Golden Boy

by Tara Sullivan

  I look at Davu and our eyes catch. Please, please, please, I beg with my eyes. She glances away. No promises.

  “Yes, I have. We spent most of the day here together. We cleaned up a bit. Really, Great-Uncle, you should keep the place more tidy!”

  This, of course, is another joke, since not so much as a blade of grass dares to grow sideways in all of Kweli’s compound. He laughs.

  “Well then, that’s settled! Come inside, you two, and let’s eat! With three of us to share it, the fish will really be a feast!”

  Davu takes Kweli’s hand and walks in with him, chatting about people they both know but who I have never heard of. I want to run away, but I realize I have to do the opposite. If I hang back too far, then it’ll be easy for the conversation to go in directions I don’t want it to. Maybe if I’m there, I can steer the talk away from myself. I hurry to catch up.

  Davu and I help Kweli prepare the stew, and I force myself to take part in their easy banter. I’m tense, and more than once my laugh is too loud, too grating, and there’s an awkward pause afterward. But, miraculously, we get through the preparation, cooking, and eating of the fish without the color of my skin coming up once.

  As we scrub out the dishes with ash afterward, Kweli finally says, “Well, Davu, it was wonderful to see you, but you should probably be getting home. Is it dark out yet?”

  Davu and I look out the open door.

  “Ndiyo, Great-Uncle.”

  “Hmm. Then Habo should go with you for safety.”

  “I . . . uh . . .” I interrupt, then realize I have nowhere to go with that sentence. Come on! What would a normal boy complain about? Think! I try again. “I don’t know the way. And it’s dark. What if I get lost?” My voice breaks at the end, and I hate myself for it. Kweli cocks his head toward me.

  “It’s not so far. Do you really think you won’t be able to find your way through the city?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble.

  “Well, you’re not used to cities, so I suppose I can understand that.” Kweli heaves himself to his feet from where he’d been sitting. “Come on, I’ll go with you. That way you won’t get lost, and maybe next time Davu comes to visit you’ll remember the way by yourself.”

  Trapped! He’s taken away my only rational reason for wanting to stay here. I can feel my terror mounting. Davu must have seen it, too, because she breaks into the conversation.

  “Really, Great-Uncle, it’s all right. I can find the way alone. I’ve done it plenty of times before. You and Habo should stay here and get some rest. It’ll be late when you get home.”

  I barely have time to feel a second’s worth of hope.

  “Don’t be silly, girl!” Kweli waves a hand in her direction, dismissing her idea. “Of course we’ll walk you home. Come on, get your things.”

  Davu shoots me a quick look of what may have been apology, but I’m too busy panicking to notice. What if we meet someone Kweli knows and they say something? What if Davu’s mother is home and she says something? What if Kweli turns me out on the streets tonight, after it’s already dark—where will I sleep? What if Alasiri’s here and is waiting to kill me when Kweli throws me out? I have no answers. In a moment the three of us are standing in front of the metal door and Kweli is turning the key in the lock to let us out. In another moment he and Davu have crossed the threshold into the darkened street beyond and are waiting for me to follow them.

  My hat is completely unnecessary because of the darkness, but I pull it low over my face and tuck my hands into the ends of my long sleeves, trying to cover up as much of my white skin as possible. Then I take a deep breath and follow them into the shadowy street.

  The metal door closes with a clank! behind me and I jump a little, even though I’m the one who closed it.

  “The way to my niece’s house isn’t difficult, boy. Repeat after me: five blocks straight ahead, left for three, take a right, then two more streets.”

  “Five blocks straight ahead, left for three, take a right, then two more streets,” I repeat dutifully, glancing up and down the street for suspicious people, poachers, or waganga.

  “Very good, let’s go.” He holds out his free hand, the one that isn’t holding his cane, to Davu. Davu takes Kweli’s hand, and there is a brief pause where I can see her consider offering her other hand to me. I wait to see what she’ll do. She doesn’t. Instead, she puts it in her pocket.

  I shrug as if it didn’t matter to me one way or the other, but then I see that she has frozen awkwardly, emotions chasing themselves across her face too quickly for me to name them.

