Free Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor Page A

them by name, observing marks, bumps, limps, and moods. He will stroke the head and trained, curved horns of his elegant red dance-ox. When she wakes up, hours later, after remembering where she is, Ajany will join Galgalu in the milking shed.
    What endures?
    Heat of fresh milk.
    A kid butts Ajany’s leg. She shoos it away.
    What endures?
    Galgalu.
    What endures?
    Fear of lunacy.
    But not if she dies first.
    Ajany glances at Odidi’s coffin.
    Nightfall endures.
    And when, later, flames sputter inside Galgalu’s cracked hurricane lamp, an orange glow appears, the same as that which had assured two desert children that light confounds darkness. That is how they wait for Akai-ma to return home.

5
    THE NEW DAY ’ S MORNING LIGHT DRIPS AND ENGRAVES HUMPS into surfaces. Nyipir stares at his gnarled hands, hands that scrub his face four times a day, and have done so for forty years. Galgalu leaves to pasture the ranch animals. Enshrouding the land a mantle of silence that is vast, feral, and resplendent under naked blue skies in a season that is drier than a dead chameleon’s hide. The stillness is interspersed with the buzz-drone of blue flies.
    Nyipir now wipes the coffin lid until it shines, and he greets his son: “You look well.” Slurred words. Nyipir imagines his son’s rock crypt. “I’ll build you a home big and strong … as you are.” New lines on his face: “You’re safe now.”
    When he lifts the hoe to dig, old scars tingle in his hands, burning a silent man from the inside out. Nyipir hits the ground to the tune of one-word thoughts: Akai! Her name is a snuffle. And then it is noon, and her name— Akai —is a hard, salt tear ball stuck in the back of Nyipir’s throat.

    Within that day, sporadic howls, and Galgalu crashes into the courtyard without the livestock. A jarring “Wo d’abeela, halale …”
    An elderly keeper of ritual turned necromancer, a d’abeela , had turned his turban on him—a death curse. Galgalu flings the rusty G3 rifle to the ground, and turns to see if the rabid elder has followed him.
    “What? Where?” Nyipir wields the hoe, fight-ready, thinking of his buried arsenal inside the cattle boma , of how to reach it, how to distribute arms.
    Ajany runs into view. Galgalu stretches out his right thumb to squeeze his tears. He blows his nose with his other hand; the sounds are interrupted by his muddled words: “Aya! D’abeela … wo d’abeela.…”
    “Who?” Nyipir shouts.
    This is what had happened:
    All had been well at the western pastures when Galgalu had blown air into his cupped hands—a whistling —fuulido —to summon a bird, a white, long-tailed honeyguide. It appeared. He followed it. As he scrambled through the scrub, he heard bees buzzing. He was reaching for the honeycomb when he heard a piercing cry, thought it was an eagle, and swung around to look. There, standing behind him, was a d’abeela .
    The disenchanted priest had been prowling the land looking for people upon whom he would incant malice and whom he could afflict with the miserable bile that broiled in his soul. God had abandoned him. He would show God that he was not too old to taint favored souls. Too old! All his five sons had participated in the decision to replace him, as if he were already dead. So he had escaped the boundaries of his vast home, wandered farther, and turned his stiff white turban so its seams were at the front rather than on the left, where they should always be. The gesture was the ritual, the performed curse. So fearful that not even the dying named it, so rare, it had not been seen in five generations. So potent, nothing existed that could halt its malevolent intention. The d’abeela had happened upon a honey-seeking fool.
    Incessant flies buzz. Kites soar. Ajany’s eyes fixate on Galgalu’s fallen rifle. “Where are the animals?” she murmurs.
    “The animals?” Nyipir repeats to Galgalu.
    Galgalu uses his chin to point westward.
    Nyipir shouts to Ajany,