free, I told myself. And would tell myself all night and all day for three days.
I never went searching for my grandmother. What would she have done but tell me more things I did not want to hear? Things that would make me understand the past but give me more tears and grief. And grief was making me sick. I went to he who was building a fire outside his hut. Why his hut, his grain keep, his fires were all without the company of woman, I did not ask. For a boy who was not yet a man, he was raising himself.
“I will take you to the Zareba, and you will gain manhood. But you must kill the enemy before the next moon, or I will kill you,” he said.
“I call you moonlight boy in my head,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because your skin was dark-white like the moon, when I first saw you.”
“My mother calls me Kava.”
“Where is she? Where is your father, sister, brothers?”
“Night sickness, they all die. My sister was last.”
“When?”
“The sun circle this world four times since.”
“I feel sick from the talk of fathers. And mothers. And grandfathers. All blood.”
“Cool that rage like me.”
“I wish blood could burn.”
“Cool that rage.”
“I have them and I lost them and what I have is a lie, but the truth is worse. They left my head on fire.”
“You will go to the Zareba with me.”
“My uncle says I am not for the Zareba.”
“You still take word from your blood then.”
“My uncle says I’m not a man. That the woman at the end of this has not been cut away.”
“Then pull the skin back.”
Behind his hut was not far from the river. We went down to the banks. He had a gourd in his hand. He scooped water in his hand, poured it into the gourd, and waved me over. I stood still and he took some of the wet white clay and painted my face. He marked my neck, my chest, my legs, my calves, and my buttocks. Then he dipped his hand in the water and marked my skin in lines like a snake that tickled. I laughed, but he was stone. He marked lines on my back, down my legs. He grabbed my cock foreskin and pulled it hard and said what to do with this shriveled foro? Words were spoken up in the trees, but I ignored them. Kava said, “I wish I had an enemy to avenge my mother and father. But which man has there been, that has ever killed air?”
THREE
Here are the things I have seen.
Three days and four nights in Kava’s house. My uncle made no fuss. He was the man of this house in sun and in moon, and thought I looked at his wives with the same open mouth and loose tongue they looked at me. Truth, my uncle’s house was large enough that we could go a quartermoon and never meet. But I could smell out what he hid from his women—expensive rugs from the city under the cheap ones, precious skins from great cats under cheap skins of zebra, gold coins and fetishes in pouches that stunk of the animal whose skin it was cut from. His greed made him squeeze in on himself to hide everything, which made him smaller even with his big belly.
But Kava’s hut.
He had cloths and skins on the ground that were garments when I pulled them up. Black dust in a gourd for shining walls fresh. Jars of water, jars for churning butter, a gourd and a knife for drawing cow blood. This was a home still run by a mother. I never asked if his parents were buried right under him, or maybe his father left him with his mother so he learned woman’s work, since he never went to hunt.
I did not want to go back to my uncle, and I would not talk to voices in trees, who never gave me anything but now demanded something. So I stayed at Kava’s hut.
“How do you live alone?”
“Boy, ask what you want to ask.”
“Fuck the gods, then tell me what I want to know.”
“You want to know how I live so good without mother and father. Why the gods smile on my hut?”
“No.”
“The same breath carrying news of your father tell you he is dead. I cannot—”
“Then don’t,” I said.
“And your grandfather is a father of lies.”
“So.”
“Like any other father,” he said, and laughed. He said this also: “These elders, they say it and