The Lightning

Many months before, the uncle of one of my good friends had died. He was old, but not old enough that his death was considered a joy, as are the deaths of the crippled women I often buy drinks for when they hobble in to the boutique, supporting their weight on a large teak branch. My friend’s uncle was an important man, a teacher and a middle school director, well known in the community, and equally liked. According to tradition, following the internment of the body, there was no funeral. Now, in March, the tail end of the season for such effusions of grief, it was time.

I had been in the capital for many weeks before the funeral. In truth, I hadn’t known about it until my return to the village. I was weary from the journey, and my pockets were considerably lighter. The local cuisine has a bland, usually fishy taste I cannot get around to enjoying, and even when meat takes the place of fish, the fat and the cartilage attached to the normal edible bits turns me off as well. Nonetheless, unwilling to cook, and having nothing really with which a proper meal could be made, I decided not only to go to the funeral to pay my respects, but to capitalize on the food.

My friend, whom I call by his family name, Nabede, welcomed me and bade me sit inside his house, where there was a television. I would have been content to sit in the circle of small stools, most of which were occupied by the village’s older men, doing much the same as I and scraping back all the food their hosts were willing to offer them. Perhaps it was my fatigue, or my desire not to make any kind of scene, but I did not protest to remain with the men, and allowed him to seat me on an uncomfortable high-backed chair in his parlor. The walls of the house were of mud brick, and the roof was the standard tin sheets nailed to a central support beam. In the afternoon sun, the room was stifling. There was no fan, and the breeze through the small barred window flickered feebly in through the lace curtain. He turned on the television to a sports channel and left me.

His wife, a couturier in another village, came in to bring me a calabash, a dried, hollowed out bowl-like gourd, of tchouk, the local beer brewed from millet. She left and returned almost immediately with a large plate of rice mixed with overcooked spaghetti. The sauce was thick and red, and a fall of palm oil dribbled down from the sauce into the rice. There was a dark brown hunk of indeterminable meat.

I ate and watched a recap of the previous year’s European Cup. By the time I had finished, I could hear thunder in the distance, and the sunlight was fading into the alkaline clarity of a semi-obscured twilight. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and stood up to leave. I shook the hands of all the men on their stools, and thanked my hosts. I walked home alone, watching small rolls of lightning in the clouds against the horizon.

I awoke the next morning to a muted world. It had rained in the night and no one was out. The houses were calm, the green of the verdure so fierce it seemed the world was plugged in. I felt comforted by the scent of wet soil, the air on which you could actually taste the filtering effect of various trees.

I put on some shorts and went outside. Lidao, the ten-year old son of one of my neighbors in the compound, was sweeping my portion of the yard, pushing the papaya and palm leaves that had fallen in the night into a compost hole I’d dug. “Bonjour,” he said, and then he asked, “Did you hear about what happened last night?” “You mean the rain?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the deaths.”

Over the next few days, everyone I asked gave different versions of the story. Some say the people had been outside, dancing in the rain; others said they were huddled under the small eaves of the roof; yet others averred that they had all been sleeping inside the house. Whatever the details, though, the story remains essentially the same. After I had gone home, the rain arrived. The rain here seems to be one of Nature’s angrier forces, for it rarely falls with the monotony and disinterest that is common in temperate zones. Nearly always the rain is accompanied by fierce blowing winds which, despite my efforts, blow water in through the wooden slats of my windows and under the space beneath my door. Then there is the celestial lightning, and thunder that shakes the water in its cisterns.

That night, aside from the driving rain, the lightning was low and rolling in the clouds. I remember watching it before going to bed; it seemed as tumultuous as a sea storm, and washed down from the north with frightening speed. All recounts of the story agree that, despite the rain and the lightning, the sound system and the large speakers were not only not disconnected from the main power line, they were not turned off at all. As the rain fell and the lightning broiled, the funeral attendees continued to dance.

