The Ghosts of Eden

by Andrew JH Sharp

  The men were to be summoned into the hut, one by one. The gyoogi enquired if any man was missing. Stanley’s mother shouted from the doorway to say that her son was missing and that her husband was looking for him. He had been gone two days and had not yet returned.

  ‘On that matter I have news for you,’ one of the gyoogi said.

  The crowd quieted.

  ‘Your husband found your son in the town yesterday. He attended the police station to report him missing but returned later to say that he had found him. Pah! The youth of today! He’s taken him to see an uncle and will be gone a little while longer.’

  His last words were almost drowned by an outpouring of celebratory ululating from the women and a concordant murmuring from the men.

  A gyoogi spoke above the din, ‘Please! Your attention everybody. We’re here on a different matter. A very serious matter.’

  The noise died instantly. Stanley strained, not to miss a word.

  ‘We’re investigating a crime. A terrible crime. That is why your small village has received not one, but two, inspectors. This is Inspector Obonyo and I am Inspector Babumba.’

  ‘But what crime?’ someone shouted.

  ‘Please, please, do not hurry the law,’ Inspector Babumba said. ‘The law cannot be pushed like . . . er . . . you people push your cows. However, I can reveal that the crime we’re investigating concerns a killing. That’s all I can inform you – that’s all you’re permitted to know – until we’re authorised further.’

  ‘That is true,’ Inspector Obonyo said. He had a deep voice like the King’s drum.

  ‘Yes, of course, the law agrees on this point,’ Inspector Babumba said.

  The gyoogi made it plain that their official business must commence without further interruption. They instructed the men to line up in front of the hut and assigned Bejuura to the door to call each man through at their bidding. Stanley came around the hut to be near the line, hugging the curve of the wall to push his way close.

  The first man looked pleased to be first. This would be an event talked of for many seasons to come.

  Stanley heard Inspector Babumba say, ‘What you’re permitted to view here is exhibit number one.’

  ‘Ah!’ the first interviewee exclaimed.

  ‘This spear was used in a mortal crime.’

  Stanley pictured the spear, black with blood from point to tip.

  ‘Do you know the owner of this spear?’

  There was no reply.

  The Inspector repeated his question slowly in case the man was an imbecile.

  ‘What of it?’ the first interviewee said.

  ‘This spear was used to kill.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Please, please, it is necessary for you to inform us of your answer. Do not keep the law waiting.’

  Stanley heard Inspector Obonyo agree, ‘That’s true. The law’s waiting.’

  Now the man spoke, but quietly, as if he did not wish to be overheard. ‘It’s the Head Herdsman’s spear.’

  Inspector Babumba asked loudly, ‘The Head Herdsman’s spear? Are you positive in your identification?’

  The crowd exclaimed ‘Eh!’, and all eyes were on Bejuura.

  Stanley heard Bejuura’s sullen voice, ‘I’m the Head Herdsman. This man’s right. That’s my spear.’

  The crowd gasped and shrunk back. Stanley took the opportunity to push a little nearer to the door. The daub pressed rough against his cheek.

  ‘Then where did you go three nights ago?’

  ‘I was in the kraal all night.’

  ‘You have a strong arm to throw this spear eight miles.’

  Inspector Babumba chortled to himself. There was a short silence and then Inspector Obonyo laughed. It sounded to Stanley as if a hippo had belched.

  Inspector Babumba said, ‘This spear, this very spear which is revealed to you by the law, was found at the scene of the crime.’

  ‘It must have been taken by a ghost. I was not there.’

  ‘You’re spinning fables for the children,’ the Inspector replied, and then added, slowly and pointedly, ‘Telling ghost stories.’

  Inspector Obonyo’s voice vibrated the packed-earth floor again. ‘That is exact. Ghosts – they’re just for the kids.’

  Everyone was quiet.

  ‘The law does not believe in ghosts. We cannot arrest a ghost. The judge cannot sentence a ghost. The law cannot hang a ghost.’

  ‘Hang?’ Bejuura’s voice sounded thin.

