The Cattle That Came Back
by Samuel Kozah
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
I.
The cattle were back.
Zugwai stood at the compound entrance before first light and counted by shape. Gwom at the entrance, head tilted east, his habitual east. Behind him Tiya with the wire-scar along her left flank, a keloid ridge three months in the closing that Zugwai’s thumb could map in total darkness. The young heifer he had been pricing for the Zonkwa market since August. The two older cows purchased the year before. Every animal. All of them unmarked, standing in the predawn compound in a stillness that belonged to objects. He moved toward them, and the herd held.
He crossed to Gwom.
The skin of Gwom’s neck was warm. His thumb moved along the north-south grain, Gwom’s grain, the exact grain pressed into his palm by two hundred mornings. His palm settled, and the flesh gave under it, precise, unchanged. He pressed again. The neck answered. His thumb moved to the base where the hair thickened, and he pressed his palm flat against the pulse. Even, slow. He kept his hand there. The neck was this neck. The animal was this animal. Gwom’s skin, warm and present under his hand, the pulse in the right place at the right pace.
His hand came off the neck.
Gwom stood. Zugwai looked at his palm, and his palm confirmed what he had already taken.
Zugwai went inside. Ketura breathed slowly and evenly in the other room. He sat on the wooden chair by the door, the one with the cracked left armrest, and his hands went to his thighs, both thumbs pressing the inner bone of each knee. The window above the door went from black to grey while he sat there.
Before the light reached the far wall, he rose and crossed to the compound entrance and looked at the cattle once more. Gwom’s head was still east. He went back and sat. Ketura slept on.
The grey came in and spread, and the room became a room with a floor. He sat with his hands on his thighs and heard the compound behind him, the small sounds of the animals settling. Those sounds had been absent for three weeks. The chair he sat in was the same chair he had taken his tea in every morning for eleven years before going out. He sat in it now. The tea went unmade.
II.
Ketura found the cattle at first light.
She came through the door still tying her wrapper and stopped when she saw the compound. Her hands went still at her waist. She stood at the entrance with her shoulders very still, and then her shoulders moved, and she pressed her hand to her mouth, and when she took her hand away, she turned from the compound and came to Zugwai.
Her palms held his face, warm from sleep. She looked at him. “Now Sadiq can go to school in September,” she said.
Sadiq. Their youngest. Seven years old, his school fees counted against the herd every October, a calculation that had broken when the cattle went. Zugwai looked at his wife’s face, the specific way her face softened when she was done being afraid. The cattle were back. Sadiq could go in September. In the world she inhabited, these two facts formed a complete sentence, and she was building it correctly.
“Yes,” he said.
The neighbors came before nine. Peter Tiokpat, the church elder, arrived first with his hands clasped before him and his face carrying the particular satisfaction of a man whose faith has just been confirmed by evidence. Other men arrived and gathered along the compound wall and talked about the herd, which was really talking about the valley and whether the valley could still hold its people and whether this morning said yes. The women moved in the kitchen. The smell of stew and pounded yam came through the window.
Zugwai moved through the gathering. He spoke correctly and accepted each hand on his shoulder. Peter Tiokpat gripped his forearm and said God had not forgotten them here. Zugwai said he knew it. Peter Tiokpat led a prayer at midday, his voice carrying over the compound, and the men bowed their heads, and the women came out of the kitchen and bowed theirs, and Zugwai bowed his, and the prayer was a true prayer, and he said amen at its end. He meant the amen, believed it. God had not forgotten them here. He also knew another thing, and it lived in the same body as this belief and did not argue with it, and he held both, each in its own room.
The cattle existed behind him as sound only, the compound-sounds of animals content in their space.
Ketura brought him a plate. Jollof rice and a cut of beef she reserved for celebrations. She brought it with the motion she had used for twenty years, her wrist turning slightly inward as she released the plate to his hands. He received it. The celebration moved around him. A child ran laughing past the gate. Two men made a joke near the wall, and both laughed at once.
He held the plate.
Someone asked if he was well. He said he was only tired. The food had gone cool in his hands.
