by Tim Young
The men sweated and groaned in the heat while the coffins on
their shoulders ground into their skin, tore the collars from their shirts,
shed more blood for Uncle Ashong into the long dusty street. Dede Nunu shuffled
alongside the great train, his smile falling down his sparkling face as
weariness from months of woodworking overtook him. But then a tall girl with
peacock feathers twisted into her hair swept past, pulling him forward and
laughing at the suddenly famous coffin maker stopping to catch his breath.
Auntie would still be somewhere along the road, but maybe it would not be so
bad to be known. He imagined the old woman dressed in her blistering red like
the rest of the ancients, frowning at the Khpanlogo music and suddenly he
laughed with the dancer and pressed his hand down the damp skin of her back.
What was an old woman who could not see the new way?
Auntie watched the procession’s throbbing centipede creep
closer, shifting from foot to foot to ease the pain in her back. Nunu had put
Ashong inside a great black train engine that bobbed and whistled above the
quaking legs of its bearers. A cherry-red Lamborghini followed, Ashong’s
ridiculous folly on Ghana’s mud roads, then a coffin version of the enormous
warehouse he’d built in Accra to house every scrap of wood that he stole from
the villages and sold to the British for so much
more.
Children rushed up and pulled at her hands to dance but she
clamped her arms together and said “No children, no. This funeral is not for
celebrating.”
“But Auntie Uncle Ashong built the first train in Ghana!”
“We’ve had trains before.”
“Where did they go?”
From beside her Paa Joe spit a kiwano seed into the rising dirt.
“Railroads are for taking,” he said and rustled back into the thick shade of
their house.
“He’s a sore loser.”
“Sore loser! Sore loser!!”
“You hush up children. You shoo.”
They squirted off to dance between the kaleidoscope coffins, the bottoms of their
feet lighting their backsides through the great cloud of dust that sheathed the
parade. The procession drew even with her and she studied each glistening face
but could not find the thief she boiled for.
“You don’t want to look?” Auntie called into the house after ten coffins had
passed.
“I already know.”
Nunu stayed on the opposite side of the procession from Auntie’s
blue-bricked house, hiding his face behind a giant coca-cola bottleneck that
had taken him two days to shape and sand and paint. Had it been his fault that
Ashong loved him more than his own son? What was a son worth, accused his
father, that never wanted to see a village progress?
“He tells me I should be respectful of tradition!” Ashong had railed from a
bench in Nunu’s workshop. The flesh at his throat quaked like a bullfrog when
he slapped at the mosquitoes circling his ears. “Should I have stayed barefoot
and poor as the British made us when they ran their railroad?”
Nunu worked at a piece of stiff pepiase wood with his awl. With
great men, he’d learned long ago never to speak, only to listen and do.
“You offer me one coffin for each of my businesses. Twenty
coffins, when Paa Joe tells me a man of my position should have only one!” Ashong
bellowed. “One!” Then he’d leaned over his round stomach and whispered while
akpeteshie dribbled from his mug. “If I give you all the wood you’ll win the
contest. He’ll have none for my coffin or anyone else’s. Maybe with his pockets
turned out my eldest will realize all that I’ve done for him and come down a
peg or two.”
With that Ashong had rolled upright and stomped into the evening
and that had been the last Nunu had seen of the big man alive. One of Ashong’s
wives brought the payment when the Uncle had died and Nunu was richer than he’d
been in his whole life but in the heat of the day’s march he felt bone weary
and drained and missed that Auntie had seen him.
“Dede Nunu!” She clamped down on his arm, jerking him from his reverie. Gray
had shot through her hair since he’d last seen her and she stood quivering in
her faded red dress while the dancers spun faster and faster around them.
“Auntie Shora,” he answered and remembered to pull his smile up his face. “You
look fine.”
“I don’t need courtesy from a thief Nunu.”
He licked his lips, watching his dancing girl skip farther ahead and curl
around four men laboring under a green and white wingtip shoe that bore flowers
and a portrait of Ashong on his first wedding day.
“Auntie will you come up the hill with me?” he asked.
“I’m old and I don’t walk. You stand here in the sun and explain yourself. ”
“Auntie I won the contest. Ashong chose my coffins.”
