Pumpkin Eaters

by Leslie Farnsworth

"Every day he nourished his plot with water collected from the stream; every day he rustled the land and pushed in more earth from his sack, and every day the villagers' frowns deepened."

The children in his village knew hunger before love. South African tension trickled past the border on foot and in paper. The Afrikaners, South African natives prideful in their European descent, were unkind. They pointed at their poverty. They wore shined leather shoes that said, look, look, how disgusting, these savages.

Kenosi thought, I am an old man, an elder in the village. I have traveled far, I have seen many things.

One night, Kenosi walked past brush and thorns into South Africa, where he knew a man with a garden.

After miles enough to make his concrete feet ache, he opened the thatched gate and looked on soft, loamy earth. The house was quiet. When he peered into the back window, he saw the man's stomach rise and fall in rhythm. The moon cast Kenosi's shadow. He put his hand in the dank earth, he ruffled the soil through his fingers, he bent down and smelled its ripeness. Plump pumpkins waited, gleaming.
Kenosi rubbed them, felt their firmness, put an ear to their cool, waxy
bodies and thumped them with a leathery finger. He nuzzled their stems, their tough exteriors.

Underneath the straw awning of an open-air shed, Kenosi found a burlap sack, its soft, partially unraveled edges rolled down. The wide, white seeds caught the moonlight. He thrust his arm down to the elbow and drew forth a thick handful. He put two handfuls into the woven sack resting across his back and shoulder. As he walked home, the seeds in the woven sack thumped against his spine.

Kenosi prepared his garden. He spent days on his knees, his back gleaming with sweat, working the land with a spade he had fashioned from an old soda can, flattened and caved and threaded onto new wood. Kenosi pulled along beside him an infant-sized sack full of the heavy earth that had been piled in the South African shed. He took fistfuls from this sack and pushed it into his land, kneaded the mixture into the soil with cracked hands.

As he sat in his open door at nightfall and looked out at the mud huts, his thick feet resting on parched earth, he would glance down at his blackened palms and know that their ache would soon be over.

Kenosi was neglectful of greetings and gossip. Villagers walked by with expectation and he would not see them, so intent was he, his forehead dripping into the soil. They would straighten their backs, turn their faces, and whisper with curled-lip anger. They were not stupid. He was preparing a garden. And they would say, "He's mad, he's not well anymore, this hunger will kill us all." They mocked him.

When the plot was ready, he planted in the hazy dawn. Crouched in his garden, his feet and hands on the hard edges of the silky plot, he could smell ripe pumpkins.

The women washing at the stream saw him caressing the ground as they trickled back to their huts, but it was too dim to see the seeds in his hands. "He thinks he's planting something now," one said to another.

Every day he nourished his plot with water collected from the stream; every day he rustled the land and pushed in more earth from his sack, and every day the villagers' frowns deepened. But as he sat in his doorway at dusk, scratching the dry earth of his threshold with the soles of his feet, he would smile to himself and think that soon their ache would be over.

Green seedlings pulled free of the soil, their leaves soft and promising. Kenosi looked into the stars at night and nodded back. Soon there would be plenty. With his harvest he would have seeds for more pumpkins and seeds to crack between his teeth as he sat in his doorway at dusk. He would teach the villagers what he had learned, he would give them knowledge and means. Then they would eat. Then their ache would be over.

The villagers studied his yield, leaning over his land, each whispering to the other that they hadn't doubted, that they had always believed. "After all," they said, "Kenosi has always been the smartest man in the village."

Kenosi's land nourished only a small group of pumpkins, for although he had planted many seeds, five came forth. But they were good pumpkins, and each plant bore one to three fruits.

When the pumpkins were still very young, his village bristled. "Why don't we pick them now?" They knew their size and color were not yet right. They were greedy and hungry. They were tired of scavenging, living off berries. "They are not ready yet," he answered.

But harvest could not come fast enough. When their persistent questioning ceded the same answer, they began to doubt again. Every morning at dawn, as the women washed in the stream, they continued fragments of the same conversation: "Kenosi wants the pumpkins for himself."..."He wants us to starve, and so he hoards them."..."Soon he will pick them when we are asleep and hide them, telling us theyhave died."

This talk left an angry taste in their mouths. During the hunting, the men plucked this conversation from the air. Kenosi remained behind now, to tend his garden. Day upon day they crouched through the thorns and brush. When they brought something back, it was a small bird. And they looked at Kenosi as the man who could provide but would not.

His pumpkins were getting firmer, but they were far from harvest. Each day Kenosi bent down, smelled the soil, ran his hands over the fruit. He was patient when the villagers peered at his progress and frowned, saying, "Are you going to tell us again that they are not ready?" He looked at their proud shoulders and remembered that their ache would soon be over. They would walk away and say, their words floating back through the scratchy air, "The old man is crazy."

After the stars grew as bright as they could, Kenosi would turn his back to the garden, carry in his sack of earth and his spade.

One night, Kenosi's door was opened. Shades of young hunting men pulled wide across the room. The pointed shadows of their spears came together in a huddle against the opposite wall. They said to Kenosi, "Old man, we are tired of this." Kenosi sat up, crossing his legs tight together, their raspy dryness whispering in the dark. And he thought, as the shadows fell against his face, that soon their ache would be over.

Their sharp shoulders cut the moonlight into slivers. He looked at them, his spine stretched like a reed, and said, "They are not yet ready."

The next morning, Kenosi pushed his door open and pulled morning air into his lungs. He choked on half a breath. The furrowed land had been pillaged, its loamy dark soil patted flat or cast out of the plot by footprints, all the pumpkins gone but one. This pumpkin had been dropped and lay in three parts, two trampled in quick retreat. The air was dense and sweet, hung heavily on his shoulders.

Kenosi wept, the pumpkin-thick air seating him in his doorway, his feet sprawling across the earth. The unripe fruit would provide a bitter meal. The village huts were dark, the stream empty of bathers and washers, no children in the path. His people were peeping through holes in their doors. Kenosi thought, I am an old man, an elder in the village. I have traveled far, I have seen many things. But I had not seen this before.

*****

--LF
Copyright (c) 2000, by Leslie Farnsworth

Note: This parable was inspired by the author's study of Botswanan culture and politics in both nonfiction and fiction, including a thorough reading of the author Bessie Head's major works.

Leslie Farnsworth writes, "Although born and raised in Houston, Texas, I lived in Memphis, Baltimore, and Chicago before moving to London, England, where I am currently living and writing full-time.During my undergraduate work at The Johns Hopkins University, I studied creative writing in the Writing Seminars Department, primarily under the guidance of author and professor Stephen Dixon. I have written many short stories, and I am presently at work on my first novel. My fiction has appeared in Downstate Story magazine and is forthcoming in Yellow Sticky.