The Tomorrow-Tamer

  “At least you have come back,” the old woman said pettishly. “Not like those cowards who ran away. I told them, but of course they would not listen. If we die elsewhere, I said, how are the spirits of our ancestors ever to find us? Tell me that, I said. But they would not listen.”

  Adamo, staring at her, did not believe. He could not believe that the spirits of all the dead any longer remained in this place, as the old woman hoped. It seemed to him that the living who had gone from the village had taken with them the ancestral spirits, for their own protection. Whether his parents were alive or dead, they were gone–they had somehow been taken away. The village to him now was deserted as it could not have been had it been empty only of tangible life. The chain that linked endlessly into the past had been broken.

  Adamo stood looking at the huts, at the old woman, seeing nothing. Then he turned and ran through the village until he reached his father’s hut. He entered and lay down on the floor, not violently but quietly, like a man settling himself for sleep. He was determined to die because he could not think what else to do. Dead, he might find his people.

  When the third morning came, his rigid limbs stirred stiffly, his head turned, his nostrils dilated because he smelled food. A betrayal, although she had meant it well. The old woman had crept up to the hut door in the night and left a bowl of goat milk and a dish of fried plantains. Adamo, sobbing despair at his body, rose shakily from the hut floor and bolted the food.

  So his belly committed him to life. He went to the river and washed. Then he talked to the old woman and spent the rest of the day gathering firewood for her. When he had accumulated a large pile of dry branches, she assured him it would be enough, for she would not live long. Adamo took both her withered hands in his, looked one last time into the vague and watery eyes that were nonetheless the eyes of one of his people, and walked back into the forest.

  He never knew how far he went or where. He drank from brackish pools, scooping the lime-green scum away. Fevered, he shouted and burned, and when the evil yielded he lay down and covered himself with palm boughs while the sweat lasted. A bush rat crossed his path and he killed it with his machete and ate it, sucking even the frail red bones. He came to villages where he was fed as a madman, but no one had seen his people–they had not passed this way. Adamo found a stony road and followed it until his feet were crusted with hard mud formed of the dust and his blood.

  When finally he came to a town, his weariness was overcome by his astonishment, for the full streets jangled with lorries and the shops shone with a greater wealth of new knives and patterned cloth than Adamo had known existed. He strolled and gazed. A few people laughed, but he did not realize they were laughing at him, wide-eyed and filthy, his loincloth in shreds.

  In an open field at the edge of the town, men were walking to and fro with guns. At dusk, when the soldiers were sitting outside the long huts, gossiping and rolling dice, Adamo ventured closer. One of the men was cleaning a white leather strap fixed to a drum. The drum was fascinating to Adamo. He knew many drums used by his people, but this kind he had never seen before. He touched it curiously with his fingertips, and the soldier, laughing, handed him the sticks and showed him how to use them.

  Adamo and the drum found one another. His fingers sensed some way of expressing what his mind and speech could only grope after and fail to grasp. The strange drum uttered to him the voice he now heard only in dreams, the sorrowing of someone once inexpressibly dear to him, someone whose face he could not now visualize however hard he tried.

  When the soldier reached out for the sticks, Adamo would not relinquish them and the soldier grew angry and alarmed, for he could see an officer approaching. He grabbed Adamo roughly by the shoulder.

  “Here–wait a moment,” Captain Fossey said. “He’s not bad. Who is he?”

  Adamo was startled by the alien voice, for he knew no English. He had seen white men before, but only at a distance. He wanted to run, but the soldier caught his wrist.

  “He thinks you would make a drummer. He would teach you. How would you like to stay with us, bush boy?”

  So it was that Adamo, who was not aware that he was an African, found himself a private in a West African regiment, having agreed to serve for five years his country, whose name he did not know.

  He was given khaki shorts, a jacket with brass buttons, heavy boots, a red fez with a black tassel. He was given food, too, three times a day. But he had no idea what was expected of him, so he did everything wrong, and the men who gave commands became angry. Adamo slept badly, and his dreams filled him with emptiness, like a starving man’s belly bloated with air.

