Dreams from My Father

that goat myself until it was back to health.”
    We became quiet again; lamplight grew low and people began drifting off to bed. Granny brought out blankets and a twin-sized cot for Bernard and me, and we arranged ourselves on the narrow bed before blowing out the lamp. My body ached from exhaustion; inside Granny’s bedroom, I could hear the murmur of her and Auma talking. I wondered where Roy had gone to, and thought about the yellow tiles on the Old Man’s grave.
    “Barry,” Bernard whispered. “Are you awake?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you believe what Zeituni told you? About night runners?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Myself, I think there is no such thing as a night runner. They are probably just thieves who use these stories to make people afraid.”
    “You may be right.”
    There was a long pause.
    “Barry?”
    “What?”
    “What made you finally come home?”
    “I’m not sure, Bernard. Something told me it was time.”
    Bernard rolled over onto his side without answering. A moment later, I heard his soft snores beside me, and I opened my eyes to the darkness, waiting for Roy to return.
             
    In the morning, Sayid and Yusuf suggested that Auma and I take a tour of the lands. As we followed them across the backyard and down a dirt path, through fields of corn and millet, Yusuf turned to me and said, “It must seem very primitive to you, compared to farms in America.”
    I told him that I didn’t know much about farming but that, as far as I could tell, the land seemed quite fertile.
    “Yes, yes,” Yusuf said, nodding. “The land is good. The problem is that people here are uneducated. They don’t understand much about development. Proper agricultural techniques and so forth. I try to explain to them about capital improvements and irrigation, but they refuse to listen. The Luo are very stubborn in this way.”
    I noticed Sayid frowning at his brother, but he said nothing. After a few minutes we came to a small, brown stream. Sayid shouted out a warning, and two young women emerged on the opposite bank, wrapped in their
kangas,
their hair still gleaming from their morning baths. They smiled shyly and stepped behind an island of rushes, and Sayid pointed to the hedges running alongside the water.
    “This is where the land ends,” he said. “Before, when my father lived, the fields were much bigger. But as my mother said, much of the land has now been given away.”
    Yusuf decided to go back at this point, but Sayid led Auma and me along the stream for a while, then across more fields, past the occasional compound. In front of some huts, we saw women sorting through millet spread across square strips of cloth, and we stopped to talk to one of them, a middle-aged woman in a faded red dress and red, laceless sneakers. She set aside her work to shake our hands and told us that she remembered our father—they had herded goats together as children, she said. When Auma asked how life had been treating her, she shook her head slowly.
    “Things have changed,” she said in a flat voice. “The young men leave for the city. Only the old men, women, and children remain. All the wealth has left us.” As she spoke, an old man with a rickety bicycle came up beside us, then a spindly man whose breath smelled of liquor. They immediately picked up the woman’s refrain about the hardness of life in Alego, and the children who had left them behind. They asked if we might give them something to tide them over, and Auma dropped a few shillings into each of their hands before we excused ourselves and started back toward the house.
    “What’s happened here, Sayid?” Auma said after we were out of earshot. “There never used to be such begging.”
    Sayid leaned down and cleared away a few fallen branches from between the rows of corn. “You are right,” he said. “I believe they have learned this thing from those in the city. People come back from Nairobi or Kisumu and tell them, ‘You are poor.’ So now we have this idea of poverty. We didn’t have this idea before. You look at my mother. She will never ask for anything. She has always something that she is doing. None of it brings her much money, but it is something, you see. It gives her pride. Anyone could do the same, but many people here, they prefer to give up.”
    “What about Yusuf?” Auma asked. “Couldn’t he do more?”
    Sayid shook his head. “My brother, he talks like a book, but I’m afraid he does not like to lead by