  “Habo . . .” She trails off. Then, wordlessly, she pulls her hand out of her pocket. In it is my carving knife.

  I should laugh. But there’s something about knives that’s really just not that funny to me right now. I look at her. She turns it in her hand and holds it out to me, hilt first.

  “You should take this,” she says softly.

  “What’s that?” asks Kweli, confused at the delay.

  “Nothing, Great-Uncle,” says Davu quickly. “I just had something that belonged to Habo in my pocket. We can go now.”

  I reach out and take the knife from her. The hilt is still warm from where it has spent the day nestled against her hip, and I wrap my fingers tightly around it. What should I do with it? Should I put it in my belt? My pocket? I flex my healing arm, remembering when I had to run away from Alasiri. A carving knife wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome of that day, but I lie to myself that it might have. I grip the knife in a solid hold and nod to Davu. We start walking.

  We make it five blocks straight ahead, left for three, a right, and two more streets without incident. Even so, by the time we get to Davu’s house, my palms are slippery with sweat and I’m having trouble making my breathing sound normal.

  “Here we are,” says Davu, and points a little ways down the street toward a large concrete house with a low wall surrounding the yard. There must be multiple families living in it. I notice construction materials stacked against the back wall. They must be making it bigger, too, maybe to rent out more rooms.

  “Lovely,” says Kweli. “I suppose I should stop in and say hello to your mother and the boys.”

  Davu looks at me, at my barely contained anxiety, and then up the street at the clearly lit windows of her house. She winces slightly as she turns to Kweli.

  “I don’t think they’re home yet, Great-Uncle. Perhaps next time?”

  I let out a shuddering breath. Thank you, I mouth to her. But she refuses to meet my eyes.

  “All right then, give her my love,” says Kweli.

  “Good night,” says Davu.

  “Good night, Davu. Thank you for visiting an old man,” says Kweli.

  “Good night,” I mumble, but she has already turned away. She pauses at the door, not going in until we’re out of sight.

  “Well, that was a nice visit,” says Kweli. He holds out his now-free hand to me, like family. I have to move the knife to my other hand and wipe the sweat off my palm in order to take it. The weight of my lie to Kweli is even heavier than my dread.

  “Ndiyo,” I echo, hollowly. “A nice visit.”

  “What did you think of Davu?” he asks, his cane swishing briskly over the sidewalk, his calloused hand holding mine with a surprisingly light touch. “A nice girl, isn’t she?”

  For a moment I struggle to put how I feel about Davu into words. Then I give up.

  “Ndiyo,” I agree. “A nice girl.”

  My days fall into a pattern. Every day Kweli attacks a new stage of the large sculpture in the backyard and I run around like an ant, doing the housework, keeping his work area tidy, and hiding from the people passing by on the road outside our wall. Every evening Kweli asks me what I’ve learned. And every night, just as he is going to bed, Kweli hands me a new piece of wood and a carving assignment
for the next day.

  The dog and cat were the easiest. Since then, Kweli has assigned me snakes, fish, people, goats, and automobiles. He has given me different knives to work with and different kinds of wood. Sometimes the wood is soft and the knife is sharp and the carving comes out as easily as scooping ugali off the bottom of a pan. Sometimes the knife is dull, or strangely shaped, and I have to wrestle the figure out of the block in a way that leaves my knuckle joints sore all night. Sometimes the wood is dry and filled with imperfections and I have to change my plan five or six times to account for them. Sometimes I don’t finish in just one day, but those are evenings when I have many things to say I learned, and Kweli has never yelled at me for it.

  Davu comes by about once a week, but she has always made sure to leave during broad daylight to prevent me having to escort her home. Other than Davu, no one else has come to the door except for people trying to beg, and I haven’t opened the gate for them, pretending no one was home, so no one else has seen me. Davu has still not promised to be silent—she keeps telling me I should tell Kweli myself—but since she hasn’t said anything yet to him about my odd looks, I think I’m safe for the moment.

