The Story of Bones Read online

  The sun was clearing the treetops. Heat pressed down on my head, arms, and legs. Under me, the tub was warming up too. Before long the metal would feel like a griddle. I shifted my weight and considered how much heat a reptile could endure. The cobra hadn’t moved in a while, as far as I could tell. The protruding length looked limp and lifeless. I was unsure whether the tail had been severed or was still attached by a flattened shred of tissue. Blood had drained into the soil, leaving a glistening black circle. I tapped my knuckles against the metal, braced for a furious explosion. No response. I knocked again, louder.

  In the distance a dog barked. A squadron of insects buzzed in for a look at the bloody mess on the dirt. I heard nothing from the cobra, and for some time I hadn’t detected the slightest quiver in the metal surface touching my skin. The snake was dead, playing dead, or catatonic from heat and exhaustion.

  Hyunk-hyunk-hyunk. Rooper Nobbs, my best friend from school, was coming up the road with some other kids. Roop’s distinctive laugh rang out over the shouts of the rest. Hyunk-hyunk. They were kicking a ball made of knotted plastic bags, too absorbed in their game to look in my direction. As they came nearer, I considered calling to Roop for help, but how, exactly, could he help? The lot of them would rush over and create a big scene. I could not imagine a happy outcome. I sat very still, eyeing the commotion beyond the scrappy hedgerow. The boys were clustered around the ball, yelling and laughing. Was this what they did when they skipped school? I wouldn’t know because I had never skipped. Although I liked Roop, cutting class to play in the street seemed stupid to me.

  The barking dog nosed through the churning mass of legs. The boys’ cries rose as the mutt snatched the ball between its teeth and loped away, leading the whole pack on a rowdy chase. They disappeared down the road. Roop’s laughter melted into the suffocating air.

  I used a knuckle to wipe the sweat from my eyes. Flies circled my head. My mouth felt like cotton, and my legs tingled with cramps. Worse, I felt like an idiot, perched on a washtub in plain sight of anyone who cared to look. I was lucky the boys hadn’t taken notice. What if Skinner came back? He would howl with derision.

  The flat shag of our yard stretched before me. I considered the odds of a long jump and a clean getaway. More than once, I had seen this cobra winding its way through the scrub, and I knew it could move at impressive speed. Unless the snake was good and dead, I would have to clear the tub by a sizable distance to make a safe escape. I gulped in air, gathering courage.

  As slowly as I could manage, I altered the angle of my folded legs until my feet sat flat on the tub, snug against my butt. I took great care to keep my weight centered, to prevent the slightest tilt from opening an exit at ground level. Now my chin rested on my knees, and my arms were tight at my sides, braced on fisted knuckles against the tin. I took a breath and pushed myself up.

  My legs felt wobbly. I windmilled my arms for balance as I rose, rocking forward and back, terrified of tipping over. Once I had straightened up to stand on the flat surface, I felt a little calmer, more in charge. The treads of my sandals formed a barrier against the thin, hot metal and its unnerving vibrations. I bounced on the foot closest to the exposed tail. The tip moved up and down counter to the pressure—not the cobra’s doing but what looked like the reaction of a rubbery dead weight. Dead or alive? Cobra, are you dead or alive? I bent my knees and swung my arms a few times, warming up for the longest jump of my life. Steady, steady. I eyed a spot in the middle distance, willing myself to land there. I flexed my knees, took another deep breath, and pushed off.

  My heels landed about a meter and a half from the washtub. The rest of me tipped back, and I came to rest with my hands splayed against the ground behind me. If the snake had gotten loose, this would be its moment to strike. I remained in that vulnerable position about one one-hundredth of a second. Springing to my feet, I ran as fast as I could across the yard to the far corner of the house. I stopped there, breathing hard, and ventured a look back. The washtub was just as I had left it, upside down next to my bicycle.

