Chapter Two
The Track
She was eleven the day she decided she could beat him.
“Race me,” she said. “Mango tree and back.”
“I am an old man.”
“Then I’ll win.”
Her father considered this the way he considered everything, as if it had been submitted in writing. Then he was gone — not down the road, which was the only sensible way to the mango tree, but sideways, through the goat pens, under Mama Osaro’s washing lines, over a fence she had never seen anyone climb, scattering hens in every direction. By the time she understood what was happening, the race was already lost.
He was at the tree when she got there, hands on his knees, breathing hard, grinning like a boy.
“You cheated!”
“I navigated.”
“There’s a ROAD!”
“The lane is for the stadium,” her father said. “The Ridge belongs to the cunning.”
She shoved him. He did not move at all. He laughed.
That was the fifth.
The track sat below the village, six lanes of red dirt beaten hard by more feet than anyone could name. There was a wooden stand on the home straight that leaned a little, and a finish post gone silver from the weather. Her father walked the lanes at first light most mornings, slowly, looking down, the way a farmer walks a field. Sometimes he crouched and pressed the dirt with his thumb. He never said what he was checking for.
By the time she was seventeen she trained there every morning. The sound of it was her footfalls and her breath and nothing else, the mist still on the lanes, the village above them not yet fully awake.
Except for the humming.
Her father hummed while he timed her. The same tune, always — some old Highland song, four bars of it, slightly wrong. It had probably been right once, years ago, and then worn into its current shape like a path. He hummed it through every drill, eyes on the watch.
“You’re ruining my splits,” she told him, hands on her hips, chest heaving.
“If you can hear me,” her father said, “you are not running hard enough.”
She went again. Somewhere off the bend the tune slipped under her heartbeat and she couldn’t hear him anymore.
The only person who teased her father was Cheta.
Cheta kept the grounds. He was old in a way that seemed permanent, as if he had been issued to the track along with the lanes, and he carried a rake in one hand and a small cloth-bound book in the other. He stood at the rail most mornings, and he and her father argued the way other men breathed.
“Slow track today.”
“The track is fine. Your eyes are slow.”
“In my day we ran on worse dirt.”
“You ran on excuses.”
“I beat you on excuses, then.”
Her father took a moment with that one. “Twice. In forty years.”
“A man remembers his harvests,” Cheta said.
Then Dara came down the straight, and both old men stopped talking. They always did. They never decided to; it just happened to them, every time, like weather.
Cheta licked his pencil and wrote her split in the little book. He had books like it going back longer than she had been alive. She had asked him once what he did with all the numbers. He said somebody had to keep them. She had not thought to ask why.
One evening she came home early from the track and stopped in the doorway.
The radio was playing. In the kitchen her father was dancing with her mother. He danced terribly — stiff, deliberate, counting under his breath. “One-two. One-two-three.”
“It’s a dance, not a relay,” her mother said.
“Everything is splits.”
Her mother laughed at him, and there were years inside the laugh, and he turned with the next count and saw Dara in the doorway.
He stopped. Completely. A man that size, frozen by a girl with a kit bag.
Her mother did not stop dancing.
Dara backed out into the yard before the smile got away from her, and stood by the wall, and listened. The radio played on. She could not see whether he kept dancing. She liked to think he did.
When the song finished she counted to twenty and went in. Nobody said anything about it.
Dinner was rice.