  ‘You’re under arrest. You must accompany us to the police station for further questioning.’

  Stanley squeezed his head around the entrance but all he could see were the whites of the gyoogis’ eyes in the dark hut: triumphant and staring. Why doesn’t Bejuura tell them that Zachye stole it? Stanley thought, but then considered the shame.

  The gyoogi handcuffed Bejuura and led him away. The crowd shook their heads. As Bejuura passed, Stanley saw his wandering eye fix on him, and stay on him long past the angle an eye could naturally revolve.

  For a long time after the gyoogi had gone the men and women discussed Bejuura’s crime; at first in terms of disbelief that one with a roving eye could find his target with a spear, and then later agreeing that they had always suspected he could kill, and were thankful that the clan members had escaped falling victim to such a man.

  Once again Stanley found himself lying awake at night. When he had asked Erinesti what they should do, Erinesti had said that it was up to Zachye on his return to speak up if he chose.

  A quiet Zachye walked into the kraal with his father two days later. When Stanley asked him where he had been he shrugged his shoulders. His father told his mother that he had found Zachye trying to find work in the town. She did not ask more for she was bursting to tell them what had happened to Bejuura.

  ‘Murder?’ Stanley’s father repeated.

  ‘It was murder. Bejuura killed a man, but he left his spear at the place.’

  Stanley’s father shook his head slowly. ‘Bejuura?’

  Zachye had been listening intently. Now he spoke up. ‘Father, I have something to tell.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Sir, it concerns this matter with Bejuura.’ His parents swivelled around. ‘It was a goat.’

  ‘What goat?’ his father asked.

  ‘It was not murder. I only killed a goat.’

  ‘Don’t speak in riddles. Speak plainly.’

  ‘I wanted to take its skin and sell it in the town. To pay for my school fees.’

  ‘How does this concern Bejuura?’

  ‘I killed the goat with Bejuura’s spear. I took his spear.’

  ‘Cho!’ his mother cried.

  ‘But who used that spear to carry out the murder?’ his father asked.

  Zachye shrugged. ‘It was not me.’

  His father stood motionless for a long time, and then said, ‘Tomorrow I’ll walk back to the town, to the police station. Zachye, you will come with me.’

  They left early, Kaapa Katura and Zachye, and returned, silent, the next evening after dark, with Bejuura. Bejuura went immediately to his hut. Zachye said nothing, and Stanley knew better than to ask. His mother spoke little for days but Stanley waited patiently, knowing that she would tell him when the will to keep any promise of secrecy she had made to his father had weakened with time.

  She told Stanley, ‘There was no murder. The police wished to frighten Bejuura. The goat belonged to an important man.’

  ‘What will happen to Zachye?’ Stanley asked.

  ‘Nothing. Zachye’s too young to be arrested but your father,’ she put her hands to her head, ‘he will have to pay for the goat.’

  Their father came into the hut that evening when Stanley and Zachye were about to sleep. ‘Zachye, I’ll be sending you to school with Stanley. It’ll be safer if you’re not out on your own on the pastures. Bejuura will not forget you wronged him. My cousin, Felice’s father, is to pay your fees.’

  Zachye looked triumphantly at Stanley b
ut his father reprimanded him, ‘I have shame that I should have begged again. Do not disappoint me at school.’

  Stanley slept the sleep of one untroubled by the spirits. To think his protector would be going with him to school! But his mother went out to make offerings in the ghost huts. When she returned she stood for a long time watching over her sons while they slept. Outside in the kraal the cattle moaned, and on the far horizon a grass fire burned.

  Six

  Felice’s father, Kaapa Katura’s cousin, sent shorts and shirts for Stanley and Zachye. At first Kaapa Katura said he was minded to sell them for cash to pay the hut tax but the village headman dissuaded him, saying that the schools did not want people in ‘backwards’ clothing of skin or bark. The night before their first day at school the boys’ mother permitted them to put on their uniform. With the younger children watching they pulled their shorts up as high as they could, but as soon as they let go the shorts dropped to their feet. The little children laughed. Zachye boxed one on the head.

