West is the first fact of me. I have faced it for eighty years.
My world is curved. The earth presses against my round edge from all sides and continues outward in directions I will never travel. The yam roots come back to the same depth each planting. They do not know my hair lies where they stop. I have not told them.
The red clay settled against me in the first months. Termites traced their incurious lines across my shins. Rains raised the water table and I was wet, dry seasons came and I was less wet, and these alternated. Above me the compound kept its rhythms: boards expanding under heat, the cook fire returning each evening to the same place so its warmth reached me at the same angle. Sunlight arrived broad and sourceless across the yard. The fire knew where it was, and from the pressure of its heat I learned its location.
Everything in the compound came to me from below. The threshold and its heavy step. The water drum, where feet went light and returned carrying weight forward. The corner where children relieved themselves at night. Every stone and post I learned by the vibration it made when struck, and I did not ask for any of it. The tending of the corner became what I was. While I held it, I was coherent. This is the only stake I have ever had.
The first root that found me was yam, tentative, testing. I made the chemistry at my boundary unwelcoming and the root adjusted. We arrived at an agreement at the depth where my ribs used to be. The return is no longer a search. It knows where to come.
*****
Ankpang, who had been my mother, came the month after the soil closed over me.
Rain falls indifferent to where it lands. What Ankpang poured arrived above my chest with intention, moved through clay, reached me carrying everything the living carry for the dead when the dead can no longer carry it. She knew I faced west. She knew I was twenty-three when the soil took me, and that I used to sing the planting song so loud the women three compounds over could keep time by me. The water held all of it. It is still here.
A new weight pressed the soil above me one morning, light and undecided. Bare feet moved from the threshold to the cook fire and back, a child learning the compound. The footfall stayed longer than the others. This was Zibvong, my granddaughter, though she would not be named to me until much later, when I had memorized her heel-strike in the dark.
The garden kept the compound’s rhythms. Corn in rows ending three arm-lengths before my corner. Citrus seedlings against the east wall, their roots shallow then, the bitterness of orange peel reaching me sometimes through Ankpang’s libation when she had been peeling fruit before she came. One of the women said once the soil in my corner was bad. The soil was not bad. I had been adjusting the mineral composition outward, making germination unrewarding, and the family planted around the dead place and tended what needed no tending. The grass grew tall at the back wall and no one cut it.
Zibvong’s small weight returned each morning. Season by root cycle, heavier. By the time it carried the weight of a body that had begun to bleed monthly, I held her heel-strike, the favoring of the left foot, the careful pressure of a child who watched her feet. One arrival came denser, a body holding a second body folded inside it, and I lay still beneath her. For many months afterward she did not come. She returned lighter. The years continued and the weight grew old: tendon loosening, bones releasing their mineral, the increasing lightness of a body whose preparation had begun. One dry season she did not come. The wet season after, she did not come. The clay holds her absence with no less weight than it held her steps.
*****
Ankpang’s water stopped first.
The intention that arrived with regularity became irregular. Monthly, occasional, twice in three root cycles, once. A year came when nothing deliberately poured found me. After that year, water arrived from younger hands two arm-lengths from my chest, without that quality of knowing.
A man lived in the compound for several years who walked differently from the family. His footstep held no variation. Every crossing the same pressure, the same path, regardless of weather or season. The family’s steps had question in them, slight shifts responsive to what lay below. His did not. I disliked him. I had not known I could still dislike, and the discovery was not welcome. His feet never searched my corner. The Swa Nakan, the libation of memory, thinned in his years and stopped. He left. The feet that replaced him varied, but the ceremony did not return.
One year a child was named in the yard above me. Many feet gathered close, libation poured at multiple points across the soil at once, each pour precise. The drum reached me through clay. This was the last time the nkwa came from many hands.
*****
Then no footstep came for twelve root cycles.
Twelve wet seasons and twelve dry. The compound held only rain and insects. Grass rose and fell at the back wall. No cook fire warmth came through the soil. No child’s heel struck the threshold.
In the second of those years, the east side burned. For three months I was warm with a warmth that did not know I was there. A roof beam fell and its impact reached me through forty arm-lengths of packed earth, the single largest event of those twelve years. After it, silence resumed.
I tended the corner. In the empty compound I faced west as I had always faced west. The absence of anyone above me changed nothing about the terms of my existence.
