Vernon Mooers writes

THE WHITE MAN'S GRAVEYARD

For Candace
 

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or actual events, is strictly co-incidental and unintended.

Sections of this novel appeared in a somewhat different form in: Caribe, The New Quarterly, Green's Magazine and The Toronto  South Asian Review.  Another excerpt was a prize-winner in The 1990 Newfoundland Arts and Letters Competition.

 



chapter 1 (2)

It was the end of the rainy season but the blazing sun still squelched the land dry. Alex walked along a donkey path a few paces behind several women balancing urns of water on their heads through a field of maize, his camera in an army knapsack slung loosely over his shoulder, the amulet, for good luck, around his neck, on his way from the Secondary School to the market. It wasn't exactly a village. Like other villages in Africa, it contained a whole lot more people than dwellings. They crammed whole families into those huts, extended families into the mud houses and they had up to four wives, some more.

No one even knew the population of the country, let alone the town. All the statistics were just estimates -- eighty to a hundred million, give or take twenty million either way.  He figured fifty thousand for the village, give or take twenty thousand. It was Wednesday, market day, and all the tribes from a hundred miles around converged on the town -- countless donkeys, camels, goats and tribes people with strange hairdos and crazy getups, weirder than a street corner in Haight-Ashbury in 1969, people covered in slung cloth and beads and jewellery.

Alex hadn't been in Nigeria but a few days.  Still suffering the effects of culture shock, his eyes bulged at the seams from all the stimulation. He still didn't feel at all at home. A week ago he'd been transported to the other side, to this world, to a completely totally different environment from where he'd grown up and lived most of his life.

They'd all thought he was foolish not to accept graduate school admission at Antigonish and go wandering off somewhere in Africa. Alex was from a middle-class Canadian family. Few he knew in Wolfville even knew where Nigeria was without looking at a globe.

Africa! Disease, starvation, corruption, coups and black people -- millions of them. There was never any good news from this part of the world. He could still hear everyone's reactions, "They're going to rise up and kill every white man there," Bill Kavanaugh, the neighbour's voice yet echoed in his eardrums. But Alex had the amulet. The medicine man outside the Lake Chad Hotel had said it would protect him from evil spirits.

Alex wasn't suicidal. He was just different, one of those rarities who get bored when things are too quiet. Things were stable in Wolfville, too stable. People lived and died there. Nothing ever happened. It wasn't that he was searching for something. They used to think that priding themselves on their maturity and experience of having gone through it themselves. "Sowing his oats... almost joined the merchant marine myself... see the world when you're young," Bill Kavanaugh and the others would say wittily, in ignorance, content to view life in terms cliched words of wisdom, because they fit when someone didn't.

Alex had just been bored. It was simply a case of looking to experience life, wanting to quicken the firing of his neurons. That's why he left and others stayed near home, with the security of their habits. That was why he'd gone to University and most of his High School friends had been content to sell building supplies or insurance or work at Canadian Tire. A growing hunger to learn drove him.

Besides, it had been a bad year. After four years, he and Sharon had parted ways. She'd taken a teaching job in Northern Saskatchewan and was gone. He'd gotten through it -- sort of. One time he'd been downtown at the bar and was pretty drunk. It was two o'clock in the morning and raining when he stepped into a phone booth on King Street and phoned her. She was stern, cold.  Someone was with her in the trailer. He could hear her turning to talk to the person but kept insisting that she come home or he'd go out there. She hung up. He sat on the curb and cried and got drenched until the street-cleaner came along and almost ran over him. He wandered home and puked his guts out all night.

He couldn't even land a job. Last May he'd finished up his engineering degree. The past year he'd fired off over a hundred resumés. He'd had to hang on to his part-time job selling advertising for the University newspaper and worked on photography. He'd tried to freelance but there was no money for it in Wolfville and gave it up. Now, they were harassing him for his student loan and his first payment was due the next month, or the first of September.

Then he thought he'd gotten cancer. He passed blood in his stools and had gone to emergency and they tortured him with a barium enema and then a colonoscope. The doctors said it might possibly only be a fissure or a polyp due to the strain on his bowels and he had to check back in six months. But he'd read all kinds of Chatelaine and Reader's Digest articles on it and didn't want to have a colostomy. He'd broken down one night. He was afraid of dying. He was too young. He didn't understand why things always happened to him.