  ‘They are for big Bazungu,’ Stanley said.

  Zachye examined his shorts, turning them around to find an alternative way of wearing them.

  He puzzled over the buttons before saying excitedly, ‘Look, these are to tighten them.’

  They threaded the buttons through the buttonholes and tried again. Zachye’s stayed up but Stanley’s fell to his ankles again.

  ‘You will have to hold them,’ Zachye said. ‘You cannot go to school naked like a baby.’

  They swaggered around, their legs moving back and forward inside, and independent of, the wide leggings. Then they put on their new shirts (the shoulder seams of Stanley’s shirt reached halfway down his arms) and then paraded up and down with their spears. Stanley held tightly onto his shorts with his other hand. The onlooking children drew back to let them pass.

  That night, lying inside his shorts, Stanley could not sleep for thinking about holding his shorts all the way to school and all day at school. So he unthreaded a bark strand from the hut wall and tied it around his waist. There were floppy folds above the makeshift belt, but when he stood the shorts stayed up.

  They started out before dawn: Stanley, Zachye and their father. He accompanied them in silence to the road, by which time a thickening band of light was spreading across the eastern horizon in the direction of the school. Without a word Kaapa Katura took their spears, turned and left them to walk on down the road. Later, when Stanley had become familiar with measuring distance by the multiples of a fixed yardstick, rather than the passage of the sun across the sky against the speed of walking, he would work out that the distance each way was nine miles. Only nine miles from the old world to the new.

  As they looked ahead down the road they saw other children, in twos and threes, walking in the same direction, all quiet as they emerged from the night.

  Stanley dated their arrival into the new world not by their stepping into the school compound but by the rude and terrifying appearance of a bus, which came out of nowhere from behind. For a moment it was as if a crested crane was shrieking in his ear, and then he found himself being propelled into the culvert by Zachye. The bus, horn still honking viciously, passed above them: a high wall of rubber, metal and glass. Giant machinery on the rampage. Stanley lay frightened in the ditch while the single rear light gouged an angry red line down the road. He had instinctively tightened his hand as the bus leered over him, but he found no spear to grip.

  The tension of the past days of anticipation broke when he picked himself up. He trembled, and made a pretence of wiping dirt off his shorts. A shout caused him to look up. Zachye had jumped into the middle of the road and was screaming ‘Bean eater! Egg sucker!’ at the disappearing bus, whooping as if he was a raiding warrior. Shouts of agreement, and companionable laughter, answered him from the other children down the highway.

  ‘Come on, let’s get there,’ Zachye said. ‘We’ll soon be running down this road in my big car, then the bus will get out of our way.’ He held up his arm as if balancing his spear and quoted a favourite recitation, ‘He Who Is Of Iron, at Burimbi, called up the Abahandura with The One Who Drives Off The Foe.’

  Zachye strode on with new vigour. Stanley followed uncertainly in the wake of Zachye’s recharged enthusiasm. It seemed that the bus had so excited Zachye that he expected to pick up his car, and the box that made music, at the school that very day. But Stanley longed to be back in the kraal, leading the calves to their mothers, hearing the milk spraying into the gourds from the stroke of the teats, smelling the sleepy smoke from the dozing fires.

  Thirsty, for they had drunk little milk in the haste of leaving, they followed the other children into the school compound past a sign, which they could not read. Six hard-walled buildings, with shining metal roofs and black-framed windows cut in orderly repetition along the white walls, lay in two neat rows along each side of the compound on raised concrete plinths. Standing outside the door of the last building on the left, where the rising sun flashed from a pane of glass, was a squat man with skin of such a deep and non-reflective black that Stanley nudged Zachye to draw his attention to him.

  ‘He must be from far away – further than the hills,’ Stanley said, staring.

  They could see by the flicks of the whites of his eyes that the man was scanning the compound, although his head remained motionless, stuck well forward on his shoulders, his neck short or possibly absent. His tie looked like a pink belly streak under the shell of his black jacket.

