Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

134 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Terez Rose
in the moment, singing and swaying with the music. The thunderous
drumbeats echoes off the walls and fills the building, resonating in
her head. She feels far from home right then. And she’s glad.
The next morning, over Christmas muffins, scrambled eggs,
and coffee, Kate can’t stop raving about the pageantry of the mass.
“I know dance,” she tells Carmen and Henry. “Those women were as
good as professionals. They had such incredible energy, such finesse.”
“You think that was great,” says Henry as he butters his third
muffin, “you should check out my village on New Year’s Eve. They throw
a hell of a party. There’s a troupe of women—priestesses, actually—who
come to the village every year and perform in a special dance ceremony
to usher in the new year.”
“Ooh, I’d love it. And your village is on the way back to my town.”
She turns to Carmen. “You game to check it out?”
“Count me in.”
They arrive at Henry’s on New Year’s Eve day. Henry’s village
is a roadside clearing of mud and wattle huts with rusting corrugated
tin roofs, surrounded by dusty, open yards. Henry comes out of the
corps de garde, an open-sided thatched structure in the center of the
village, to greet the two women. He brings them over and introduces
them to the village chief and some of the elders. Kate and Carmen join
them in the corps de garde and sit back to drink beer.
The village feels like the Africa of the Peace Corps brochures.
Gone is traffic, commerce, stress. Children band together and race
around in yards kept scrupulously free of foliage. Hens peck at the
dirt. The peaceful silence is periodically broken by a burst of scolding
coming from one of the cuisines, a structure adjacent to the house that
serves as its kitchen. The children skitter away from the women and
resume their play. They creep up closer to the corps de garde and when
Kate twists around to look at them, they run away shrieking. When
she turns her back, they repeat the exercise.
After they finish their beers, Henry shows Kate and Carmen
his home, a mud and wattle structure like the other dwellings in
the village. Inside the dim living room, a woman sweeps the dirt
floor, nodding her greeting. “Living room, bedroom,” Henry calls
out, pointing to the sparsely furnished rooms with crumbling walls
that allow light to peek in through cracks. “Cuisine to the right of the
house, latrine out back.”