Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

And he is at the crossroads now. Waiting for a pickup truck to pass—the driver, an old white man in a beaten cap, gives him a suspicious look that Ransom meets, unsmiling—he proceeds to the middle, turns his back, and throws the water, with his essence in it now, over his left shoulder, east, toward the rising sun. And then, not looking back—as instructed by Shanté—he puts Alberta’s money in the box and returns the way he came.

In the yard, the excavator’s hole is bound by yellow tape. The Odyssey’s rear hatch is open. Shanté has taken out her things. Ran can see her, kneeling in the cemetery. With Claire’s garden trowel, she pours a scoop of graveyard dirt into the pot, and her lips move, praying as she works. He enters by the creaking gate, and she stands up and wipes her hands. “I guess it’s time.”

“I guess it is,” says Ran.

Uncovering her basket, with quick, effective violence, she takes out the black rooster she picked from her friend’s stall. As she hands the bird to him, it erupts with surprising fury, and in the flurry that ensues, Ran’s arm is scored and starts to bleed.

“Hold it upside down.”

When he complies, the rooster’s wings fall loose, its golden eyes grow tranced.

Untying the bundle, she places the palos, one by one, upright inside the pot. Standing behind her, holding the passive bird, Ran experiences a misgiving he hasn’t felt till now. When he bought the bird from Shanté’s friend, he told himself that it was just a chicken, after all, and how different, really, from going to the grocery and bringing home the pieces in Saran? Now, though, feeling its bony spurs against his fingers and thumb, the soft wing feathers brushing the tops of his bare feet, its body heat against his leg, the whiff of barnyard shittenness—all this drives home the fact that this is not a harmless game he has consented to. Here now, in the cool of morning, to take its life seems no small thing. Suddenly Ran is far from sure a game is not exactly what it is…if not that, an act of reckless, foolish hope.

From a carved box, Shanté has taken out a folded leopard pelt and draped her shoulders. Inside, Ran can see a pile of fine white ash with larger bits in it. There are dried plants, roots and snails, an armlet she slips on. Lifting a staff, she starts to speak.

“Do not be surprised to see us here today,” she says, speaking to the air, the old trees in the park, the mossy headstones, leaning silently. In her left hand is the staff; in her right, hanging at her side, the gleam of the thin knife…. “We come here to Makulu with offerings, to make Munkukusa, to confess and purify ourselves, so that we may be clean and righteous in your sight. This man, Ransom, and his family have been afflicted with grievances of which we do not know the cause. We come to ask how he has offended you and what it is you wish from him. He is lost, and we are lost, because we have forgotten you. Yet we know that you have not forgotten us. We know only that this pot was made, that you served its maker, and then were turned out in the anthill, consigned to wander restlessly, like them. Today, we call you to return into the nganga, which you see we have prepared for you. It is time for you to journey to Mpemba, to join your mwela there and to live among the bakulu forever. See, then, here is your wine….” And now she pours it on the ground, a splashing cross. “Here, the prenda, here, the menga…”

And now she turns, and with a brief, hard look in Ransom’s eyes, she grips his wrist and raises it. “Ensuso kabwinda.” As she draws the knife across the rooster’s throat, the blood spurts, hot, on Ransom’s cheek. “Embele kiamene…Eki menga nkisi…”

She forces him to hold the bird in place, over the pot, and the blood pours, swift at first….

Ahora sí menga va corre, como corre,

Ahora sí menga va corre, si señó,

Ahora sí menga va corre…

As she sings, her song is like something Ran remembers…some old lullaby someone sang him long ago. But who? There is an ache in Ransom’s throat, and an ineffable tenderness and pity well in him toward the bird. His misgiving, where is that? He doesn’t know. It simply is no more. And the blood is falling, menga va corre, como corre, not horrible, not horrible at all, but somehow connected to the day, this day, to the lifted sky, the lonesome feeling in his heart, the stab of mortal grief, the wound that, at its edge, is touched with sacredness. It is one and the same thing.

It is slowing now, dripping, drop by drop, over the palos, like a soft, warm rain falling in the jungle, running down the branches of the trees, over the stones onto the forest floor, into the black depths of the pot, where it mixes with the earth which itself is living, is human flesh and tissue, bone and blood, the thing that’s left, the thing that we become, and reaching the foundation, it touches the old sygill outlined in new white chalk.

“Now the firma is empowered,” Shanté says, and, turning, once more to the air, in a commanding voice: “Tell us who you are and what you want.”

And Ran, for one moment of unbearable suspense, allows himself to hope. And for that moment, as he waits—for what, he knows not—he closes his eyes and prays in silence, to the air, to the old trees in the park, to whatever power Shanté has called forth, and the prayer he says is, Give me back my life.

Now they wait. The moment of unbearable suspense, no longer than a thunderclap, has passed. And another.