Footsteps returned. Unfamiliar ones first, light, the steps of people who had not learned the surfaces. Among them, one carried the family’s inherited heel-strike, that favoring of the left foot I had known from the daughter and from the granddaughter who once sat in my corner at age nine. This foot was back. It poured no libation. I continued.
*****
Zibvong’s right foot is heavier than her left.
Her stride compensates for an old injury that became gait long ago. The left side carries itself gingerly without choosing to. The injury lives in her hip or higher, old enough to be in her bones, and the becoming is complete.
Her sweat reached me after the first afternoon she worked in the yard. Coffee in it, processed food, a body living at city pace long enough that the distance showed in what the soil received from her. She came from somewhere with water in pipes and light past dark. Her heel-strike was beyond doubt the same girl I memorized through her mother’s belly and her childhood and her departure, returned now into a body she went away from this place to make.
She pours no libation. The clay receives her regardless.
She gardens with patience. Her contact with the soil holds duration. She kneels in one place before moving to the next, presses seed into earth carefully, turns the soil with her fingers before planting. The yard learned her in the first week. The man whose footstep held no variation, and the years of irregular libation, and the twelve empty cycles brought women who gardened hastily. Zibvong is something else.
One afternoon she cleared the path to the back wall and sat down in my corner.
The shade falls deep there in late afternoon. She found it by moving through the yard until she found the coolest place, and she sat with her back against the wall, facing west into the compound’s open ground. Her full weight came onto the soil above my chest. Thighs and spine and the tension of a body that worked all morning, settling directly above where my weight ends. I received her from below.
Through the afternoon, her tension released in increments. The clay between us was perhaps two arm-lengths of packed red soil. I received her through it. The warmth of her built and concentrated above me where it would have trailed off behind a passing footstep. The old women pressed their afternoons into the yard’s hardpack this same way in the early decades, and the receiving was the same.
She goes still sometimes in the yard, work stopped, the full weight of her present on the soil. In her stillnesses she is listening. She came back to a place she believes has kept something of hers, and she tries to locate it by being quiet. She faces west when she stands this way.
I have been keeping things here for eighty years.
*****
She cleared my corner in the third month.
Wild grass came up section by section, the shallow root network I cultivated for decades lifted free. She worked from the back wall inward. My ceiling of packed clay and root tangle and low mesh opened. Fresh water fell into bare soil without obstruction. The boundary between the depths that were mine and the depths available to ordinary growth became ordinary ground.
She planted an orange tree.
The seedling went in on a dry morning. The root ball pressed into a hole at the center of my corner, soil tamped firm with her palm. The first root came down thin and seeking, its chemistry unlike the yam’s patient annual return. This root intended to go deep. It knew the moisture gradient, and the gradient led toward me.
Through the wet months it extended. Through the dry months it held in the harder clay and waited. It came past where the yam ever came. It came past where I let anything come. A handspan from my curved edge, it kept descending.
At my boundary the mineral concentration thinned.
I held it dense for eighty years. Dense at the edge means stop. Now it thinned outward, toward the root rather than away from it, and the gradient reversed at my surface before I decided to reverse it. The root found my edge more permeable than the clay above and turned. My round boundary became a basin. The root curved around me because I made curving easier than descent. The orange tree’s structure described a slow circle around the place I occupy, and from above this was invisible.
Zibvong watered the tree and watched it put out leaves. She planted it without knowing what lay below. The tree grew without knowing what it grew around.
One morning she knelt at the tree’s base and pressed her palm flat to the soil. The warmth of her hand arrived through the clay, deliberate, located above me with awareness different from the casual footstep. Ankpang’s water had moved through the clay toward something. Ankpang knew I was here. Zibvong does not, and Zibvong’s warmth carried some ancestor of that quality regardless. A person putting her attention into the ground is the closest a living person comes to me without knowing I exist to come close to. It is the orange peel in Ankpang’s libation reaching me from a different mouth across eighty years.
She probed with one finger near the root mass and found where the root curved. She stayed kneeling a long time. She stood, brushed clay from her knee, went inside.
The orange tree will fruit. Zibvong will eat what comes from the shape my presence made.
The making was possible. That is the whole of it.
Zibvong stands at the tap washing clay from her hands, facing west. The water crosses the compound’s drainage channels and arrives through clay as a thin sweetness moving from above.
*****
Image: Satwika Ananta Unsplash cropped