A Girl Named Disaster

37

She’s going to look awful,” said Mother as Sister Gladys shaved Nhamo’s head. It was several weeks later and Nhamo’s wrist had nearly healed, but she still had it bound tightly in a bandage.

“Demons get tangled in the hair,” Baba Joseph explained. “That’s why Vapostori men shave their heads.”

“Why not the beards?”

“What an idea! The longer the beard, the holier the prophet.”

Sister Gladys rolled her eyes.

Nhamo hadn’t looked into a mirror since the day she thought she resembled a wall spider with a burr on top. Now the burr was gone. She didn’t think it was going to improve her looks.

“Are you sure it’s safe out there?” Mother said. “Karoyi Mountain is infested with hyenas.”

“Nothing in this life is safe,” replied Baba Joseph tranquilly.

“I can send a guard along with a gun.”

“No outsider is permitted. Mwari will look after us.”

Mother’s expression showed she felt this was unlikely. “I think this is a mistake, but if Nhamo believes it…”

And Nhamo wanted to believe it with all her heart. Baba Joseph and the other Vapostori prophets were going to conduct an exorcism ceremony on Karoyi Mountain. Karoyi meant “little witch” and it had a reputation for being a gathering place of evil, although Dr. van Heerden said that was because of the hyenas that lived there.

Baba Joseph’s eyes shone as he talked about how he was going to send Long Teats back to her smelly den in Mozambique. While he was at it, he might as well clean up the other witches who might be lurking on Karoyi Mountain.

“Don’t overdo it, Baba,” Mother said gently. “You aren’t as young as you used to be.”

Sister Gladys swept Nhamo’s hair into a pile. It looked like a dead animal sprawled on the floor. Nhamo was given a white dress and a scarf for her naked scalp. She would be allowed to wear sandals until they neared the exorcism site. The Vapostori never wore shoes for their ceremonies because the ground where they prayed to Mwari was sacred. “Please don’t make Nhamo carry anything heavy,” the nurse instructed Baba Joseph.

The sky was black when they started out. Mother hung a flashlight on a leather thong around Nhamo’s neck. “Don’t use up the batteries,” Mother warned as Nhamo delightedly clicked it on and off. The prophets, ghostly in their white robes, carried blazing torches. They had different symbols embroidered on their robes to indicate their rank within the church. Their bald heads shone in the flickering light. They walked off along a forest path with Nhamo in their midst.

She saw Mother and Sister Gladys standing in the doorway of the hospital as they moved away from the comforting lights of Efifi. Dr. van Heerden was in his house. He had not entirely forgiven Nhamo, but he had promised to keep the generator going until she returned.

On and on they went through the eerie sounds of night. An owl hooted softly as they passed its tree. Bush babies chattered. Water trickled in streams left over from the rains. Nhamo turned her flashlight on only when she couldn’t see by the light of the torches. Once she aimed it into the forest and caught a pair of red eyes staring back. She didn’t do that again.

The path gradually began to rise. It threaded between boulders and past baobab trees with their roots firmly tapped into pockets of water in the soil. Soon they left the baobabs behind. They came to drier soil with strangler figs splitting the rocks. They passed close to a solitary mukonde tree, which raised many pale, leafless branches against the dark sky. They were careful not to touch it, for the sap was poison.

At last they arrived at the bare knoll of the mountain with only the stars for cover. Baba Joseph told Nhamo to remove her sandals. “Ow!” said Nhamo, stepping on a thorn. Once her feet had been like balls of baked clay, but Sister Gladys had made her work on them with a pumice stone. “Ow,” Nhamo cried again, trying not to notice the pain.

“Be quiet,” Baba Joseph said sternly.

The prophets must have gathered wood earlier because a great heap was already present at the center of the bare knoll. They thrust their torches into it. Soon it was blazing high into the sky. Nhamo wondered whether Mother could see it from Efifi.

At first the ceremony was exactly like the service on Saturday. The men sang “Kwese, kwese” to invite the angels to come down. “I imagine they’ll need a lot of angels tonight,” Nhamo said to herself. She took no part in the proceedings. The Vapostori sang and prayed until the flames died down to coals. Then they behaved very strangely indeed.

