Journeying Mercies: Tuesday Was Gone

Journeying Mercies

Book 1: Tuesday Was Gone

Bob Neudorf

Published by Bob Neudorf at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Bob Neudorf

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Journeying Mercies

Doing Violence To No Man

A Passport To Exciting Pleasures And Glowing Memories

Planet Africa

Ronnie

Mon Dieu, Pas Un Autre Enfant Mort

Altared Thoughts

Fire And Ice

A Long Journey

Day Two

Under A Great Blue Sky

Tuesday Was Gone

Consider It An Awful Offense

Vacation

A Handful Of Christmas

Mana

Children Of The Heavenly Father

Paris

The Farm

Winter

Smithville

Pirates And Dolphin Guides

Dakar To Bamako

Too Old For Tenderleaf Tea

Drawn by Ruth Stein

Preface

Fleiss und geduld machen dich zum meister. [Perseverance (in hard work) and patience makes you a master (brings success).] These words were embossed on a school Christmas card given by my grandfather to his parents in December of 1912. Mom, Dad and I sat at the kitchen table looking at this ancient document, and wondered at some of the unwritten details: where was the report card that went with the card? What was the winter of 1912 like? What were the young writers expectations for his life? The message written inside of the card was written in long, beautiful script. It wished happiness and good fortune for the coming season. One thing was the same for me now as it was for my grandfather then--that patience and perseverance were the two main ingredients that were needed to see this memoir through to its completion.

This book is an autobiography, about a boy growing up in Africa during the colonial era. It is based solidly on my own life. The sequence of events, some names and details such as what the weather was like on any given day, have been changed or fictionalized.

The book is about journeys--a boy, Phillip Bartsch and his family who are perpetually on the move. But, though the book describes many physical journeys, the treks are, as described in Chapter one, both physical and mental, as Phillip travels the much more dangerous roads of his memories, trying to recover from the trauma of a boarding school gone terribly wrong. The Dutchman’s trek in chapter one parallels the dangers of living life in Africa, but really describes a journey of the mind--thus the twin nature of the journeys in Journeying Mercies.

I have been asked about the Dutchman’s stone guardian, and while I am reluctant to answer in detail, let me just say that I needed to answer the question of why parents would go against what they know deep down about raising their children. The old woman, wolf and Greek god that describe the physical details of the stone guardian all describe, to me anyways, the essential nature of the church, or at least church leadership. It is, at least in part, the unrelenting, autocratic, paternalistic rule of the few over the many that explains why many people equate the rule of man with the mind of God, and send their children away, to be raised by strangers.

Chapter one describes the same physical journey as the journey in the last chapter in the book, bringing it to a full circle. Phillip is seven years old, has come back from a year in Canada, to Africa and is returning to the boarding school where he had taken his grade one. Chapter two begins with a Bartsch family history; a background story of the forces driving the family’s journey over three continents and five countries. The next chapter’s detail life lived in the wild heart of Africa, and the death of a child, my brother.

Starting at chapter ten, Phillip is sent away from his family to go to a missionary-run boarding school, where some of the adults deny themselves no degree, or method, of finding their pleasures. Journeying Mercies becomes a story of survival, where Phillip learns from the animals how to survive an attack from a ferocious predator. Tucked into these chapters about Mamou is a fairy tale, an attempt to describe the completeness of the trauma that these people inflicted on Phillip’s life. The chapter is also an attempt to answer the question about what happens to a child who loses a portion of who he is (turns to ash), and is that damage permanent?

Throughout the telling of Phillip’s story, a personality emerges, one that is indestructible, though it does change who he later becomes. Some who have read the manuscript think of it as a story with no hope, because Phillip doesn’t arrive at a moment when he finds God as all sufficient. But I find the very story of survival as positive, hopeful. Life is made up of both circumstances (the things we can’t control) and our reactions to them (the things we can control). The simple act of survival is a decision, or rather; it is a multitude of decisions of immense hope in the future.

Chapters eighteen through twenty-one describe another journey, a trip to Canada for a year of furlough. Canada was a strange place for us. It never once occurred to Mom and Dad that they were coming home for that year, but we were being dragged away from home. In the midst of their journey to Africa, their children had found a different homeland.

The last chapters of the book have the Bartsch family on the move again, back to Africa and for the children, back to the boarding school for more of the treatment they had received before. The book ends with Phillip’s first night, laying in the dark and dreading the future. He knows that he will have to be strong in order to endure the coming months. In the darkness, he traces a message to himself on his forehead. In a way it is a calculated act of rebellion, because in that act he rejects the message that some of the adults have been so persistent in delivering to him.

With the exception of the flights of fancy, my parents and I have made the journeys described in the book together. We traveled to many of the world’s exotic places, but more importantly, we journeyed together around the kitchen table as I poured out, through the reading of the many changes of the manuscript, what Mamou had done to me, and to our family. It was mostly a bitter journey, but one that we needed to travel in order to begin the process of healing. Over the years it took to write the book, the location of the table has changed, as has the table itself, but the one constant has been the love of my Mom and Dad--that, and perseverance and hard work.

I hope you enjoy this story of survival.

Bob Neudorf

CLAY

If I had a lump of clay

And an eye to see the ideal child

And the hand to shape the clay,

What should I make of you, o man?

I think I would make you more noble than I,

Shaped, but not scarred by hardship.

I think I would make you with a duller sense of justice,

So you would be able to tolerate man’s vulgarities

With a shrug, a smile.

I think I would make your skin harder, bruise-proof,

So the blows would not

Show your sorrow to the world.

I think I would give you a quick-heal heart.

Yes, definitely that,

So you would not have to shut it down for years, to heal.

The rest I like just fine.

If I had a lump of clay

And an eye to see the ideal child

And a hand to shape the clay,

What should I make of you, o man?

Bob Neudorf

Dec. 02, 2002

CHAPTER 1

Journeying Mercies

You didn’t see the bitter trace

Of anguish sweep across my face;

You did not hear my proud heart beat,

Heavy and slow, beneath your feet;…

I watched the distance as it grew,

And loved you better than you knew.

Left Behind, by Florence Percy

From the window of the truck I watched the clouds begin to queue up on the horizon. Black, and spewing lightning, they mirrored the mood of most of the people in the convoy as we inched our way toward the boarding school. The trip was a hard one for everyone, the parents who did the driving and the driven--the children.

It was late July; the middle of the rainy season, and the storms usually began to form in the early afternoon. The hot, sticky, morning hung heavily on everyone and everything, creating heat waves on the horizon that shimmered and danced, distorting everything between the gathering storm clouds and us.

We had arrived by train in Bamako, in the French Soudan, three short weeks before and were now heading for Mamou Academy, I for my third grade and Anne Marie for her fourth. Before that we had boarded a tramp steamer in New Orleans and sailed to Dakar. The journey had been a long one, and now we were on the move once again. The rest of the convoy that accompanied us consisted of other parents who were making the difficult journey to visit their children for the ten days that separated the school semesters. It took two days of bone-bruising travel to get from Bamako to Mamou, on roads that were only called that because they had no other name for them. The trip had all the major themes built into it: hardship, feats of engineering, breakdowns, peace of soul beside a slow-moving stream and even the very real possibility of death waiting along the roadside and around each corner.

It was July 29, 1959. We planned to leave Bamako on the thirtieth, arrive in Mamou, Guinea on the thirty-first, then spend ten days at Dalaba, a resort cut into the mountainside just an hour or so drive (depending on the road conditions) north of the missionary boarding school. The morning began as all these mornings did, with Dad calling me or singing to me long before the dawn. The four trucks making this trip were already lined up at the gates by the time we sat down for breakfast. I packed my pajamas in the top of the suitcase and it was whisked away by Dad to be packed in the back of the truck with the others. We ate breakfast in the small kitchen, lit only by a single, glass kerosene lamp; droopy little heads huddled around a communal dining room table. Take another bite, Phillip, Mom had to keep reminding me. It was cold and dark on these mornings and my cooperation was at a minimum.

A fog hung heavily over the river and the city of Bamako as we stood in a ragged circle next to one of the trucks. They were lined up at the gates of the mission compound, silent in the pre-dawn darkness. We sang, Blest Be the Tie That Binds, all three verses, as well as another hymn that I don’t recall, perhaps, Rock of Ages. Someone said, Henry, would you lead us in prayer? Dad began to thank God for this day, even though none of us had wanted this day to come. I must confess that I was quietly sorry that God had allowed it to come at all. Dad continued to thank God for life, health and the many blessings too numerous to mention. I mostly faded out during these long prayers, sermons really, designed to remind us all of the basic truths that we all held so dear. I picked out the two words that echoed in all of these pre-dawn circles, journeying mercies. It was one of those phrase fragments that went largely unexplored like, "coup d’etat, or sanctification of body, soul and spirit." But it was the one phrase that I would take with me from these dark, pre-dawn hours, a whispered hope for the future. Within its then unfathomed words was the belief that life was a journey, a series of connected events. Those two words, for me, would eventually form the still-raw prayer that God would be more merciful in my future journeys than He had been in the past ones. For now though, the words found a familiar echo in the back of my mind, rattled around in the deep recesses of my thoughts until the rest of the prayer was finished, and then was stored away once again.

We passed through the main gates and entered the darkened streets. In a few minutes we began to climb the hills on which the city of Bamako had been built. Once we reached the plateau above the city I could see a faint hint of morning to the east. The stars began to blink out one by one as the gray horizon brightened, caught the blues of the heavens, then slowly turned orange. The journey was only a couple of hours old, but I was already nauseous and bone tired from the constant pounding that my body was taking from the rough roads. Morning crawled into afternoon as the overpowering calm of the heat gave way to a light, fresh breeze with the earthy scent of rain. The going was slow. It was only a little over two hundred kilometers to Siguiri where the road crossed the Niger River, but it would probably take us until mid afternoon to get there. The road was mainly composed of potholes, full to the brim with yesterday’s rain, with a little bit of roadway visible immediately around each hole. Only a careful probe with the front tires of the trucks would tell if it were passable, or if it should have been avoided. Speed equaled wrecked trucks, and there were enough of those alongside the road as we inched our way along.

The wind began to pick up and brought with it the crash of thunder and lightning. One elephant, two elephants, three elephants…. I had often made a game of it, counting the elephants between the blinding flash of the lightning and the rumble of the thunder. Someone, somewhere had told me that each elephant equaled one mile that the storm was away, either coming or going. Today, however, the storm was upon us without any elephants. The wall of water hit us, instantly engulfing each truck in its own separate world. We fought the road alone. There was no way to know if the last vehicle in the lineup was still following the rest. It would have been foolhardy to stop along the road and check, at least while the storm raged on. The next rain barrier, a forced stop, would be a good place to check and see if everyone had made it safely, or if one of the trucks had to backtrack and help out.

