The Tomorrow-Tamer (24 page)

Tetteh's mother was wearing a skirt of dried palm fibre, a fringe of fresh banana leaves around her full bosom, a shaky-looking headdress of white hen feathers, and an exceedingly surly expression. Tetteh grinned.

“Wife of the ju-ju man. Real bush lady, this one.”

“I have prepared a good groundnut stew,” Tetteh's mother said crossly. “I worked all morning. I wish now I had rested instead. Your white man probably cares only for drink, anyway.”

“It would be such an advantage if I spoke the language,” Hardacre said regretfully. “What did she say, Tetteh?”

“She is saying she has ready a great feast for honouring you, man. Look, here is the python priest now.”

Tetteh's father had been persuaded to don the grimy loincloth he wore when he worked in the fields, and to strap a dagger around his chest, but beyond this point he would not go. He dragged himself into the hut with painful slowness, as though suffering from partial paralysis. After a swift and shamefaced glance at Hardacre, he turned to his son.

“Greed is an affliction of the soul. You will have us all in serious trouble one of these days.”

Tetteh politely translated for Hardacre. “The old man, he is welcoming you to Gyakrom and praying his python god to give full blessings for you.”

Hardacre looked pleased. “That's decent of him, I must say. When will he perform the rites?”

“First the meal,” Tetteh said, holding out a bowl of palm wine, “and then the snake-calling.”

After the trip Hardacre was thirsty, and once he had downed the first bowlful he found the palm wine quite palatable.

“My meeting you like that–” he said feelingly, after the fourth bowl had been emptied. “You were absolutely right, Tetteh–it was a real stroke of luck.”

Tetteh lifted his wine bowl in salute. “Live long, Uncle, and never leave me.” Then, seeing Hardacre's puzzled expression, he explained. “Just some words I say when I drink. No meaning for you, man.”

When they had eaten, Tetteh grabbed a small drum and thrust it into his father's arms.

“Drum, papa!”

With a look of disgust, Tetteh's father picked up the curved stick and tapped once. Then he threw it down.

“I cannot.”

Kwaame seized the stick and began to drum, clumsily but with verve. Tetteh tore out to the lorry and came back with a paper bag, from which he took half a dozen crudely-carved fetish figures. Hardacre examined them.

“Intriguing–where did you get them, Tetteh?”

“Secret place,” Tetteh said. “Perhaps later I will be telling you.”

Tetteh's father frowned. “I do not like those things here.”

“They are nothing,” Tetteh said in his own tongue. “Nothing has been done to them. They come straight from the carver. Nothing has been said over them. They are harmless.”

“Still, I do not like it.”

“Papa, it is all right. They sell them like baskets of groundnuts in the city market. Anyone can buy them there.”

“That is what you say.”

“No difficulty, is there?” Hardacre asked anxiously.

“No, no, man,” Tetteh swung into English. “The old fellow wanting to be sure all things are correct for his snake god, that is all.”

He disappeared again and returned a moment later carrying by the feet a struggling, squawking white chicken. He tethered it and placed it on a stone block, where it lay palpitating and all at once eerily silent.

“A cockerel for the god,” he explained to Hardacre. “While the young man is drumming magic drummings and saying magic sayings, then the python priest is cutting this same cockerel's throat, and when the blood running down, the god drinking it, you see. Then, if we have luck, the pythons coming out of the bush.”

Tetteh's father was glancing dubiously across the room at the chicken. He shouted for his wife.

“Come here, Akosua! You had better make sure this is the right hen. It would be just like Tetteh to take the young cockerel instead, and we would have no eggs next year.”

“Papa–” Tetteh pleaded. “Don't you think I know a cockerel from a hen? Anyway, you do not need a cockerel to get eggs, except the eggs for hatching.”

“And a child does not need a father, either, I suppose?” the old man snorted.

“I learned about the eggs at school,” Tetteh said defensively.

“That is the sort of thing they taught you. No wonder you act in such a peculiar fashion.”

Tetteh's mother examined the fowl. “This is the right one. A hen, the lame old one. See her leg?”

