Ch. 2: The Palm Branch and the Rain
That night Ananse could not sleep. He lay on his mat and stared at the roof and listened to the crickets, and every cricket seemed to be saying “python, python, python.” Beside him Aso lay awake too, but she was not worrying. She was thinking.
Before dawn, she sat up.
“Husband,” she said. “Go and cut a branch from the palm tree. A long one, the longest you can find. And cut some string creeper as well, the tough kind that grows by the stream.”
Ananse sat up too. “What for?”
Aso told him. And as she told him, a slow smile spread across Ananse's face, until by the end of it he was grinning so widely that his children woke up and asked what was so funny.
“Nothing,” said Ananse. “Your mother is a genius. Go back to sleep.”
Onini the python lived by the river, in a place where the grass grew tall and the water moved slowly and the air was warm all day. He liked to lie stretched out on the bank in the sun, and if anyone passed by he would lift his head and say, “Have you ever seen anybody so long? I don't think you have.”
That morning, Ananse came walking along the path to the river carrying a palm branch over his shoulder and a coil of creeper on his arm. And as he walked, he talked. Loudly. To nobody.
“Ah, she is wrong,” he said. “She is wrong, she is wrong. My wife Aso is a sensible woman, but this time she is wrong. Longer than him? Never. Not this branch. I told her so. I said, ‘Aso, you are mistaken.’ And she said, ‘Kwaku, I am not.’ And I said, ‘You are.’ And she said—”
“Who is wrong?” said a deep, lazy voice from the grass. “About what?”
“Oh! Onini! Good morning. I did not see you. You are so still, I took you for a fallen log.”
“I am not a log,” said the python, offended. “What is this argument?”
Ananse sighed and put down his palm branch. “It is a foolish thing. A family matter. I am embarrassed to speak of it. My wife and I were talking last night, and your name came up. I said that you were the longest creature in all the forest. And Aso said, ‘No. That palm branch over there is longer than Onini.’ Imagine! I said she was wrong. She said she was right. We argued until the fire went out. So this morning I cut the branch to settle the matter. But now that I am here,” and he looked at the python and then at the branch, and he scratched his head, “now that I am here, I am not so sure. That is a very long branch.”
Onini lifted his head higher. “Longer than me? Nonsense. Lay it down. I will show you.”
“Oh, you don't need to trouble yourself,” said Ananse.
“Lay it down!”
So Ananse laid the palm branch down on the grass beside the python, and Onini stretched himself out along it. He stretched and stretched. He pushed his nose up to one end of the branch, and he reached his tail toward the other end, and he strained, and he grunted, but there was always a little bit of branch left over at one end or the other. When his head reached the top, his tail fell short of the bottom. When he wriggled down to reach the bottom, his head slid back from the top.
“It is very difficult,” said Ananse sympathetically, “when the creature being measured keeps moving about. A measurement is no good if the thing measured won't keep still. Perhaps, if you allowed me, I could tie your head to this end, just lightly, just to hold it while you stretch? Then we will know the truth, and I can go home and tell Aso she was wrong.”
Onini thought about this. He thought about Aso being wrong. He liked that thought very much.
“Tie my head, then,” he said. “Quickly.”
So Ananse tied his head to the top of the branch with the string creeper. Then he went down to the tail. “Now stretch,” he said. “Stretch! Further! Ah, you are almost there!” And when the python had stretched as far as he could go, Ananse tied the tail to the bottom of the branch. Round and round went the creeper, until Onini was bound along the palm branch from one end to the other, as straight and snug as a sleeping baby on its mother's back.
“Well?” said Onini. “Am I longer?”
“Onini,” said Ananse, “I must tell you something. You are exactly as long as the branch. Not a finger more, not a finger less. Aso was half right and I was half right, which in a marriage is the best that can be hoped for.”
“Then untie me.”
“Ah,” said Ananse. “That is the other thing I must tell you.”
And he lifted up the palm branch, python and all, and set off for the edge of the sky.
At the top, Ananse laid the branch down before the stool of Nyankonpon.
The elders stopped chuckling. The old man of the Kyidom with very few teeth leaned forward and stared.
“Nana,” said Ananse to the linguist, who said it to the Sky God, “here is Onini, the python. One part of the price.”
Nyankonpon looked at the python for a long time. Then he reached out his hand and touched the branch. “My hand has touched it,” he said, which is how a king says that a thing has been received. “There remains what remains.”
Ananse bowed, and climbed down, and went home. He was very tired, but he was whistling.
“Now,” said Aso the next morning, handing him a calabash, “fill this with water.”
Ananse filled it at the stream. When he came back, Aso gave him a dry gourd as well, the kind with a narrow neck that people use for storing things, and a broad, flat leaf from a plantain tree.
“The hornets,” she said, “are in the bush beyond the cocoyam farm. They have their nest in the old dead tree.”
“Yes,” said Ananse nervously. “I know. I have been stung there. Twice.”
“Then this time,” said Aso, “don't get stung.”
And she told him what to do.
Mmoboro the hornets were not a single creature but many, and they all spoke at once, a buzzing, crackling, cross sort of voice that went up and down like heat shimmer. They were busy that morning, as hornets always are, going in and out of the old dead tree on business of their own. Nobody had ever caught them. Nobody had ever wanted to try.
Ananse crept up through the bush, holding his calabash of water very carefully so as not to spill it. When he was close enough to hear the buzzing turn from busy to suspicious, he stopped. Then he dipped his hand into the calabash and flung the water up into the air over the nest, so that it came pattering down on the hornets like the first drops of a storm.
Then, quickly, he poured the rest of the water over his own head, and held the plantain leaf over himself like an umbrella, and came running out of the bush, dripping, shouting, “Rain! Rain! Mmoboro, it is raining! Don‘t you see it’s raining? Why are you still out in it? You will be soaked to the wings!”
The hornets stopped. They felt the wet on their backs. They saw Ananse, streaming with water, crouching under his leaf. They began to buzz in alarm.
“Where shall we go?” they cried. “Our tree is old, it lets the rain in!”
“Here,” said Ananse, holding out the dry gourd. “Come in here, where it is dry. I will keep you safe until the rain passes. Quickly, quickly, before the big drops come!”
“Thank you, thank you,” buzzed the hornets, and they streamed into the gourd, every last one of them, in a long humming line, until the gourd was full and singing.
And Ananse took a plug of soft grass and pushed it into the gourd's neck, and stopped it up tight.
“Thank you, thank you,” said the gourd, more muffled now. “Is it still raining?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ananse, tucking the gourd under his arm. “It is going to rain for a very long time.”
He took the hornets up to Nyankonpon that same afternoon. The Sky God held the singing gourd to his ear, listened, and smiled. “My hand has touched it,” he said. “There remains what remains.”
The old man of the Kyidom with very few teeth did not say anything this time. But he moved his stool a little further away from the gourd, just in case.