The River Walk

“If you go to the river alone and Adze will get you.”

Grandmother warned me of many things that would come for me if I did not listen, and so I listened. Of all the monsters, the Adze scares me the most. I’ve seen one with my own eyes. You have probably seen one too, but you did not know what you were seeing. 

Amatefe promised to catch one and use it to get back at our teacher. She was horrible. When we got the spelling words wrong, she would shout and make us stand on our tables. Amatefe got them wrong every week. Sometimes I got them wrong on purpose so he did not spend break time alone. 

I begged him not to go after the Adze, but he wouldn’t listen. It was my turn to fetch water from the river, and Amatefe promised to come with me. Grandmother was happy that I was not alone. He carried an old coffee tin his mother used for storing flour. 

When she found the flour on the kitchen table, Amatefe tried to move into our home. Instead, he went to bed without akple with his dinner for a week. 

“I will get it this time! The Adze will come to me and when I catch it, it will become a human again.” He was triumphant, dreaming of his plan’s success. While he spoke he climbed onto a rock that bordered the dirt track we were trudging along. 

I looked up at him. He was taller than me, but on the rock he was a giant. “But Amatefe, what if the Adze gets you and you are the one who becomes a witch?”

He considered my words. Sandwiching the tin between his feet on the rock, he placed a hand on each hip. “Don’t you know that the Adze will not hurt the one who catches it? How can you not know this!”

I didn’t know. Grandmother had never told me that about the monster. But he is two years older than me, so he must know more than me about many things. 

“Come down from there so we can get the water and your firefly!” I said, walking along the path without him. He would catch up. He always did. 

There were stagnant puddles on the shore of the river. I picked my way gently through the mud, trying to get as little on my feet and legs as possible. The rotting water bit at my nostrils and I breathed out hard, opening my mouth instead. I could almost taste it. 

The river had receded even further this week and there was more mud to cross. I waded into the shallows, repeating my mantra. “It’s just plants. It’s just plants” as they grabbed at my ankles. The tendrils curling around me like fingers preparing to drag me to the depths.

“ADZE!” The shout sent me off the precipice of panic. I screamed and backed out of the water, escaping the clutches of the plants. One held on and, paired with the speed of my reversal, they conspired to send me sprawling backwards into the mud. I sat covered in filth. The mud wormed its way between my fingers, and the slime hit my gag reflex. Retching, partially in disgust and partially out of fear, I leaned to my side, while trying to spot the monster that was coming to suck my blood. 

Instead, I saw Amatefe. He was dancing through the mud, tin open and waving in the air. He laughed as he tried to catch the insects my eye could not pick out in the dusk. 

Fuming, I set my forehead into my carefully practised frown. I was an excellent study of Teacher’s best withering looks. I washed my hands and filled the bucket with water from where the river flowed steady and fresh. 

Without calling out to him, I stalked out of the mud, oblivious to it as it climbed to my feet and ankles. I heard his shout of surprise when I reached the path, and I carried on the military march home. His long legs caught up with me before long, and he teased me for the mud patch on my backside. 

“Why did you not go to the bathroom before we left!” He said, flicking my arm and then patting the lid of his tin. “I have got an Adze in here. Teacher will be in trouble tomorrow!”

I was almost scared enough to forget my anger. But his teasing stung, and I refused to acknowledge his monster hunting success. It did not matter. He kept up his chatter the entire way back to the village, dreaming of what evil our teacher would be accused of when she became a witch. 

By the time we got back to the village, his tirade had lost its bluster. He finished it with his usual chorus. “But it does not matter. At the end of the year, I will go to school in the city and Teacher will be your problem!” Only then did he realise that I was still silent. 

“Why are you so angry?” He said, raising a single eyebrow. 

“You scared me at the river and I am dirty because of you! And now you have brought an Adze to the village. It’s too dangerous! Grandmother will be so angry with you!”

“But she is not my Grandmother, so it will be okay. And you do not need to tell her about it. Just say you fell because you are so clumsy!” He laughed and walked to his house opposite my Grandmother’s. 

Even though he made me so angry I could push him into the mud, I would miss him when he left. 

Two weeks later, on my day to fetch the water, Amatefe did not meet me to walk to the river together. I waited for as long as I could bear it and then ran. Sprinting through the mud to the waterside, I filled the bucket and hurried away. The guilt of disobeying Grandmother’s warning beat in my eardrums, and I gasped past the stitch in my side. 

