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.
“When you were only a few years, though we do not count in years, the Gangatom tribe across the river killed your brother. Right after he came back from the Zareba rite of manhood. On a hunt in the free lands, owned by no tribe, he came across a group of Gangatom. It was agreed by all, there should be no killing in the free lands, but they chopped him to death with sharp hatchet and ax. Your true father, my brother, was the most skilled bow and arrow man in the village. A man must know the name of the man on whom he is taking revenge, or he runs the risk of attacking a god. Your father listened to no man, not even his father. He said that the blood that runs in him, a lion’s blood, must have come from his mother, who had always cried for revenge. Her cries for revenge drove her out of her husband’s house. She stopped painting her face and never groomed her hair again. Some think it foolish to avenge the death of one son with the killing of another son, but it was the