Tetteh threw up his hands. His father merely shrugged. Then Tetteh shook himself, jumped to his feet, snuffed out all but one of the wicks burning dim in vessels of oil, tiptoed across the room to Hardacre and placed wiry fingers on the whiteman's shoulders until he flinched. The light in the hut was feeble and shot through with shadows and shadowy presences. The drum rumbled and Kwaame chanted. Tetteh's father raised his knife. Hardacre breathed rapidly.

But the old man, the squirming fowl underneath his hand, hesitated. The sweat stood out on his forehead, and the wrist of his knife-hand trembled. Tetteh, now sitting cross-legged beside Hardacre, half rose and then sank back again uncertainly.

“What is it, papa? What is wrong?”

“What if they are offended?” Tetteh's father said in a low and distant voice. “Perhaps it will go badly for all of us here. What if they believe themselves mocked?”

“Who?” Tetteh almost shrieked. “Who?”

The old man looked blankly at his son. “Those whose names and powers you have forgotten.”

Then he seemed to recover himself. He coughed a little and blinked his eyes.

“Now I will have to see Bonsu, to set the matter right,” he said plaintively. “Well, it cannot be helped. Let the false cockerel die, then, for it would have been killed for the cooking-pot tomorrow, anyway.”

The knife came down and the blood spurted. Tetteh, sloughing off his momentary anxiety, danced with a reckless joy. A crackling of dry palm boughs sounded overhead, and from the hut roof three dark writhing coils appeared and began spiralling downward. Tetteh caught Hardacre's arm.

“The pythons from the bush, man. They are here.”

Hardacre leaped out of the way. “My God, did it actually work?”

At that moment a voice like a judgement roared outside the hut, and the struggling reptiles abruptly disappeared. Tetteh whirled, his startled eyes questioning his brother. But Kwaame stood paralysed, listening to the deep and godlike voice. Like dead butterflies on a pin they all stood fixed in the attitudes they had held when the voice began. Hardacre's arms were outstretched and rigid. The old man's hands were stiff around the reddened knife.

Then a figure appeared in the hut doorway. A grey-haired man, a portly and rather elderly African, clad in a black suit with a high white collar. Released, the people in the hut stirred and breathed. Tetteh's mother, palm leaves rustling, fled into the back room.

“Two boys are on your roof, Kobla,” the Reverend Timothy Quarshie said mildly. “I shouted at them to get down.”

His glance took in the adorned hut, the block, the bleeding fowl.

“What are you doing here?” he cried. “What can you be thinking of, Kobla?”

Tetteh's father threw down the knife. “It was nothing. A jest of this boy's. Yes, I am an old fool. Tell me.”

The Reverend Timothy Quarshie regarded both Tetteh and Hardacre with disapproving eyes.

“You, sir,” he said to Hardacre in English. “I do not have any idea what you are doing here, but I must tell you I think you are a bad influence on my congregation that I have spent nearly twenty-five years building up. I never thought to see an elder of my church acting so.”

Hardacre stared. “An elder of your church?”

“Indeed, and a member of my congregation for many years. I myself baptised all his children, including Kwaame and Tetteh here.”

“His children? Tetteh?” Hardacre looked at Tetteh, who groaned and put his hands over his eyes.

“I see.” Hardacre faced the pastor. “Well, sir, I'm exceedingly sorry, but I was very interested in ancient customs, you see, and I'd hoped to find in Gyakrom the preservation of such observances. Tetteh told me–”

“You are interested in such things?” Quarshie seemed surprised. “Why did you not go to see Bonsu, then?”

“Who's he?”

“Why, the fetish priest, what else?”

“The–good heavens–do you know him?”

“Of course,” the pastor said, rather irritably. “Everyone in Gyakrom knows Bonsu. Who knows him better than I? I have been trying to convert him for–let me see–it will be fourteen years this August since I first tried to convert Bonsu. Nearly every evening we have a game of checkers, Bonsu and I. He is certainly the best checker player in Gyakrom, I will say that for him. And, of course, no one makes a bunion cure equal to his.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you, a pastor, buy remedies from a witchdoctor?”

“I am a foot sufferer,” the Reverend Timothy said with dignity. “Corns and bunions trouble me. Bonsu makes the
best foot ointment I have ever discovered. Are you suggesting I should not relieve my feet in this manner?”