Every depression in the ground quickly filled, joining up with the other now swollen potholes, inundating the ground under a blanket of red, muddy water. The raindrops were so large, and so many, that when they hit the ground and the water on it, they splattered upwards, obliterating the earth--water falling and rising simultaneously in a dizzying blur, as if the earth god, Banna, was trying to give it back to the sky god, Awa. This type of rain was repeated with almost clockwork regularity every day of the rainy season, with occasional days and weeks turning into a steady drizzle in between the cloudbursts. Normally I enjoyed the rain, watched it, drank it, played in it and listened to all of its voices. Normally the rain, no matter how hard it fell, was a comfort, but not today and not on this trip. Lightning whitened the black skies and the thunder exploded across the broad plains of the Sahel. The power and the magnitude of the storm that was raging all around us was an echo of the violence that had dominated my first year at Mamou, over a year ago now. I had barely hung on through that horrific first grade year and gone to Canada for grade two. But now I was journeying back to the terror, the blackness, the lightning and the thunder.

A red and white pole stretched across the road. The lead truck was already parked in front of it when we pulled up. It was one of a system of rain barricades that had been set up to prevent the roads from being torn up too badly when they were wet and soft. The rain had now eased to a steady drizzle, but it would still be a while before the road was dry enough to travel on. Dry, I think, was defined as, when the road between the potholes was visible again.

There was time to think along the way, especially at the rain barriers when there was nothing to stare at from the box of the truck but a wall of water. I thought about the Dutchman, the tall, frail man who had limped up our driveway about a year and a half before. White visitors were rare to our mission station at Warsala, and the ones that did arrive at our gates were usually well known to us, friends. He looked like something out of a fairy tale, an old wizard perhaps, but without the pointy hat, long, white hair and gnarled staff. I watched this tall, stooped man make his way slowly toward the gate, and then ran to call Dad from the garage where he was working on the truck. He got up, washed his hands and went out to meet the strange man. His name was Jan, or Hans or something. Excruciatingly thin and tanned a deep nut-brown, he was the only tourist I had ever seen in our part of Africa. He spoke halting English, and that with a thick Dutch accent. Mom, whose ancestry was Dutch, found that she had retained enough of the language that she could understand him no matter what he spoke.

That he was ill was clear. His skin was translucent, like someone had poured clear wax over a tree limb. His hands shook as he accepted the fresh lemonade. And when he looked up to thank Mom, I noticed his eyes, under deeply hooded eyebrows, were filled with bright red lines. The limp in his step was from pure weariness, his progress marked by a monumental effort to put one foot in front of the other. It was not, as we found out later, caused by a particular injury to his legs or his feet. He had looked old to me, the indefinable age of a young man in a body turned old by the ravages of illness. His walk through French West Africa had taken its toll. He had been sick in Bamako, malaria he thought, but had decided to push on even though he hadn’t quite recovered. Malaria isn’t to be trifled with, I already knew that, and now it had caught him again half way between Bamako and Warsala, our mission station. He was certain he would have died in the middle of nowhere if our driveway had not materialized. The station wasn’t on any of his maps and it had caught him by surprise when, through the fog of fever, he had seen our sign. He gratefully accepted Mom and Dad’s hospitality. For supper that night we had Nile perch (an extremely large fish known to the Bambara as the captain), French fries and chocolate cake. He was amazed that these things could be found in the heart of nowhere and I was amazed that one human being could consume that much chocolate cake. He thanked us all for the food and limped away to bed to heal.

He emerged from his fever and raving several days later with a broad smile, thick stubble on his face, hungry for food and starved for conversation. He had started walking in Egypt two years before this, traveled south along the Nile to Khartoum, and then followed the Blue Nile toward Addis Ababa. He had then begun to walk due west, drifting in and out of the Sahel and the jungles of southern Chad, crossed the Niger River at the coast and followed the coastal highways until heading north at Abidjan. He had walked all that way and he had escaped with no major illness until he hit the backwater of Bamako. His stories touched me deeply; he must have tapped the wandering spirit within me. I felt as if it was I who had walked the Valley of the Kings, had seen the confluence of the two Niles at Khartoum and traversed the impenetrable jungles of Cameroon.

Tell me about the Stone Guardian, I asked him in one of his pauses.

He gave me a strange look. What Stone Guardian? he asked.

The one you talked about in your dreams, I told him. A look of panic briefly passed across his eyes, like a cat’s second eyelid sliding open and closed. He leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands tightly behind his head and closed his eyes. The lines on his forehead tightened as an image appeared in his mind. He then drew a deep breath, held it for what seemed an eternity, and then released it slowly through pursed lips, reluctant to begin the story. Other than when he had been sleeping, it was the longest I had seen him silent.

It had taken him four months or so to get from the Lagone River, on the border of Chad and Cameroon, to Bamako. In that time he had thought constantly about that thing, whatever it was. There were few villages in that swampy region and the heavy growth had made the going difficult. He had been lost several times and had unwittingly backtracked a couple of day’s worth of trekking. It was the only place in all of his journeys that he had been frustrated to the point of raising his face heavenward and letting out a primal howl, twisting his head from side to side while in full scream.

