How Beautiful We Were(102)

Our friend wept like a child as he sat in the graveyard watching us dig his son’s final resting place. During the burial, we needed all of our strength to hold his wife back so she wouldn’t jump into the grave after her little boy’s coffin had been lowered in.

The evening after the funeral, our friend decided his wait was over.

Possessed by an evil long lying dormant within him, he went into the forest. He dug out his gun and headed into the bushes at the edge of Gardens. From behind a tree, through his gun’s telescopic sight, he observed three laborers smoking pipes in the late evening’s breeze, chatting about one thing or another that had transpired during their day.

He killed them all.

Shot the first in the head. The second man’s bullet entered his chest before a scream could get off his tongue. The third man he shot in the back as he turned to run away. No one in Gardens heard anything; the gun’s silencer made sure of that. The bodies would not be found until after our friend had fled to the guns’ hiding place. There he stayed as darkness descended, weeping, with the weapon in his hand.

After reburying the gun, he came to one of our huts to tell us what he had done. He was still crying and trembling, his eyes bloodshot. His son was his first child, his only son. His name would die with him if his wife did not give him another boy.



Two of us had already buried children, all of us had carried more miniature coffins than we could count, but something about watching our friend undone by grief made us realize that our time to kill had come. We’d had enough. We’d wept enough. We’d buried enough. Our enemies needed to start paying for our suffering.

We decided on that day that we did not need Thula’s blessing to do what we ought to do for our families. We would continue traveling with her to convince people to come to Liberation Day, and we would start avenging every child Kosawa had lost.



* * *



—

For days after the killings, we waited for soldiers to arrive. They didn’t. Pexton, we later found out, had decided not to make the killings public, afraid of what the news might suggest about its oil field. We later heard that supervisors told the murdered men’s families that the men had died in a drilling accident, that their deaths had been so grotesque their bodies weren’t suitable for viewing. We heard the families were given the remains in coffins sealed by Pexton so that the true cause of the men’s death would never be found—how would Pexton have explained its laborers dying of gunshot wounds when the only people who owned guns were soldiers?

How the news leaked we never knew, but in no time, across the district, people were talking about the killings. Some said one of the laborers was sleeping with a soldier’s wife and the soldier had killed him and his friends in revenge. Others said Pexton had paid soldiers to execute the men for something they’d done to offend the overseer. One of us heard a woman in the big market telling her friend that it was the spirit of someone one of the laborers had betrayed: spirits now had guns. This was closest to the truth, for it is what we’d become: phantoms leaving dead bodies in the dark.

A month after the killings, knowing of a house where two soldiers lived, three of us went there and put holes in their heads while they slept. A government worker at the head office in Lokunja was next, together with his wife, in their car. We knew none of these people. We executed them only to pass a bit of our pain along to our tormentors.



After every kill, those of us who had taken part in the act accepted palm wine from the others. While the killers got drunk, the sober ones pondered whom to kill next.

We were now the spears of our people.



* * *



—

The soldiers came hunting after our twelfth kill. In all eight villages, they searched for guns under beds and in kitchens, ransacked piles of dirty clothes looking for bloodstains. They gathered males in village squares and ordered the murderers to surrender. Their warning was clear: if the murderers did not surrender and were later caught, all the men in the village would be executed. They got no confessions, only silence.

In some villages, they forced dozens of women into their trucks at gunpoint and drove them to Lokunja. There, at the prison, the women took turns lying on their backs in a dim room as the soldiers interrogated them, demanding every detail on the whereabouts of their husbands and sons on the night of the latest killing. Old women, who’d heard only rumors, were struck in the head and promised a protracted death if they did not give detailed enough answers. Young women returned home with accounts of how their underwear was ripped off, their legs pried open by three or more soldiers—some women couldn’t recall how many soldiers had mounted them. The sister of one of us was among them. A cousin, barely out of girlhood but with the body of a woman, was left bleeding for days, her womb in danger of becoming useless. Our wives cried, as did our mothers, fearing their turn would inevitably come. Sonni met with the wojas of the other villages to search for a solution. They went to the district officer, who told them that until the murderers were handed over he couldn’t promise that our people would be left alone.



Thula came from Bézam with a newspaperman. She took him to all the eight villages to talk to the women who had been beaten and raped. The newspaperman asked the women if they thought the killer was from our villages. The women shook their heads; they swore upon their ancestors that no man among our people could do such a thing. Thula swore too, even though she knew. She’d figured it out after the first killings. She’d pleaded with us to stop it, and we had asked her what evidence she had that it was us—wasn’t it possible there were other men in the eight villages with guns? We couldn’t confess the truth even to her; we couldn’t expect her to understand why we had to do it.