SNAPSHOT
by Jane Campos Johnson
by Jane Campos Johnson
In the long, thin line of the horizon nothing looked more like a real savannah than the grass plain outside the marrow village where Seku had lived almost 90 of his allotted 92 years, and he knew with a stroke of envy that those last two years were going to be his easiest but also the shortest. He dug around in his pockets. When had his people stopped wearing the kilt and sneakers? Now he dressed like the Wacana and the Bruy, and hardly a day went by that he didn't see someone dropping their pants in the street and giving the crazy dance to the tourists with their cameras and such. Maybe it was because his people were crazy, now. Short pants. Knee-high boots with laces and a knife shoved inside with no sheath. Who couldn't be crazy? A coin fell to the ground.
Silver. One coin and he could buy a roast duck and pea beans for dinner. One coin and he could bury his son in a proper bed someday in the hard, parched earth.
But this coin would go for something less important, he'd already decided. The crazy girl with her hair down to her ears and the long purple curls needed a groom, and he would be the one. She was 12, almost too old for marriage, some said. Seku stuffed the coin in his pocket on the other side because it had holes and he would drop it and then he could claim poverty and have the purple-haired girl for free, according to village rule. And that was enough for him. He smiled. The gray wicks that had once been his teeth stood small and blunt against his lips. Yes. The girl was his as long as the coin were lost. Madara would make it so, and he would bed the girl as he had the proper ten times before the ceremony, and no one, not his last month's wife, his twice-dead son or the tourist priests who tried to make unlawful law for his people with just the wave of a piece of paper could change what destiny had promised.
Marrow.
Who had called it that the first time? Seku strode with all the effort of a 90-year-old to the Hut of Marriages. When the coin plopped onto his boot and then into the dust, he knew it had been a perfect name for the people of Ju-seku where life was lived for the obligation to blood and bone, and no matter who spoke ill of the old sekus and middle-aged sekus and young sekus, to come against them would bring all the marrow, the souls, of all others in their defense. Or so it had been said.
Seku ducked inside the hut with that same smile in his cheeks and a light in his eyes. No one from the village stood about or offered congratulations. When Madara saw him, she knew at once that he had lost his coin and she sat back in her hammock ready as she had been every day for the last several days for him to make his claim.
"It's her," he said, predictably, open-handed, pointing with one finger to his empty palm. The girl with the curls sat smiling, too, and Madara had draped her lap with a cloth of bright yellow silk as was proper, and one of the other girls now seated nearby had marked out some of her front-most teeth for removal in preparation for the blessed marriage event.
"Yah, I sees that," wheezed Madara. "Ain't she been here every day? Seku-seku you been making this girl wait." She laughed. Seku sat beside the purple-haired girl.
Purple was the color of truth. It had been that way since the beginning of time, so this girl had to be the one to give him the honesty that at least one of the other wives had not.
"You have the silk," Seku said. He drew it away from the girl to expose her bare legs, but just so far. She was 12, so it had almost been too long and she almost too old and she would have to retain at least a bit of her mystique in public or the whole ceremony would be ruined. Her long black boots halfway to the hip rustled against the silk and it gave Seku just the idea he had wanted. "I have no coin," he said as expected.
Tsk, tsk came the sounds from the women...Madara, the girl, her three attendants...they rang sweet and crisp against the calf's-cloth tent all as planned. Outside, one of the other girls would already be patting the dust for the coin, pocketing it, planning her wedding with Seku for tomorrow. Did he know her name, yet? He wasn't sure, but the thought made him smile.
"My marrow calls out," the girl whispered then.
Had the day grown a tad bit brighter outside, Seku wondered? His eyes had been growing dim in the last years, but he thought he knew the heat of daylight in him when he wakened and for 90 years that had been enough.
"And mine," Seku swore solemnly. When he took her by the hand and the cloth fell to her boots, tangling with the long, snakey laces, Seku could see that she was purple from the knee to the hip, and from the navel to the throat, and it was a good thing, of course, because last month's wife had been a liar, he'd found, and last week's wife a no-good cheat and a thief. But this one, would make no promises that she couldn't keep. The purple proved that. He bent to stuff the silk in his waistband before taking the girl's hand. "You have a name, of course," he said by way of statement, and she nodded but said nothing. Seku smiled, pleased. They walked, he with a slight limp that he tried not the least bit to conceal and she gracefully and with the ease of youth, to the door, the ceremony complete.
"When you finish with her Madara'll be right here, Seku-seku. Right here, and the one who is next," Madara promised, and Seku nodded.
Tomorrow. Always tomorrow.
The new wife flitted in her joy out the small curved doorway, then, under the branches of the eaves and the calves-hoof dangling from the hut rafters.
Outside no one greeted the happy couple, as it had been for at least a thousand of the years, Seku knew. One of the younger girls followed them out. She had a coin in her mouth, he thought, by how she held her lips. When she spit it into his hand, he understood completely.
Night fell swift and long after the yellow-sky day. It fell on the huts of the marrow village where Seku, who was now Seku-seku in the eyes of all his clan for taking his ninth wife, came in under the hut entrance to bed his new bride. The marriage cloth and short pants of last month's and last week's wives still hung sweet and soft on pegs, their hair and just a little bit of their salted and puckered faces and lips stuck out from their boots. The remains hardly filled the boots and they'd been arranged neat and odor free in the soft earth of the hut floor, and the new wife studied the row carefully, Seku thought, for just the proper moment. She lay ready, her hair arranged around her young face, the purple of the curls and the purple of the yam of honesty streaked all over her breasts and into the bedclothes and some even on the other wives as the twice-dead son passed drinks for them all in cups the size of a small fruit.
Twice-dead. Yes, it meant something to have borne up to the task of marriage in the marrow village, something to be laden with wives, to be at least as dead as those who had only one or none.
Yesterday's wife lay with today's wife and day-before-yesterday's wife next to her. All smiled at him with the proper and dutiful expressions...devotion and patience and pride... that Seku expected of a woman new to the marriage bed. He glanced at the twice-dead son. He had come in while Seku had sat with the last of his dinner by the fire. He'd dressed in short pants like a man and in his best knee-high boots, and he smiled, too, when his father lay into the midst of the wives who remained. He had his two years, his destiny and the last of life ahead of him. And the twice-dead son? Seku smiled and the son smiled back. Oh, how the son already twice-dead would fare in their lovely marrow village, his father's wives already chosen in preparation for his later taking, his destiny already set.
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