There had been a clearing, he said. It was at the end of a path or trail that I had been following all morning, and now it just suddenly ended. I fought along a compass line for a while but must have somehow been turned around. The jungle does that to you. It forces you into circles and eventually you find that you’re in the same clearing you had left an hour, or a day ago.

Weariness overtook him, a mental refusal to hack one more vine out of his way. On all sides of the clearing the cluttered expanse of the jungle pressed in on him, piled layer upon layer, hundreds of feet in the air, crushing him inexorably. It was noon, the sun was directly overhead and the sunlight lit the entire clearing, a white-hot spot in the shaded, muggy expanse around it. The journey had finally caught him, tripped him up, but not in the way for which he had prepared himself. He had planned for the possible breakdown of his body, the reason he had landed at our station. But back at the clearing the journey had defeated him mentally. There are a few days in a whole lifetime he said, when you see yourself for who you really are, and then you realize how that revelation comes at such an enormous cost.

He hadn’t realized that he could be weak in this way; that his mind could give out before his body. He had always considered his body to be the weak link. He had begun his trans-Africa journey partly out of curiosity about the continent and its history, partly to experience some of the places he had read about in the journals of the early explorers, but mostly as a test of his endurance, a chance to harden up his only weakness--his body. There would seem to be a certain arrogance deep inside of all explorers. They have the belief that they are harder, stronger and smarter than any obstacle that is in their way. The Dutchman was no different, normally. But now he sat down at the edge of the clearing with his back against a tree trunk and allowed his mind to go blank. For the moment he forgot about the hardship ahead, the triumphs behind and just sat. It wasn’t a rage moment; he was too tired for anger. He was overcome with the despair of knowing that the last drop had been drunk out of the well and all there was left to do was sit and wait, for what he didn’t know for sure, but death was the probability. Waiting for death is an odd mental state to be in—not living, not dying, just waiting.

He was in this state of mind when the jungle parted. It rose from the rot of the jungle directly in front of me, he said. The trees parted as it appeared at ground level, and then took form as it came up. There was no sound, no swish of leaf against leaf, no crack of branches or vines vacating the spot where it grew, or emerged, or whatever.

While we waited at the rain barrier the light drizzle became scattered beams of sunshine. The guards eventually came from their hut, raised the barricade and locked it in the upright position. The truck engines fired back to life and our trip resumed. Two hours had slipped past while we were parked alongside the road. More heavy rain was likely on the way and chances were good that we would get stopped at the next barricade down the road, or the next one after that. We resumed our road slalom toward the border, trusting that the lead truck had woven the best route through the upside-down moguls that pocked the road.

The border was a tiresome formality. In a 1957 referendum, Guinea had voted overwhelmingly for total independence. France had offered sovereignty association to all its colonies and couldn’t imagine any of them turning down such a generous deal. Sekou Toure and Guinea had done the unthinkable and rejected the French offer, the only country in all of French West Africa to do so. The French government, feeling like a rejected lover, had decided to make an example of what happened when a country refused a French kiss. On their way out, the French removed everything that wasn’t anchored in cement, theirs by divine right, they must have thought. The rest of the colonies would later decide on association with France. The boarding school was in neighboring Guinea and was a jewel set atop a hill in the middle of the Fouta Djallon, in the highlands, the birthplace of three of Africa’s major rivers.

When we had left Mamou a year earlier the border formalities were still a bit like going from one province to another. Now we approached a fully independent country with miles of red tape to wade through. Also, wherever the possibility of a gift of extra cash was present, graft will be holding out its hand, and the border was one of those places. A How soon would you like to continue? payment was demanded of the black truckers and most of them accepted it graciously as a cost of doing business. To the white truckers (us) the payments were only strongly suggested. The missionaries had a policy of not giving any of these gifts, so the borders could be long times of rest for us as the tension-filled arguments filled the guard hut which hosted the negotiations. Each side had to explain their positions carefully, over and over. Each side must have thought the other a bit thick.

The road between the puddles remained visible despite the continuing rain showers and we made it through one open barricade after the next, reaching Siguiri early in the afternoon. Siguiri was our only ferry crossing of the entire trip, the only spot we needed to cross the Niger River. Whenever we asked our parents, How much longer? we always meant, How much longer to Siguiri? It was a welcome break from the constant jolting of the road. Lunch was also served there, usually while en route across the river. There were few other stops along the way. Dad, and the rest of the drivers wanted as much road as possible behind them. A kilometer of bad road behind us was one kilometer closer to the end of the journey. The rain continued, coming in spits and spurts. The trees alongside the road caught the raindrops, pooled them into large drops on their leaves, and then hurled them down into the puddles in the road below. They exploded on the muddy surface of the water, overwhelming the thousands of tiny wavelets created by the softly falling rain. There was a steady tap-tapping on the roof of the truck, just like the noises the rain made on our tin roof at home.

With the rain delay it had taken us just under eight hours to travel the two hundred plus kilometers to the ferry. It was a relief to stagger out of the trucks and stretch our legs while we waited for the ferry, which was waiting on the opposite bank. They remained tied up to the far bank, idly looking at our line of trucks for a while, perhaps hoping that another truck would come along on their side of the river and they wouldn’t have to make an empty crossing.

