A chicken scratched at the earth near them. Somewhere behind the house, a woman’s voice called to a child. Ordinary village life continued around two men discussing something for which neither possessed a proper name.
Addiction was not a word Yerro knew in the sense later generations would understand it. He knew only what he had observed: men promising themselves one thing in the morning and doing another by evening; men who hated what drink did to their families yet returned to it; men who could endure public shame, domestic quarrels and even physical punishment and still find their feet carrying them back.
He knew weakness.
But he also knew that some weaknesses behaved strangely.
They did not retreat when punished.
Sometimes they grew.
“His mother is making him worse,” Baa Bocar muttered.
Yerro sighed. “Leave the woman alone.”
“She hides things from me.”
“She is frightened.”
“She gives him food after I say nobody should give him food.”
“He is her son.”
“She sends him to you behind my back.”
“Because she thought you nearly killed him.”
Baa Bocar turned away.
After a while he said, “She cried.”
Yerro looked at him.
“Last night. She thought I was sleeping.”
The anger had gone from his voice.
“She was putting something on his back. I heard her telling him, ‘You will kill me before my time. After everything I have buried, you want me to bury you too.’ Then she was crying while insulting him.”
Yerro smiled sadly. “That sounds like a mother.”
“She is angry with him.”
“Of course.”
“But she protects him.”
“Of course.”
Baa Bocar shook his head as though the contradiction irritated him.
Yerro understood it better. A mother’s anger did not cancel her tenderness. She could curse the behaviour while pulling the blanket over the child. She could tell him he had disgraced the family and then secretly save the softest portion of food for him because his mouth was swollen. She could agree that he deserved correction and then throw herself between father and son when correction became rage.
“She buried six children with you,” Yerro reminded him. “You cannot expect her to look at the seventh and see only a drunkard.”
Baa Bocar’s eyes lowered.
“She still sees the baby who lived.”
“And what am I supposed to see?”
“Your son.”
“I do.”
“No. Sometimes I think you see the alkalo’s son.”
Baa Bocar looked up sharply.
Yerro held his gaze.
“That is different.”
“How?”
“The alkalo’s son must behave because people are watching. The alkalo’s son must protect your name. The alkalo’s son must never give anybody reason to laugh at your compound.” Yerro leaned closer. “Your son is the man underneath all that.”
Baa Bocar said nothing.
“Perhaps you stop thinking first about the people laughing.”
“You think I care only about gossip?”
“No. I think gossip is making you angrier than his drinking.”
The truth of it hurt.
Baa Bocar rose abruptly and walked several paces away. Yerro remained seated. He knew better than to follow.
“What do you know about carrying this name?” Baa Bocar demanded. “People come to me with their sons. ‘alkalo, speak to him’. They bring husbands who beat wives. They bring boys who steal. They bring boundary disputes. They expect me to put other people’s houses in order. Then my own son passes drunk through the village.”
“So?”
Baa Bocar turned. “So?”
“Yes. So?”
“They laugh!”
“Let them.”
The alkalo stared at him as if Yerro had suggested he walk naked through Farato.
“Let them?”
“Today they laugh at you. Tomorrow they will laugh at somebody else. Is that worth killing your son?”
“I was not going to kill him.”
“You did not know that while you were beating him.”
The words were hard, but Yerro’s voice was not.
Baa Bocar sat again.
For a long while, neither man spoke.
Then Yerro said, “Do you remember when I first came here?”
Baa Bocar grunted.
“You helped me.”
“I remember.”
“You could have watched me struggle. Instead, you made things easier. You spoke for me. You showed me where I could settle. You helped me understand people. You made sure I was not treated forever as the man who came from somewhere else.”
“What has that to do with Kornyagi?”
“Everything. You taught me that a man does not stand alone. That is why I am sitting here now.”
Baa Bocar looked at him.
“Kornyagi came to me because he still thinks of me as his older brother. Your wife sent him because she knows I owe this family something. And I came because you once made room for me when you did not have to.”
He paused.
“I will not repay that by telling you what you want to hear.”
Something softened in Baa Bocar’s face.
