The Tomorrow-Tamer by Margaret Laurence Page B

liked to run her fingers over the faces of her grandchildren. Kofi smiled so that she could touch his smile. She murmured to him, but it was the name of one of his dead brothers.
    â€œAnd when I think of the distance we walked,” Kofi’s father was saying, “to clear the new patch for the cocoyam, and now it turns out to be no good, and the yams are half the size they should be, and I ask myself why I should be afflicted in this way, because I have no enemies, unless you want to count Donkor, and he went away ten years ago, so it couldn’t be him, and if it is a question of libation, who has been more generous than I, always making sure the gods drank before the planting–”
    He went on in this vein for some time, and Kofi waited. Finally his father looked up.
    â€œThe government men will build a bridge at Owurasu,” Kofi said. “So I heard.”
    His father snorted.
    â€œNana Ayensu told me this morning. He heard it from Attah, but he did not believe it. Everyone knows the ferryman’s tongue has diarrhoea. Garrulity is an affliction of the soul.”
    â€œIt is not true, then?”
    â€œHow could it be true? We have always used the Atware ferry. There will be no bridge.”
    Kofi got out his adze and machete and went outside to sharpen them. Tomorrow he and his father would begin clearing the fallow patch beside the big baobab tree, for the second planting of cassava. Kofi could clear quickly with his machete, slicing through underbrush and greenfeather ferns. But he took no pride in the fact, for every young man did the same.
    He was sorry that there would be no bridge. Who knows what excitement might have come to Owurasu? But he knew nothing of such things. Perhaps it was better this way.
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    A week later, three white men and a clerk arrived, followed by a lorry full of tents and supplies, several cooks, a mechanic and four carpenters.
    â€œOh, my lord,” groaned Gerald Wain, the Contractor’s Superintendent, climbing out of the Land-Rover and stretching his travel-stiffened limbs, “is this the place? Eighteen months–it doesn’t bear thinking about.”
    The silence in the village broke into turbulence. The women who had been filling the water vessels at the river began to squeal and shriek. They giggled and wailed, not knowing which was called for. They milled together, clambered up the clay bank, hitched up their long cloths and surged down the path that led back to the village, leaving the unfilled vessels behind.
    The young men were returning from the farms, running all together, shouting hoarsely. The men of Owurasu, the fathers and elders, had gathered outside the chief’s dwelling and were waiting for Nana Ayensu to appear.
    At the Hail Mary Danquah found two fly-specked pink paper roses and set them in an empty jam jar on his counter.He whipped out an assortment of bottles–gin, a powerful red liquid known as Steel wine, the beer with their gleaming tops, and several sweet purple Doko-Doko which the villagers could afford only when the cocoa crop was sold. Then he opened wide his door. In the centre of the village, under the sacred fire tree, Nana Ayensu and the elders met the new arrivals. The leader of the white men was not young, and he had a skin red as fresh-bled meat. Red was the favoured colour of witches and priests of witchcraft, as everyone knew, so many remarks were passed, especially when some of the children, creeping close, claimed to have seen through the sweat-drenched shirt a chest and belly hairy as the Sasabonsam’s. The other two white men were young and pale. They smoked many cigarettes and threw them away still burning, and the children scrambled for them.
    Badu, the clerk-interpreter, was an African, but to the people of Owurasu he was just as strange as the white men, and even less to be trusted, for he was a coast man. He wore white clothes and pointed shoes and a hat like an infant umbrella. The fact