My thoughts returned to the Dutchman and the Stone Guardian. It had risen noiselessly out of the jungle, across the clearing where he sat frozen. It had reared up two, three stories into the air, a mottled gray, like granite. He had been unable to describe what it looked like exactly, it kept morphing its features from Greek god with lava locks, to wolf, with an odd tuft of lambs wool on its head, to kindly old woman. It sat on all fours, he thought, coiled, ready to leap, but he was unsure of this as well. It loomed over him for a while, staring at him across the clearing. It was the wolf that he thought he remembered speaking to him, but he wasn’t sure--it might have been the aged woman. Her face was weathered, wise he thought. He hung onto the only thing that seemed real; the tree anchored at his back, and pressed himself against it until the rough bark bit into his back muscles.

The Dutchman paused in his story. It had been an intensely personal experience and he was reluctant to release it to someone else. It was like admitting publicly that he had been probed by aliens, or seen a burning bush from which issued the very voice of God. Skeptics vastly outnumber believers and if he admitted speaking to a large, stone statue, the prospects of heavy medication loomed large, he thought. Beyond that though, there are a few messages that a man gets in his lifetime that seem to hit the heart in just such a way and it seemed like a betrayal to share it with another person. This had been one of those times, and one of those messages.

What did he….um, it say? I pressed.

I don’t recall a voice as such, he said. The wolf growled, the old woman moved her lips and I understood it all in Dutch. The Greek, with his long, curly, stone beard looked on in an amused and all-powerful way, watching over the proceedings.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been in attendance in that clearing. He knew the Stone Guardian was right, whatever it had said. The Stone Guardian went the same way it had come, the vines and branches noiselessly filling in the space as it disappeared into the jungle soil. The detritus and rot of the earth showing no evidence that it had been disturbed. The Dutchman became aware of the intense pain in his back from pressing against the tree so hard. He shifted his weight forward, watched the shadows of the trees that bordered the clearing move across as noon ambled into late afternoon, and thought and thought.

The ferry bumped at the bank of the Niger River and we crawled back into our places amongst the trunks, suitcases, spare springs and other assorted repairs for the truck that were essential elements of the trip. The rain had guaranteed a stopover for night at Kankan, still a couple of hours away. The mountainous roads between Kankan and Mamou were too treacherous to drive on at night. There was also the chance that Kankan was as far as these trucks could go. If the reports coming out of the mountains were that no trucks were arriving, it meant that the road ahead was closed, and the remainder of the trip to Mamou would have to be made by train. In these cases, where phones were still non-existent except in a few of the government offices, a telegram would be sent from Kankan to Mamou telling them to send a teacher to accompany us the rest of the way to the school. We pulled into Kankan about mid-to-late afternoon and wound our way slowly through the muddy streets to the mission compound. It was surrounded by a low, freshly painted, white brick wall. The yard was enclosed by an iron gate with a large, loud dog pressed against its bars. It didn’t take long for the dog to call its masters and we were ushered into the central compound. The dog, it turned out, was friendly.

A quick drive to the Milo River, where the trucks were bathing along the shoreline sandbars, confirmed that the road was open. So we prepared for the usual early morning getaway. I think that the early bedtime though, was for the parents’ benefit rather than ours. Children that have been penned up for extended periods of time, as we had been, tend to become a bit wild when they are released, like jittery doves escaping their cage with a loud flap of wings. Coo, coo, coo, they sang from their treetop perches. But there was only one tree in the compound that was big enough to climb, so we were easy to recapture. It was interesting to climb some of these old trees scattered throughout the mission field, especially the stations that were at major crossroads such as Kankan. Every boy with a pocketknife, and that was pretty much all of us, left his initials somewhere in the bark of the tree, usually at the highest point that he could climb. It was an impromptu history. As the tree matured, the wounds scabbed over, puffing around the letters making them look ancient. Some of the fresher ones I knew: SB- that would be Stanley Burns. He was known for many things, one of which was that he had left his name in the bark of every tree on the mission field. I climbed a bit further. JM- Jimmy McKinney? When was he here? It must be someone else. I put my PB next to a BN and a CK, and then it was suppertime.

We ate the loaves of French bread with sardines that we had brought with us from Bamako and then prepared for bed. The sun set while we ate next to the truck, the tailgate serving its usual function of table. Mom insisted, as always, on a tablecloth, her nod to civility no matter where we were. The stars came out in their entire equatorial splendor while we were cleaning up. Overhead the future opened up as a blinking dot moved carefully across the darkness. The space age was upon us in the form of Sputnik, though it had been two years ago since the first one had appeared. No one could say a word as we followed it across the sky.

We had hauled the bedding from our trunks to make up beds on the floor in one of the rooms. We crawled over each other and into our beds, head to head, and shoulder-to-shoulder, still vibrating from the pounding of the road.

I was restless, unable to sleep, still slightly nauseous from the day’s ride. Every time I closed my eyes my inner world began to spin, and then I was sick again. So I kept my eyes open in the pitch dark of the African night. Others around me breathed easily, lost in deep sleep, while someone across the room, with a sinus condition, snored fitfully.

I traveled the day’s events in my mind—the clouds lined up on the horizon like an army poised to attack, the many attacks that followed, the river crossing and the endless miles of narrow road lined by elephant grass. Eventually I stumbled across Hans, or Jens in his clearing and paused.