  My relief was sweet but replaced almost immediately by worry about what to do next. I couldn’t leave the cobra, dead or alive, hidden under Mama’s washtub for her or someone else to discover. The porch door was open. Baba hadn’t appeared yet. I heard Mama singing to the baby. Both of my parents thought I had left some time ago. If I knocked over the tub and freed the cobra or removed its corpse without bothering them, I could still ride to school and avoid a big commotion—and avoid fingering Skinner too.

  The decision to carry on without help from anyone came naturally to me. I was a resourceful, peaceable boy who shied from turmoil and liked order and routine—conditions difficult enough to achieve in our teeming household. I enjoyed solving problems, and I would rather try to fix something than stir up a hornet’s nest of blame. Skinner, I just wanted to forget.

  Thinking up a plan as I went, I ran to the stream that coursed past our square of farmland. The water was just a trickle then. During the rainy season, the stream and the river it fed rose and rushed, a thoroughfare for travelers paddling dugout mokoros. The water then churned with tilapia and catfish and the crocodiles that arrived to feed on them.

  The fishing pole I had made from a slender branch still rested in its hiding place among the bushes. The pole was longer than I was tall and awkward to carry. I gripped it in both hands and ran as fast as I could back to my viewing spot by the corner of the house. What I saw from there changed everything.

  Mama was striding across the grass. The thin line of her mouth and the parallel creases between her eyebrows told me she wasn’t at all pleased about the current location of her washtub. Panic seized the back of my throat. I managed to yell, “Stop!” but my voice sounded strangled and weak.

  In a hurry, she only glanced at me. “What are you doing home?”

  Before my lips could shape another word, she leaned over the tub. The world went silent and slow. I watched her fingers curl under the metal rim. My mouth froze in a horrified O. She swung the tub up on its side, and a dark length of enraged cobra rocketed from the grass. With a dart of its head, the snake spit a volume of venom so great that I could see the fluid fly through the air. The spray sparkled in the sunlight, a silvery arrow shot from the gaping jaw straight into my mother’s wide, surprised eyes.

  She dropped the tub and cried out, turning away with both hands pressed against her face. Cobra venom in the eye burns and can blind but seldom kills. The pain, however, creates a gasping, flailing target that tells the snake where to land the fatal bite. I had seen this very cobra spit at a gecko that turned and bolted to safety. That memory gave me hope.

  “Run, Mama, run!” I shouted, finding my voice at last.

  But the enflamed cobra wasn’t finished yet. The swaying, slithering body followed my mother’s movements—the swing of her skirt, the bend of her knees. With terrifying precision, it lunged for the soft flesh on the back of her leg. The fangs gripped and held even as she staggered away. She cried out again, a keening wail, and stumbled forward, dragging the snake behind her. Finally, the creature unhooked its jaw and sank into the grass.

  Baba appeared at the door looking sleepy-eyed and disheveled. He took in the scene—Mama, the cobra, me—and went rigid with understanding. He bolted down the steps faster than I had seen him move in a long time. When he lifted Mama in his arms, his face had gone gray. “Stay away, Bonesy,” he said, not looking at me. I didn’t know if he meant from him and Mama or from the mangled snake winding its way toward the ditch.

  I watched him carry her up the stairs and across the porch. The whites of her eyes had turned a ghastly, livid red. Her face was shiny with tears. As they disappeared through the front door, I heard her raspy breathing and a sob that must have come from him. I collapsed in the grass and stayed there, slack with shock and grief and a crushing sense of shame.

  We buried Mama on the crest of a hill stalky with sunfl
owers. Zola quit school to take care of the baby. Baba succumbed with increasing frequency to drink, and at ten years old, I felt responsible for all of us. I practiced tracking and hunting small game for our dinner, worked hard in school, and marked off the days of each term on the wall calendars I got free from Ruby’s Amazing Safaris. No one asked why I had been home on the day Mama died or how the washtub had come to be in the yard. The cobra turned up dead in the ditch. And for a while, Skinner kept his distance.

