Cha forced me to sleep in his bed.
The summer I tried to be a missionary in Togo, I stayed in Cha’s village one long weekend. I protested, but he disappeared and left me wrapped in mosquito netting on a wooden board in his cinderblock house with a dying kerosene lamp I didn’t know how to operate, my stomach swollen with bowl after bowl of rice and tomato sauce he had given me to keep eating. In the middle of the night I blundered out to relieve myself, and a pig squealed in my face in the pitch black.
I tried to plough his millet field by hand the way he showed me, but after ten minutes, he took the hoe back, just a wooden handle attached to iron the shape of a bent arm so you had to lean forward with each chop to reach the ground. I sat at the edge of the grass. When he came back, I displayed the blisters on my palm proudly. He pressed his against mine and showed off huge yellow callouses in the same places. As we walked home across the fields at golden hour, those callouses scraped my T-Shirt when he stopped my chest, stock-still. Then he took off running, and I followed. Rain showered from the sunny sky just as we reached his house.
Another day, we found a chameleon crossing our path, a leafshock against clay red. Cha stood back. Its eyes swiveled toward my fingers as I picked it up gingerly, and black spots appeared on its skin that flashed white. I carried the chameleon arm’s length to Cha’s house, where I half-sealed it in a ziplock bag to give to the missionary’s kids. She explained that people there view a chameleon in your home as death. She said Cha assured her he believed in Jesus now though. This is one of my callouses.
