The Tomorrow-Tamer

by Margaret Laurence

  When the council of elders met, Kofi was told to attend. He was not surprised, for he had now been the spokesman of the village youth for some time. Nana Ayensu spoke.

  “The bridge is beside us, and we live beside this bridge, but we do not know it. How are we to discover its nature?”

  Danquah, who was there by reason of his wealth, flatly stated that the bridge had brought good fortune to the village. Business was brisk; money flowed. He could not see why anyone should be worried.

  Kofi’s father leapt to his feet, quavering with rage. The bridge might have brought good fortune to Danquah, but it had brought ill fortune to everyone else.

  “What of my son, spending all his time in the company of strangers? What of Inkumsah’s child, buried in the river mud until his limbs rot soft enough for the crocodile to consume? What of–”

  “Kobla, Kobla, be calm,” Nana Ayensu soothed. “Remember the river.”

  “The river itself will not be calm,” Kofi’s father cried. “You will see–Owura will not suffer this thing to remain.”

  Okomfo Ofori and Opoku the linguist were nodding their heads. They agreed with Kobla. Kofi looked from face to face, the wise and wizened faces of his father, his uncles, his chief and his priest.

  “Something is dwelling in it–something strong as Owura himself.”

  Silence. All of them were staring at him. Only then did Kofi realize the enormity of his utterance. He was terrified at what he had done. He could not look up. The strength was drained from his body. And yet–the belief swelled and grew and put forth the leaf. The being within the bridge was powerful, perhaps as powerful as Owura, and he, Kofi, was a man of the bridge. He knew then what was meant to happen. The other bridgemen might go, might desert, might falter, but he would not falter. He would tend the bridge as long as he lived. He would be its priest.

  When the paint began to appear on the bridge, the people of Owurasu gathered in little groups on the river bank and watched. The men shook their heads and lifted their shoulders questioningly. The women chirped like starlings.

  “What’s the matter with them?” Gerald Wain asked. “Don’t they like the aluminium paint?”

  “They like it,” Badu replied. “They think it is real silver.”

  “What next?” the Superintendent said. “I hope they don’t start chipping it off.”

  But the villagers were not primarily concerned with monetary value. The bridge was being covered with silver, like the thin-beaten silver leaf on a great queen’s chair. Silver was the colour of queen mothers, the moon’s daughters, the king-makers. The villagers wondered, and pondered meanings, and watched the bridge grow moon-bright in the kingly sun.

  Kofi, who had been shunned at home ever since his insolence, himself brightened and shone with every brushful of paint he splashed and slapped on the metal. He painted like one possessed, as though the task of garbing the bridge lay with him alone.

  In the Hail Mary he questioned Emmanuel.

  “Where will you go, when you go from here?”

  “Back to the city. First I’ll have a good time. Everything a man does in the city, I’ll do it–hear me? Then I’ll look around for another job.”

  Kofi was amazed. “You do not know where you will go?”

  “I’ll find out,” Emmanuel said easily. “What about you, bush boy?”

  “I will tend the bridge,” Kofi said in a low voice.

  Emmanuel’s laughter boomed. “Do you think it needs looking after? Do you think it would fall down tomorrow if no one was here?”

  That was not what Kofi had meant. But he did not perceive the difference in their outlooks. He heard only one thing–the bridge did not need a priest. Emmanuel must be wrong. But if he were not? Kofi thought once again of the bridgemen, coming together for a while and then separating once more, going away to look for other places, somewhere. The thought could not be borne. He clicked it off like the little light of the green and silver torch.

  He could return to his father’s farm. That would please Akua and his mother. His father would welcome another pair of hands at the planting. He thought of his machete and adze. They would need a lot of sharpening. He stood up indecisively, looking from the counter to the door and back again. In his pocket the silver shillings clashed softly as he moved. He pulled them out and held them in his hand, staring at the last of the thin bright discs. Then he grasped Emmanuel’s arm, clutching it tightly.