  2

  ZOLA WAS INCONSOLABLE FOR MONTHS after Mama died, but she was not unhappy to leave school. At thirteen, my sister was taller than average, shy, and too womanly in appearance to go unnoticed by the older boys. She would slope her shoulders and cross her arms over her chest to flatten her rounded breasts. She wore her tops untucked and unbelted to hide the gentle curve between waist and hips. With no money for new school clothes, she did her best to put together suitable outfits from the castoffs available to her, but fit was always a problem. The buttons on her blouses strained and popped. Her skirts either stretched tight across her hips or hung shapeless and bothersome, catching at her calves. At school I could do little to protect her. Trying to stop whistles and jeers was like trying to stop the wind. Her decision to stay home came as a relief to both of us.

  I watched her take on Mama’s household chores without complaint. At first she moved mournfully through the work, silent and downcast, finding in every pot and pan a sad reminder of our dead mother. She handled the wooden spoons, the straw broom, even the old scrub brush with a reverence that made me ache. She showed special tenderness for the baby, Hannie, who was generous with her smiles and smitten by the sudden intensity of her sister’s affection. Zola herself—her willowy movements, the line of her back as she bent over the cradle, the soft notes she sang—so vividly recalled our mother that I often had to turn away and blink back my tears.

  Zola’s talent for the home arts surprised me. I realized I hadn’t paid attention earlier when she was helping Mama. Now I saw her move among her everyday tasks with a calm efficiency that both relieved and saddened me. My sister’s girlhood had ended. The trill of her laughter was rare, but she possessed a knack for creating warmth and comfort in our shabby surroundings—wildflowers in a jar, a polished window that let in the sunlight. I helped as much as she would allow, but she didn’t pile on chores. “Your job is to study,” she said, sounding ever more like Mama. “Study and make something of yourself.”

  School was free through the tenth grade, when we became eligible to take the all-important Junior Secondary Certificate Examination. Passing the test opened the door to two more years of high school for students who could afford to pay. For boys like me who couldn’t pay yet hoped to escape a life at the barest edge of subsistence, the certificate stood as a passport to a better future—a respected marker of diligence and promise. In my small village, a JSC counted almost as much as a twelfth-grade diploma.

  Neither of my parents had gotten past primary school. “My family showed little interest in book learning,” Baba once told me. “They wanted help in the field, and that was fine with me because I preferred the outdoors.” Then he looked me in the eye as if to clear up any misunderstanding. “A man can learn a lot on his own, you know.”

  He had learned a lot about farming and hunting, and his knowledge of the bush was undisputed. But as I grew older, it became clear to me that those skills hadn’t gotten him very far. I loved the outdoors as much as he, yet I saw a cruel trap in the exhausting, uncertain work of subsistence farming. Drink had become my father’s avenue of escape. Mine, I believed, would be through the bright portal of a Junior Secondary Certificate.

  As the most difficult months of bereavement passed, Baba became a benign though increasingly undependable presence in our household. On his good days, he worked in the field, even selling a few extra bushels at the market. But we couldn’t count on him to rise from bed before noon or to get much done at all. “I’m not quite awake today, Zo,” he would murmur, shuffling out of his dark, rank bedroom for water or a hunk of bread. “Sorry, Bonesy. We’ll go hunting next weekend.” Many evenings, he drank out on the porch while he rolled and smoked the cigarettes that Mama, and now Zola, wouldn’t let him smoke inside. Some nights he went to Captain Biggie’s Tavern in the village. Some nights he didn’t come home.

  Early one Saturday he knocked on my bedroom door, clear-eyed and sober. “Wake up, Bonesy. Get your gun.”

  We set out on foot while the air held a cold, clean nip, and the first spill of light marked our path through the bush. The thought of fresh game on the table cheered me almost as much as a day out hunting with Baba. My pack contained two squares of corn bread and two twists of biltong Zola had wrapped in paper and tied with a string. We had eaten thinly for weeks. I was pretty sure the dried meat was the last of our supply.

  My father went in front, resting his shotgun on his left shoulder. I walked behind with my shotgun resting on my left shoulder. Baba didn’t own a rifle. He said I didn’t need one either because I mostly shot birds and hares. The biggest game he hunted was impala, a species so plentiful on the open plain we called them “bush groceries.” Baba could take down an impala with a single, well-placed slug fired at close range. I hoped he would get one today.