Around midnight, according to Nabede, the only people left dancing were a group of about fifteen adolescents. As I said, what exactly they were doing at the time the lightning struck is disputable. Even the exact site of the lightning strike is unknown. Nevertheless, what happened is irrevocable and only too painfully known. All the houses branched on to the power line in that area had their light bulbs burst or burn out; meters were fried and the numbers frozen; those with televisions still plugged in had their sets destroyed. But the brunt of the electrical force was directed at the children. Whether dancing in the rain, huddled beneath the eaves, or sleeping under the tin roof, the lightning struck them. Two, a twenty-two year old lycée student, and a fourteen year old elementary schoolgirl, were killed. Four were seriously burned, to the point of disfigurement. The rest were burned on their hands, chests, and heads, painfully but superficially.

When Lidao finished his version of the story I went to speak to Lao, another compound-mate and good friend. He told me his version, and we sat on the steps of his terrace in near silence, speaking intermittently about what happened. “They say it is because God is angry,” he told me. “We have defiled the funeral ceremonies for too long, and now God has punished us.” Kpekpou, another neighbor, said that it was not God, but the fetish priests who were to blame. Somebody, he said, associated with the grieving family, must have angered the priests, and to punish them the priests had called down the lightning. It could simply be bad luck, I said, but they clucked in disapproval of my theory.

I made my way to Nabede’s house. His wife welcomed me in, but she was withdrawn, and immediately went to lie down again. Nabede was sitting in a chair, hunched over, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. He vaguely indicated the burn marks on the walls of his home, where the surge had scorched the mud behind the power lines. His light bulb was intact but burnt out, a dark black smudge coating the interior. He had been this morning to help dig the graves. Now he was trying to rest, but he could not sleep. I told him about what my neighbors had said, that it was either God’s punishment or the work of fetish priests. He shook his head. “It’s just Nature,” he said. An explanation all the more incomprehensible for its simplicity.
“What happens now?” I asked. He looked up at me as though he did not understand the question, or the impertinence to ask it. “Nothing,” he said. “La vie continue.”

The next day, Monday, I was teaching troisième, the oldest class at the middle school. The director came in and made his way over to a student who, I had not noticed before, was burned on his forehead and his left hand. “Don’t you know better,” the director said, “than to play near electronics in the rain?” It’s the question I’d wanted to ask, though he posed it with considerably less tact.

Class ended at noon, and the students got up to file home for the long break until afternoon classes. I called the burned student over to look at his wounds. His skin was split open along the knuckles of his hand, the flesh pink and beginning to dry out. There was a small split in his forehead. The surrounding skin was a dark purple color, and the outer edges of the burn were the green of an old penny. He said he felt fine. The only people left at the dispensary were the four who were severely burned.

I didn’t hear any more of the incident for the rest of the day. It had been a bad month, with several deaths, and despite the grotesque nature of Saturday night, the sadness was subdued and it seemed as though the incident would go the way of the storm, leaving nothing for memory but a slowly eroding imprint on the ground.

The next day I had no classes, and woke up late to the sounds of people conversing in the compound. Every day, several women in the village make tchouk, and people go from house to house to drink. The woman in my compound, Lidao’s mother, whom I also call Maman, makes what I consider to be the best tchouk in the village, and the benches she arranged around the fence securing my part of the yard were filled with men, farmers either on their way to their fields or coming back from them. A few were discussing the lightning from Saturday night. Most, though, were lamenting the state of their fields. It was not yet the rainy season, yet they were already decrying the lack of a strong downpour. That seems to be the way with the farmers. Either there is too little rain or too much. Rarely does Nature get it just right.

I spent the morning drinking with the men, and by noon I was lightheaded and exhausted. Though it might not be the best way to become known, I’d built up something of a reputation for being able to drink like the villagers. When I first arrived, I would slowly sip one calabash while they would chug back two or three. I’d finally gotten used to the taste, and could drink just as fast and just as much as the men. My record for a day is nine calabashes, a feat which most people only attribute to the village drunks. I may have had four or five that morning, so I made myself some lunch, and went to sleep.

I woke around four o’clock, which is essentially the end of the day. By this time, afternoon classes are over, the men are done in their fields, and even some of the women are beginning to make dinner. I got dressed and decided to head to the boutique to see if any of my friends were out, starting on their nightly round of sodabe, a moonshine brewed from the sap of palm trees. On my way out of the compound, Madame Lao was sitting in her kitchen, a small room separated from the rest of the house so that the smoke from the fires does not become a nuisance. “Good afternoon,” she said, “are you heading up the road?”
“What’s up the road?” I asked.
“The judgment,” she said, “for the sorcerers who killed the children.”