The men knocked the embers into a long, glowing line and began to walk over them as though it were a path. Nhamo stifled a scream. They not only walked, they rolled on them and placed hot coals in their mouths. No one seemed to get burned. Even the robes didn’t catch fire.

After Baba Joseph had crossed over, he shook his staff and shouted. “I have heard! I have heard the word of God, alleluia! He said, ‘You witches come out. You make your feet to go. You take your ugly toes somewhere else.’ Ehe! I have heard it! The waters of the earth have witnessed it! Falaula he! God has said it! We don’t want you anymore! Zifokola hau!”

Nhamo didn’t know what all the words meant, but there was no mistaking the power that filled Baba Joseph. If she had been a witch, she would have leaped straight off the mountain.

The other prophets joined in, praying, cursing, prophesying together with a kind of weird music. After a while Nhamo realized they weren’t the only ones making it. From all around on the dark hillside came the voices of hyenas. They had observed the intruders in their country. They didn’t like it.

“I call on you, Long Teats!” bellowed Baba Joseph. “I say, Come here like the mangy dog you are! Come and see your power destroyed! Mezu-kano-eh!” The old man laid the panga on the hot coals. Nhamo hadn’t seen it since she arrived at Efifi. A breeze caused the fire to leap again. The wooden handle burned to ashes.

On the edge of the hill, at the very rim of the light, was an enormous hyena with red-shining eyes.

“Eh! You have crawled out of your pile of dung! You have come to witness the superior power of Jesus!” Baba Joseph laid his hand on Nhamo’s head. She wasn’t expecting it and flinched.

“I will send you to hell along with damned Satan!” The panga burned in the fire with a sickening, metallic smell.

You miserable worm, came Long Teats’s voice from the dark. You’re no match for me. I’ll burst your lungs between my teeth like old rotten bladders.

Nhamo hugged herself so tightly, her arms turned numb.

“You’re stupid, like all witches,” taunted Baba Joseph. He took out a bottle of holy water from a pack he had carried up the mountain. Nhamo had seen holy water blessed after the Sabbath ceremony. It was used to cure illnesses. “Watch this!” the old man commanded. He poured the liquid on the panga. It hissed up in a furious steam—and the metal snapped!

Aauu, wailed Long Teats. The hyena seemed to have shrunk. It was only a cane rat watching the fire with glittering black eyes.

“I command you to bring me the ngozi. I have words to say to him as well.”

The form of the cane rat wavered. Its eyes became dull. There is no ngozi, sighed Long Teats.

“Don’t give me your damned lies! I want Goré Mtoko!”

There is no ngozi. The cane rat came apart in shreds of air. It was only a blackjack weed at the side of a rock.

“Alleluia! Alleluia!” sang the Vapostori as they circled the broken panga. “Mwari save Africa!” they sang. They were beside themselves with joy. But Baba Joseph wasn’t finished. He began striding up and down again, praying and prophesying, with his words sometimes shifting to an unknown, yet strangely powerful, tongue. Nhamo was sure it was the language of the angels. She was weeping with relief. She felt clean and free again. She was as happy as she had been when Masvita’s face lost the deathly gray pallor of cholera.

“I call on you false gods of Africa!” shouted Baba Joseph, shaking his staff. “I call on the njuzu and on the ngozis! I call on the vadzimu, the ancestors of this girl.”

Uh-oh, thought Nhamo.

The old man shouted challenges at the pagan spirit world. He ordered the spirits to line up like naughty children in front of an elder. Nhamo began to get seriously worried. She wanted to get rid of Long Teats, but no one had mentioned driving away the njuzu. And she couldn’t part with the vadzimu. Although in one sense Mother had returned as a Matabele doctor, deep down Nhamo knew the truth. Her real parent was with the ancestors. And someday Grandmother would join her…

“I don’t want to lose Ambuya,” Nhamo cried out suddenly.

“Hush, hush,” murmured the Vapostori. Nhamo shuddered. She didn’t want to oppose them, but she didn’t want to lose her family either. She stood up, desperately trying to think of a way to stop them. All at once she became aware that the other prophets didn’t seem as confident as Baba Joseph. They stopped now and then to observe their leader’s performance. When they began speaking the angel language again, they looked around as though they weren’t sure what might be lurking in the darkness.

