Black Leopard, Red Wolf

The boy pulled me off into thicker, colder bush. I smelled them as soon as he heard them. Sweat funk rising and spreading on wind. The woman squatted down on the man, then up, then down, up and down. I blinked until I had night eyes. Her breasts jiggled. They both made sound. In my father’s room only he made sound. The man did not move. In my father’s room, only he moved. I saw ten things this woman did for the one thing the man did. The woman hopped up and down, jiggled, whispered, panted, bawled, grunted, screamed, squeezed her own breast, opened and closed herself. The moonlight boy had moved his hand between my legs, pulling my skin back and forth to match her up and down. The spirit struck me, made me spurt and made me shout. The woman screamed and the man jumped up, pushing her away. We ran off.

My father said he left his place of birth because a wise man showed him that he was among backward people who never created anything, never knew how to put words down on paper, and fucked only to breed. But my beloved uncle told me different. Listen to the tree where you live now, for your blood is there. I listened to branch upon branch and leaf upon leaf, and heard nothing from the ancestral fathers. A night later I heard my grandfather’s voice outside, mistaking me for his son. I went out and looked up in the branches and saw nothing but dark.

“When will you avenge your father’s killer? Restless sleep rules me, it waits for justice,” he said. He also said, “With Ayodele slayed, you are eldest son and brother. That defiles the plan of the gods and must be avenged. My heat has not gone cold, my weak son.”

“I am not your son,” I said.

“Your brother Ayodele, who is eldest, is here with me, also in troubled sleep. We await the sweet smell of enemy blood,” Grandfather said, still mistaking who I was.

“No son of yours am I.”

Did I look so much as my father? Before I had hair, his was gray, and I have never seen myself in him. Except for stubbornness.

“The quarrel runs fresh.”

“I have no quarrel with crocodile, no quarrel with hippopotamus, no quarrel with man.”

“The man who killed your brother also killed his goats,” my grandfather said.

“My father left because killing was the old way, the way of small people with small gods.”

“The man who killed your brother still lives,” my grandfather said. “Oh how big the shame when that man in your house left the village. I shall not speak his name. Oh what a shameful way, more weak than the bird, more cowardly than the meerkat. It was the cows who told me first. The day he saw that I would not rest until he took revenge, he left the cows in the bush and fled. The cows took their own way back to the hut. He has forgotten his name, he has forgotten his life, his people, hunting with bow and arrow, guarding the sorghum field against birds, caring for the herds, staying away from mud left by flood for that was where the crocodile sleeps to keep cool. And you. Shall you be the only boy in a hundred moons that the crocodile hates?”

“I am not your son,” I said.

“When will you avenge your brother?” he asked.

I went around the back and found my uncle drawing snuff from an antelope horn, like rich men in the city. I wanted to know why he left for the city, like my father, and why he returned, unlike my father. He was coming back from a meeting with a fetish priest, who had just returned from reading the future at the mouth of the river. I couldn’t read on his face if the priest foretold more cows, a new wife, or famine and sickness coming from a petty god. I smelled it on him, the dagga he was chewing for second sight, meaning he didn’t trust the priest with his news and wanted to make sure for himself. This sounded like something my uncle would do. My father was an intelligent man, but he was never as smart as Uncle. He pointed to the white line on his forehead.

“Powder from lion’s heart. The priest mix it with woman’s moon blood and mahogany bark, then chew it to tell the future.”

“And you wear it?”

“Which would you choose, to eat the lion’s heart or to wear it?”

I did not answer.

“Grandfather’s ghost is a mad spirit,” I said. “He asks, over and over, when shall I kill my brother’s killer. I have no brother. He also thinks I am my father.”

Uncle laughed. “Your father is not your father,” he said.

“What?”

“You are the son of a brave man but the grandson of a coward.”

“My father was as old and frail as the elders.”

“Your father is your grandfather.”

He did not even see how he shook me. Silence grew so thick I could hear the breeze shake leaves.