  “What will I do? What will I do now?”

  Emmanuel looked at him in astonishment.

  “Why ask me?”

  The towers were painted from small platforms run up on pulleys, and the cables were painted from the catwalks. Then the day came for painting the cross-members at the top of the towers. It was not a job which many men would have wanted, for one had to leave the safety of the catwalk and crawl gingerly out onto the steel beam.

  Kofi at once volunteered. He swung himself lightly over the catwalk and onto the exposed steel. He straddled the beam, two hundred feet above the river, and began to paint.

  On either side of the brown waters lay the forest, green and dense, heavy-hanging, sultry and still at mid-day. The palms rose above the tangle of underbrush and fern, and the great buttressed hardwoods towered above the palms. Through and around it all, the lianas twisted and twined. Poinsettia and jungle lily blood-flecked the greens with their scarlet.

  Kofi listened to the steely twanging of the cables. The sound, high and sweet as bees or bells, clear as rain, seemed to grow louder and louder, obscuring the bird-voiced forest, surpassing even the deep-throated roar of Owura the river.

  Squinting, Kofi could make out other villages, huts like small calabashes in the sun. Then he saw something else. At a distance a straight red-gold streak pierced like a needle through the forest. It was the new road. He had heard about it but he had not seen it before and had not believed it was really there. Now he saw that it would emerge soon here and would string both village and bridge as a single bead on its giant thread.

  Emmanuel would ride along there in a mammy-lorry, shouting his songs. At some other village, some other bridge, Emmanuel would find his brothers waiting for him, and he would greet them and be with them again.

  Then Kofi knew what to do. He was no longer the bridge’s priest, but now the thought could be borne. He was fearless, fearless as Emmanuel. He knew the work of the bridge. In the far places, men would recognize him as a bridgeman. The power of it went with him and in him. Exultant, he wanted to shout aloud his own name and his praises. There was nothing he could not do. Slowly, deliberately, he pulled himself up until he was standing there on the steel, high above the forest and the river. He was above even the bridge itself. And above him, there was only the sky.

  Then he did something that Emmanuel would never have done on the high steel–he looked up. The brightness of the bridge seemed strangely to pale in the sunfire that filled his eyes. For an instant he looked straight into the sun. Then, blinded, he swayed and his foot slipped on the silver paint. He pitched forward, missing the bridge entirely, and arched into the river like a thrown spear.

  The bridgeworkers’ shouted alarm, as they saw him, was each man’s cry of terror for himself, who might have been the one to fall. The pirogues went out, and the men of the village dragged the river. But Kofi’s body was not found.

  “What could have possessed the idiot?” the Superintendent cried, in anger and anguish, for it was the only fatal accident on the job.

  “He did not believe the bridge would hurt him, perhaps,” Badu said.

  “Did he think it was alive?” Wain said despairingly. “Won’t they ever learn?”

  But looking up now, and hearing the metallic humming of the cables, it seemed to him that the damn thing almost was alive. He was beginning to have delusions; it was time he went on leave.

  As for the people of Owurasu, they were not surprised. They understood perfectly well what had happened. The bridge, clearly, had sacrificed its priest in order to app
ease the river. The people felt they knew the bridge now. Kofi had been the first to recognize the shrine, but he had been wrong about one thing. The bridge was not as powerful as Owura. The river had been acknowledged as elder. The queenly bridge had paid its homage and was a part of Owurasu at last.

  The boy’s father quoted, stoically and yet with pride, the proverb–“A priest cannot look upon his god and live.” Kofi’s mother and his widow mourned him, and were not much consoled by the praises they heard of him. But even they, as they listened, felt a certain awe and wondered if this was indeed the Kofi they had known.

  Many tales were woven around his name, but they ended always in the same way, always the same.

  “The fish is netted and eaten; the antelope is hunted and fed upon; the python is slain and cast into the cooking-pot. But–oh, my children, my sons–a man consumed by the gods lives forever.”

