How Beautiful We Were(115)

We did not know whom to feel sorry for the most when we heard this—ourselves, or Thula. Our friend’s lips quivered as she spoke, but she would not allow herself to cry. This is not over, she said repeatedly. But we knew it was over. We had lost our last chance at restoration. Filing a lawsuit against the government and Pexton in a Bézam court would be ludicrous. The people who owned those courts were the same people who had given our land to Pexton. The judges who would rule in our lawsuit might be the same ones who had condemned the Four to death. We had no chance at justice there.



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THROUGHOUT THE VILLAGE THAT DAY and the next, it was as if an eternal night had settled and the sun would never come up. We went to our farms, and to the forest, and to the market, but our thoughts were seldom on what our hands were doing, or where our feet were going. Our minds swirled with questions: How could this be? What do we do now?

With every subsequent visit to Kosawa, Thula seemed to be sinking deeper into the same darkness that had consumed her when her father vanished. She spoke little and she wouldn’t eat, though we offered to make her favorite meals. When the children ran to her, she looked at them blankly. She and the Five sat in the square late into the night, whispering. It was from one of the wives of the Five that we learned that there was even worse news than Thula had told us: Pexton had filed a lawsuit against Kosawa, demanding that Kosawa pay its lawyers, since it was our fault that they’d needed to hire lawyers. If we lost that lawsuit, whatever we owned of worth would go to Pexton.

Thula told us at a meeting that we had no reason to worry about the lawsuit: no judge would ever place such a punishment on us. Pexton was only doing it to warn those who would dare follow in our footsteps—they didn’t want villagers thinking they could rise against corporations with impunity. “Do you really believe an American judge will side with us and not allow Pexton to take everything we own?” someone shouted. Hadn’t a judge just doomed us to perpertual terror? Thula did not seem to know what she believed; she spoke without conviction. We heard little hope in her voice when she said that she’d had many conversations with her friends in America, friends who still believed in her dream, and she had also spoken to Carlos. They had all reminded her that there were other courts we could take Pexton to, courts in Europe whose jobs were to protect people from their governments. But who among us still trusted courts?



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If we were walking around with broken hearts, our friends the Five were sitting in one spot, sharpening machetes in their heads. In the week after Thula told us the news, whenever we happened upon any of them, they had no patience for inconsequential conversations—they were in a hurry to get on to the next phase of Kosawa’s war. Though their zeal for Kosawa always awed us, we never wondered why they were the ones to dedicate their lives to Thula’s ideals. Even as children, they were the most aggrieved of us, the ones who kept count of the number of spills in a given month, the ones who helped their fathers and uncles carry picks and shovels whenever the time came to dig a new grave. Yet they were the ones who rarely cried at the news of a death. We could tell, even then, that their pain was bound to find a violent form of release. As we got older, they bonded closer to each other by virtue of this shared determination to save Kosawa.

Like us, they’d dreamed of dying in Kosawa after living lives unfettered by toxic matter and the fists of men with no regard for our worth. Unlike us, however, they couldn’t accept that such a destiny might never come to be. We admired their wives, who stayed with them, though we knew, because we were friends with them, that their marriages were full of silence and uncommunicated agony, circumscribed by the worst kind of loneliness.



If we had known how close they were to an explosion, we would have said something—anything—to prevent it, but how could we have known? In the months after learning of the verdict from America, our hearts were still heavy, but Thula’s visits to the village put little smiles on our faces, even if she was nearly devoid of hope. Most of us had decided to take each day as it came and leave everything to the Spirit. Who knew, Pexton might decide the next day that it had taken all the oil it needed and that the time for it to leave had come. But the Five—they entertained no such fantasies. While we were beginning our long, slow march toward resignation, the Five were making plans.



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THULA WAS IN THE VILLAGE the day the Five exploded.

Nothing about that morning was extraordinary. We sent our children to school. We went to work. Some of us entertained relatives visiting from other villages. A wedding was coming up in a few days—one of our young men was marrying a girl in one of the sibling-villages—and the women of Kosawa busied themselves talking about the newest girl who would be moving to Kosawa. Maybe it wouldn’t be long before all the huts filled up again, they said; may the Spirit be thanked for love that causes blindness.

Thula was excited about the wedding too. It was the first time she looked happy in the months since the verdict—seeing her eyes aglow again was like stepping out of a smoky kitchen. She and Sonni and two of the Five attended a meeting at the district office in Lokunja in the afternoon, the details of which Sonni was going to tell us at the next village meeting. Thula had dinner with the wife and children of the one of the Five in whose hut she always stayed. After dinner she helped the children with their homework. She laughed hard when one of them read to her an essay about why every country ought to be like America—it sounded like a place where everyone had everything. Thula went to bed smiling. The truth about what happened after that, we’ll never know.