| Next | Contents | Frank's Home |

Stephen Vincent: WALKING
 

fr. AFRICAN CYCLE
 

1

Kill the cow
Drink the milk
Climb the tree
Break the branch
Scale the mountain
Split the rock
Pick the fruit
Throw the apple
Mine the metal
Burn the copper
Open the bucket
Fling the paint
Pick the cotton
Eat the seeds
Steal the pants
Rip the seam
Burn the house
Use the flame
Call an ancestor
Bury his name
 

3

He worked the fields.
She stayed home. They lived
near Calabar.
After lunch
he would return.
The other man
was a stranger to the village.
He had gone
unnoticed, somehow.
In the afternoons
he would enter the house.
He would hold her hand.
They would embrace.
It was somehow natural.

One day the husband became suspicious.
He came home early.
He entered the house quietly.
It was no amusement.
They were asleep.
He left quietly.
He returned to the field
and planted grain there.

It was early in the season.
In the evening he befriended the man,
asked him to come to the field.
He also asked his wife.
He carried a machete and a spear.
When the wife and stranger arrived
the sun was dropping
toward the horizon.
The man, as quietly and forcefully as possible,
raised his machete over his head.
He told her to lie on her back in a furrow.
He told her friend to lie on top of her.
She spread her legs, and his legs went between.
It was extraordinarily quiet. The sun
began to disappear. At dusk the husband
raised the spear.

It was a quick
and sudden blow. The blade
and the wood. Just
below the waist. Their blood
flowed through the furrow.

The next evening the husband
appeared in the village. He called the elders
together. Under a cover of jute
he showed them the heads.
His wife and her lover,
he explained.
He left the heads.

He returned to the field.
He buried the bodies
and harvested fully
at the end of the season.

I was told this story by a woman
who lives close to the village. Each year
there is a ceremony. The head of the wife
and the lover
are carried separately. They are wrapped
in thick woven jute.

There is a slow parade
through the village.
The jute-covered heads
are carried at the front.
There are slow drums.
There is something sad.
No one wants it repeated.
I forget when it happens,
at harvest-end
or the start of a season.
 

4

IN CLASS

Azuonye sits in front. He's tall.
He loves to raise his long arms
to discuss literature. Yeats. Achebe.
Wordsworth. Okigbo. Shakespeare.
An ear for two worlds, and more. I
change the subject. We speak
about how the children
are named. That in his village,
six weeks after birth, it is
the grandmother who visits.
If there is a dimple in one place
and not another, the grandmother
says it is this uncle or great uncle
or cousin and not another. He demonstrates.
He points to his neck. He wears
an open-collared shirt.
There is a large birthmark, purple,
almost black, below the jugular.
Its wide diamond shape
cuts a sharp angle
down to his chest. "I am named
after a distant uncle," he says.
"The man was assassinated
with a machete
in an act of revenge."
The class-many of the students
are from nearby villages-
suddenly ricochets with laughter.
Even Azuonye, as if already
divided by fate, breaks into
an odd smile. Only gradually
can I turn the class back
to a poem by Yeats.
 

| Next | Contents | Frank's Home |