The Realm of Owls

A story by PERPETUAL MURRAY

A song comes to you. At this point, it is only a melody. No lyrics. Not a ballad— not yet. This song rides, a current so subtle beneath the cawing of guinea fowl foraging for mites and weeds in the savannah. Perched in the canopy of a Mukwa tree, you sit up, attune your ears, and reach through the guinea fowl’s guttural chattering, past the discordant squawking. You reach for the heart of the noise—the chorus—and finding it, close your eyes. It is a tune so clean, so polished, like a star in the crypt of an October night.  

The tune planted in your head, eyes still closed, you pick up your banjo, which rests between your legs, and begin to strum. You pick the strings with your fingers, yielding an indulgent melody, one that conjures images of swigging from a calabash of munkoyo sweetened to your liking, a knack only your mother possesses. 

But to be indulgent, blasé, is a luxury denied you. This melody, then, must dissipate, not allowed to settle in your soul. For a melody, you know, is unlike dew, but rather like a word; once uttered, it solidifies and cannot be taken back. 

You take your fingers off the strings and open your eyes. The guinea fowl continue to squawk. You must find an entryway back into the marrow of the noise. This time, you must listen for the confluence of jagged sounds, raw, not smoothened like cowries. This time, you don’t close your eyes. You let them trace the source of every sound you hear. Your eyes find every fowl your ears train on, and like that, you toss all other sounds out of your mind and strew them onto the wind. Only the squawking fills your ears.        

Dust drifts this way and that, sending a shudder through the wind, which gusts your way and skyward. Like an apparition, the dust is feathery against the wind. You shut tight your eyes, but not before spatters of the loose earth make it in, grating against your eyeballs and blinding you.

The stream is countless footfalls away, and to get there, you must pass through your village, past your mother’s hut, which sits next to your compound’s insaka, where your mother keeps gourds of water for drinking and cooking. You wish your mother could gather you up and blow her breath into your eyes to sweep out the dust as with a broom, and she would if she saw you this way. But you’re no longer a child. Your voice has broken and your throat, once level, now houses a hump. The thought of your father’s ire at finding you nestled on your mother’s lap or leaning on her bosom jolts you and stiffens your muscles. Obscene, then, is the thought of rinsing your eyes with water from your mother’s gourds. Your father’s ire aside, your mother, now in the late afternoon of her life, is no longer able to make trip upon trip to the stream to fetch water. If only you could do it for her, after all, you’re her only child, but alas— you’re a son; you perform tasks assigned by your father. Fetching water is solely your mother’s chore. Even so, you wish you could do it for her, perhaps deep into the tomb of the night when the village rests its eyes, when it surrenders the realm to owls. 

Laying down your banjo, you clap dirt off your palms. You form a fist, and with its rim, rub your eyes. Your eyelids clamp up, encasing the dust. Tears course out. You don’t dissuade them. If not to purge the loose earth from your eyes, you hope the tears will at least blunt the pain you live with, the pain of wanting to be a musician, to play your banjo because it’s the only thing you’re good at, the only thing that sates—even if for a spell—the yen in your chest. 

The pain gnaws beyond your eyes, knocks at your skull, gnaws at the nub of your being, gnaws, and you gnash your teeth. You prop yourself against the tree, decide you’ll head for your mother’s gourds, your father’s ire aside. First, you must stow away your banjo, back into its hiding place. 

You reach for your banjo. 

Alas! where your banjo should be, grass, flattened, a hollow in the earth, now meets your palm. 

Your heart knocks at your chest. How could this be? In the chaos of trying to get dust out of your eyes, could it be that you’ve lost your bearings and forgotten where you placed your banjo? 

You reach about, feel your way to the left, the right, rearward, forward, farther— no banjo. Like a war cry, every synapse in your brain calls for your eyelids to snap open. As much as your eyelids want to comply, so pointed is the gritting that instead, your eyelids clamp up even tighter, and only tears squirt out. 

On all fours, in total darkness, in the middle of the day, you grope for your banjo. Your search halts when you hear, “Your coming out is only heartbeats away, and this is how you choose to prepare for it?” Your father’s voice is ablaze.  The very life of you writhes. Coming out. These words imply exposure, baring oneself to the world, yet your coming out will be sunless, the beginning of operating in the dark, a prowler in the realm of owls.  

“But father—”

Clank! Smash! Split! “Get up!”

Everything in you shatters, like your banjo. Even if you could open your eyes, you don’t want to do so now, not when it’ll be to the sight of your banjo in pieces. Clank-smash-split ricochets off the surface against which your father smashes your banjo, echoes through the roots in the earth, up along stems of grass, trunks of trees, out toward the veins in the leaves, out into every stoma of the savannah. Clank-smash-split leaves you in shards. The air strains with thorns.

