feast with abandon. One spares me a look, and in its black eyes I see nothing but contempt.
“Go away!” I yell again, kicking at them. They bleat in protest, moving lethargically, bumping stupidly into each other, dancing around the ruin of yam tubers. But they don’t run for the door, only avoid my flying feet as they continue their feast. The nerve. The disrespect. They’re hideous things, these goats, these intruders, and they infuriate me.
A rake rests on the nearby shelf next to the sea of rusted farm tools. I grab it by the toothy end and swing for the cluster of invaders.
There’s a satisfying crack as the long handle connects with the rump of a goat. It squeals, a sound eerily human in its agony, and bolts for the door.
The goats scatter. Bleating, climbing over each other in their bid to escape the sweeping rake.
“That’s it!” I scream. “Run, you little shits, and don’t come back here.”
I chase them to the barn doors where an old woman stands, resting against a herding stick. A single fading ankara piece drapes across her torso. The goats hide behind her like petulant children, peeking out and bleating in different octaves. It almost feels like they’re telling her exactly what happened, communicating their discontent.
“What’s this?” I pant. The little exercise has me short of breath. “Are these your goats?”
“My children,”
she says.
“What?”
“These are my children.”
The goats circle the woman’s feet, scuffling for the place closest to her, almost like . . . children. And all the while their black eyes never leave me, baleful stares weighing down on me as if to say, you’re in trouble now.
“Well, madam, your—children—broke into my barn and were eating my yams. Shouldn’t you be—I don’t know—watching them?”
“They’re hungry.”
I open my mouth in indignation, then close it. Try again. “So you led them here deliberately. To eat my yams?”
The woman stands well away from me, so I only just notice the faint wisps of coarse black hair on her lips and chin. There’s something not quite right about her face. Too angular, perhaps, or too disproportional . . . I can’t place my finger on it.
“My children are many,” she says. “They number in their thousands. They’re always hungry.”
Something about her tone, the words themselves, sends a chill down my spine.
She moves suddenly, brushing past and startling me into immobility. When I regain myself she is already in the barn, disappearing round the corner.
“Hey! You can’t just—”
I hurry after her, growing increasingly flustered with each passing moment, unable to shake the feeling that something is seriously afoot. I find her in the bend where her goats (children) had been violating my hard-earned harvest. And lying like an offering among the mess of half-eaten tubers and wood-filings is a dead goat.
“You killed my child.”
“What? No!” That’s when I see the blood on my hands, thick and clumped with tufts of goat fur on my forearms, my dirty jeans, the old leather of my apron. “Th—this is—”
The strength expires from my arms, and the rake drops to the floor, teeth bloody with the proof of my guilt. How did this happen? “No! I didn’t do this!”
The four black goats cluster around their fallen sibling (where did they come from? I didn’t see them reenter the barn) There’s something organized and unanimal-like about their movement. I want to scream, but something has eaten my voice.
The woman bends and scoops the dead goat into her arms, scoops it as lovingly as a mother with her dead child.
“A goat for a goat,” she says, then turns and walks away, her children scuttling in her wake.
* * *
I wake to the sound of screaming. It takes me a moment to reorient, to register the cramped space of the children’s room, the dim lantern, the cords in Teju’s neck as he screams.
I leap off the rocking chair, fall to the floor as my stiff muscles spasm. My eyes water with pain, still I manage to gasp a “What’s wrong?” For one wild moment I’m convinced the house has been breached—Eleran and her thousand young flooding the house. But Teju is looking at the bed, eyes wide with horror and confusion, as he gabbles and points at a sleeping Ebun.
“What—”
Ebun is curled fetal, chest rising and falling as she sleeps, completely oblivious to the ruckus. She looks the same but for the two spiral mounds poking out of her tangle of hair, black and shiny and—
Goat horns.
* * *
The blood flows in patterns down the cracked basin drain as I wash my hands. There is so much blood. But where did it all come from? I never killed that goat. I know I chased them, hit them with the handle of the rake. But I didn’t kill that goat.