  THE RAIN CHILD

  I recall the sky that day–overcast, the flat undistinguished grey nearly forgotten by us here during the months of azure which we come to regard as rights rather than privileges. As always when the rain hovers, the air was like syrup, thick and heavily still, over-sweet with flowering vines and the occasional ripe paw-paw that had fallen and now lay yellow and fermented, a winery for ants.

  I was annoyed at having to stay in my office so late. Annoyed, too, that I found the oppressive humidity just before the rains a little more trying each year. I have always believed myself particularly well-suited to this climate. Miss Povey, of course, when I was idiotic enough to complain one day about the heat, hinted that the change of life might be more to blame than the weather.

  “Of course, I remember how bothersome you found the heat one season,” I parried. “Some years ago, as I recollect.”

  We work well together and even respect one another. Why must we make such petty stabs? Sitting depressed at my desk, I was at least thankful that when a breeze quickened we would receive it here. Blessings upon the founders of half a century ago who built Eburaso Girls’ School at the top of the hill, for at the bottom the villagers would be steaming like crabs in a soup pot.

  My leg hurt more than it had in a long time, and I badly wanted a cup of tea. Typical of Miss Povey, I thought, that she should leave yet another parental interview to me. Twenty-seven years here, to my twenty-two, and she still felt acutely uncomfortable with African parents, all of whom in her eyes were equally unenlightened. The fact that one father might be an illiterate cocoa farmer, while the next would possibly be a barrister from the city–such distinctions made no earthly difference to Hilda Povey. She was positive that parents would fail to comprehend the importance of sending their little girls to school with the proper clothing, and she harped upon this subject in a thoroughly tedious manner, as though the essence of education lay in the possession of six pairs of cotton knickers. Malice refreshed me for a moment. Then, as always, it began to chill. Were we still women, in actuality, who could bear only grudges, make venom for milk? I exaggerated for a while in this lamentably oratorical style, dramatizing the trivial for lack of anything great. Hilda, in point of fact, was an excellent headmistress. Like a budgerigar she darted and fussed through her days, but underneath the twittering there was a strong disciplined mind and a heart more pious than mine. Even in giving credit to her, however, I chose words churlishly–why had I not thought “devout” instead of “pious”, with its undertones of self-righteousness? What could she possibly have said in my favour if she had been asked? That I taught English competently, even sometimes with love? That my irascibility was mainly reserved for my colleagues? The young ones in Primary did not find me terrifying, once they grew used to the sight of the lady in stout white drill skirt and drab lilac smock faded from purple, her greying hair arranged in what others might call a chignon but for me could only be termed a “bun”, a lady of somewhat uncertain gait, clumping heavily into the classroom with her ebony cane. They felt free to laugh, my forest children, reticent and stiff in unaccustomed dresses, as we began the alien speech. “What are we doing, class?” And, as I sat down clumsily on the straight chair, to show them, they made their murmured and mirthful response–“We ah siddeen.” The older girls in Middle School also seemed to accept me readily enough. Since Miss Harvey left us to marry that fool of a government geologist, I have had the senior girls for English literature and composition. Once when we were taking Daffodils, Kwaale came to class with her arms full of wild orchids for me. How absurd Wordsworth seemed here then. I spoke instead about Akan poetry, and read them the drum prelude Anyaneanyane in their own tongue as well as the translation. Miss Povey, hearing of it, took decided umbrage. Well. Perhaps she would not have found much to say in my favour after all.

  I fidgeted and perspired, beginning to wonder if Dr. Quansah would show up that day at all. Then, without my having heard his car or footsteps, he stood there at my office door, his daughter Ruth beside him.

  “Miss–” He consulted a letter which he held in his hand. “Miss Violet Nedden?”

