Wool-Bound

Of all the ways I’d imagined dying, perishing on the slopes of  Semien Mountains had never crossed my mind. I walked up the slopes holding a thick  weathered stick, its surface smoothed by years of herding sheep. The holes on the trail yawned beneath my boots, musky scent of flock clung to the air mingled with the earthy breath of wet shrubs. I could hear the bleating now, soft and scattered. I paused my weary legs to laugh at the thoughts crowding my mind.

I imagined the faces of the people at 42nd Bells & Co. Avenue, where I worked as an insurance agent: clean, manicured, pressed in designer suits, watching me clamber up in sackcloth. It was the same sackcloth my father had hand-sewn for me before the sickness took his strength. I resumed walking towards the flock as my thoughts no longer eased my mind. They stirred trouble and made me shudder. 

For weeks, I hadn’t slept well or finished a bowl of Sam’s porridge which he made so well. Sam, my father’s housekeeper, kept the house running while the rest of us fell apart. The cause of my restlessness? My sister’s devotion to my father’s sheep and her refusal to embrace the allures of the city. She called the sheep foremothers and scribbled poems about them in the margins of old newspaper clippings. She stayed home herding them, harvesting cotton, and driving thousands of miles in our ragged old truck to factories in need of cheap, fresh sheep cotton. 

“Come to the city,” I once told her. “Wine and dine with men and women whose accents are as thick as their perfume. Live in tall penthouses, the ones we drew and coloured red at school. But they are not steep and haunting like we imagined. They are clean and bold, built with steel and cement. They are not red, but slate, ochre, ocean blue, taupe.” She cursed and called me a dissolute daughter. She said I was plotting our father’s death, planning to sell the sheep, fire the housekeeper, and burn the cotton stalls.  She claimed the mountains had birthed us, fed us, clothed us and I was trying to bury them under perfume and concrete. When Father finally got sick, she stopped talking to me. 

Prince, my father’s Border Collie barked as I reached the wooden fence my grandfather built to stop the sheep from rolling down the mountain. My sister stood naked among them, dancing to The Beatles playing on my father’s cassette player. Prince wagged its tail, and my sister moved like a stream, howling the tune. The truth lay bare before me and I realized my sister had gone mad. Not quietly, like my father, who had slipped into the darkness of his sickness with dignity, but loudly, flailing under the mountain’s moon, dancing to ghosts on cassette.  

I turned down the trail, my legs wearier. I craved the warm, delirious escapism of the city’s nights. The knowing glances of women in rooftop bars, as their lipstick-stained smiles called to me. And I heed them, more often than not. I longed to be far away, not just from my mad sister and my father’s sheep, but from a deeper fear: that madness might be a birthright.