  One evening a short sturdy man with an enormous stomach clumped into the barracks and unslung his pack onto the cot beside Adamo’s. He gave the boy a quizzical glance.

  “Where from you?”

  Adamo did not speak any pidgin, so he could only shake his head. The other man laughed and spoke in his own tongue, which was Adamo’s as well.

  “We have men of ten different tongues in this army, bush boy. And the white officers don’t speak any of them. You must learn English now, if you want to get along. I myself will teach you.”

  Adamo’s stiff smile loosened, became real. He rose, stretched, towered, held out both his hands.

  “Yes–you will teach me,” he said, still shyly but with certainty, for now he saw this was what was meant to happen. “You will tell me, and I will learn everything that must be done.”

  The others yelped with laughter. “Manu is the clever one! Hear the Big Drum who drums his own praises. Watch out, boy, he’ll have you cleaning his kit and thanking him for the privilege.”

  Manu was the regimental bass drummer. His nickname came not only from his instrument but from his paunch and his jovial pomposity. He had just come back from leave. He told them the news of his family, and Adamo listened, too, for the hearty voice and belched laughter seemed to be for him as well. Then Manu began to scold the others.

  “What have you done for this boy, scoundrels? Nothing. Lartey, when you joined the army, I saved you a thousand times–have you forgotten? Listen to the Big Drum, you small and little drummers–”

  And so, with their duties assigned by Manu, they began to show Adamo what to do, and to protect him from his mistakes. When he did not understand Captain Fossey or Sergeant Sarpong, the others translated unobtrusively, and after a while he recognized the standard commands himself. He cleaned Manu’s boots and even polished the brass on the great drum. The bandsmen took this as a joke, and Manu himself sometimes chortled in the depths of his throat, but Adamo did not mind. “Big Drum” seemed too familiar a name, so he called Manu “uncle”.

  From Captain Fossey, who in Adamo’s eyes was the head of the army, the boy learned how to play the parade drum. From Sergeant Sarpong, the regimental drum major, a gaunt and haughty giant of a man, he learned how to march, how to sling his drum at the proper angle, how to watch the baton signal without appearing to do so. The daily drill was not boring to him. With each repetition, Adamo became more confident.

  When he finished his basic training, and was proficient enough as a drummer, Adamo was issued with the bandsman’s scarlet bolero trimmed with gold, and the square leopardskin apron the regimental drummers wore. He took fanatical care of his uniform and spent hours in cleaning and polishing.

  The day came when Adamo was permitted to march with the regimental band, a drummer among the drummers. First came Sergeant Sarpong, tall as a tree, his baton aloft. Then the ranks of drummers, Adamo marching beside rangy Afutu and Botsio with his wrinkled face. Behind them came the Big Drum, Manu, wearing atop his uniform his magnificent mottled leopardskin. Then came the brass section, the horns blaring and bursting with the march tunes. And after the band, the close ranks of soldiers, the clacking boots, the bright bayonets. All the young warriors who now were not strangers to Adamo.

  Captain Fossey was pleased at the speed with which Adamo learned.

  “I can always tell
a promising youngster,” he confided to his colleagues. “Keen as mustard, he is.”

  Captain Fossey’s tour of duty here had not been particularly encouraging. He was a ginger-haired, slightly plump Englishman of lower-middle-class origin, a man who had risen from the ranks. This in itself was bad enough, but the bandmaster also had the uncomfortable suspicion that his fellow officers regarded his branch of military activity as not quite manly.

  Sometimes Captain Fossey looked at the lanky loose-limbed African bandsmen and thought that they would never in their hearts understand precision. When he heard their deep laughter he wondered uneasily what they were laughing at, and when he went back to his quarters he would strip to his pink flesh and weigh himself on his bathroom scales.

  He was a bachelor. The alternate complaining and tittering of the wives at the Club filled him with alarm. How could a man commit himself to regular performance with one of those? A duty, even if only for pride’s sake–that was the appalling thing. He did not intend to marry.