“Because you took Joe’s wood! A carpenter all his life and when the time came
to carve he found only scraps? I’d like you to explain that to me, right now.”
A gleaming cigar lumbered behind Auntie, its bearers tired and
shuffling. Nunu reached for her arm to pull her from the road but she flung his
hand away.
“Please Auntie, step to the side. You’ll be hurt.”
“You don’t tell me to move! Two months now and Joe’s had no
wood, while everyone who needs a coffin comes to you. You strike at your
cousin’s livelihood like some whoring serpent!”
She’d never talked like this to him before. Never to anyone.
Nunu’s head swam with the smell of hot lacquer while Auntie ’s torn eyes cut at
him through the dust. The cigar passed, two months of hard work smeared by the
palms of bearers who the Uncle’s wives had paid extra to celebrate the big
man’s spirit because they knew no one would come of their own free will. It had
been Joe’s choice to try and stand in the way of his father. And now Nunu
marched miles in the heat because Joe had never understood the disappointment
in the old bastard’s eye.
“It’s much harder to be a good man,” Nunu finally said.
“Joe needs no pity from swine! You’re just a bone picker, a liar
and a thief and the whole village will know about it!”
“Then tell them the truth that Joe will not!” Nunu shot back.
“Did he tell you I offered him wood after his own father loved Joe so little
that he took every last board? Because Paa Joe knows the same truth that I do,
but I wonder what his pride tells you while he sits in the heat and chokes on
it.”
Drums beat the air and the dancers whirled higher and higher.
Nunu swabbed at his neck and Auntie stood like a rock as the procession’s river
broke against her. But then her face crumbled and she turned to shuffle through
the sea of marchers. Nunu followed, but many in the parade recognized him from
the contest day and they smiled and clapped his shoulders and slowed him until
he could only call after her.
“Everything changes Auntie! Everyone and everything!”
Then he stalked forward and caught the dancer where her feet twirled in the
grass. She smiled when he swept her up and they climbed the hill together while
the sun grew hotter and the bearers groaned in time to the music.
From her threshold, Auntie shaded her face to watch the great
man’s train struggle up the hill. Her arm shook with the strain and behind her
she could hear Joe shifting in his chair. She hated the shack and the plastic
sheet they used for a door and the peeling blue Joe had painted it the day he’d
laughed and told her that the color of the sky would be good enough for them.
She wiped the dust of the village from her face and had nearly gathered herself
to go inside when a warning cry from the top of the hill caught her attention.
On the steepest part of the hill, the engine’s gleaming boiler
tottered, wobbled. Brown hands scrabbled to control the weight but black paint
simmering for hours in the sun burned their palms. The first coffin crashed to
the ground, turning over once, twice. Train wheels flew from their wooden
spokes and the smokestack cracked and splintered. Gathering speed, the coffin
rolled downhill into the Lamborghini, spilling bearers and offerings and
bloodied screams. Then other coffins began to fall in great thuds as men’s legs
were swept from them.
“What’s happening?” Paa Joe called from inside their hut. He worked a piece of
melon free from his gum with a toothpick he’d carved himself, an expert little
tool.
“They’re falling,” she said, “they’re too heavy.”
“Are they breaking?”
“Yes. Oh yes Joe they’re breaking. It’s horrible.”
The heavy wood tossed men aside like dolls when it flew against
them. Where coffins hit rock they shattered, scattering dancers and children
like bowling pins. The dirt ran red while she watched men jerk and die in
miniature, imagining Ashong’s body stabbed dozens of times with great
splinters, already starting to bloat from the heat. None of it would be enough
for the man that did this. None of it.
And then the hill fell silent.
Survivors staggered upright, holding hands over their wounds and
wailing. And one among them ran from coffin to coffin, throwing his shoulder
against the split logs and colorful paint. It was Dede Nunu, lifting one panel
after another, searching for the dancing girl he’d always known but had talked
to for the first time today. He lifted up board after board and then tossed them
aside until finally he fell to his knees and let out a shriek that squeezed at
Auntie’s roiling heart.
“Of course those things would break,” Joe explained from inside their dark
house. “Nunu builds from bad wood.” Then he sucked on his toothpick and spat
into the corner, waiting for Auntie to come back into the shadows.