  We said little. He had taught me to move quietly, placing one foot down before lifting the other, avoiding dry foliage, toeing each stick and root with snake sense. I watched his broad shoulders dip under branches and the way his head turned right and left, wary, as he monitored our surroundings. Hunting heightened the importance of everything. The slightest rustle drew our attention. A wisp of wind determined success or failure. My heart beat fast as we walked along. I was very happy.

  Mama’s death had not warped my interest in the natural world or in any of the life-forms that thrived near our home. I did not see evil in venomous snakes or poisonous plants, and I wasn’t ruined for excitement and adventure. Although Zola seemed prematurely somber, almost fully grown overnight, I kept my boyish enthusiasms, including a love of the outdoors in all its messy, elegant, endlessly captivating variety. I was learning that grief was a season that changed over time, like the rains and the drought. My memories of Mama occupied a sweet and achy chamber in my heart, a place where she would remain for the rest of my days. But for me, the dark sadness of her death had given way to acceptance and a heightened respect for the survival instinct so devastatingly unleashed in the cobra that had killed her.

  On this Saturday morning, Baba and I had been on the move for more than an hour when we came to a circular midden of black pellets, dung that marked impala territory. He stopped and glassed the open plain. A herd of twenty or more impalas was spread out, grazing. The animals closest to us stood with their necks stretched tall to look in our direction. “They know we’re here,” he said in a low voice. “Let’s go downwind and find a place to settle.”

  I followed him in a wide circle around the herd. Another midden indicated we remained on promising turf. Baba pointed to a fallen log, and we stopped there, shielded from the impalas by a thicket of bush. I rotated my stiffened gun shoulder before sitting down next to him, quiet and still. He turned to me and smiled. A current passed between us that swelled me with love and pride. I was only a boy, but already I felt the bone-deep camaraderie that forms among men on the hunt, as ancient and enduring as survival itself.

  For many minutes we sat motionless but present, sensitive to the air feathering our skin, the faint creak of branches, the earthy smell of trampled vegetation and dust. I imitated Baba’s posture, relaxed and stooping, a pose that declared with every angle of his limbs an infinite willingness to wait. Small creatures alert to our arrival soon got used to our presence. A mouse darted into the underbrush near my foot. A dragonfly landed on Baba’s shoulder, dipped its wings, and flew off.

  An uptick in the ambient chatter of birds and squirrels signaled a new arrival. Baba raised his head. We both knew
the intruder could be anything, including a predator stalking us. Quietly, we took our shotguns in hand and rose from the log. For several minutes we stood in a state of acute awareness, open to every whisper and scurry. When the sound we were waiting for finally broke the air, the crackle of footfall seemed unnaturally loud. My heart was thumping so hard I was sure Baba could hear it. He had directed his attention to the thicket of bush in front of us. I peered through the branches. Four slender legs and the elegant flank of a young male impala stood well within the range of our guns.

  Baba lowered his shotgun and turned to me. My eyes widened as I realized he meant for me to take the shot. The biggest game I had ever brought down was a two-kilo hare. A miss now would end the best hope of meat we’d had in a long time. I swallowed hard and nodded.

  The impala stood about fifteen meters away. He was a handsome young buck with a glossy coat and midsized, S-shaped horns. I raised my gun and flicked the safety, slipping into the calculating, impersonal zone that enabled me to aim, shoot, and kill. I knew a lung shot would spoil the least amount of meat, so I aimed up the foreleg about a third, then a little to the rear. I settled there, calm, and squeezed the trigger.

  The bush is never silent except in the stunned moment following a gunshot, when even the insects cease their whining. In that noiseless instant the impala shuddered, pronked, and bolted out of view. I wasn’t sure whether I had hit my target or missed completely. The confidence I had felt moments earlier vanished. Had I failed to hold my breath? Did my hand shake at a crucial moment? Was the wind playing tricks? What I dreaded most was the shame of inflicting a wound that doomed a creature to a prolonged and senseless death, even as it escaped. The sour taste of panic rose in my throat.