Year of No Rain by Alice Mead

Author:Alice Mead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2011-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

They walked for three nights along the narrow dirt track, but there was no sign of the road Jairo had promised. Maybe they had walked too slowly. In the darkness, it was impossible to have any sense of how far they’d gone.

And once more they grew hungry and thirsty. The days were bright and hot, making it hard to sleep. As they rested, Stephen drew one letter per day in the dirt: A, B, C. In English. He taught them the sounds for each one.

As they walked at night, swarms of mosquitoes hovered around them in thick clouds, clogging their noses, their eyes and ears. In desperation, they covered their arms and faces with dust to prevent the mosquitoes from biting.

“With all these mosquitoes,” Jairo said, “I’m sure we’re nearing that river I was thinking of.”

The thought of a river, of bathing in cool water, made them walk a little faster. They heard the highpitched squeak of bats diving for insects and the harsh, barking cough of lions, as though they had choked on something and were trying to cough it up. An hour passed. Then another. There was no river.

Stephen felt cold and lonely, walking at night. It was hard to see the ground, and they all stumbled often, tripping over sticks, stepping into holes, and twisting their ankles. All the time, he wished for his mother, and he was sure that the others did, too. But most of the villagers were dead, the huts burned, the cows stolen. He wiped the tears from his cheeks.

To keep himself going, he tried to make friends with the stars that hung so brightly over the savanna, and began giving them names. Peeker. Little John. Bright Eyes. The north star he knew. It was the star that never moved. They kept that at their backs all night long.

To cheer themselves up, they sang—songs about the sun coming up, the rainy season, pounding grain for bread, songs about beautiful girls, hunting, and cattle.

Toward sunup on the third day, they stopped, completely exhausted. Stephen stared overhead at the sky. Star after star grew tiny and faded as the dawn turned the sky from black to pale gray to pink.

“We must have walked right past that road in the dark, Jairo,” Deng suggested. “Maybe it was covered over by sand from a windstorm.”

“How could we miss a road?” Jairo countered.

Deng shrugged. He sat down.

Stephen sat, too. His eyes closed while he rested with his head on his drawn-up knees. He dozed off. He didn’t care if a haboob, a violent storm of wind and sand, came. He wanted to be whirled into the air in a cloud of blowing dust. Maybe he could be dropped down someplace far, far away—a cold, snowy Santa Claus place full of shiny cars, televisions, relief workers, and smooth roads. With big, green soccer fields to play ball on.

And then that dream blew away and he dreamed of a fierce man who said he was his father, a soldier, and now he was urging them on, telling them they were men, not boys.

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