Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor Read Free Book Online Page B

glided out into the darkness.
    “ Ch’uquliisa ,” Galgalu sings to Ajany. “ Ch’uquliisa .”
    His arms around her.
    One wild afternoon, by decree of elders, Raro Galgalu was chosen as scapegoat for all clan guilt. He had been bringing home a kid that had sprained its leg. Its mother bleated behind him while men surged around him and inflicted the ritual curse. He tore at his heart, to pull out the malediction. The scars were curved lines across Galgalu’s chest. The kid tumbled from his arms, and his goats cried as he was driven away with sticks, stones, dust, and dung. Driven by billows of unwantedness, he marked his progress by cairns in the daytime and falling stars at night. He wandered, a solitary, bowlegged creature intending to walk itself to death.
    Until, that soft dusk of December 12, 1963, when, down in the city, a doleful officer unwrapped the last Union Jack that would ever soar over Kenya, Galgalu stumbled in front of a coral-hued edifice. Wuoth Ogik. A brown-and-black-patched cattle dog that had a lot of hyena in its ancestry had appeared and wagged its tail at him. Galgalu stroked its head. It licked his hand. He would learn that its name was Kulal, after the cherished mountain. By the time he saw the tall, dark, long-limbed spirit flowing toward him, its arms swinging in wide swoops, he was ready to die. Ekhaara . A roaming spirit. It carried a headrest and club—things men carried—and a gourd of sour milk, herbs, and grasses. Its feet were dusty in akala tire sandals. It had hitched its sarong up on its thighs. Its eyes took in everything. Raro Galgalu had closed his eyes.
    Woitogoi! Akai Lokorijom exclaimed when she saw him.
    She reached for him.
    The dog whined.
    Galgalu quivered.
    Akai stroked his head. “ Woitogoi! You’re a bone, small boy!” She had clucked. “Your name?” She giggled.
    He had wanted to laugh with her. Instead, he wailed, because he understood he might live after all.
    Galgalu tells Ajany, “Always, she comes back home.”
    “We didn’t catch her shadow,” Ajany replies in between hiccups.
    “No,” he agrees.
    When Ajany and Odidi were children, Galgalu would scoop the soil where their daylight shadows fell and cast the dirt into holes where dusk shadows gathered, so the departing sun would take with it any evil that had threatened them. Galgalu had tried to scrape the earth under Akai-ma’s shadow, to try to exorcise those ghosts that made her wander. Ajany and Odidi had colluded with him by trying to make their mother stand still. They always failed. As long as there was sun, Akai jumped from place to place.
    Footsteps.
    Nyipir hobbles to join them, blinking at the track.
    Speaking to Ajany: “Mama … she … um …” Nyipir’s voice cracks. “She’s happy you’re here. Just …” He waves in the direction of the coffin.
    Ajany nods.
    He says, “I tried to … but Odidi … um.”
    Ajany nods again.
    There is something unnamed and shameful about loneliness created out of rejection. Ajany takes refuge in stillness.
    Nyipir says, “Once, when I was a boy, a leopard used to escort me home.”
    Galgalu and Ajany have heard the story before.
    Nyipir continues: “A black leopard used to weave in and out of the shrubs, and his body contained all the nights of the earth. His eyes were made of stars.”
    “D-did he make a noise?” Ajany asks, as she did when she was ten years old and scared of night.
    “Footsteps like silence. When I reached home, the leopard left.” A brittle note. “Don’t ever call out a leopard’s name. Say gini , ‘this thing,’ or gicha , ‘that thing.’ Kwach, no! ”
    Kwach .
    Ajany squelches the word on her tongue. The temptation to howl it hurtles around her skull. She presses down on the need, suffocates it with memory.
    One evening, long ago, Nyipir had found Ajany sitting inside the broken courtyard fountain, waiting for him. She had asked, “Baba, did gicha come?”
    “No. Not today,” he replied.
    Years