How Beautiful We Were(15)

On the eleventh evening, Mama and Bongo take turns sleeping and sitting outside until the sun rises and the dew dries. The next night, I cry in the darkness, begging Papa not to leave me, to please hurry back home to me. In the morning, Mama rises up with bloodshot eyes. She walks to Gardens and takes the bus to Lokunja, to the big market. She returns with fresh produce and kills two of our chickens. She makes a meal of grilled chicken and boiled green plantains with eggplant and tomato sauce on the side, Papa’s favorite—she’d had a dream in which Papa returned and asked for something to eat. When Papa does not return, Mama offers the food to those who come to tell us that Papa is surely on his way back, shaking their heads sadly as they rip off meat from bones with their teeth and lick their fingers before asking for a cup of water to wash down the meal.



By the fifteenth morning, Yaya can barely climb out of bed. Mama wipes her down because getting to the bathroom is too long a walk—first age attacked her legs, now heartache is finishing the job. More neighbors and relatives arrive to comfort us in the following days. Bongo visits the families of the other men to assure them that, though hope might be frail, everyone has to do whatever they can to stay strong. At school I avoid all eyes. I sit alone during recess, having no need for hollow words of comfort.

Twenty days come and go, twenty nights of nightmares.

Worse than the waiting is the punishing nature of time, its ruthless inflexibility. Our appetites disappear before us. What sort of news should we prepare ourselves for?



* * *



—

Woja Beki’s son Gono arrives from Bézam on the thirtieth day.

I’m returning home from school when I see the car he hired in Lokunja dropping him off. I hurry home to alert everyone. We all run to Woja Beki’s house, Mama holding her belly, Juba on my back. Even Yaya, who has barely eaten in days, picks up her cane and hauls what little is left of her body. Because, surely, it has to be good news. Or not the worst of news, at the very least. Gono hasn’t returned with a carful of dead men, so it must be that Gono came to tell us why Papa’s return has been delayed.

But Gono does not know where Papa is.

The Six arrived safely in Bézam two days after they left the village, Gono tells us. He was expecting them, because his father had sent him a message through the district office, so he went to the bus stop to meet them. He hugged them and took them to his house, where his wife fed them her special cocoyam porridge with smoked porcupine, and gave them mats to sleep on in the living room. His wife served them potatoes and fried eggs for breakfast, and then the men got on a bus with him to go to the government office, their bellies filled, their eyes bright as they gaped at quick-walking, fast-talking crowds, cars as far as they could see, houses sitting atop other houses, some structures so high they had to lift up their heads to see the roofs.



“I left them in the children-affairs office to meet with two directors of health I’d arranged for them to talk to—I’d been thinking that if the government could send some medicine to Kosawa, that might help,” Gono says. “Then I went to my office, came back to get them two hours later, but they weren’t there.”

Our gazes upon him are cold as he speaks, standing in his father’s parlor, encircled by us, the fathers and mothers and wives and children and brothers and sisters of six most likely dead men. The rest of the village is outside, wondering about the fate of their cousins and nephews and friends and neighbors.

“You went to get them after their meeting and you didn’t find them because they had vanished like dust, is that what you’re telling us?” Bissau’s father asks.

Gono nods.

“Vanished how?” Bongo asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Do not lie to us,” Bissau’s wife, Cocody, shouts. She is pregnant, her belly bigger than Mama’s.

“I swear it’s the truth. The directors in the children-affairs office said they met with them, then sent them on their way. I thought they’d be waiting for me in front of the building, but I went all around the building, over and over, and I couldn’t find them.”

“You sold them to the government,” a missing man’s brother yells.

“I’d never—” Gono cries.



“You killed them,” a voice behind me shouts.

“Kill my own friends? Why?”

“Grown men don’t get lost.”

“They don’t. That’s why…that’s why this situation…I just don’t understand….”

“Tell us the truth, Gono,” a mother cries. “Please, tell us the whole truth.”

“I swear to you all on every last ancestor,” Gono says, bending to swipe his index finger on the floor, lick the dust on the finger, and point it to the sky, “I swear upon all that I am that the government people promised me our brothers left their office alive.”

Wives and daughters and mothers begin wailing, their voices flying through the double doors of Woja Beki’s house, over the apple trees in his compound, along the path that leads to Gardens, through the supervisors’ offices and the school Pexton built for the children there, past their clinic, into the meeting hall where the laborers gather on many evenings to reminisce about the distant homes they left behind to work for Pexton, onto the vast, grassless field on which stand structures of metal spewing fire and smoke, and down into the wells, where they become one with the oil.