August, 1933
267
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
cheeks, her shoulders, her arms and legs. It would help to make her husband well, he said. She wrested herself from his grasp, pressed through the crowd, and hid in a grain hut near, waiting for developments. “ He’s dead! Great Thuku Bubo’s dead!” the hopeless wail was relayed to the edge of the crowd. Wanjiku heard it, shaking in her weakness. Munjiru would make her go to Muigi; he would know about the bees for which she had not sacrificed. He would say she had bewitched her hus band and caused his death. What should she do? Suddenly, a look of bitter determination flashed over her face. Dare she do it? Her time was short. Scarce feeling her wounds in her frantic effort, she sped through the night to the peak o f a hill, stopping only to place a few blades o f grass on a dead snake in the pathway as an offer
Long after the other women had finished their abbre viated household tasks and gone to their millet fields, she came back for Mugo. He was gone ! Fresh blood and pad ded tracks on the ground by the hut told their sad story. Wanjiku screamed the alarm in terror. Women came running from near-by gardens. Men roused from their beer drink, spears in hand. They followed the tracks through the jungle about half a mile, and there, outside the cheeta’s* lair, they found all that was left o f little Mugo. There was nothing to do but go back and leave him for the hyenas that night. To touch his body would bring unclean ness to the village. Wanjiku staggered back to her hut in anguish, follow ed by screaming women and whimpering children. She was childless now. Munjiru’s curse had worked. The swarm ing bees had brought their trouble. No tears wet her tatooed
ing to the spirits. She stood an instant—a black silhouette against the moonlit sky, looking at the cruel craigs below. One mo ment more, and her angry, disembodied soul would be free to return and wreak vengeance on Muigi and Munjiru. She bent her knees to jump. “ Wanjiku,” whispered a soft voice be hind her—a voice familiar, yet strange in its tenderness. Wanjiku was not used to love. She turned, and a cry of surprise left her lips. “ Karanja, my lost brother,” she gasped, “ they— said— the white— men— had made you—a slave!” She sank to the ground, her weakness returned. Slowly Karanja drew from her the whole awful story. Lovingly he sympathized. “ Wanjiku,” he said, pressing her woolly head against his neat suit, “ I have not been lost; I have been in the white man’s head school, many, many miles away. I do not fear the spirits now. I love the white man’s God.” Wanjiku’s longing eyes betrayed a hun gry heart as he told the old, old story o f a
cheeks, no sobs racked her body; only bit terness and hatred filled her crushed child- heart that knew no other outlet for its sorrow. The weary days wore on, one no different from the other. Each had its round of drud gery, its dole o f discipline. The wounds on her back were healed, leaving their ugly marks, but Wanjiku’s heart was sore with a soreness none could heal. Fear of the curse and the evil menace o f the bees, coupled with a restless watching for a chance to do Mun- jiru harm, was eating away at her life like a dread disease. One afternoon on the way home from the millet field, she saw two young warriors run ning toward Thuku Bubo’s hut. Four elders followed, carrying Thuku Bubo himself on a grass mat stretcher, accompanied by his brother, Muigi, the witch doctor. They laid him on the mud floor. Muigi snatched a brand from thé fire and, brandishing it before the fever-stricken man, shrieked to the spirits, “ You are bad, I will strike you with this fire brand.”
M uigi , the W itch D octor
God who “ so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” and o f how all his uncleanness was washed away in the precious blood of the Lamb o f God. “ Girls live there, too,” he continued. “ Kind Missioni** hides them from their enemies. God’s Spirit told my heart to come here. He knew your trouble. Come, I will take you to Missioni.” “ No,” she drew back, disappointed. “ I’ve heard your Jesus story before. I ’ve heard it in the little school in our own bush. I like it-^but Munjiru and Thuku Bubo cursed me. They said, ‘I curse you. May every journey bring you trouble.’ He’s dead and can’t remove the curse. I wouldn’t dare to go. I have too much trouble now.” Karanja put his hand to his breast pocket. “ In here,” he said, “ I carry God’s Book. It says Jesus was a curse for us, to make us free from the curse. W on ’t you believe in God’s Book? Put Jesus in your heart, and come with me to Missioni.” Wanjiku stood silent, a battle raging within. The dark ness of superstitious centuries had met the light of Calvary. The struggle was intense. At last the girl spoke. [Continued on page 288]
The clan began to gather. By evening the sheep had been sacrificed and the yard was seething with heathen humanity, yelling like madmen to scareaway the spirits. The sick man tossed on his grass mat, imploring Muigi to help him. Wanjiku sat watching the witch doctor from a recess in the hut wall. He moved about with uncanny gestures, grotesque in the firelight, now chanting to the spirits, now darting fiercely at Thuku Bubo, like the very incarnation o f a demon, his paint-daubed face aglow with a fiendish glare, leopard tails and ghoulish charms swinging from his belt with the motion of his body. If Thuku Bubo died, she would become Muigi’s wife by law o f inheritance. She shuddered at the thought, as she saw him take a sharp knife from his goatskin wallet and cut a.piece from the sick man’s scalp, drawing the blood by sucking through a hollow horn— to let the troubling spirits out. “ Some one else must bleed !” he hissed, casting glow ering eyes on Wanjiku, in her dark retreat. Snatching her and holding her on the ground, he cut deep gashes in her *A cat of the leopard family. **Native name for the missionary’s wife.
... hast redeemed us to
“ Not willing that any should perish,” “ thou
God by thy blood out o f every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker