The Tomorrow-Tamer by Margaret Laurence Page A

case.
    The young man’s broad blank face suddenly frowned, as though the news had at last found a response in him, an excitement over an unknown thing.
    â€œStrangers would come here to live?”
    â€œOf course, idiot,” Danquah muttered. “Do you think a bridge builds itself?”
    Danquah put on his pink rayon shirt and his metal-rimmed spectacles so he could think better. But his face remained impassive. The boy chewed thoughtfully on a twig, hoisted his sagging loincloth, gazed at a shelf piled with patterned tradecloth and long yellow slabs of soap. He watched the sugar ants trailing in amber procession across the termite-riddled counter and down again to the packed-earth floor.
    Only the children did not hesitate to show their agitation. Shrilling like cicadas, they swarmed and swirled off and away, bearing their tidings to all the world.
    Danquah maintained a surly silence. The young man was not surprised, for the villagers regarded Danquah as a harmless madman. The storekeeper had no kin here, and if he had relatives elsewhere, he never mentioned them. He was not son or father, nephew or uncle. He lived by himself in the back of his shop. He cooked his own meals and sat alone on his stoep in the evenings, wearing food-smirched trousers and yellow shoes. He drank the costly beer and held aloft his ragged newspaper, bellowing the printed words to the toads that slept always in clusters in the corners, or crying sadly and drunkenly, while the village boys peered and tittered without pity.
    The young man walked home, his bare feet making light crescent prints in the dust. He was about seventeen, and his name was Kofi. He was no one in particular, no one you would notice.
    Outside the hut, one of his sisters was pounding dried cassava into kokonte meal, raising the big wooden pestle and bringing it down with an unvaried rhythm into the mortar. She glanced up.
    â€œI saw Akua today, and she asked me something.” Her voice was a teasing singsong.
    Kofi pretended to frown. “What is that to me?”
    â€œDon’t you want to know?”
    He knew she would soon tell him. He yawned and stretched, languidly, then squatted on his heels and closed his eyes, miming sleep. He thought of Akua as she had looked this morning, early, coming back from the river with the water jar on her head, and walking carefully, because the vessel was heavy, but managing also to sway her plump buttocks a little more than was absolutely necessary.
    â€œShe wants to know if you are a boy or a man,” his sister said.
    His thighs itched and he could feel the slow full sweetness of his amiable lust. He jumped to his feet and leapt over the mortar, clumsy-graceful as a young goat. He sang softly, so his mother inside the hut would not hear.
    Â 
    â€œDo you ask a question,
    Akua, Akua?
    In a grove dwells an oracle,
    Oh Akua–
    Come to the grove when the village sleeps–”
    Â 
    The pestle thudded with his sister’s laughter. He leaned close to her.
    â€œDon’t speak of it, will you?”
    She promised, and he sat cross-legged on the ground, and drummed on the earth with his outspread hands, and sang in the cool heat of the late afternoon. Then he remembered the important news, and put on a solemn face, and went in the hut to see his father.
    His father was drinking palm wine sorrowfully. The younger children were crawling about like little lizards, and Kofi’s mother was pulling out yams and red peppers and groundnuts and pieces of fish from bowls and pots stacked in a corner. She said “Ha–ei–” or “True, true–” to everything the old man said, but she was not really listening–her mind was on the evening meal.
    Kofi dutifully went to greet his grandmother. She was brittle and small and fleshless as the empty shell of a tortoise. She rarely spoke, and then only to recite in her tenuous bird voice her genealogy, or to complain of chill. Being blind, she