The spirit in the upper branches of this tree was my father talking to me. Telling me to kill for my own brother. And the village knew. They came to my uncle’s house to ask. The old women sent word with the children, When will you avenge your brother? The other boys asked me as they taught me to fish, When will you avenge your brother? Each time someone asked the question, the question had new life. After years of wanting to be nothing like my father, I now wanted to be him. Except he was my grandfather; I wanted to be like my grandfather. My grandmother had gone mad from her need for revenge.
“Where does she live?” I asked my uncle.
“A house built then left behind by large birds,” he said. “Half a day from this village if you stay on the riverbank.”
I sat behind the grain keep.
I stayed there for days.
I spoke to no one.
My uncle knew it was wise to leave me alone. I thought of my grandfather and my uncle, and tried to make in my head what my father looked like. But that always died and left me with my grandfather and my mother, both naked but not touching. What does the bearer do with the thing he can’t bear, throw it off? Let it crush him underneath? I was a fool for they all knew. I was an animal who would kill the first person to speak of fathers and grandfathers. I hated my father even more. My grandfather. So many moons telling myself that I did not need my father. We came to punches and blows, me and my father. And now that I have none I want him. Now that I know he would have made a sister also an aunt, I wanted to kill him. And my mother. Rage, maybe rage would lift me up, make me stand, make me walk, but there I was, still by the grain keep. Still not moving. Tears came and passed without me even knowing it, and when I knew it I refused to think it was so.
“Fuck the gods, for now I feel like I can skip on air,” I said out loud. Blood was boundary, family a rope. I was free, I told myself. And would tell myself all night and all day for three days.
I never went searching for my grandmother. What would she have done but tell me more things I did not want to hear? Things that would make me understand the past but give me more tears and grief. And grief was making me sick. I went to he who was building a fire outside his hut. Why his hut, his grain keep, his fires were all without the company of woman, I did not ask. For a boy who was not yet a man, he was raising himself.
“I will take you to the Zareba, and you will gain manhood. But you must kill the enemy before the next moon, or I will kill you,” he said.
“I call you moonlight boy in my head,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because your skin was dark-white like the moon, when I first saw you.”
“My mother calls me Kava.”
“Where is she? Where is your father, sister, brothers?”
“Night sickness, they all die. My sister was last.”
“When?”
“The sun circle this world four times since.”
“I feel sick from the talk of fathers. And mothers. And grandfathers. All blood.”
“Cool that rage like me.”
“I wish blood could burn.”
“Cool that rage.”
“I have them and I lost them and what I have is a lie, but the truth is worse. They left my head on fire.”
“You will go to the Zareba with me.”
“My uncle says I am not for the Zareba.”
“You still take word from your blood then.”
“My uncle says I’m not a man. That the woman at the end of this has not been cut away.”
“Then pull the skin back.”
Behind his hut was not far from the river. We went down to the banks. He had a gourd in his hand. He scooped water in his hand, poured it into the gourd, and waved me over. I stood still and he took some of the wet white clay and painted my face. He marked my neck, my chest, my legs, my calves, and my buttocks. Then he dipped his hand in the water and marked my skin in lines like a snake that tickled. I laughed, but he was stone. He marked lines on my back, down my legs. He grabbed my cock foreskin and pulled it hard and said what to do with this shriveled foro? Words were spoken up in the trees, but I ignored them. Kava said, “I wish I had an enemy to avenge my mother and father. But which man has there been, that has ever killed air?”
THREE
Here are the things I have seen.
Three days and four nights in Kava’s house. My uncle made no fuss. He was the man of this house in sun and in moon, and thought I looked at his wives with the same open mouth and loose tongue they looked at me. Truth, my uncle’s house was large enough that we could go a quartermoon and never meet. But I could smell out what he hid from his women—expensive rugs from the city under the cheap ones, precious skins from great cats under cheap skins of zebra, gold coins and fetishes in pouches that stunk of the animal whose skin it was cut from. His greed made him squeeze in on himself to hide everything, which made him smaller even with his big belly.
But Kava’s hut.
He had cloths and skins on the ground that were garments when I pulled them up. Black dust in a gourd for shining walls fresh. Jars of water, jars for churning butter, a gourd and a knife for drawing cow blood. This was a home still run by a mother. I never asked if his parents were buried right under him, or maybe his father left him with his mother so he learned woman’s work, since he never went to hunt.
I did not want to go back to my uncle, and I would not talk to voices in trees, who never gave me anything but now demanded something. So I stayed at Kava’s hut.
“How do you live alone?”
“Boy, ask what you want to ask.”
“Fuck the gods, then tell me what I want to know.”
“You want to know how I live so good without mother and father. Why the gods smile on my hut?”
“No.”
“The same breath carrying news of your father tell you he is dead. I cannot—”
“Then don’t,” I said.
“And your grandfather is a father of lies.”
“So.”
“Like any other father,” he said, and laughed. He said this also: “These elders, they say it and sing with foul mouths that a man is nothing but his blood. Elders are stupid and their beliefs are old. Try a new belief. I try a new one every day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Stay with family and blood will betray you. No Gangatom looking for me. But I envy you.”
“Fuck the gods, what is there to envy?”
“To know family only after they are gone is better than to watch them go.”
He turned in to the dark corner of his hut.
“How did you know the ways of woman and man?” I asked.
He laughed.
“Watching the new men and women in the bush. Luala Luala, the people above the Gangatom, have man who live with man like a wife, and woman who live with woman like a husband, and man and woman with no man or woman, who live as they choose, and in all these things there is no strangeness,” he said.
How did he know since he was not yet a man, I did not ask. In the mornings we went to river rocks and painted what sweat washed away in the night. In the night I knew him as he knew me, when he wanted to sleep, his belly touching my back when he breathed. Or face beside face, his hand between my legs scooping my balls. We would wrestle and tumble and grab and jerk each other until lightning struck inside both of us.
You are a man who knows pleasures, inquisitor, though you look selfish with yours. Do you know how it feels, not in the body but in the heart, when you have made a man strike lightning? Or a woman, since I have done so with many. A girl whose inner boy in the fold of her flesh was not cut out is blessed twice by the god of pleasure and plenty.