The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories by Margaret Laurence

Author:Margaret Laurence [Laurence, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction
Publisher: New Canadian Library
Published: 1970-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

I was frantic lest Miss Povey should find out and notify Dr. Quansah before we could find Ruth. I had Ayesha go all through the school and grounds, for she could move more rapidly and unobtrusively than I. I waited, stumping up and down my garden, finally forcing myself to sit down and assume at least the appearance of calm. At last Ayesha returned. Only tiredness showed in her face, and my heart contracted.

“You did not find her, little one?”

She shook her head. “She is not here. She is gone.”

Gone. Had she remained in the forest, then, with its thorns and strangular vines, its ferned depths that could hide death, its green silences? Or had she run as far as the river, dark and smooth as oil, deceptively smooth, with its saurian kings who fed of whatever flesh they could find? I dared not think.

I did something then that I had never before permitted myself to do. I picked up Ayesha and held the child tightly, not for her consoling but for my own. She reached out and touched a finger to my face.

“You are crying. For her?”

Then Ayesha sighed a little, resignedly.

“Come then,” she said. “I will show you where she is.”

Had I known her so slightly all along, my small Ayesha whose childhood lay beaten and lost somewhere in the shanties and brothels of Takoradi or Kumasi, the airless upper rooms of palm-wine bars in Lagos or Kaduna? Without a word I rose and followed her.

We did not have far to go. The gardeners’ quarters were at the back of the school grounds, surrounded by niim trees and a few banana palms. In the last hut of the row, Yindo sat cross-legged on the packed-earth floor. Beside him on a dirty and torn grass mat Ruth Quansah lay, face down, her head buried in her arms.

Ayesha pointed. Why had she wanted to conceal it? To this day I do not really know, nor what the hut recalled to her, nor what she felt, for her face bore no more expression than a pencilled stick-child’s, and her eyes were as dull as they had been when she first came to us here.

Ruth heard my cane and my dragged foot. I know she did. But she did not stir.

“Madam–” Yindo’s voice was nearly incoherent with terror. “I beg you. You no give me sack. I Dagomba man, madam. No got bruddah dis place. I beg you, mek I no go lose dis job–”

I tried to calm him with meaningless sounds of reassurance. Then I asked him to tell me. He spoke in a harsh whisper, his face averted.

“She come dis place like she crez’. She say–do so.” He gestured unmistakably. “I–I try, but I can no do so for she. I too fear.”

He held out his hands then in an appeal both desperate and hopeless. He was a desert man. He expected no mercy here, far from the dwellings of his tribe.

Ruth still had not moved. I do not think she had even heard Yindo’s words.

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