At the village, I knocked on his door. I had not even taken the time to wash my feet. His mother answered. She did not give me her normal singsong greeting. She nodded at me and put her finger to her lip. She did not even chide me for the mud I trapped into the kitchen. Amatefe was sitting in the room he shared with his youngest sister. She lay on the bed, unconscious. He knelt at the bedside, holding her hand against his cheek. 

“What has happened to Afreya?” I asked gently. Even at ten, I could sense the seriousness of the occasion. 

He did not look away from her face. “The Adze has sucked her blood, and she has the fever. You were right, I should not have caught it.” 

I backed away, shaking my head. There was a ringing in my ears which only increased when I knocked into the doorframe. The Adze had come. My house was right across the road, and I was there when he caught it. It would come for me next. Or worse, Grandmother. 

He did not look up as I escaped the room, but his mother stopped me in the kitchen. She hugged me to her waist, and I buried my face into her apron. “These are sad times.” She said, and I nodded into the folds.

The next morning Grandmother prepared our funeral donation, and I knew for the next weeks we would sing and dance for Afreya.

After that, the end of the year rushed forwards, and I lost my friend to the city. But in truth, I had lost him the day we lost Afreya. 

Every holiday he came home, and I charted his growth by his relation to our fence poles. The food in the city was good, and soon he was taller than them. At the start of each vacation, I waited in our garden, knowing that he would walk up the road to his house, turn to face mine and wave. 

Little by little, he returned to his smiling, cheeky antics. Without fail, even when the days were bad ones, he returned to walk with me to fetch water. When he joined me, my friends, who had replaced him as my water companions, giggled and stayed away. 

We did not speak of the Adze. I never told Grandmother of the terrible thing we had done, and Amatefe bought his mother a plastic flour box from the city. The tin disappeared. 

The next holiday he was not only taller, but he was also full of muscles. I put on a colourful dress to fetch the water with him that night, and my friends’ giggles turned to jealousy. But he was still the same boy who liked to stand on rocks and know better than me. He lectured me as we rambled along the path. I did not need to concentrate on where I was going, so I focused on his words. 

At the river, he watched as I waded into the water. There were very few stagnant mud puddles. The years of drought had given way to rain on the fourth anniversary of Afreya’s death and they had flowed ever since. 

“You have become very beautiful! Every time I come home you have changed.” He said, placing his hands on his hips. 

My face was warm, even though the river was icy on my legs. “Thank you!” I called back. I was not unused to comments like this. 

“I think I will come back for you one day and bring you to the city with me. You will love it.” 

My heart beat faster than the river rippling around my ankles. He would come back for me. I beamed at him and walked out of the water. He took my free hand as we walked back to the village. I lay that night dreaming of the city, both while I was awake and when I finally fell asleep. 

But when I saw him later the next day, he did not invite me to a new life in the city. “I have a job now. I cannot just come home for every schoolboy holiday.” He said, “But I will come visit you once a year in November.” 

I tried to hide the tears that pricked my eyes. The thought of walking to the river without him for a full year was more than I could process. When he was gone, I waited for his return and when he was there; I revelled in it. That was how I had come to count the passing of the years. 

“Don’t be sad. I will come back, I promise! I will walk you to the river and tell you everything I have seen in a year. There will be so many stories to share!”

I nodded and wiped my face. There would be so many stories to hear. 

The year without Amatefe dragged. I watched the corn and okra grow and die and I did not look forward to the holidays anymore. Nothing was different when they came. Every week, when it was my turn to fetch the water, I found a companion to go with me. Grandmother had long since ceased her warnings about the Adze, but I knew better than to go to the river alone. 

Sometimes other young men from the village offered to walk with me, but they could not tell a story the way Amatefe did. They could not hold my interest for long. 

November came with the minute temperature change that told me the rainy season would soon be over. On the first of the month. I did something which shocked the village. I refused a companion for my walk to the river. 

Since I was old enough to carry the bucket, I had walked to the river alone only once, but now I did it every day, so that when Amatefe came back, he knew I had waited for him.

November dragged; the days were warm, and it was perfect weather for walking and hearing stories. But he did not come. 

Grandmother shook her head at me and I prepared for my last water walk of the month. She had even taken to repeating her old warnings to get me to talk to one of the other men. “If you go to the river alone and Adze will get you.”

But I went alone. I sat on a flat rock near the water’s edge and I watched the insects and birds along the river. I wondered if any of them were Amatefe’s Adze firefly. Even though the terror of a ten-year-old gripped my chest, I did not move as the shadows grew, and the water cooled the shade. 

He would catch up. He always did.