They reached the farmland that was wild with bushes, taller than the boy and the old man, from having an entire year of fallowing to take over the land. A path diverged from the main road into the farmland and continued to a plywood shack that was surrounded by soft grass that barely reached up to their ankles.
They gathered a quick breakfast from leftover yam tubers, roasted over a small fire between three rocks, eaten with a smattering of oil.
'We will start clearing from here upwards and work these plots today.'
The old man said when they were back at the road, facing the farm. The boy went away to a tree and swung his cutlass at it to fashion himself a hook stick. He cut one for the old man too and after handing it over he went to take his position fifty meters away, at the lip of the road.
The boy stood with his hook stick in one hand and the cutlass in the other and surveyed the bushes. He found they were thorny with nasty burrs. He pulled at a clump of the stalks with the stick, raised his cutlass while standing straight, and swung down. The blade slipped through the clumped stalks easily. They fell to the ground, he threw them behind himself with the hook.
He bent down and started to work, now aiming at a few inches above ground with his cutlass.
The boy fell into a rhythm of hooking bushes and raising his cutlass and mowing away at bushes. Hook. Raise. Swing. Throw. Repeat.
Time began to pass pleasantly and the chlorophyllic odor surrounded him and he got itchy where sand and the burrs fell on his skin.
He sweated under his burlap shirt and after a while he decided to remove it and hang it on a tree branch. He went back to work with the breeze cooling him off directly and kept at it for a while before he had to stand up to relieve the strain on his back.
For a few years now he had always been on the farm at this time of the year clearing wild bushes. He had grown a lot between those periods. He was now as tall as the old man and he was growing to be as strong, he was yet to match the stamina of the old man when it came to farmwork but he knew it was just a matter of a few more years.
He then realized he would be here next year doing the exact same thing he had been doing a year ago and two years ago and years further back. He would still be under the roof of the old man, tending to the maize behind the yard, gradually bearing more and more responsibility until the passage of time and age worked its cruelty on the old man. The boy would then start taking care of the old man. The old man would die and he would be all alone in that compound with a hut and a shack and a plot only good for growing maize.
The boy shook his head to clear away the empty life he imagined for himself. He swung his cutlass and stood up to rest for a moment and he wiped sweat from his brow. He looked around. He could not see the old man across the bushes but he could hear the swishes of the cutlass and there was also the humming of a tune. He listened to it. Mosquitoes buzzed around him.
The boy went back to working and tried not to think about the future, however the proof of the future lay right there beside him less than fifty meters away. The old man had been working and doing the same things for years and years and decades. The boy wondered if the old man had always wanted to be this and nothing more. The old man certainly had never expressed such but how could one simply choose to be this.
The boy thought of the grandfather who he did not know anything about because the old man barely talked about his own past.
The boy thought Grandfather must have been just another farmer and the old man must have been to Grandfather just as he, the boy, was to the old man. And perhaps that's all they have ever been in their lineage.
The boy stopped again and looked at the cutlass and the hook stick in his hand and looked back, over his shoulders, at the dozens of meters he had cleared and then ahead at the endless bushes he was going to clear. He wanted to go to the old man to ask if this is all there was to life but he could not. He was confused. He did not know what was wrong about such a life but he felt it within himself.
'This won't be my life.'
He went back to work and found that he was able to fall back into rhythm. Hook. Raise. Swing. Throw. Repeat. And he worked until the old man called for him with a whistle that was similar to the energetic hooting of a stoneowl.
The boy rose and sweat rolled off him and caught at the bands of his shorts, darkened from being wet and soaked with sweat. He went over and found that the old man had gone to fetch some water in two small calabash bowls.
'You always forget to drink water. I warn you everyday about the heat sickness.'
The boy was indeed thirsty. He drank the water from both bowls greedily and washed his face with a little that was left. 'Not long now before it becomes too hot.' The boy said.
'Yes, we'll rest our backs.'
'Okay.'
The boy went back to his portion and began clearing and soon afterwards the cleared portions from him and the old man linked together and they diverged again. They kept working until the sun was directly overhead and his skin began to feel like it was blackening at the intensity of the sun rays.
They had only a little more to go. They suffered through it without consulting one another and before they were were done a dark cloud drifted across the face of the sun and cast a shade they were grateful for.
They finished and afterwards went under the shade of a palm tree whose canopy cast a billowing shadow across the floor. Their cutlasses were slick with pieces of grass and bushes and the handle was sweatworn against their calloused hands.
A hissing sound reached the boy's ears.
'I am hearing something.'
'I can hear it too.'
He knew that hissing sound belonged to a bluetongue snake. The old man was already casting his eyes amongst the bushes that were around them outside the shade of the palm tree.
The boy had been nine-years-old when he had gotten bitten by a bluetongue and the pain was seared into his mind like a glowing brand that was pressed against his skin. Now he had a cutlass at hand. He was also searching for the snake.
They stopped moving around and listened for the silence. The snake would be hard to spot except when hissing. It was perfectly camouflaged with the surrounding and only that blue tongue could give it away.
The hissing came once again and now he could hear that it was coming from behind, where the bole of the fat palm tree blocked their field of vision.
'Is it on the tree?' The old man asked.
'I am hearing it from the back.'
'Be careful and don't be rash.'
'It has not seen us yet.'
'It will know when we move. We must have disturbed its nap.'
'I think it is a blue one.' The boy said.
The old man looked at him. 'You are correct.'
'What do we do now?'
'It is not too difficult to kill but only if we are very quick about it. Speed is the essence. We'll go around this palm tree and confuse it from two different directions.'
'But it is a blue one.'
'Don't worry, I will kill it before it has a chance to run away or to bite anybody.'
'I am scared.'
'You don't have to be. I killed that one that bit you when you were a child.'
The old man instructed the boy to turn slowly, and eventually they were able to face the tree and the bluetongue snake was still hissing and since it had not come around the tree they knew it still had not realized they were there.
The boy raised his cutlass but the old man was swinging his hook stick and he pointed it at the tree.
'When I say run you will run and we will do as we have discussed. You will see the tongue immediately and you will be able to strike it if even I miss, but just run past very fast and you will confuse it proper and properly.'
The old man spoke after a few seconds passed when nothing changed.
'Run!'
The boy sprang to the side and his heart was pounding. His foot slid across palm fronds but he stamped the floor with his other foot and burst forward across the tree. His cutlass was raised high and the hissing of the snake was all he could hear.
He was aiming for the source of the sound as he went past the tree trunk but then the hissing had stopped in the time between the signal and his movement. As he moved past he could not see the telltale blue tongue.
He faltered.
The old man's voice snapped at him, he did not hear what it was exactly. He turned to look. He tripped on a root of the palm tree and saw as the old man's hook lashed out at a seeming part of the palm tree.
The boy fell hard and screamed as he saw the blue tongue manifesting almost out of thin air.
The old man's hook stick whacked the snake and sent it whirling and twisting in the air like a sinous piece of the palm tree and the blue tongue was visible once again.
The old man was upon the snake and he whacked it again with his hook stick.
The boy shouted at him to behead it but the old man's cutlass was wedged into the bole of the tree where, after his powerful slash, the honed edge cut deeply into the tree and he could not get it out in time to behead the snake as it lunged towards the boy and he had had to employ his hookstick to stop the snake by whacking it.