Mother and Son

The old woman sat on a large tree stump with a brown roll between her lips, as she sucked on the roll, her cheeks sagged fearfully. A fire was burning Harmattan fields somewhere not too far and the smell of the smoke in the crisp air was like the smell of the old woman’s weed.

Her son stood by a wooden-framed doorway, ash debris crowded his head like a bad omen, he looked into the sand and shuffled his big naked toe. He drew futile patterns on the sand and then looked around, his face was sedate and quiet but on the old woman’s face was a sterile disgust. A certain indicting knowledge hung between them like cobwebs so that shame was not so far away. And the old woman with her eyes set in glass was determined to bring it out…

The day was ending, there was no great orange sun painting the hills and the grass-scape and the houses, just an evening crowded with cold and smoke and wandering grey. In this place, life came with the first murmurs of darkness. In the opposite house, laughter came out first, followed by three girls, one of them holding in her hands a paraffin lamp, the other carried a small wooden stool with long half-braided hair trailing behind, and the last carried in her hand hair-making utensils.

From the small distance and the onslaught of dark, the old woman could not see the things in her hand, but she felt their laughter with all its carelessness in her head, it made her -for some strange reason- feel like dancing. The son does not feel anything, he is trying with every mental resolve he can muster to avoid feeling, but the blasted laughter of the girls, like the ash, crowded his mind with too much discomfort. The woman so sensitive to her son’s heart laughed a small derisive laughter, and then she puffed and removed the roll from her lips and then talked:

‘When will the Police come?’

‘I don’t know.’

The boy looked towards the girls, even in that dappled evening, he could see the suppleness of their flesh and hear the youthfulness of their chatter.

‘It is late, Maami, maybe tomorrow.’

‘Of course, at least then, we will have the night,’ Maami patted the wooden stump. She puffed again. ‘One more night in one’s home is like magic, I give God thanks for that.’

The son looked at the girls, he could not be rid of their sound anyway, so he tried to revel in it, the girl in the middle has her head thrown backward and behind her, a girl standing is rubbing a sort of cream into her braids, the other one sitting is swinging the hurricane lamp in the throes of a new laughter, something swings out of her hand as she laughs and falls a few paces away from Maami. They turn insulting mouths towards her. But the girl doesn’t seem to mind, she rises, still laughing and starts to make her way towards Maami who already has a mischievous smile on her face.

The girl’s movement is slow and deliberately sensual, the evening loves her. The son stops looking, she reminds him too much of Joy. Joy is in the city now with both of her sisters and his wife, their mother. The girl is near now, so near that the son sees that she has a fear in her features, the fear of an old lonely woman smoking something foul on a December evening. And Maami is skilled in dressing up her loneliness, it is an aura that unravels about her like an onion, each peeled layer revealing depth. The girl’s face is beautiful and strong without intention, it would be easy for this kind of girl to look rude.

‘Good evening Ma…,’ she said and then goes straight to pick the object, a comb that has flung out of her hands.

‘Is it not a strange evening?’ The girl does not answer. ‘Yes, a strange one, a sort of evening in which a girl will say an empty greeting to an old woman, a woman who could have suckled her mother’

The girl is torn between guilt and defence. It is true, she should have knelt, if only slightly. But God, she looks so like Joy, the son should have known it, there was too much spirit in the laughter that had come from her, her large eyes, her pouted lips, everything about her troubled him especially! He asked himself again, Why had his daughters left? Surely, he would not be the first man to have lost his head, they could have forgiven him; it would not have been hard.

‘I’m sorry, madam.’

‘Madam? Me… Madam, you daughter of a witch, let my mothers take your tongue…’ Maami is getting up, her lips are shuddering in the spasm of spilling violence, her wrapper loosed in a bit and her black pale flesh opened to the girl’s ashen face. The son rushed to Maami. He tries to put the robe back around her, but Maami pushes him; there is much strength in her frail arms, and when one’s violence is not premeditated, it is a dangerous thing indeed.

‘Go… get away!’ The son says to the girl’s large face. There is water in her eyes already, and fear has transfixed her. She runs back to her friends, who promptly pack back inside the house.

Maami settles back, slowly, with regained dignity, she is smiling, she puts her roll back in her mouth and puffs. A new cold is in the air, assembling quietly as the night darkens. The weather has been capricious this December, this day, there had been a stale whispering cold, tomorrow could be the steady heat of fire logs. Everything changes here, some evenings, the eastern field is ablaze with sun and some other evenings like this one, the grey makes it eerie. The weather changes, the people change too, like the son’s daughters, more people are going to the city, and some are coming back to rebuild farmsteads. Even the trees change, the moringa tree in the court was now just many branches of white sticks pointing to heaven. Only the old woman was almost the same, she always sat on that wooden log and smoked weed that she had rolled carefully the day before. The plant is behind her house, well, the house is not hers anymore, and several things could change soon.

This knowledge pains the old woman. She had seen many things in her life and very few had resembled the pain of her son when his wife and daughters left him for the city, she had always told him that the woman was a bitch and that his daughters leaving was nothing sincere, there was nothing in the village anyways. But the son could not conceive that two things could be true at the same time: that his daughters leaving was not the same thing as his wife leaving. The old woman was confronting her own sort of sadness, an angry pain at circumstance and her own dejected son was at the cornerstone of this circumstance.

“Do you know what your father did to own this place? Mud as it is?”

The son does not answer, the wind is blowing the smoke from that burning field towards them, it is heavy and dense.

The son does not know what to do, he is only thinking perhaps now he will see his daughters again, but the mother knows, she has only ever known one place, and her son will not fight for it, he is concerned like a woman about daughters and not land so she had in her that motherly instinct to torture her child into feeling.

In the son’s eyes was a confusion so large, it remade his world, the smoke was nearer, fished in his nostrils and the grassland that fell from the top of the eastern hill had lost its piety, it was simply nothing, just a horizon. The mother saw this! But the mother had to hurt him.

‘The smoke…’ the son said, ‘The smoke is in my throat.’

‘He he he, see my son, his daughters are taken and he does nothing, his father’s house is taken and he does nothing yet, but he wants to fight smoke in his throat.”

The son wants to cry, but there is something stronger than want inside him, it explodes! The son is gripping the doorpost, wooden fragments are tearing in his hand, he is weeping like a child, he is saying:

‘I don’t know what else to do, it’s not my fault, they want to take my land, I’ve tried everything, I’ve tried!’  The boy sounded so tortured.

The old woman puffs into the air, she looks at her broken son, destroyed by her words, a power she thought she’d lost but after all this time, it still works.