  “Yes.” I limped over to meet him. I was, stupidly, embarrassed that he had spoken my full name. Violet, applied to me, is of course quite ludicrous and I detest it. I felt as well the old need to explain my infirmity, but I refrained for the usual reasons. I do not know why it should matter to me to have people realize I was not always like this, but it does. In the pre-sulpha days when I first came here, I developed a tropical sore which festered badly; this is the result. But if I mention it to Africans, they tend to become faintly apologetic, as though it were somehow their fault that I bear the mark of Africa upon myself in much the same way as any ulcerated beggar of the streets.

  Dr. Quansah, perhaps to my relief, did not seem much at ease either. Awkwardly, he transferred Miss Povey’s type-written instructions to his left hand in order to shake hands with me. A man in his middle fifties, I judged him to be. Thickly built, with hands which seemed too immense to be a doctor’s. He was well dressed, in a beige linen suit of good cut, and there was about his eyes a certain calm which his voice and gestures lacked.

  His daughter resembled him, the same strong coarse features, the same skin shade, rather a lighter brown than is usual here. At fifteen she was more plump and childish in figure than most of our girls her age. Her frock was pretty and expensive, a blue cotton with white daisies on it, but as she was so stocky it looked too old for her.

  “I don’t know if Miss Povey told you,” Dr. Quansah began, “but Ruth has never before attended school in this–in her own country.”

  I must have shown my surprise, for he hastened on. “She was born in England and has lived all her life there. I went there as a young man, you see, to study medicine, and when I graduated I had the opportunity to stay on and do malaria research. Ultimately my wife joined me in London. She–she died in England. Ruth has been in boarding schools since she was six. I have always meant to return here, of course. I had not really intended to stay away so long, but I was very interested in malaria research, and it was an opportunity that comes only once. Perhaps I have even been able to accomplish a certain amount. Now the government here is financing a research station, and I am to be in charge of it. You may have heard of it–it is only twenty miles from here.”

  I could see that he had had to tell me so I should not think it odd for an African to live away from his own country for so many years. Like my impulse to explain my leg. We are all so anxious that people should not think us different. See, we say, I am not peculiar–wait until I tell you how it was with me.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “I do hope Ruth will like it here at Eburaso.”

  My feeling of apprehension was so marked, I remember, that I attempted exorcism by finding sensible reasons. It was only the season, I thought, the inevitable tension before the rains, and perhaps the season of regrets in myself as well. But I was not convinced.

  “I, too, hope very much she will like it here,” Dr. Quansah said. He did not sound overly confident.

  “I’m sure I
shall,” Ruth said suddenly, excitedly, her round face beaming. “I think it’s great fun, Miss Nedden, coming to Africa like this.”

  Her father and I exchanged quick and almost fearful glances. She had spoken, of course, as any English schoolgirl might speak, going abroad.

  I do not know how long Ruth Quansah kept her sense of adventure. Possibly it lasted the first day, certainly not longer. I watched her as carefully as I could, but there was not much I could do.

  I had no difficulty in picking her out from a group of girls, although she wore the same light green uniform. She walked differently, carried herself differently. She had none of their easy languor. She strode along with brisk intensity, and in consequence perspired a great deal. At meals she ate virtually nothing. I asked her if she had no appetite, and she looked at me reproachfully.

  “I’m starving,” she said flatly. “But I can’t eat this food, Miss Nedden. I’m sorry, but I just can’t. That awful mashed stuff, sort of greyish yellow, like some funny kind of potatoes–it makes me sick.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to cassava,” I said, restraining a smile, for she looked so serious and so offended. “African food is served to the girls here, naturally. Personally I’m very fond of it, groundnut stew and such. Soon you won’t find it strange.”

  She gave me such a hostile glance that I wondered uneasily what we would do if she really determined to starve herself. Thank heaven she could afford to lose a few pounds.

  Our girls fetched their own washing water in buckets from our wells. The evening trek for water was a time of singing, of shouted gossip, of laughter, just as it was each morning for their mothers in the villages, taking the water vessels to the river. The walk was not an easy one for me, but one evening I stumbled rather irritably and unwillingly down the stony path to the wells.