  Adamo became Captain Fossey’s prize. He gave the boy encouragement and praise, for he was under the impression that this was what Adamo needed. Adamo, who had picked up a fair amount of pidgin English, would beam in evident gratitude and produce the first phrase Manu had taught him, a phrase of exceptional efficacy.

  “I t’ank you, sah,” he would say in his heavy voice, so much at odds with his watchful, uncertain eyes. “I t’ank you too much.”

  And Captain Fossey would smile, his pale mouth parting slightly, his ginger moustache upturned.

  The bandmaster often detailed Adamo to do some little job for him–an hour’s work in his garden or an evening spent in helping Fossey’s old steward-boy to beat the carpets. These tasks Adamo performed eagerly. He never refused Captain Fossey’s shilling or two, but the Englishman had the feeling that the money was not important. Loyalty was the word that rose to Fossey’s mind, a sense of personal loyalty. Captain Fossey had never had loyalty directed towards his person before.

  He so far relaxed his guard as to mention Adamo to Captain Appiah. Appiah was one of the few African officers in the regiment. He did not like the British officers to make conversation with him, for he felt they were being patronizing. But if they did not speak, he resented their snobbishness.

  “That young drummer of mine–Adamo,” Captain Fossey said. “Lot of your people must be like that, Appiah. No education, coming straight from the bush, but by gum, all he needed was a chance in life.”

  Captain Appiah’s tense face brooded. He had grown up in the city and had done extremely well in secondary school. He did not like to hear himself equated, as he fancied Captain Fossey was doing, with Adamo. Your people, indeed.

  “I do not think he was looking for a chance in life,” Captain Appiah said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Appiah was not sure himself what he meant. He had observed Adamo on the parade ground and had seen the boy’s pleasure in the endless repetitions of the drill. He knew that Adamo followed regulations to the letter. But he could not help wondering how Adamo interpreted the rules he so scrupulously obeyed.

  Once when Captain Fossey was ill, Captain Appiah took kit inspection for him. When he came to Adamo, he nodded in satisfaction. Everything was neat, in order, polished. Appiah was about to walk on, when his own curiosity or some obscure malice against Captain Fossey made him stop. He spoke in Adamo’s tongue so there would be no misunderstanding.

  “This”–indicating the buckle on Adamo’s pack–“and the boots, and the brass buttons. You clean these things. Do you know why you must do so?”

  “Sah?” Adamo’s eyes widened.

  Captain Appiah repeated his words. He did not, as Captain Fossey might have done, imagine that Adamo would make some remark about discipline or the smartness of the company. On the contrary, he expected Adamo to reply that he did not know or that he merely did what he was told. But the young drummer, standing tall in his flawless uniform, did not answer in this way either.

  “So all things will go well,” Adamo said calmly, as though there could have been no possible doubt about the matter.

  Less and less did Adamo enquire in the palm-wine bars and thronged streets for word of his family. He did not often think of them now. At night in the barracks, after he took off his boots and folded his clothes carefully in the prescribed way, Adamo would lie on his cot and listen to the breathing of men all around him. Then, reassured, he would sleep.

  Adamo was not talkative, but he liked it when the others talked to him. Lartey, restless as a scurrying cockroach, always searching for morsels of gossip, sometimes settled briefly beside Adamo while he worked. One afternoon Lartey began to complain about Captain Fossey.

  “Again he tells me I am no good, not a soldier. I don’t say I am the bravest man in the regiment. I play a drum. I am not a man for rifles. But what is he? Remember when a detachment was sent to stop the riots upcountry? Our big man heard that the band was going to be sent, too, and you should have heard him. What if a spear happened to slit a drum? Terrible! He was so worried about the drums he would place his hands over his own belly whenever he spoke of it. Then, when we were not sent, he said what a pity–we would have given heart to the men.”

  Lartey spluttered with laughter, and Adamo laughed too, companionably. Although he and Lartey had the same mother-tongue, Adamo was never quite clear about the other man’s meaning, but he took it on faith, sensing from the voice tone what response was expected. Lartey gave him an oblique glance.

