How Beautiful We Were(41)

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We felt for Woja Beki the more we learned about how well he took care of the Sick One: holding a bucket under his mouth for every vomit, wiping him down with a cold cloth when his temperature rose. We knew he was diligent not because he had any experience caring for a sick man—none of our fathers knew how to care for their sick selves, never mind the sick selves of others—but because he understood what would happen to Kosawa if the Sick One were to die our hostage. We heard the women whispering about it, that Woja Beki could have escaped Kosawa if he wanted to, that if he’d sat down with his family to plot their freedom, they could have found a way to get one of his sons to run to Gardens—surely, there had to be a moment in the deepest hour of night when all the eyes set to monitor them were shut. Once he got to Gardens, the son would have been able to send a message to officials in Lokunja or to Bézam. The government would have sent soldiers to rescue the Pexton men and return Woja Beki to his rightful place.

Our fathers joked about how they’d shrunk him from a leopard to a rabbit, but we knew that couldn’t be the sole reason why he’d become so abased. We hadn’t seen him since the day he misled the soldiers, but we imagined he was flashing his teeth less, contemplating his love of Kosawa more, a love that years ago evaporated somewhere in his brick house, or was subsumed by the basket of cash we hear sits under his bed, only to return the first night he spent on the floor of Lusaka’s back room. This renewed love for Kosawa was at his core now; it was evident in actions driven by a cognizance that his title would be worth nothing if he were reinstated as the head of a village of slaughtered men and grieving widows and dying children. We’d never considered Woja Beki a wise man, but his behavior after his release from Lusaka’s hut was the opposite of foolish.



When we asked our older siblings if they agreed with us, they said that, yes, Woja Beki had opened his door to the Sick One because he wanted to be one of us again. They said that days spent isolated in his house, sitting by himself on his sofa—the clock above his head ticking, no one coming to visit, no one for him to visit—had forced him to consider his ways and admit that no amount of wealth was worth the indignity of being an outcast in his own village. A couple of our uncles, though, when we asked them what they thought of this theory, had laughed and said we shouldn’t be fooled: Woja Beki had no capacity for such wisdom, he was still a snake. Who knew what he would do or say if the government were ever to find out about what the village had done to the Pexton men?



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The government would never find out from any of us, that much was certain—we had sworn an unbreakable oath. The night after our fathers allowed Woja Beki to return home, they assembled our families in our parlors and brought out the umbilical cord bundle. Taking turns, we held it, this clump of our umbilical cords and those of our siblings and our fathers and their siblings and our paternal grandfathers and their siblings and relatives, all the way back to the time when our ancestors first established our bloodline in a valley wherein a big and a small river flowed. The umbilical cords, shriveled and reeking, had turned black and brown through the years and generations, but with every addition to the bundle it appeared even more alive, binding us more tightly to our past and our future. We knew what it signified—the essence of our existence. To hold it and make a declaration was to be aware that our words would walk with us for the rest of our days. Which was why our fathers only brought it out when there was an oath to be made whose keeping would determine the course of our families’ future.

On that night, we all took turns holding the bundle and swearing by all it represents. We swore we would never tell anyone about what our fathers had done. We promised we would say nothing to any relative or friend visiting the village. If we were to leave the village to go to the big market, or to visit one distant relative or another in any of the five sister-villages or two brother-villages, we would have nothing to offer them except a smile and conversations about anything but Pexton. If asked about the latest news from Kosawa, we would respond that all was well, except for the usual sorrows, a new illness here, another death there, but of course life intersperses suffering with joys, so there was also this upcoming wedding, and that birth celebration scheduled for next month. We would never tell anyone anything about the captivity until someday in the far future, when the story had spread because it could no longer be contained, the same way a pregnancy was bound to be revealed no matter how well garments had hidden it in the early months; by then, all would be well with us, and the story’s revelation would be of little consequence. And if we had to be the ones to tell it, the story we would tell—only if we absolutely had to—would be a story of how our fathers did what the Spirit had commanded them to do.



With the bundles in our hands, we asked the Spirit to curse us in the worst possible ways if we were to break the oath and, in so doing, bring calamity upon our families and our village. If we were girls, our wombs would close up and we would be childless, worthless women for the rest of our days. If we were boys, our strength and manhood would desert us; we’d be the most woeful things that had ever walked this earth.

We passed the umbilical-cord bundles to the next person in our families after we’d said our oath, and we closed our eyes and listened as the next person took the oath.