Dreams from My Father

thought perhaps he was asleep, but when Billy stepped forward the old man’s head tilted in our direction, and I saw a mirror image of the face I’d seen yesterday in Alego, in the faded photograph on Granny’s wall.
    Billy explained who was there, and the old man nodded and began to speak in a low, quaking voice that seemed to rise out of a chamber beneath the floor.
    “He says that he is glad you have come,” Roy translated. “He was your grandfather’s brother. He wishes you well.”
    I said that I was happy to see him, and the old man nodded again.
    “He says that many young men have been lost to…the white man’s country. He says his own son is in America and has not come home for many years. Such men are like ghosts, he says. When they die, no one will be there to mourn them. No ancestors will be there to welcome them. So…he says it is good that you have returned.”
    The old man raised his hand and I shook it gently. As we got up to leave, the old man said something else, and Roy nodded his head before closing the door behind us.
    “He says that if you hear of his son,” Roy explained, “you should tell him that he should come home.”
    Perhaps it was the effects of the moonshine, or the fact that the people around me were speaking in a language I didn’t understand. But when I try to remember the rest of that evening, it’s as if I’m walking through a dream. The moon hangs low in the sky, while the figures of Roy and the others merge with the shadows of corn. We enter another small house and find more men, perhaps six, perhaps ten, the numbers constantly changing as the night wears on. In the center of a rough wooden table sit three more bottles, and the men begin pouring the moonshine into the glasses, ceremoniously at first, then faster, more sloppily; the dull, labelless bottle passed from hand to hand. I stop drinking after two more shots, but no one seems to notice. Old faces and young faces all glow like jack-o’-lanterns in the shifting lamplight, laughing and shouting, slumped in dark corners or gesticulating wildly for cigarettes or another drink, anger or joy pitching up to a crest, then just as quickly ebbing away, words of Luo and Swahili and English running together in unrecognizable swirls, the voices wheedling for money or shirts or the bottle, the voices laughing and sobbing, the outstretched hands, the faltering angry voices of my own sodden youth, of Harlem and the South Side; the voices of my father.
    I’m not sure how long we stayed. I know that at some point, Sayid came up and shook my arm.
    “Barry, we are going,” he said. “Bernard is not feeling well.”
    I said I’d go with them, but as I stood up, Abo leaned over to me and grabbed my shoulders.
    “Barry! Where are you going?”
    “To sleep, Abo.”
    “You must stay here with us! With me! And Roy!”
    I looked up to see Roy slumped on the couch. Our eyes met, and I nodded toward the door. It seemed then that the entire room became silent, as if I were watching the scene on television and the sound had gone off. I saw the white-haired man fill Roy’s glass, and I thought about pulling Roy out of the room. But Roy’s eyes slid away from mine; he laughed and poured the drink down his throat to much cheering and applause, cheering that I still could hear even after Sayid, Bernard, and I had started making our way back toward Salina’s house.
    “Those people were too drunk,” Bernard said weakly as we walked across the field.
    Sayid nodded and turned to me. “I’m afraid Roy is too much like my eldest brother. You know, your father was very popular in these parts. Also in Alego. Whenever he came home, he would buy everyone drinks and stay out very late. The people here appreciated this. They would tell him, ‘You are a big man, but you have not forgotten us.’ Such words made him happy, I think. I remember once, he took me to Kisumu town in his Mercedes. On the way, he saw a
matatu
picking up passengers, and he said to me, ‘Sayid, we will be
matatu
drivers this evening!’ At the next
matatu
stop, he picked up the remaining people and told me to collect the regular fare from them. I think we squeezed eight people into his car. He took them not only to Kisumu but to their houses, or wherever they needed to go. And when each of them got out, he gave them all their money back. The people didn’t understand why he did this thing, and I also didn’t understand at the time. After we were done, we went to