Hardacre was spared a reply, for Tetteh's mother now reappeared, respectably clad in her best cloth, a handsome blue-veined print patterned with golden and great-eyed fish. The pastor turned to greet her. Then his attention was caught by the fetish figures, which Tetteh was unsuccessfully attempting to stow away in the paper bag. The pastor picked one up, looked at it, and threw it down.

“Not even good carving. I have a dozen better than that.”

Hardacre gaped. “How can you?”

“Quite simple,” Quarshie replied calmly. “People who join the church give such figures to me, along with amulets, charms, magical bracelets, phylacteries of unchurchly origin,
nufa
medicine, and other assorted pieces of what you would call ju-ju. A certain man brought me such a collection this evening. I have not had time to burn them as yet.”

“You surely don't destroy them?” Hardacre cried in an anguished voice.

“Indubitably,” Quarshie said. “That is the very thing which I do.”

“Do you think you could see your way clear to selling that lot to me instead? I am speaking as a private collector, but I might ultimately donate the things to a museum.”

The Reverend Timothy Quarshie stood quite still, evidently engaged in some sort of soul struggle.

“Saint Sebastian Mission,” he said finally, “has a tower–a small one, true, but a real tower. We have never had a bell. I have in my possession many catalogues showing church bells, and I often look through these booklets and think which bell I would choose if ever any money came by some miracle into my hands. You would not believe how many kinds of church bells are
made. All sorts–large, small, brass, bronze, iron, low voices and also tones high and musically sweet. I sometimes hear them in my dreams–all those bells, pealing and chiming for evermore.”

He brought his hands together in a clapping gesture that was half prayerful.

“I will do it! You shall have the
suman
.”

“You couldn't by any chance introduce me to this Bonsu?”

“Nothing would be easier. He does not live very far from here.”

“I'm sorry to leave like this,” Hardacre said to Tetteh, “but I'm sure you'll understand. I've settled with you for the lorry. I don't really think I owe you anything more, do you?”

“Go,” Tetteh said bitterly. “But if you look for justice, man, you will not be finding it in this world.”

Later that night Kwaame came back to the hut after a brief foray and reported that Bonsu was displaying some sort of rites in the sacred grove beside the river for the edification of the stranger. Tetteh rose from his sleeping-mat and went out into the darkness.

The grove was hushed. The tree toads chirped in muted chorus and an occasional night bird cried. Tetteh concealed himself behind a clump of bushes. Soon Bonsu with two acolytes appeared, followed by Hardacre, stumbling in the gloom. Bonsu, a bent and bow-legged old man, wore his full regalia–palm fibre kilt, white tunic, strings of charms around wrists and ankles. In his hands he carried his
kukuo
, the earthen pot in which he could see the future. He filled the pot with river water, into which he poured palm wine. The two youths handed him eggs, intestines of a fowl, a brass gold-weight, and he placed these in the
kukuo
. In the murky light of the wood torches, Tetteh could see Bonsu's gnarled hands as he set the earthen pot with great care on the ground. Hardacre's face now bore an
expression of happy fulfilment. Speaking to himself in a furious whisper, Tetteh was not even aware that he spoke aloud.

“How much for that? Twenty pounds? Thirty? That scoundrel Bonsu–if I could only strangle him–”

Behind him, a slight movement and a hand placed gently on his shoulder.

“Fifty pounds,” the Reverend Timothy Quarshie said, with a faint chuckle. “That was the sum agreed upon.”

Tetteh swung around. “You! How do you know?”

The pastor settled himself comfortably on his haunches beside Tetteh in the thorny underbrush.

“Yesterday,” he said, “after all these years, Bonsu finally joined the church. Perhaps he thought I would not continue to play checkers with him otherwise, or perhaps–I don't know. He still believes in the old gods, of course. I cannot ask too much, and maybe it is only a question of names anyway. He will sell herb cures as always, but no more charms or predictions. It was his carvings and
suman
which I sold to Mr. Hardacre. Bonsu has tonight a special permission. Half the money is to go to Saint Sebastian. He is looking into his
kukuo
for the last time.”

“I am ruined,” Tetteh said. “But do not upset yourselves, you and Bonsu.”

The pastor smiled, deafly absorbed in his own thoughts.