By late afternoon the compound had emptied. Ketura moved inside, clearing dishes and washing, her footsteps against the concrete floor following their familiar pattern. Zugwai sat on the bench along the compound wall where the cattle were visible. The animals were quiet. Their breathing sounded correct.
III.
The compound entrance faced north, and Zugwai sat with his hands on his thighs and the north in front of him.
Three weeks ago, men had come from the north. He knew this without proof, knowledge settled in the body before it arrives at any named understanding. The men who came from the north came every few years. Communities in this valley kept this accounting without ceremony: certain paths closed after dark, his sons’ ages mapped against the years when the violence was heavy, a word spoken in one register dissolved into silence before it reached another. The cattle were one cost among many. He had paid others.
The cattle were taken by men. What sat in his compound now was returned by something beyond those men. That was the first boundary: whatever held this debt lived outside any jurisdiction he could name.
His eyes moved to the animals.
All present. His catalogue ran them, and they answered. Gwom at the entrance. Tiya. The heifer. Whatever had handled them had handled them with deliberate care, toward specific terms. They were delivered.
His right thumb found the inner bone of his right knee.
He moved back to the moment of delivery. Before dawn, alone, his palm on Gwom’s neck in the dark. The moment arrived ordinary. The air held nothing of what moved inside the transaction. The geometry incorporated him, and incorporation required only a body present and receiving.
He worked through the calculation.
What was given: the herd, whole, returned to the correct compound by something that knew the correct compound. He had priced this herd, knew the number in naira, knew it against what a man’s working years produced and what that production was worth at market. The giving had real weight.
What equivalent weight meant in the older logic he had known his whole life, known without having decided to know it. Equivalent return. Denominated in what could not be replaced by any market or any prayer.
He arrived at Ketura.
He ran the calculation from another angle. Ketura. From the beginning then, each step checked. Ketura. He found one more angle and went to it: perhaps the denomination remained open. Perhaps knowing the shape of the debt meant the terms were still open.
Nothing in the geometry was open.
He pressed his thumb harder into the inner bone of his knee and held it there. He had one more exit and he took it: perhaps debt crystallised only through action. He sat with this for a long time, running the logic of it, and the logic was sound until it wasn’t, until he understood that he had already acted. He had received the delivery, stood in his own compound and pressed his hand to the neck of the returned animal, and the neck answered. Reception was action. The exchange required only his presence, and he had been present.
He looked at his right palm. He closed his hand.
In the house Ketura had gone to bed. The compound was quiet except for the cattle breathing and the night insects and a generator somewhere down the road going through its noise. Zugwai sat on the bench with his thumbs on the inner bone of each knee, and the problem completed around him and was done, and he sat inside it while the stars moved and the road went quiet and the cattle breathed in their correct way in the dark.
IV.
Dawn came through the same sky.
Zugwai was already in the compound when the black went to blue. His catalogue ran, and the animals answered one by one. All present, all correct.
Gwom at the entrance. Six years of this habit, since the animal was a calf and turned to the rising light. Zugwai had watched it so many mornings that it had become simply a condition of dawn. Gwom east. The day beginning.
Then he looked at the house.
Gwom’s head was turned toward the house.
The sky was still going pale. The door closed, Ketura inside. Gwom’s head toward the door, toward the house where Ketura slept. Zugwai stood with this for a long time. The trees above the compound wall became visible one by one. The other animals stood still. Gwom held the angle.
His hands found his thighs without his having reached for them.
He went inside.
Ketura stood in the bedroom doorway tying her wrapper, and when she saw him, her face opened. The smile of a woman who had slept without weight for the first time in weeks. The answered prayer in her face. Sadiq going in September, the valley still holding them. She came toward him.
He sat on the edge of the bed. She sat beside him. Her hand came over his, her palm settling over his thumb, the weight of it against the back of his hand.
She looked at the side of his face. She had always been patient when he was working through something difficult, patient without question, and she was patient now.
He looked at the open compound entrance, at the cattle in the grey morning light. Gwom at the entrance. The angle of the head.
He looked at his wife’s face. His mouth opened and closed.
Outside, Gwom breathed.
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