Since that day, she no longer brought food to the men; they served her. Her other stepbrother Tamu always made sure that she ate to her satisfaction. Mosa, her younger brother, took his concern to the point of providing her with her favourite fruits daily. He was ready to run up and down a guava tree for her at any moment. Mefo was the best of all. She cooked pounded potatoes and beans for her and served her more than one slice of meat. Fatti had even moved out of her mother’s hut and now slept permanently with Mefo. Though she missed her mother, she loved Mefo’s cotton mattress and was in no rush to return to her mother’s hay bed.
Fatti could not help but agree that her return from the land of the ancestors had exposed a side of life she never thought possible in her father’s lifetime. But what about Saha Tpune? Why had Mefo’s father sent her with a coded message to a dead man? Why had he picked her? What did a dead man want with her?
The questions were still plaguing her mind when sleep crept in and took control over her body. She dreamed she was playing hide and seek with a dead man.
What was intended to be a nap ended up as more than an hour of sound sleep. When she stirred it was to realise that the sun had started losing control over the sky. She quivered.
‘Fatti, oh. Fatti, oh,’ someone was hailing.
‘Ouuuuuuuuu!’ She threw back into the air as she struggled to her feet and hurriedly dusted the grass from her dress. ‘Ouuuuuuuuu! I am on the way, oh.’
She scampered down the hill, ignoring the adults she passed on the way and ignoring her favourite guava fruits offered by one of her friends. She only slowed when her soles acknowledged the slight elevation of earth at the entrance to their compound. Totso was waiting for her. His advice was grim: ‘Go to Papa’s hut before he comes for you.’
Without uttering a word, Fatti walked through the yard towards their father’s hut. The door was ajar. She could hear voices coming from inside. She crawled in to find that Mefo and her father were engaged in their favourite past time of hurling invectives at each other. If they noticed her presence, they did not make it obvious. Fatti wished she could escape unseen; after all, she would have reported to see him. Yet she dare not look at the door. Once a child had shared the same space with adults, their permission was the first key to open any door. That meant she could not walk out and neither could she walk into the quarrelling pair. She had been scared to face her father, but as she looked at him and Mefo swinging fingers in each other’s faces like two delinquent children, she became restless. She was simply eager to get the matter settled and to get out. To make the waiting bearable, she decided to close her eyes. But just then all went still. The crackling fire, only seconds ago muffled by heavy voices, now sounded like a trumpet in the heart of night. As though fearing what she might see but having no choice but to look, Fatti slowly opened her eyes.
When her gaze merged with her father’s, she knew that her liberty was over. Something in his eyes told her that all the leisure was over. She wanted to look away but she could not. She was no longer looking at her father but at herself in his eyes. The reflection she saw was not that of the girl she was but the one she used to be, the girl with twelve brothers: the one who swept the compound while the boys swept their classrooms; the one who bent over the grinding stone three times for three mothers in three huts, everyday; the one who walked long distances with short messages; the one who went to bed weak as a girl but woke up strong as a boy.
‘Do you have holes in your ears? When I push a word so it comes out through my mouth, I expect that you do the same,’ her father was yelling at her.
‘Has night come, Papa?’ Fatti said, unsure of what she had missed.
‘Did that long journey to the other world take away some of your senses? How can you come in front of adults and close your eyes? Do not tell me that you are still sick. If you are strong enough to be walking about at this hour, then you are strong enough to go to the farm. No more lying about pretending to be sick. As from tomorrow you go back to all your duties.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘A child cannot wake up in the morning and become an adult,’ Mefo intervened.
‘Has night come, Mefo?’ Fatti greeted.
‘Was the day good, my child?’ Without waiting for an answer Mefo continued, ‘Let us go to my hut. I have something for you.’
Temkeu’s yells about how Mefo was teaching Fatti a bad example by shielding her from reproach even in the face of misconduct rebounded into his ears. Fatti and Mefo had walked past his door.
Fatti looked forward to one last nice night before adopting her old life. Did Mefo really have something for her or had she said so only to get her out of her father’s hut. If someone were to ask her what she wanted from Mefo on a last evening of freedom, she would have asked her to complete the story of why she never got married. Too many times Mefo has started the story, the last being only the previous evening, but too many times something or someone had prevented Mefo from completing it.
When they arrived at Mefo’s hut, one of the five in the compound, the first thing Fatti did was to light the bush lamp. After bringing the fireside to life with glowing flames, she placed a pot of water on it. As she waited for the water intended for bathing to get warm, she started washing the cocoyams for the evening meal.
Finally, the two women sat warming themselves by the fire. They had taken their daily baths and were waiting for the food to get ready. Mefo asked, ‘We are in which year?’
‘1959’
‘I do not want to hear anything about the white man.’ Mefo sighed. ‘That white man has brought nothing but division. We used to have the annual dance at the end of each year. The village used to come out as one to rejoice and offer thanksgiving sacrifices to our ancestors. The white man came and had to put his own big feast at the same time as our own. Then he said those who choose to follow him should not come to the village dance because we do evil things there. Do not mention that white man near me.’ She paused and asked again, ‘In which year are we?’
‘We are in the year after the Church came to our land.’
‘Are you not still talking about the white man?’
‘Sorry, Mefo. The year ... the year ... ’
‘Beauty used to have a home in me,’ Mefo said slowly.
Fatti smiled. That was the typical start of the story she wanted to hear.
‘Beauty was mine in the days when my breasts were hard like unripe pears and my skin smooth like the back of a calabash.’ The wrinkles around Mefo’s eyes formed thicker folds as they bore the effect of the smile that shaped on her lips. Most of her face was twisted, layers of tradition trapped in the folds. ‘My beauty was a fact.’ As she spoke, she pushed the firewood deeper into the fire to fuel the dying flame. She then dove into a narration about the years when she shone as intensely as the flame. ‘With each step I took, more and more eyes followed me.’ The small penetrating eyes, the pointed nose, the heart-shaped lips – these features transferred to a trimmer and firmer body would indeed produce a sight worth pursuing.
‘You are still beautiful, Mefo,’ Fatti confirmed and then bent beneath the pot of cocoyams to fan the smouldering coals. She had to blow several times to reawaken the flames.
Mefo watched on, inhaling and exhaling tobacco-scented air from her pipe. From beauty queen to Queen Mother, she continued the narrative of her glorious days. ‘I am sure you know that the beauty living in you comes from me and not from that stupid man the gods punished you with for a father.’ This brought a turn in the story. It was now about Mefo’s father. A period of prolonged silence soon followed.
Fatti looked about the hut lazily. The upper layers of the wall had lost their original earth colour and were now painted black with several coats of soot and so were the layers of bamboo shelves at one corner of the hut. She glanced at Mefo. Her gaze was still fixed on the glowing