When Hoopoes Go to Heaven Read Free Page A

gaps, but
it kept them from wandering off the property and into the road where they might get an accident. What he did know, without even trying, was that it would keep him on the property, too: while going
over it in a vehicle held no fear for him, he wouldn’t be able to cross it on foot.
    Perhaps the gaps in the bridge to the middle of the dam were to keep the cows off it, too.
    A low rumble of distant thunder made something move in the long grass far to the right of the dam, and he saw a skinny young man stand up. He must have been squatting there all the time, so
quiet and still that Benedict hadn’t noticed him. It was Petros, who helped with the cows and lived at the dairy below the other house. The Tungaraza children weren’t supposed to talk
to Petros because he smoked a lot – cigarettes with a funny smell that he made for himself – and people said that he wasn’t quite right in his head.
    Benedict had never spoken to Petros, but he liked him anyway. He liked the way Petros could be still enough to make himself invisible. He had once seen him standing next to the cowshed –
only, even though he had been looking right at the cowshed, he hadn’t seen him at all. Not until Petros had raised his hand to give a small wave of hello. Petros had a way of blending in to
wherever he was so that nobody noticed him, just like a chameleon did, and that was something that Benedict sometimes tried to do himself. If you blended in, nobody noticed that you didn’t
belong.
    Petros gave him a small wave now, and Benedict stood up from the water’s edge to return it. Then Petros made a loud, whooping, whistling noise that brought his dog and a number of cows
from the field beyond the trees. Benedict watched as the cows ambled slowly towards Petros’s repeated call, their udders heavy with milk, speeding up only as a louder, closer clap of thunder
rumbled through the darkening sky. When Petros was sure that the full count of cows was there, he gave Benedict another small wave before taking the cows to the far end of the clearing and leading
them, with his dog, along their well-trodden path through the trees to the shed below the other house.
    Benedict headed home himself, down his own path. Mama didn’t want the children to be out when a storm was on its way, and Benedict knew that she was right to worry. Daniel and Moses, his
two younger brothers, were in the same class at school, and a girl in their class had lost her mother and her baby sister to lightning just last month. The mother had been carrying her baby on her
back when lightning had struck them, and now they were both late, and the girl from his brothers’ class had never had a father, so now she’d gone to live in Siteki with her uncle.
    Safely inside when it came, Benedict found the storm glorious. Deafening thunder rattled the tin roof of the house, making all of them stop what they were doing to cover their
ears with their hands, and lightning stabbed at the sky’s darkness, tearing it open with light. Rain pounded against the tightly-shut windows at the back of the house as though it was
desperate to be let in to shelter from itself, and Mama and Titi, steaming up the kitchen with the evening’s cooking, pushed a towel up against the small gap between the door and the floor to
stop it from finding its way in underneath.
    After the storm passed, the air felt cool and fresh – almost relieved – as if it had picked itself up after something really bad had happened to it, and was ready to start again.
    They were all in their usual places after a delicious supper of stewed goat served with sweet potatoes and pumpkin leaves: the girls and the two younger boys on the two couches in front of the
TV, Mama and Baba talking at the far end of the dining table, and Benedict between the children and the grown-ups, sitting on a big cushion on the floor under the lamp next to the bookshelf, his
back up against the closed front door and a book open in