By the following morning, there was hardly a corner of Farato where the story had not reached.
The alkalo had beaten Kornyagi.
Not merely struck him once or twice in anger, as fathers sometimes did with sons who had disgraced them, but beaten him until even those who believed strongly in the correcting power of the cane whispered that perhaps Baa Bocar had gone too far. Kornyagi had returned from the palm-wine tappers drunk again, staggering into the compound after dark, his clothes dusty, his speech loud and careless. Something he had said — or perhaps the sight of him itself — had finally broken whatever restraint remained in his father.
By sunrise, the story had acquired ten different versions.
Nenneh Dado brought one version from the well. Borogie heard another from a woman passing the compound with firewood balanced on her head. Bubel, who understood almost nothing of the matter, nevertheless announced confidently that Kornyagi had fought “the whole village.” Even Matou, who had only recently returned to Farato and was still reacquainting herself with the complicated web of village relationships, soon understood that this was no ordinary quarrel between father and son.
Kornyagi was the alkalo’s only surviving boy.
That fact sat beneath everything.
Baa Bocar and his wife had buried six children over the years. Each death had taken something from Kornyagi’s mother. By the time Kornyagi survived infancy and began running about the compound on sturdy little legs, she had wrapped all the love she had been unable to give the others around him.
He was her boy.
Her surviving son.
People understood drunken men. They understood bad behaviour. They understood weak discipline and disobedient sons. But the idea that a person could become dependent on alcohol—that repeated drinking could change the relationship between desire and control — was not something people around Kornyagi knew how to name.
So Baa Bocar responded with the tool he understood.
Punishment.
The more Kornyagi drank, the more his father beat him.
And the more he was beaten, humiliated and driven away, the more Kornyagi returned to the place where drinking dulled everything.
It became a cruel circle.
That morning, however, Kornyagi did something unexpected.
He came to Yerro.
Matou was helping Borogie sort vegetables when she saw him entering the compound.
At first she did not recognise him.
He walked slowly, favouring one side. His face was swollen around one eye, and there were marks along his arms. His usual swagger had disappeared. He stopped at the edge of the compound instead of walking directly in, which alone told Borogie that something serious had happened.
“Yerro is there,” Borogie said, pointing towards the shade.
Kornyagi nodded.
Matou watched him cross the compound.
“Don’t stare,” Borogie murmured.
“I wasn’t staring.”
“You were looking with both eyes and all your questions.”
Matou lowered her gaze, although not her curiosity.
Yerro was repairing a wooden handle when Kornyagi approached.
“Koto Yerro.”
Yerro looked up.
For a moment neither spoke.
Yerro had known Kornyagi from the time he first came to Farato, but theirs was more than an ordinary village friendship. Yerro was the older man, and in many ways Kornyagi had grown to regard him as an elder brother. The bond had begun through the Alkali himself. From the time Yerro arrived in Farato, Baa Bocar had taken a particular liking to him and had helped him establish himself in the village, facilitating much of what a newcomer needed in order to settle, farm, build a home and become accepted among the people. Through that closeness, Yerro became almost an extension of the alkalo’s household.
Kornyagi had therefore known Yerro for much of his life. When he was younger, he had followed him about, sought his company and listened to him in a way he did not always listen to others. The difference in their ages made the relationship closer to brotherhood than friendship. Yerro could tease him, reprimand him or advise him without Kornyagi immediately taking offence, and Baa Bocar trusted Yerro enough to allow that familiarity. In better years, before palm wine and belligerence began to define Kornyagi in the eyes of the village, there had been genuine affection between the two men.
That history was precisely why Kornyagi’s mother had thought of Yerro after the terrible beating. She knew her husband respected Yerro, but she also knew that Kornyagi still regarded him as an older brother. If there was anyone who could stand between father and son without appearing to take sides against either of them, it was perhaps Yerro.
And for Yerro, there was an obligation that went even deeper. He had never forgotten what Baa Bocar had done for him when he first came to Farato. The alkalo had helped make the village a home for him when he was still finding his footing there. Now the same man’s household was coming apart around his only surviving son. Yerro could hardly turn away and declare it none of his concern.
