Where Bones Dance: An English Girlhood, An African War

Harbor

256 Harbor T he motor turns and dies, turns and dies. He pulls the cord until it catches. He stands up, smiling. The harbor is blazing behind him. He’s cut out of the red sea like a huge dark statue. We’re sitting in the boat at his feet, looking up at him. He doesn’t have a face. Father, I think. He’s my father, making the word like a hand reach up to his head, touch the skin there, warm and real, the dark coming in around us and the drumming now the Harmattan’s come. Out in the deep harbor the liners move like giant jeweled women. We have to stick to the shore, the thick rotten smell, the shacks without sewers, children with their belly buttons sticking out standing at the water’s edge. It’s too dark to see them but their eyes follow us, my father standing at the wheel, steering. In the settlements they dance, they cut off chickens’ heads with silver machetes, the chickens run around, headless and bleeding, children chasing after, the chickens leaving a map of their blood in the ground, the broad, brown, cracked feet smudging it, dancing through, singing like a growling from the ocean, clapping like the ground’s heart beating in the dark where we can’t see. The chug of the engine cuts a line through that sound that goes on and on like breathing. My father is steering us home. 257 C y c l e 4 ...