  ‘His mother was a beetle,’ Zachye sniggered. ‘Let me guess – a dung beetle I think.’

  Two other boys nearby overheard him, laughed, and then passed on the man’s nickname to the other children.

  With a jerk of an upper limb, Dung Beetle crossed his chest with the short knobbed stick he held, and shouted out, in Runyankore but with a rasping foreign accent, ‘Attention! Attention! All P1 children this way.’

  ‘Are we P1?’ asked Stanley to Zachye, buffeted by the milling children.

  ‘How do I know?’

  The youngest children were heading that way so they followed, and were encouraged by the twitching of Dung Beetle’s stick to enter the classroom. Stanley looked around to find the Bazungu children, but there were none. This surprised him: if this was the Bazungu Education, where were the Bazungu?

  Inside the classroom the children made way for Zachye. He looked tall and muscular compared with everyone else.

  ‘Are you one of the teachers, sir?’ a girl asked Zachye.

  Zachye looked down at her and then around at the other children, some of whom were looking up at him expectantly.

  ‘Heh? I’m starting at school.’

  ‘Hah! Your father must be poor. He cannot send you to school until you’re old,’ the girl said. She and her friends turned to each other and giggled.

  Zachye pushed his way to the back of the class. He leant against a window and looked out. Stanley stood beside him feeling the cold of the concrete under his bare feet. Two small, upside-down flies buzzed on the window ledge. Zachye silenced them with sticky shots of spit.

  Dung Beetle came in and scuttled in a fast-legged action to the front of the class. The children stopped talking immediately and averted their eyes. Dung Beetle spoke in English. ‘Good morning, children.’

  Stanley did not understand. No one else spoke and no one looked at Dung Beetle. He brought his stick down with a loud crack on his table so that the children jumped.

  ‘When I say “Good morning, children” you must answer “Good morning, teacher.”’

  He repeated his greeting. A few replied timidly, ‘Good morning, teacher.’

  Dung Beetle became agitated. ‘Attention! P1 children! Look at me! I’m your teacher. I have my school certificate. For too long you have been quiet when your elders have spoken to you. That is respect, which was good, but now you must learn something new.’ He hit the table again with his stick, making Stanley jump again, although Stanley could tell from Zachye’s slouching stance t
hat he was not intimidated, or impressed. ‘This is your first lesson. When I speak to you, then you must look at me and you must answer me loudly. That is the way of the school certificate.’

  He greeted them again. More answered him, but he was not satisfied.

  ‘You! Come here.’ He pointed at Stanley. Stanley moved forward, looking at the floor. The teacher put his face to Stanley’s. ‘Good morning, children.’

  Stanley was barely audible. ‘Goo maw.’

  The teacher’s arm swung in a wide arc and the stick buried itself in the folds of Stanley’s shorts. ‘Look at me when I speak to you and speak loud.’

  Stanley glanced anxiously at the teacher, whose face was still close to his own. His bulbous cheeks and prominent forehead reminded Stanley of the outer mouthparts of some strange forest animal – or beetle – that might suddenly extend itself, fix onto his face and suck him. A musty odour seemed to be oozing from some pore. But then the teacher withdrew, as if taking pity, and sent Stanley back to his bench. He saw the wide eyes of the other children follow him back. The stick had not hurt but this first lesson had been hard.

  ‘Now we have lesson number two,’ Dung Beetle said. ‘Stand in front of the benches.’

  The children complied urgently, although they stood too many to some benches and too few to others.

  ‘Sit down.’

  They started to bend.

  ‘Stand up.’

  Some sat down.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Some stood up.

  The stick fell on the table again. ‘No, P1!’

  Stanley, mindful of lesson number one, and of the stick, looked fully at his teacher. For a moment Dung Beetle said nothing, as if overwhelmed by the enormity of his task. He said wearily, ‘When the headmaster comes in I’ll command you to stand up, to sit down, to stand up.’ His voice strengthened. ‘If anyone does not obey, they will feel the full power of my stick.’