He had been unable to quote even a single word that the Stone Guardian had spoken to him. He came away from the encounter though, knowing some things as certainly as he knew his own existence. For instance, he knew where the next village was, and how far he needed to walk to get there, and safety. The sun had moved beyond the treetops at the edge of the clearing, deepening its shadows as he prepared to resume his trek. He felt refreshed, like he had just gotten up from a month-long nap and had eaten a full meal, including a large helping of chocolate cake. He crossed the clearing, stepped over a vine where the statue had stood and walked confidently into the jungle and toward the nearby village.

Also, he now knew that he was being watched, and had been watched since the start of his trek, perhaps even throughout his entire lifetime. But not watched in an eerie or spooky sense. It was a protective type of watching that he had become aware of in the presence of the Guardian. The type of protection that a mother guinea hen gives her chicks, warning them of hawks flying overhead, or even gathering them under her wings when a brush fire overtakes them. She could fly to safety, but she gathers them underneath her wings and body and waits for the flames. They crawl out from under her charred remains when the danger is past. They are unaware that she has exchanged her life for theirs, that they exist solely because she has chosen it to be that way. That’s the kind of benevolent protection that he felt he was under, that anything that sought to harm him would have to go through the Guardian first. It brought a smile to his lips even now as he told the story. He had clung to that, used it to laugh at dangers and drew on it for strength when the obstacles of the journey threatened to overwhelm him once again. It was his ace up his sleeve and, like every good gambler, he had never told another soul about it.

He also knew there was a God, someone who had ordered up the universe, and he thought that the Guardian might have been He. The Guardian was too powerful and kind not to have spoken with the voice of God. He had never been an atheist, but he had never been particularly religious either. He had slipped through Sunday school classes in the Dutch Reformed Church without achieving any deep beliefs and had quit church altogether as soon as his mother had tired of the Sunday morning fight. But now he believed in mercy, kindness and an all-powerful God who had both in abundant supply for him. He had whispered this last part, in awe that he could be so loved.

As he had passed over the spot that the Stone Guardian had vacated, a chill passed over him, a sinister wind, something black that flitted off in the corner of his subconscious. He quickly dismissed it as a dilemma that he didn’t need and a half hour later he arrived in the nearby village with a lilt in his step and a smile on his face.

I fell asleep being chased by wolves, the Dutchman’s guardian wolf, with its lamb’s wool on its head, having multiplied itself in my dreams, becoming a ferocious pack of hunters, ravenous for my blood and bruises. They chased me relentlessly through the night, stopping only briefly when I woke up in a cold sweat, fetal. I tried to erase the wolves by pressing my fists sharply into my eye sockets, creating an explosion of color and shapes that gradually died out into fireflies, flying against an utterly black background. I forced my legs out, finding the far edge of my makeshift bed where Mom had tucked the covers underneath, willing them to stay there. I tried to find my place of contentment in those blacknesses, but throughout the long night the wolves returned, over and over. Eventually Dad reached down between the relentless wolves and into my vast darkness, and said softly, Up and at ‘em, Phillip. It’s time to get ready to go.

I could smell the Sunny Boy boiling on the stove as everyone got up and began to fold up their bedding. We were like bumper cars, foggy little minds unaware of any bodies attached to them. Mine, I think, was a reptilian mind, needing light and warmth to begin functioning. A child’s mind needs the touch of at least a single ray of sunshine to turn it on. Before being touched, my mind had no connection with its surroundings. We stumbled around in the cold darkness, untouched, and slowly got our things out to the truck where Dad was. He soon had everything packed and loaded and we headed back into the house for breakfast.

A few streaks of light stirred the eastern sky as we gathered in a loose circle and prayed for God’s journeying mercies. Dawn was still several hours away, but the sky seemed impatient to get started and let out a few gray streaks before it was supposed to. The truck engines hummed in the background, breaking the gloomy silence of the city. The dog wagged his tail in farewell as the last truck rolled past the gates and into the still dark western sky. The gates creaked closed behind us and we were on our way again. This was only a temporary goodbye to Kankan. We would have to travel through here every time we traveled to and from Mamou.

We left the darkened and silent streets behind us and headed west toward the Fouta Djallon, the highlands of Guinea. The morning was heavy, dreary and dripping with clouds. A short distance out of Kankan we left the Sahel behind and entered a land of forests, rolling hills and deep valleys. As we climbed steadily into the mountains we entered a zone that was in between the layers of cloud. Far below us, deep in the valleys, wispy clouds obscured the tops of the trees and the streams that flowed at their feet. Above us the darker clouds hid the tops of the mountains, rolling down the mountain to drizzle on us periodically. We clawed our torturous way along the slopes, mostly in first gear, or bull low. Every few minutes Dad would blow the horn, and then listen intently over the roar of the engine for an answer from around the next hairpin curve. An answering blast meant that both trucks had to pull over and let one or the other truck nudge slowly past. There was never any danger of meeting any tourists in this jewel of the African continent. Everyone who dared to challenge these roads had an excellent reason to do so, and sightseeing was not a sufficient excuse.