  “I don’t see you in trouble with Captain Fossey, Adamo. You are always trying to please him. You like him so much?”

  Adamo looked up, perplexed. “Like him?”

  He had never considered the question. Fossey’s skin, which was the palpitating pink of a fresh-killed animal’s vital organs, the sour smell his body exuded, the voice so oddly high-pitched compared to the low hoarseness of African voices, the reddish hair which seemed to Adamo a particularly offensive colour, for he associated it with forest demons who were said to be covered with red hair–all these things were unpleasant and even repulsive, but in no way significant. Adamo shrugged and resumed his work.

  “He spoke, and many listened,” he said, “and then I was a drummer among the drummers. His word has power–that I know.”

  Lartey looked at Adamo strangely and went away to talk to someone else.

  Now when Adamo heard, as he still occasionally did in sleep, the muttering river, the soft slow woman voice, the voices of gods and grandsires, he would be frightened by their questioning and mourning, until they faded and a new voice, high and metallic, alien but not unknown, gained command.

  Here, Adamo. You are here.

  And the man Adamo, sleeping with his legs clenched up to his belly and his long hard arms wrapped tightly around his chest, would sigh, his limbs and muscles unfolding like leaves, and would mercifully cease to dream.

  Captain Fossey went on leave each year, but he returned. Once, coming back with a resurgence of ambition, he decided that the regimental band could play at Club dances, and for months he sweated with his troops through campaigns of waltzes, slow foxtrots and even the African highlife tunes. Dutifully the bandsmen blew and beat a dreary path through the ballroom music, but when they played highlife their verve astounded the officers and wives. Captain Fossey was plied with compliments which he accepted as his basic due although he was aware that the troops had actually taken over while he acted merely as a kind of armchair general.

  Adamo developed a skill in highlife which became the boast of the entire band. When a number was finished he would throw down his sticks and collapse over the kettle drum in laughter and exhaustion, while Manu clapped him on the shoulder and Lartey whistled and in the background Captain Fossey’s voice tinkled high above the hubbub–“Jolly good, Adamo. Well done.” In the years of Adamo’s service, the learning of highlife was the most important innovation that occurred.

  One afternoon Captain Fossey sent for Ada
mo. The bandmaster sat in his office, his puffy hands fiddling with an assortment of papers on his desk. Adamo stood smartly to attention.

  “I wanted to see you,” Captain Fossey began, pulling a few hairs out of his ginger moustache, “because I’ll be leaving soon. Posted back to England.”

  He wondered if Adamo would express regret at his leaving. The boy looked puzzled but that was all. Annoyed at himself for having bothered to think of it, Captain Fossey continued more brusquely.

  “A lot of officers are being posted, with independence coming up. You’ll have your own chaps as officers, God help you. Thought I’d better get this settled before I go. Your five years’ service time is up this month.”

  Adamo’s face retained its composure. He stood very straight, his big hands loose at his sides, his patient eyes waiting.

  “Yes, sah.”

  Adamo’s comprehension of English was slight at the best of times, but now, with Captain Fossey’s apparent agitation, he could not understand one word. He was anxious and upset because he sensed these feelings in the bandmaster. But he was still confident that the way would be revealed and he would discover what was expected, what task would be required to restore the harmonious order of things.

  Captain Fossey sighed. Having hankered for England so long, he now found he did not want to return. He remembered the damp and the cold, the cockiness and terrifying poise of the English bandsmen. Nostalgically, he recalled the ease of his life here, the devotion of men like Adamo. Would Adamo show the same loyalty to the next bandmaster?

  “You can always sign up again, but I don’t know that I’d advise it, Adamo. Army’s liable to undergo all sorts of changes. One just doesn’t know what will happen. Men promoted far too fast, from the ranks. I shouldn’t say it, perhaps, but there it is. You’ve shown a talent for highlife. Not long ago I met the leader of a local highlife band, and–well, actually, I put in a word for you. He’s short of a drummer. You can find him any evening at the Moon Club.”