The sky was already turning to twilight, an orange-purple glow infused into the atmosphere. The green of the mango leaves faded into the darkening sky, blurring the line where the trees ended and the night began. At the boutique, I asked the owner’s wife about the judgment. “C’est finis,” she said. Up the road, lines of men were heading in our direction, among them my drinking friends. Magi, a thin old man with a tobacco-stained beard, led the column, and was the first to turn into the boutique’s yard. “I just heard,” I said. “What happened?”

That afternoon, the chief was approached by two people, an old, stooping woman of nearly eighty years, and her son, a disfigured man I’d noticed in the village before. They’d presented themselves to the chief as the sorcerers who had called down the lightning during the funeral. “They said that they hated those kids,” Magi said, “and had been performing a ceremony for many months to have them killed.”
“Why would they confess to something like that?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t have,” he said, “but ever since that night they haven’t been able to sleep. In their dreams the children come to them to ask, ‘Why have you done this?’ They confessed so that their spirits would leave them alone.”

The chief then called the sub-chiefs and the village elders, and they held a judgment. The woman and her son were questioned and beaten, questioned and beaten, until the entire truth had come out.

“The old woman started the ceremony,” Magi told me, “and her son finished it for her.” There was no real motive given for the killing. Perhaps it came out during the judgment and was lost in the retelling, but I doubt it. People here are not concerned with motive, simply with deeds and their consequences, with crime and punishment.
“This is bizarre,” I said.
“But it all makes sense,” Magi said. The son, a man of about fifty, is noticeable in the village because of his deformity. It’s as though his face had been smashed and then smudged to the side like wet clay. He has no nose to speak of, just a lumpy scar over two nostrils under the inside corner of his right eye. His mouth, more a gaping hole with teeth than a usable appendage, starts in the middle of his face and slides into where his right cheek should have been. Magi said, “His face is like that because of his sorcery. He eats the bodies of his victims.” This was such a crime against Nature, he explained, that the man’s features contorted to reveal the depravity of his soul.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Tomorrow they will be beaten again, and then they will be banished. They’ll never be allowed to return to Babadé.” I stopped my next question before I could ask it. What about the gendarmes, or the police? What about justice? But they could do nothing. This is a case of sorcery, something the government formally denies no matter that every person I’ve ever spoken to, peasants and functionaries alike, believes in it. The best justice we can hope for is that these two will never hurt our village again. For the people of Babadé, that is enough. Grief resides in the unknown, not in the inexplicable. Sorcery is derided by the West, and missionaries have done there best to replace voodoo with Christianity, but in the end, what’s the difference? Voodoo is a religion as any other, with tenets and beliefs and practitioners; it is a gathered set of mythology and ritual used by people to give meaning to the unknown.

The next day in the village people were discussing again the lightning strike, the dead and burned children, the man who ate his victims, the mother who began the spells. Their tone seemed as grotesque as the crime itself, for there was an air of relief palpable in all the conversations. What happened was terrible, the explanation bizarre, and, in my opinion, all the more frightening, but hey, thank God we know what happened, right? I had never believed in the talk of sorcery in my village, and though when my neighbor died I had to accept the verdict that the devil had claimed his soul, I never really took it as validation for all the other stories I’d heard. This, though, was something else. There was an accident, wholly explicable by nature and electricity and human negligence; there was no inquisition, and no wish to begin an inquisition; yet there it was, the confession. We did it, we killed them. We cast a spell and called down the lightning, we killed those we wanted to kill, on the night we wanted to do it. How can I deny this? If I subscribe to the insanity of the sorcerers, I must subscribe then to the insanity of the entire village, and that is not possible. I have to do as my villagers have done, and be comforted by the fact that it was not God or Nature or the ignorance of the children and soundmen. It was sorcery, which can be controlled, either by an expulsion of the source, or, more common in less serious cases, by more sorcery. I won’t try to seek any logic behind it. Crime and punishment; that will have to suffice for me now.