Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman Read Free Book Online Page A

his mind. That he had decided something important about him, or possibly himself, and so he waited for the teacher to finish thinking, and say something. But the teacher didn’t say anything, and when he looked up again he saw that the teacher had not moved. And he’d remember very distinctly what it was he thought he was seeing in the teacher, and how surprised he was to see it. As if the teacher had found himself caught out, and wanted to hide himself in silence.
    All of this was very long ago. Not much later he met Nana Oforiwaa, the aunt of the girl he saw running through the rain, and many things happened after that to dull his memory of the time before.
    But he’d often come back in his mind to that conversation he had with the teacher about chance. He’d wonder what the thing was that the teacher gave away, then tried to hide. Were the things he said too much like what the teacher believed himself? Did his own weaknesses illuminate weaknesses that the teacher knew were also his own?
    That, at least, was the opinion that he formed at first and held for a long time. Though later he began to wonder something different: that really the teacher had not been trying to teach him anything at all, as much as he’d been testing him. To see how far he might let things go in his life. How far he could be taken, before there’d be a story to pull him back.
    THE FIRST TIME HE MET Nana Oforiwaa it was early in the evening at the rest house she owned near the Botanical Gardens. Some time before in the afternoon he’d received a message from the teacher to prepare himself for an outing. The teacher wanted him to meet her. Nana Oforiwaa was rich and a senior person on the ridge and a friend of his, from the way the teacher talked.
    The journey by taxi from Akwapakrom took twenty minutes. It was the first time he’d driven on the ridge road since he arrived. He was dressed in a jacket, and long trousers which were tight in some places, and his shoes were polished. The teacher sat up front. At the back he drew the window down and let the air come in over him.
    They drove through the fields and small towns. Nobody talked. In Mampong he saw the old men with their chairs out in the shop fronts. All along the road outside Obosomase wine tappers were heading into the hills with their jerry cans and machetes. He could feel theengine through the body of the car. He closed his eyes and felt all right.
    Just short of Aburi they came to a road with a wire fence, beyond which he could see trees, sheds, and a water tower. The taxi turned right and after the fence ended there was a building. The entrance was a set of wide wooden doors that were shut. Closer to the fence there was a smaller door.
    The taxi stopped and the teacher climbed down and knocked on the door. He stayed in the car as the engine idled. There was no answer. The teacher motioned for him to get out.
    “We will have to go through the gardens,” the teacher said. “She is in the front and cannot hear us.”
    The teacher paid the taxi driver, who watched them walk a few paces before driving off.
    “Do you know this place?” the teacher asked.
    He said he did not.
    “This is Aburi,” the teacher said. “We are at the Botanical Gardens. There is every kind of tree here. You will see it is very beautiful.”
    They walked the length of the fence. He looked in, at the trees and the palms and a solid wall of bamboo. Then the road and the fence separated, and there were buildings between them and the gardens. They turned into the town. They passed a taxi rank which he recognized as the staging post down to Accra, where the buses stopped. Women were selling pineapples under the telephone poles. It wasn’t rush hour and there was little action. Music came from a parked tro-tro, its door open, its driver chewing a match.
    They walked up a path beside a steep bank, and passed the Methodist boardinghouses. The last in the row was abandoned. Part had collapsed and rooms were open to