  I’ve managed to stay hidden better than I’d hoped: Kweli has invited me to town with him every Wednesday and Friday, but has so far not forced me to go with him when I make up excuses not to go. My excuses are terrible. I have a headache; I feel sick; I need to stay and clean up a mess I made just to have a mess to stay home and clean up. Each time I lie to Kweli, my belly twists with guilt, but I tell myself that’s better than watching his face twist into hatred when he finds out I’m a lying zeruzeru. Each time, Kweli pauses for a moment, his head tipped toward me as if waiting for me to replace the excuse with the truth. But when I let the silence stretch, he simply nods and goes without me. He knows something isn’t right, but he doesn’t push me to tell him what that something is.

  What he does push me to do is contact my family. But I’ve managed not to do that, too. It’s true that I think about them and my flight from Mwanza often, but these thoughts make me feel empty and angry. I don’t want to walk out into the street to find Eshe and her phone and, even if I did, I don’t know what I’d say to the people who couldn’t protect me. Also, I’m hoping that as long as I don’t have anyone else to rely on, Kweli won’t send me away. I run my fingers along the thin scar on my forearm, pressing on it. It no longer hurts when I do this, but it helps to remind me why I can’t get too comfortable, feel too safe. I throw myself into the daily work and my carvings and try to pretend that I never existed before arriving at the sculptor’s house.

  Tonight marks a month since I tried to take a blind man’s dinner: four weeks of safety, work, and good food; four weeks of spending time with Davu; four weeks of bad excuses that Kweli has accepted without comment. The September breeze whispers to me that this can’t last, and deep down I know that’s true. Every day for weeks I’ve braced myself for Kweli to finally say he has had enough help and send me on my way instead of giving me a new carving assignment, but so far that hasn’t happened. I’ve found as many ways as I can to help Kweli around the house, doing all the things that need eyes. It makes me feel good to make his life easier. But, though he hasn’t kicked me out, Kweli hasn’t invited me to stay with him and become his apprentice, either. I try not to think about this too often.

  Tonight is no different. As soon as my thoughts start to stray into dangerous territory, I discover I feel like a second helping of dinner and strike up a conversation while getting it.

  “Your sculpture is coming along well, Bwana, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I think it looks good,” I say, scooping more stew out of the pot and into my bowl. The tin ladle clanks against the side of the pot and Kweli stretches out his bowl. I put another ladle-ful into his bowl, too. “What will it be when it’s done?” I ask.

  “What does it look like?”

  I pause. Though no longer a long, scaly crocodile, I have trouble translating the ropy, knotted shapes of Kweli’s sculpture into a word.

  “I’m not sure.” I discovered quickly that honesty is the best idea around Kweli. “There are so many twists in it; it still confuses me.”

  “Ha!” he says, and mumbles something that sounds like “good eyes.” For a moment I think that will be my only answer; it often is. But Kweli goes on: “It’s ‘Justice.’”

  I scowl into the remains of my dinner. Sometimes I think I’d be better off if Kweli didn’t answer my questions. I have no idea what he’s talking about half of the time.

  “What, boy? No answer? No impatient questions?”

  I snort in response, sounding eerily like him.

  “Justice,” I mutter, but I think he hears me. I want to move the conversation along, but I know I have to give some variety of apology. I heave a sigh and say, “Bwana, I don’t understand how you plan to carve justice, but I will continue to watch how you do it. Maybe when you’re done, I’ll know what you meant tonight.” I leave a pause that is only slightly shorter than what is polite, and then ask, “What’s my carving assignment tonight, Bwana?”

  Kweli hands me a large block of wood and a knife. My eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Kweli’s assignments have always progressed in difficulty: The wood has become harder and more temperamental, the knives duller and more oddly shaped. But this is the buttery-textured wood I carved my first dog from, and the knife is perfectly shaped and sized to fit in my hand. I am so confused by the ease these materials will lend me that I don’t at once notice that Kweli has started talking again.

  “Sorry, Bwana! What did you say?”

  “I just gave you your assignment, dreamer!”

  I try to force my brain to remember the last sounds it heard.