“I call on mhondoro, the lion spirit!” bellowed Baba Joseph.

“Respected elder, surely we have done enough…,” one of the prophets said.

“Nothing will be enough until we drive all false gods from this mountain! Don’t lose courage, brother. Satan comes in many forms, but they are all worms compared to Jesus. Come forth, you maggot-infested hyena droppings!”

The coals had died down. By the cold, distant light of the stars, Nhamo could still make out the white robes of the prophets. Suddenly, they began to move erratically.

“Eh! I feel hands on my neck!” one of them cried.

“Don’t touch me!” yelled another.

“Stand firm! It’s only Satan!” Baba Joseph shouted, but the men stumbled around, fighting things they could not see. A scream and the sound of tumbling rocks told Nhamo someone had fallen over a cliff. The cries of the Vapostori filled the air. One by one they blundered into objects until all that could be heard were Baba Joseph’s exhortations and the groans of men nursing injuries.

Finally, the fight went out of Baba Joseph as well. He sat down heavily, and his staff clattered to the ground. Nhamo flicked on the flashlight. “Are you all right, Baba?” she whispered. She crept up to him. He was slumped over with his head cradled in his arms.

“Broken reeds,” he muttered.

“What did you say, Baba?”

“I fought with a rod of iron, but my brothers fought with broken reeds.” He spoke no more. Nhamo huddled next to him. It wasn’t cold exactly, but the early-morning air raised goose bumps on her arms. She heard moaning from half a dozen places. It occurred to her that the sounds might attract predators, and so she dragged unburned chunks of wood together and rekindled them with the still-hot coals.

She made Baba Joseph sit close to the fire for protection. Nhamo carefully hunted around the knoll for the injured Vapostori. She urged them to move next to the old man, but they stared at her blankly. She didn’t know whether they were injured or possessed. “Please. I don’t have enough fuel for more fires,” she begged. They rocked back and forth, with their eyes staring.

“If I can’t bring them to the fire, I’ll take the fire to them,” Nhamo decided. She set the longest branch she could find ablaze. But first she put on her sandals. “I don’t think this is holy ground anymore,” she said. “The Vapostori certainly don’t act like it.”

Methodically, she went from person to person, waving the burning branch with her good hand and shouting insults at any hyenas who might be lurking. At the bottom of a boulder she found the first victim. He seemed to be really hurt but, paradoxically, he was the only one willing to talk. “Water…,” he murmured. “Water…”

The only water around was in the bottles Baba Joseph had brought. Nhamo knew that it was for healing purposes. The man by the boulder was certainly in need of healing, so she removed the containers from Baba Joseph’s pack and gave the injured prophet as much as he could swallow.

By now the first faint streaks of dawn were appearing in the east. Early morning was a favorite time for animals to hunt, and she didn’t dare let her guard down. What will I do if I really meet hyenas? she thought. Her wrist ached badly, and the torch had burned down almost to her fingers. The beasts weren’t going to be frightened of a small female person with a flashlight.

“Wake up, meisie-kind,” came a hearty voice. Dr. van Heerden came over the edge of the knoll with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He had a crowd of workmen with him. They fanned out at once to attend to the injured Vapostori. “Looks like you had a blerry square dance up here. You certainly live up to your name, Disaster. You’ve disabled half the farm crew.”

Nhamo turned hot with shame.

“Baba Joseph put them up to it,” Mother said sharply. She had walked more slowly than the others and was just coming up the mountain.

“Everjoice wouldn’t leave me alone until I came looking for you. Bang! Bang! On the door all night,” said Dr. van Heerden.

“He had the binoculars trained on Karoyi Mountain from the minute you left.”

“Not Karoyi Mountain,” Baba Joseph murmured, raising his head.

“You rest, oupa,”* the Afrikaner said in a gentle voice.

“No witches here anymore. We threw them over a cliff.”

“I’m sure you did, oupa, and a few Vapostori, too, by the look of it.”

Daylight and the arrival of help brought most of the prophets back to their senses. Only the man who had fallen off the boulder needed to be carried back to Sister Gladys’s hospital, and to be on the safe side a litter was used for Baba Joseph as well.

*oupa: Grandfather.