Whatever the village now said about Kornyagi — the drunkenness, the quarrels, the embarrassing scenes and the endless trouble—Yerro remembered the boy before the gossip swallowed him. He remembered a younger Kornyagi trailing after him, asking questions, laughing easily and looking to him with the uncomplicated admiration of a younger brother. It was that Kornyagi whom Yerro still saw somewhere beneath the bruised, troubled man who came limping into his compound the morning after his father’s beating.
“Sit,” Yerro said.
Kornyagi lowered himself painfully onto the wooden stool.
Yerro looked at his injuries.
“So?”
Kornyagi stared at the ground.
“My mother sent me.”
That surprised Yerro.
“Your mother?”
“She said I should come to you.”
“And what does she expect me to do?”
Kornyagi rubbed his palms together. “Talk to him.”
Yerro understood immediately.
“No.”
Kornyagi looked up.
“No?”
“I will not go to the alkalo and tell him that his son should be allowed to drink himself senseless.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what are you asking?”
Kornyagi’s face tightened. “I am asking you to tell him not to kill me.”
That silenced Yerro.
Across the compound, Matou could no longer hear every word, but she saw the change in her father’s posture.
Kornyagi’s mother had indeed sent him. She had spent much of the previous night angry with her son and frightened for him at the same time. She had scolded him while tending his wounds, asking how long he intended to shame them, asking whether the six graves behind their family history meant nothing to him, whether he wanted her to bury the last son God had left her.
But when Kornyagi groaned during the night, anger became pity.
A mother’s heart did not obey logic.
She was furious with him.
She was also terrified his father might kill him one day.
“Go to Yerro,” she had told him. “Your father listens to him differently.”
Kornyagi had laughed bitterly. “My father listens to nobody.”
“Go.”
So he came.
Yerro studied him carefully.
“Why do you keep going there?”
Kornyagi shrugged.
“That is not an answer.”
“I don’t know.”
“You know.”
“No, Yerro. I don’t.”
The answer was so immediate that Yerro stopped.
Kornyagi looked towards the road. “Sometimes I tell myself I will not go. I wake up and say today I will stay here. Then afternoon comes.”
“And?”
“I start thinking about it.”
“About drinking?”
“About going there.”
There was an important difference, though neither man fully understood it.
“And when you go?”
“I drink.”
“And when you drink too much?”
Kornyagi gave a humourless little laugh. “Then I become the alkalo’s disgrace.”
Yerro said nothing.
“You think I don’t know what they say?” Kornyagi continued. “When I pass, people stop talking. Children run and tell their mothers. Women at the well know what time I came home. Even people who have their own problems leave them and discuss me.”
“You give them plenty to discuss.”
“I know.”
That admission surprised Yerro more than anything else.
For years Kornyagi had behaved as though wrongdoing belonged exclusively to other people. But sitting there bruised and swollen, something of the arrogant boy had fallen away.
“My father hates me,” he said.
“No.”
“He does.”
“He hates what you are doing.”
“What difference does it make when the beating feels the same?”
Yerro rested the wooden handle across his knees.
“That man buried six children.”
Kornyagi’s jaw hardened. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I know! Everybody tells me. Six children. Six graves. I am the surviving boy. I am supposed to be everything.”
His voice had risen.
Yerro watched him.
Then Kornyagi said more quietly, “What if I cannot be everything?”
That stayed with Yerro.
Later, when Matou remembered her holiday in Farato, she would remember that question.
What if I cannot be everything?
It seemed to contain the whole tragedy of Kornyagi’s family.
Baa Bocar had not merely wanted a son. After so much loss, he had wanted restoration. His surviving boy had become the vessel into which grief, pride, lineage and expectation were poured. Kornyagi’s mother had protected him because death had taught her that children could disappear. Baa Bocar had indulged him because survival itself had seemed miraculous.
Then the cherished child had become the source of their greatest humiliation.
For Baa Bocar, the gossip was almost unbearable.
He was the alkalo.
People brought disputes to him. He settled quarrels between husbands and wives. He reprimanded young men for disrespecting elders. He advised fathers whose sons were becoming unruly.
And now his own son staggered home drunk.
Men lowered their voices when Baa Bocar passed, but he knew.
That was what pained him most: knowing that the village was discussing him behind closed doors.
How could a man straighten another man’s household when his own was bending before everybody’s eyes?
That afternoon, Yerro went to see him.
He did not go as an accuser. He went as a younger man who respected the alkalo but owed something to Kornyagi too.