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The sun slid to the sky’s edge before anyone arrived to plant potatoes that evening. Standing at the gate facing the afternoon light, you’d see the shadow of the mosque stretched on the ground to the right. To the left, the river aimed straight past the village to the sun, veering at the last instant when it reached the edge of the earth. The muezzin called for evening prayer and the bare earth was a dark, ascetic brown. One cart remained near the cluster of huts across the river, waiting for the last black marketeers.
The women came down the path, plastic tubs under their arms, the red and green and black and blue flower and bird and dollar-bill patterns of their boubous flowing as they waved their arms and spoke. In small groups they entered the gate. Some walked straight to the river and joined the parade of bennwars. Others knelt over their plots, untying handfuls of seeds from knots in the corners of their wrappers, answering questions about what they were planting on the edges and if they had any to spare.
Abou, shouldering a pick, followed his mother. Since he didn’t haul water (he always spilled water at the river’s edge where the girls adjusted their wrappers), there wasn’t anything for him to do until the potatoes arrived. He dropped the pick’s blade deep into the plot and turned the soil. Then he leaned on the handle and scratched his neck.
Soon came the hollow grumbling of a wheelbarrow. Abou saw Mallik coming down the path, entering with nods and greetings, guiding the load down the center path. He dumped the sacks of seed potatoes onto the ground.
All the women were digging up their plots except Adema, who still had not arrived. Mallik called Abou over and told him to take the barrow back and get the rest of the sacks. As Abou started off, women gathered around the sacks of potatoes.
Abou returned in a few minutes pushing the wheelbarrow with three more sacks behind Adema, who crossed the open space from the clinic. She walked with her head down, like she was thinking. When she reached the gate she looked up.
“So you’re a big man?” she said to Abou with a smile.
Abou maneuvered along the garden’s center path. He tried to upend the barrow with a flourish and plenty of noise, like Mallik had done. There was lots of talk while Mallik explained how the potatoes would be distributed and planted. Most of the women knew the ritual better than he did. But when he came to how to apply the fertilizer, a hush came over the garden. Ever since Mallik had told them fertilizer made everything bigger and better, even skeptics said they would try it if it might mean better potatoes.
Maïmouna Bâ listened with her arms folded. Mallik said to apply this much fertilizer one hand’s span from each potato slice, three fingers deep. He spoke in phrases that Abou had heard him practice so that he would not resort to Arabic or French. Now he repeated them with ridiculous emphasis, and girls could not stifle giggles when he said “cow dung” with the deliberation of a magistrate.
Adema handed out potatoes. Women received them and spirited them to their plots as if they were large, delicate eggs. Maïmouna cradled hers to her enormous breasts, pursed her lips and encouraged them in a motherly voice. Laughter and excitement masked conspiratorial whispers.
“Mallik! Come help me plant,” Adema said when she finished.
“I’m giving out the fertilizer,” he told her.
She muttered something that Abou didn’t catch as he carried his mother’s allotment along the narrow plot margins. Twice he leapt across plots and women shook their hoes at him. His mother was talking with Grandmother Jeynaba when Mallik started giving out fertilizer. She handed Abou the pick and rushed to where the chaos of boubous was most furious.
Abou stood in the empty plot and cut a potato with his mother’s old brown knife. The potato was thick and hard and the knife went through it with a crisp sound. He dipped two more slices into his mother’s plate of ashes and pressed them, eyes up, into the wet ground.
“Adema’s right! This isn’t enough to do any good,” said his grandmother, looking from her handful of granules to the long trench of open earth. “Typical.”
“She told Mallik,” Abou's mother said. “Oh, she killed him. You saw his face?”
“She’s jealous of Rama. She said Mallik gave her the money.”
“Nooo. He should know not to step into the women’s stuff.”
“Look! They're getting into it.”
Abou craned to see. Adema and Mallik were in Adema’s plot, both stabbing the earth with quick movements. Abou could just hear the low buzz of Adema’s voice, and imagined her harangue against useless bureaucrats, rudeness, and a trunk full of misused gold. Mallik’s words didn’t carry -Abou heard only ‘sucked dry’.
“So he did lend Rama the money!” Abou's mother said.
Then Adema yelled louder, Abou could see her teeth flash across the garden. Oh, she could speak! Abou’s stomach tightened. He knew Mallik couldn’t match her with all his Arabic and French. Mallik was still kneeling, his head bent stubbornly over something in his hands. Suddenly he sprang up with a yell and a knife.
“He’s going for her!” someone gasped.
“It’s brought blood!”
Maïmouna and two others surged toward the plot. With his left hand, Mallik grabbed the right holding the knife and yelled. Before Abou could think, he was skipping over the newly-sown earth, overturning a tub of water. When he reached the corner he looked down and saw his mother’s old brown knife still gripped tightly in his fist. But Mallik was out the gate, chased by Adema and another woman.
“He cut himself,” said a girl with slack lips. She pointed to a dark stain on the ground and a reddish blotch on a white slice of potato.
“Lie-lie-la-lie,” keened an old woman.
“Look! That’s his hand there.”
“It’s a judgment on him,” Maïmouna said. “Turning on Adema like he did. The garden guards its own!”
“Where are they going?”
“To wash it away,” said the slack-mouthed girl. “The blood, the river.”
Abou followed her gaze and glimpsed, against the horizon above the sea of headscarves, a man’s silhouette racing toward the river.
“No, to the clinic.” Maïmouna pointed in the opposite direction, to three people marching to the clinic -a man followed by two women.
Then they went back to planting and arguing -the cause, the meaning, the remedy. One old woman insisted on ashes for a knife wound. Abou walked back to his mother’s plot.
“Abou, you flew over there!” she laughed. “Is your friend Mallik murdered?”
“Not badly, I think,” Abou said.
“Then take that bennwar you knocked over and fill it up again.”
His grandmother was smoothing dirt over her potato slices. They looked like children’s faces nestled in their beds. She stood up straight with an “Eh!” Abou saw the trace of one of her triumphant smiles.
“It will be a good harvest,” she said.
“But you said it wasn’t enough fertilizer,” he said.
“Abou!” said his mother sharply.
“Oh, I don't know about fertilizer,” said the old woman. She rinsed her hands in the water left in her basin. “In the old days, Father spilled a goat’s blood for the fields, but this-” She nodded toward Adema’s plot. “I told you a Haratin in the garden is good luck.”
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