“Get up!”

You remain on all fours. If your father were a goat herder or fisherman, you might consider obliging. To say nothing of the isolation his life in the realm of owls has fated you to, a life that has thrust you in the throes of the village’s hisses at your father’s failure to explain why his barn is always full even when season after season, his field remains unfarmed. Hisses at his failure to explain his red-veined and ever yellow eyes— eyes bloodier than liver and more jaundiced than an owl’s, given that no one has ever seen him sit about with other men of the village around a fire drinking sorghum beer. “Where does he go,” you’ve heard the village whisper. “What manner of man traverses the pitch of night alone?” To say nothing of this, you don’t want to spend your nights flying over other people’s huts, creeping into their homes, filching, at times, entering sleeping women while they are under the spell of the night. If it is devastating to witness someone snatch your bag in stark daylight, how much more if you wake up to the realisation that you’ve been robbed, or, to the premonition that you’ve been raped, but not knowing how? This is your father. This is his way. Your father conjures ubwanga under the spell of the night to take that which belongs to other people. This cannot be your way. It is not you. The path you wish to take is the one that leads you to a lifetime of nights playing your banjo, entertaining people— awake and aware people. 

“Coming out,” then, is not a thing you want to do, especially because it can backfire, as it did on your father one daybreak three harvests ago. On that day, it was not the cawing of fowl that cut short your sleep. No. What roused you and sent you scampering to the centre of your hut was a blast louder than thunder, closely followed by a thud. There, you found your father stark naked, sprawled out, along with grass and stalks his fall had torn from the roof as he plummeted to the floor. “I couldn’t have miscalculated,” you remember him muttering. “This has never happened before.” 

But for you, this wasn’t the only thing that had never happened before. You had never, until that moment, seen your father in a state of uncertainty. Your father was always sure. Even graver, you had never seen him naked before. It was this, the witnessing of these firsts that shot a shriek right out of you and betrayed your aim to conceal your presence. 

“Yyouu,” your father had growled when he saw you, the word deepened and stretched so much that the sound of it threatened to drown you. He batted his eyelids countless times. When he was finally able to hold a steady gaze, he trained it on you and said, “This is an omen. It is your turn to take the reins from me.” 

There he was, your father, in the newly born morning, naked as a mole-rat, yet oh so indifferent to this detail. Had he not realised that with the wearing off of the night came the coming off of the cloak that had, until that moment, enabled him to be invisible? Was he oblivious to the truth that his nudity was now blatant? What if your father had crash-landed into someone else’s home instead of this spot in your hut? What if he had landed in the home of Bana Chola, whose teenage daughter was nacisungu— had just come of age? Or, for that matter, what if daylight had found your father in the home of Bashi Samfya, who, only a day earlier, had reported to the village elders that his barn was half-empty when he had witnesses who could testify that he had indeed filled it to the brim that very day? The horror! It was one thing to be suspected, and quite another to be caught stark naked at the dawn of day.  

Contrary to your fears, your father carried on as though his world was ordered exactly as it should. He said, “My son, this is your first lesson: make sure your potion doesn’t wear off prematurely.”  

To this day, you’ve failed to come up with words for that moment three harvests ago. 

Now, in this moment when your banjo is in shards, your father scoops you up with the ease of an eagle snatching a fish. The way he hoists you over his shoulder, you might as well be a bale of reeds. Except you are flesh. You are bone. Muscle. Hoisting you this way, hinged at your stomach, your father’s collarbone pressing deeper and deeper into you, could shred your middle. Yet, dare you wiggle. You tighten your stomach muscles, tighten and tighten until your back cricks. 

Twigs snap like dry bones under the weight of your father’s footfalls. Each time his heel touches down, the earth crumbles, and his feet sink. It requires him to lift his feet heavily, to trudge as though he were climbing a mountain to move from spot to spot. And to heave you up and down. A gust of pain surges through you. The only way you know to blunt the pain, to relegate the ache to the hindmost portion of your psyche, is to imbue your mind with song. 

Muno mumpanga mwaliba inshimu.

Elyo shila suma abali bonse:

Aba maka naba shakwata amaka.

Bonse bala sumwa.

Inshimu nga shati shisume ba tata, 

awe, ba tata balanjikisha.

(Balanjikisha)

noku uku kalipa kwamubili wandi kwala pwa.

(kwala pwa) 

muno mumpanga mwaliba inshimu.

This forest has bees.

They can sting anyone:

The strong and the weak.

Everyone gets stung. 

If father gets stung, 

he will have to put me down. 

(Put me down) 

and this pain will be gone.

(all gone)

This forest has bees.