“What should I do, then?”
It was the first real question he had asked.
“Do not beat him like that again.”
“And when he drinks?”
“Bring him home.”
“And then?”
“Tomorrow, when he is sober, speak to him.”
“He does not listen.”
“Then speak again.”
“For how long?”
Yerro shrugged. “He is your son. How long were you planning to be his father?”
Baa Bocar gave him a dark look, but after a moment a reluctant laugh escaped him.
“That mouth of yours.”
“You knew about it before you helped me settle here.”
For the first time that afternoon, they both laughed.
It did not solve anything.
That was perhaps the most important truth of all.
Kornyagi did drink again.
For several days after the beating he remained close to home. His mother watched him with the vigilance she had once used when he was small and feverish. People remarked that he had learned his lesson. Some even praised Baa Bocar’s methods.
“You see? A stubborn tree needs a strong axe.”
But Yerro was not convinced.
Before Kornyagi’s bruises had disappeared, his feet carried him again towards the palm-wine tappers.
When the news reached Baa Bocar, his first reaction was disbelief.
Then fury.
Then something quieter.
He remembered Yerro’s words.
He did not beat Kornyagi that night.
When Kornyagi staggered home, Baa Bocar looked at him for a long time and went inside.
That silence frightened Kornyagi more than the cane had.
And throughout Matou’s holiday, the story moved through Farato.
Nenneh Dado brought news from the well and defended herself whenever Borogie accused her of gossiping.
“I am not gossiping. I am telling you what is happening in the village.”
“That is exactly what gossipers say.”
“It is education.”
“Education?” Borogie laughed. “If Farato depended on you, nobody would need a radio.”
Around Yerro’s evening fire, however, the story became less amusing.
One evening Matou finally asked the question that seemed simplest to her twelve-year-old mind.
“Papa, why doesn’t Kornyagi just stop drinking?”
Yerro stared into the fire.
He thought of Fulladu.
He thought of men rolling in dust after a drunken quarrel and sharing food hours later. He remembered cousins who had struck each other and still appeared together the next morning to repair a roof. He remembered a world in which pride could flare violently but was expected eventually to bend before kinship. You did not discard your people easily. Blood was not a garment to be removed because it had become uncomfortable.
“I used to wonder the same thing,” he told Matou.
“So why doesn’t he?”
“Because sometimes wanting to stop and being able to stop are not the same thing.”
Matou frowned.
Borogie, who was listening while tending something near the fire, looked across at her husband.
Yerro continued. “I knew men in Fulladu who would swear in the morning that no palm wine would touch their mouths. They meant it when they said it. By afternoon they were drinking.”
“Then they lied,” Matou said.
“Not always.”
“How can you promise something and then do it?”
“That is what I did not understand either.”
Matou considered this carefully.
“Did their fathers beat them?”
“They were grown men.”
“Did people fight them?”
Yerro smiled. “They fought everybody, including one another.”
Bubel giggled although he had only half understood.
“And afterwards?” Matou asked.
“Afterwards they became family again.”
“How?”
“Because anger was not allowed to become bigger than kin.”
Matou stared into the flames.
Yerro poked a burning branch deeper into the fire.
“That is what I want you to remember. A person can do something wrong without becoming nothing but the wrong thing he has done. Kornyagi drinks too much. He causes trouble. He must answer for those things. But he is still somebody’s son. Somebody’s brother. Somebody’s kin.”
“And your friend?” Matou asked.
Yerro smiled.
“My younger brother, almost.”
That satisfied her.
For Matou, the story of Kornyagi became one of the enduring memories of that holiday: alongside Bubel’s laughter, the animals following her through the compound, the smell of kerosene in the hut, the market women ululating over her return and the evenings beside Yerro’s fire.
She could not have understood addiction then.
Neither, in truth, could the adults around her.
But she understood the thing Yerro had brought with him from Fulladu.
People could fight and reconcile before sunset. Pride could be swallowed. Anger could be put down. A person could disappoint his family without ceasing to belong to it.
And sometimes love demanded something harder than punishment.
It demanded staying.