The darkness was a blanket that concealed the full extent of storm damage to their home under its moonless blackness. All they could see was that the boy's shack in front of the desiccated maize plot had been crushed by a boulder that must have fallen from the pitiless sky.
He and the old man slept in the same hut on stitched straw mats. The cocks crowed before the old man woke the boy up to start the morning, to cook the herbs they had collected, and to start breakfast.
When there was enough light to see they took stock of the full damage the storm had wreaked.
A mango tree was on the corrugated roof of the mud hut, the roots were on the roof and the strong branches of the tree gouged into the grassy floor. Many sections of the wooden fence were missing. The plot of land at the back of the compound had been swept clean and was now a gathering of storm blown thatch and all the maize stalks were gone, all the ridges were flattened.
The boy and the old man could not decide on where to start from. So they instead postponed the decision making on the restoration of their homestead until after the meeting at the village square.
That morning saw the village square as noisy as a festival, one that could be heard from far far off. It was rare for the entire village to congregate without an occasion like the moon and star festival, the new year festival, the bountiful harvest festival. That they were now gathered, despite the storm, was itself a reason for the noise and the hoorawing.
The old man leaned on his walking staff and lumbered to the seats reserved for the elders. The youths however stood all over the place, according to their age groups, and were making a hell of a ruckus. Everyone had stories to tell and everyone was telling it and so the hubbub was deafening.
The boy went to his age group whom were gathered under the shade of one of the massive and wide canopied araba trees that surrounded the village square. He recognized everybody but he was looking for Terre, his only close friend. He said only small greetings as he moved through the gathering of his peers in his search.
The age group was split along the frayed length of an invisible border. The boys congregated on one side of the tree and the girls congregated on the other side. The edges where they shared a border next to the massive tree trunk accounted for most of the noise his age group was making.
It was hard to find his way to the center of the crowd. He listened harder and heard the argument and started shoving his way to the front to see what the hell was going on.
The boy heard his friend's voice, suddenly growing louder, when he was no longer at the fringes of the age group,. He moved closer to the araba tree to find out what the ruckus was about.
'Hey! Watch it!'
'What is wrong with you?'
'Let me through!'
The boy forced his way through jostling elbows and bodies, squeezing between his peers. He was getting anxious because he now heard the deeper booming voice of the leader of the age group in sharp countertone to his friend, amongst all of the shouting and yelling.
He squeezed through and he got to the front and saw his friend amidst the girls but not in the way he expected. His friend was struggling to get free from the girls who were keeping him back, and the leader of the age group was also being held back by his own friends.
'Terre!' The boy shouted the name of his friend.
Terre turned and looked in the boy's direction with bloodshot eyes. They exchanged small nods but the argument was hot and his friend's attention was forced away. The boy now asked the son of a palm oil trader, who was standing beside him, to tell him what happened, because the argument was too disjointed for him to make any sense out of.
The son of the palm oil trader asked the boy to stop bothering him.
Someone else behind was narrating what happened. Fanno,the leader of their age group, had done something terrible to the honor of Terre or to Terre's sister.
What exactly it was, the one narrating did not know. But Terre had said he would call for the Fanno removal as leader, and Fanno wanted to settle the matter here and now with a fight, The girls in the age group were stopping him from doing so.
A drum was hit with a heavy hand and a ripple went through the crowd gathered at the village square. The noise dropped several notches, but the noise from the boy's age group did not diminish. It even seemed to intensify. The drum sounded again. Then the crowd began to notice the commotion and the older age groups interfered with scalding shouts.
The noise diminished. Terre vanished into the group of girls who stood like rock pillars, daring Fanno to touch a single braid on their head under the eyes of the entire village.
The boy watched dumbfoundedly and was jostled as others behind wanted to see what happened to the argument, warnings were whispered harshly.
Fanno threatened everybody with his eyes and the anger rolling off him was a stench that everyone knew too well. He was the leader because they were all afraid of his anger, but Terre evidently did not care for it.
The drum sounded a third time and a hush settled on the village ground and they all looked to the direction of the path they knew the headman would appear from.
Two men appeared first. They were the right eye and left eye of the headman. Then the headman appeared behind them and everybody shifted where they stood, a susurration of feet and clothes rustling and murmurs.
The drum sounded again, beaten three times in rapid succession before ceasing completely. The town crier picked up the signal and announced the arrival of the headman and his two eyes.
'My people, I greet you all.'
'My elders, I greet you all.'
'My children, I greet you all.'
'My eyes can see and my ears can hear and so the head must function. We suffered as a village when the storm hit us but I have called you all, my brothers and sisters, to this ground so that we shall not suffer more.'
'First of all, under the directive of the imperial administration we must now do a headcount after every natural disaster. I am sure we all see the wisdom here. The town crier, my mouth, walked all the roads yesterday and he has done a great job for us all to be gathered this morning.'
'We will begin the head counting immediately. The leaders of the age group should start on that.'
'My eyes also have seen the state of our village. Our roads are in need of repair, as well as our houses and our marketplace. Yet the market day is coming. This decision will be made by the elders of the village. I will appreciate their wisdom very much.'
'We have been looking towards this marketday for some moons now. When it is finally our turn is when this storm hits us. We have to make a choice between fixing our homes so that we have roofs over our heads and finding our livestock and clearing our land as we were all doing before it happened. The second choice is to come together, old and young, and repair the roads and the marketplace so that we will not become the laughingstock of our neighbours. They will say we don't have roads. We have to decide upon this. My elders, I leave that to you.'
'There is then the matter of the postbills. I was away at our sister village where the monthly meeting of the headmen was hosted when those things were put up. I came back home. I saw them. I read it. And now I will tell you what it said. But you all must know that I burnt that rubbish the moment I got into my house. You will understand why soon.'
'Group leaders, I trust you are counting heads.'
'The truth of the matter now is that the empire is now preparing for war! The message they put up on our trees is a call to arms. They want the blood of our children and our fathers and our mothers to be spilled on foreign soil. They want that! They wrote that and put it up there near my house. I do not know how they expect us to fight their war but that call to arms is not something that is in my power to ignore. I have written to all the heads of the neighboring villages and we will put our heads together and go to the seat of the local administrator. We are a farming community and we need our hands to feed this nation. And most importantly we will not die for a war that is not ours, we will not wage a war of greed.'
'Have I spoken our mind as one village or is my mouth full of dung and our head is not correct?'
The crowd roared in approval of the words the headman had spoken and the drums spoke loudly and the gong joined the voices. It took a while before the hush fell on the village square that was circled by araba trees.