In this way, song and pain meld with the veld. Now you are the air, now the trees. Now the grass, now the dust. You sense that behind your closed eyes lies something you fail to describe right away, something that makes you want to flee your body. This thing takes you back to moments when you nestled on your mother’s lap, makes you snuggle within yourself. But, like a wink, this thing, this feeling, is fleeting, and it passes.

You carry on singing.

Elyo shila suma abali bonse:

Aba maka naba shakwata amaka.

Bonse bala sumwa.

Inshimu nga shati shisume ba tata, 

awe, ba tata balanjikisha.

(Balanjikisha)

noku uku kalipa—

They can sting anyone:

The strong and the weak.

Everyone gets stung. 

If father gets stung, 

he will have to put me down. 

(Put me down) 

and this pain—

Your voiceless intonations flee from your mind when you hear harsh cries, jagged utterances devoid of words, and the sound of what could easily be a thousand guinea fowl wings flapping. The air ripples and swishes with each flap as wing upon wing opens and closes, parting the air.  

In the span of a few footfalls, the utterances become dirges. You open your mouth to tell the guinea fowl that your song was just a song, but your voice dissipates like vapour into the ether. You hear an amassing of cries, more dirges, some shrill, others in bass, sotto voce, even. You hear your name spilling from the fowl’s mouths.

Thud! 

You hit the earth. Sandy. Damp. The force of the throw startles you, yet you know you can’t linger, can’t wait for your mind to find your bearings as you do with melodies. No. You know you must rouse your attention, awaken to this moment, spring to your feet—to your knees, really—until you can see. 

Damp air sails your way, and you know the stream is nearby. 

You begin to crawl.

Knees threatening to bump into arms, you crawl, numb to stumps and twigs. Into the stream. Sand stabs your knees even as it gives way under your weight and collects between your toes and fingers. You crawl until water climbs up to your wrists, up on its way to your elbows. No sooner do you sluice your hands than you cup water in both palms and begin to cleanse your eyes. On the fourth splash, all dirt lifts from your eyes, taking pain with it. Not the still-present pain over your banjo. No. This pain breaches the levee that has so far walled in the tears gathered at the hind of your eyes. Now, with all walls down, with water splashed on your face, tears break free. The weight in your eyes lifts with the falling of your tears. Not even your father, you are sure, can tell between tears and water.

He can’t—doesn’t—look at you, see you, let alone your water-tears. You are flanked by guinea fowl. 

“Off with you,” your father growls, shooing the fowl and forcing his way towards you. 

The fowl mill about you— now onward, now rearward. They jostle around you in no particular order, discordant, not unlike their squawking. The fowl cordon you off your father. He swoops and scoops a fowl and hurls it at you. But just as swiftly, aloft, the fowl puts its wings and legs to work. It flaps its wings and kicks against your father’s throw. All movement towards you halts. The fowl turns, in full control now, steady on its wings, and leaps at your father. This decides it for the rest. In concert, all fowl aloft charge at your father. Those on the ground climb on him. Claw at him. Peck at him. Your father begins to look like a lion declawed, a blind one, at that. His arms flail about under the buckling of his knees. 

You see what the fowl can do to your father, how he can be no more, along with his hard words. His deeds, too. He will never smash your banjo again, never try to coerce you to enter sleeping women, and never take you to task for fetching water for your mother. You can be a musician, play your banjo; do the only thing you’re good at. 

Even so. 

Even as the clank-smash-split of your banjo resounds in your head, as the crick in your back lingers, you fail to harden your heart. Vacant remains the seat of your wrath. Indifferent, your fury. This has to be the weakness that disgusts your father. It has to be. You see it in its fullness, this disgust, and it becomes yours. Why are you not trembling with rage the way your father does each time—which is all the time—you fail at every task he’s been asking you to perform ever since he decided to start readying you to take over his realm three harvests ago? Why do you not revel in seeing him vulnerable, particularly because feeling defenseless is how he makes you feel? Why don’t you rejoice not only for you, but also for your mother, who might now—perhaps now—find it alright to smile and show you tenderness? The thought alone! Why don’t you hold on to the hope that perhaps now all other village mothers and daughters will see no reason to scamper from the stream when your mother approaches, or edge past her if they encounter her along the path? Why aren’t you jubilating at the possibility of ending your mother’s life with your father, which you can sum up in the words, “emukwai balume bandi”? 

If only you could avert your gaze, stare at the earth beneath your father’s feet, around his person, or above his hairs. If you could only look away into the bushes, perhaps you could recuse yourself of the guinea fowls’ ambush. If not this, then you wish you could escape this moment altogether. But the mass of claws and wings with your father under its weight arrests you. Each time he falters, you feel indicted. Each time the guinea fowl claw and peck at him, you feel pelted.

A song comes to you.