The wildlife, mostly monkeys, was abundant and the flowers along the side of the road were achingly beautiful. Despite the outward evidence that we were entering paradise, Eden, every kilometer that we covered increased the knot of dread that had been growing inside. The knot had begun to grow within days of leaving Mamou for grade two in Canada and increased gradually every day until we returned to this school. The knot never really went away, even when we were away from Mamou, or as we got older. It just continued to grow gradually over time until I learned to make it not matter anymore. Eden, at least for these first few years of my boarding school life, had a worm in the apple. As the years progressed, a new administration and caring house parents would change the makeup of the apple. But now, and in the immediate past the apple lay rotting in the warm sun of paradise. Actually, the worms went by several individual names, but for us the entire apple stank of the worst that human nature had to offer. The worms had cleverly transferred the stink to the children on whom they preyed. I could feel and smell it on me wherever I went, contaminating the air around me. I was sure that everyone around me could smell it too. It made me self-conscious, wary; expecting disgust wherever I went, like being a brown smudge on the restroom wall. The odor was felt by most of the young children in the convoy who hoped, deep down, that enough lessons, whatever they might be, had been learned and they could leave the stink, and the continuing abuse behind them. Certainly this was my unspoken hope as we crawled through the mountains and the jungle, edging ever closer to the boarding school. It was a chill wind that blew out of the west, bringing the dark clouds, the mist and finally the rain. The upper and lower banks of clouds joined and the rain began to wash over the truck.

We continued on in a world of our own, enveloped in a sea of white, listening for that answering honk of the horn. Dad leaned forward, bent over the steering wheel, trying to pierce the curtain with sheer force of will. There was no way of knowing if everyone in the convoy was still on the move. We would have to wait for the lead truck to stop at the next obstruction in the road, or the next hole in the road where a bridge should have been.

One step at a time, was the Dutchman’s answer when I asked him how he had managed to survive his amazing journey. I wondered at the first steps, both of them: the one that had launched the decision to go in the first place, and then the one off the ramp at the Cairo airport as he took his first step southward. I admired him, deeply. I had briefly shelved my commitment to become a missionary doctor in Russia and determined to become a wandering inquisitor, prying under the world’s rocks as the Dutchman had done. It seemed like a noble quest, to survive for one more day and then repeat as necessary. Some may think of this as an embarrassingly modest goal and one not worthy of a lifetime. I don’t think it occurred to him that his goals were either modest or titanic. A day went by, and then a week, and then he realized with satisfaction that he was still fully alive. It wasn’t a surprise really; in fact, he had expected it. It was just a mental tick in the notebook that whatever he was doing was working and to keep it up. It was true that dignity had to be abandoned at times, but it was a small enough sacrifice in light of the nobility of survival.

Nor had the question of why ever occurred to him. Life could have been lived without the trek he was on. He didn’t need Khartoum, Cairo or the Stone Guardian to scratch an itch. In his tales there had never been an explanation for why he had done it. Nor was there ever a hope or expectation that others would do as he had done. In fact he had warned against it. But I was hooked. There were dark, shadowy places that would require my presence and I would not disappoint them.

Throughout his trip, border crossings had always been tough. None of the guards had been willing to accept, Nothing in particular, to their question, What is your purpose here? How do you explain to a border guard that all you needed to do was test your mettle, to find out when and where the well might go dry?

The trek had changed him, he had conceded one day, near the end of his stay with us. He felt old, almost used up, and was ready for the journey to end. His recent illness had taken some of the euphoria of the Guardian out of him and now he wondered if he was capable of making it all the way to Senegal, with a side trip to Timbuktu. The problem was, he was still in the middle of nowhere, at least, nowhere to him. To me his nowhere was called my home.

He was a different man from the one that had set foot in Africa two years before. He paused, knowing that I was too young to understand the complexities of a personality overhaul and the resulting conflicts of spirit as he had tried to find out who he had become. Hardship changes a man, he said. It measures him against his ideal man and coughs loudly in his face with the results. It’s unpleasant, being repulsed by a vision of yourself, having the thought of an acceptable personality shattered. It’s enough to make a grown man weep, literally. Some simply have no choice but to ignore it, deny the evidence; change is too costly, or beyond their capacity of soul. Years later I would begin to understand his words. The journey had been a difficult one for the Dutchman.

We slipped past Kouroussa, Sissela and Dabola in the driving rain. Or rather, we slipped past their shadows, huddled next to the flooded road, with their huts and houses seemingly floating in a sea of muddy, reddish water. The strain of keeping the trucks moving forward was clearly etched in the face of each of the drivers. We stopped by the side of the road near Dabola to refuel. Each of the trucks carried enough gas to make the entire trip without needing to depend on the gas stations along the way to actually have gas on hand. Fuel deliveries, especially in the rainy season, were erratic. Truckers that depended on them filled the parking spaces around the stations while they waited for gas to arrive.

The rain continued to pour down as Dad got out and wiggled a fresh barrel of gas onto the tailgate of the truck. He threaded in the hand pump and we took turns filling up the gas tank. Our hair gathered the falling rain, pooled it briefly and then, following the dictates of gravity, sent rivulets of cold, clammy water under the collars of our raincoats. It warmed up only slightly as it made its way down the small of my back. In between stints with the pump handle I tested the depth of the potholes in the road ahead. I tried to see how close to the rim of my boots I could get without the water actually getting in, a game I’m sure every boy has played in the standing water in every ditch and puddle around the world. Most of the time I was successful in keeping the water out. However, the results of a mostly successful system of staying dry look remarkably similar to partly successful and even never successful. I took off my boots, still in the middle of the road, wrung out my reddish-brown, formerly white socks, emptied the water out of my boots and slipped my bare feet back in. I hung my socks on the rear view mirror to dry in the rain, in time for Dad to finish up and return the barrel to its place. For the next ten seconds of the trip I could tell Dad exactly how deep each pothole was, showing him the water levels on the side of my boots, or on my leg if it had gone above the boot. It was valuable information for which he was only moderately grateful. He retrieved my socks from the mirror and laid them across the hump on the floor of the truck to dry. Pioneers are rarely appreciated!