  “A weevil? I’m supposed to carve a weevil?” I think of the tiny bugs that burrow into the grain and float to the top when you boil it. I have no idea what they look like up close, but I could try to find one. I’m thinking hard about how to copy the exact shape of the little bug when Kweli corrects me.

  “No, silly boy! Not a weevil! Hmph. I said: Your assignment is to carve Evil.”

  “Evil? How can I carve something that’s not even real?”

  “Evil isn’t real? There’s none of it in the world?” His questions snap in the darkness like branches in a storm.

  “No, that’s not what I meant! Of course there’s evil. Of course it’s real, but . . . it doesn’t have a body or a shape, like a goat or a truck does. How am I supposed to put something into wood that has no shape?”

  Kweli stares off into the distance and I think I’ve won. But instead, he says, “This is the next step. You have shown me that you’re a carver—even, sometimes, a good carver.” I flush with the praise. “But you haven’t sculpted anything yet.

  “A sculptor,” continues Kweli, “does not carve a thing, but a meaning. You’ve seen my sculptures. They aren’t all pretty. Some of them are not even all that accurate, if you’re expecting them to show you a cow or a girl. But each of them is the most accurate rendering I can manage of a thought or a feeling. This is the next stage. I need to see whether you are only a carver or whether you could be a sculptor.”

  As he gets up, he takes pity on my panic and adds, “The way we give shape to an idea, boy, is to show its shape in our life. Show me what you know of Evil. If you succeed, perhaps I’ll ask you to show me what you know of Love, or Happiness, or Pain. But for now, show me Evil.”

  And with that, he walks away, leaving me dumbfounded in the dark.

  18.

  That night, I have trouble falling asleep. With this one assignment, Kweli will decide whether or not I’m a sculptor. He may use it to decide whether or not I can stay with him any longer. If I can impress him enough, maybe he won’t keep asking me to contact my family, won’t even care that I’m an albino. I want this normal, useful life to continue so b
adly that the wanting is almost painful.

  I roll toward the wall and see Kweli’s face as he tells me to carve the impossible. I turn to the ceiling and the weight of what I have to prove with this block of wood pushes down on me until I feel I can’t breathe. I turn toward the room and its emptiness mirrors what I feel capable of. Finally I turn onto my face and try to smother my fears in my blankets.

  A minute later I jolt up, gasping. It’s no use. I have to find some way to carve a physical image of Evil. Should I carve a demon? I think of the Makonde masks in Kweli’s storage hut. They’ve always felt faintly evil to me. Should I make a mask? I crawl off my pallet and across the moon-streaked floor to the bench where I left the wood and the knife. Not wanting to wake Kweli, I slink out of the house, into the night.

  Stepping into the yard, my senses pop as the air opens up around me. I can only see gray shapes in the blackness, so I walk slowly, cautious of where I’m putting my feet, not wanting to step on things in the dark that could bite. When I reach a spot in the center of the swept yard untouched by shadows, I sit on the ground and hold the tools in my lap. I let the moonlight wash over me.

  I sit and I think. Some distant part of me knows I’m going to regret this tomorrow when I’m tired and Kweli wants me to bound around like an antelope, doing errands, but I don’t care. I need to figure out how to carve Evil.

  It’s as I sit there, waiting to know what to carve, that my eyes fall on the shine of the knife in the moonlight. And it hits me all in a rush. I do know Evil. My hands are shaking as I run them over the block of wood, tracing with my finger the lines my knife will carve.

  Yes. It will fit there.

  Yes. It could curve here.

  Yes. I can do this.

  When I pick up the knife and lay it gently against the side of the block, my hands no longer shake.

  It takes me just under a week to finish my carving. I work during lunches, every day when Kweli takes his naps, and late into the dry September nights when there is enough moon for me to see my fingers. I try to apply what I’ve learned from watching Kweli. That first night, I only carved the edges off the block, leaving a slab a little longer than my forearm and three times as wide in the rough outline of the shape I wanted to work with. Over the next few days I slowly whittled that blocky outline down, one layer of detail at a time. Today I finished it. I pull the knife down the long places to liberate the last curls of smoothness and dig the tip in firmly where I want texture and depth. I take a long look at it. Yes, it will do.