A Cord Around the World
The man was at the train station, propped up by a pole at Platform B. Back at the general hospital, the French doctor in the windowless cubicle had been impatient, scratching at a crack in the table. We can’t find anything. Rien de mal. Use this, it will make you shit. So the man trudged to the dibia. After throwing bones and feathers, consulting with beads and teeth, a remedy was advised. Chew this. (Alligator pepper. Bitter kola. The husk of a coconut.) Drink this. (Water collected from washing the man’s head. The sap of a White Walnut tree.) Rub this. (Lard from the belly of a rattlesnake.) Yet, he continued to lean over, undulating spasms rocking his very core.
His wife had written to him in cursive, the brown paper carrying the odor of blanched palm kernels, locust beans and goat fodder. It was the unmistakable stamp of home, a lover’s telltale of devotion, and everything that meant anything to the man:
Our child-of-love is sick. Come home. Come.
He says his insides do not rest, like
one part of him is being pulled to the earth
and the other itches to kiss the heavens. He does not sleep
at night and when morning comes
he cannot rise to meet the sun.
My mother is invoking—She is warning
the first fruit of a man should not be away from him.
Not at this age. Not for this long.
The umbilical cord is a yoke between man and child
When you ate his at the birth
you formed a bond that pulls the pair of you to each other
Come home, my love.
Our child longs for the other end he is tethered to.
Come home. Or he will die.
The Messer refused to approve his leave. The roads between here and there were serpentine and long. You are lucky to be teaching at this missionary school. The Messer was pink in the face. What is wrong with you people? Ne m'ennuie pas. Just four months here and you want to go back to your harem of wives and bush meat. Leave my office. Sortez!
So the man wrote to his wife:
I cannot come. You cannot come.
I only have enough for one.
Go to the train station. Plead with the ticket master.
He will tell you the boy is too young to travel alone.
Weep. Take off your wrappers. Roll on the ground.
Tell them a child needs his father.
The man at Platform B, his stomach full of stabbing pins and tugging pulleys, spotted the smoke of the coming train. He saw other things clearly in his mind’s eye. The extra mat he had laid for his son in the staff quarters, the freshly harvested corn from the school farm and month’s worth of smoked grasscutter in the narrow store, the lined 2A notebooks and pencils he pinched from the supplies room. He planned to teach his boy to write.
The train stopped, and moments later when man and child walked home, neither noticed that they were walking up straight, their bellies the calm of nescient death.
end.