Around mid afternoon the town of Mamou emerged out of the mists and fog. We made our way through the town and began our ascent to the school, which was perched on a hilltop overlooking the town. The direct road, straight up the mountain was about a kilometer long, but was seldom used in the dry season because of the huge quantities of roadway that regularly washed away. To my recollection, it was never attempted in the rainy season for the same reason, only much worse. The longer route, blacktopped, wound its way around the shoulder of the mountain, past the Villa, Monkey Rock, and finally, the clay mine. It was several kilometers longer and still required the trucks to go slowly, growling along in first gear. We pulled into the school compound and parked next to the flame tree. Only Dad got out. This would be a short stop, lasting only long enough to get the keys for the Bamboo house in Dalaba.

The resort of Dalaba was only an hour or so north of Mamou, depending on the rain, and the trip was pretty much a mirror of the previous eight and a half hour trip that we had just taken from Kankan. The Bamboo House was the first house on the first of four terraces that made up the mountain resort. A dozen or so other houses dug their claws into the rocks and loose soil of the mountain and hung on for dear life through the years of driving rains. The houses were primitive in creature comforts. There was no indoor plumbing; water came from a spring a short walk into the jungle. We brought our own bedding, dishes, light and heat. What these houses did have were four walls, shutters for windows, some interior divisions and a view that made you think you had gone to heaven.

Dad backed up to the front porch and unloaded the truck into the house. The rain had eased up to a steady drizzle, running off the channels of the corrugated roof and dripping off the bamboo with an occasional thud on the metal. We were dog tired from the long day of travel and grateful to climb out of our wet clothes and into warm jammies. Dad lit the charcoal pot, placed it in the middle of the room, under the dining room table and soon its warmth found its way into our deepest insides. The mixture of rain and mist continued to drum softly on the tin of the roof, falling off the edge and to the puddles below, singing us the lullaby of Dalaba and easing us into our dreams. The grove of bamboo that grew just outside the front door, for which the house was named, creaked and groaned in the breezes that carried the clouds and mist. There is no song, in the entire earth, that is this lullaby’s equal and it will be forever the defining song of peace and contentment for me. Here, in Dalaba, we were safe and loved, and could forget the cares that lurked an hour’s drive away. Here I could forget about Grace Wright’s three-inch wide, polished piece of hardened leather. Here I could put aside the worry of when Dorothy Wormley would erupt streams of burning hot, wrathful lava, scorching our souls, drawing blood with her fingernails and raising welts on our tiny bodies. Here I could leave behind, for the short duration of holidays, the shame of the horse blinders and the dunce cap that I regularly wore in her classroom.

Ten days of paradise spread out in front of me, a canvas waiting for the oils of pleasure. At seven and a half, nearly eight, my color palate was wildly inexhaustible in its possibilities and range. The joy-picture took shape, one day after the other, one step and one moment at a time. I had never planned a day’s activity in my life. I followed the stones as I kicked them and let the events unfold as they willed. I was a passenger aboard my own ship, letting events dictate the journey, in no way trying to captain my own destiny, a normal thing for a boy really. Generally, in these days of ease, things pretty much worked out as I would have planned them anyway. Ease fell into our laps in Dalaba. Picnics in various corners of this Eden followed hard on each other, chasing the days in a steady succession of leisure and fun. Discontent had been banished here in paradise. I don’t even recall hearing a single harsh or discouraging word ever exchanged, though there might have been one once that I missed in another house, at night, behind a closed door.

The best before date arrived and it was time to pack everything back into the truck and resume life at boarding school. With a heavy heart I took one last look at the Bamboo House as it disappeared behind the trees and set my face to the future, jaws set hard, determined that whatever happened, I would not be torn down, broken, obliterated. What I couldn’t realize then was that I was already broken, that the choosing had already happened.

On our way back I was quiet. I didn’t often let Grace into my head when I was away from her. Yet, as I bumped along in the back of the truck, I wondered what was in store for me when I saw her in an hour or so. What I couldn’t realize then was that the worst was already behind me. Uncle Don Dilmer and his raw wanderings into my world were things of the past, his memory already buried irretrievably in the darkest corners of my brain. Still, I couldn’t help wondering as the miles bumped us ever closer to Mamou. I wondered what Grace thought about me when I was away from the school. Did she replay in her mind the stream of red that flowed from my buttocks as she loomed over me? Did she see the drops of her sweat pool in the small of my naked back as I knelt over the edge of my bed? Did she savor the rage that she felt while she had swung the strap, over and over? Did the movement of my tiny muscles fascinate her, flexing in and out in time with the movement of her strap? Did she creep softly in her mind, down the mostly silent hallways, ears pricked to pick out the tiniest of my sounds? What did she think of when she thought of me, I wondered? Maybe she was wondering if I was still afraid of her, even when the miles separated us.