At the next celebration of his reign, while soldiers and government workers and schoolchildren of all ages stood at attention, sweating on a scorching afternoon, His Excellency gave a speech christening himself the father of the nation, the lion whose mere presence causes all creatures to lie prostrate. Anyone planning to kill him was attempting to hurt his children by rendering them fatherless, he said. Their punishment would be singular. They would be sliced and stewed and served to him in a silver bowl.
You rise up against me, he declared, and you’ll never rise again.
Six years after Thula’s return home, we had yet to set a date for Liberation Day. We still went on trips to inform and awaken, traveling to some places multiple times, but few people, outside of packs of intrigued youths, showed strong interest in our cause. Our time will come, Thula said to us as we drove back to Kosawa enervated, but her words did little to assuage our doubts and our fears that nothing would ever change.
There were months when we visited no villages, our belief in the mission floundering wildly, but hers never did—she was born a missionary for fairness and could live as nothing but a believer. Her earnings from her job, whatever she didn’t spend on her expenses and on her mother and her new father, went to helping her friends and relatives care for their children, and funding our travels. She bought books for our children, and let the little ones climb into her car and honk the horn on the steering wheel. Never forget that it’s for them we’re doing everything, she told us. When we asked her how long we’d keep at it before giving up on the revolution dream, she said: We’ve planted seeds in minds, the seeds are bound to germinate and spread; we only need to be patient, people will awaken. When she said such things—often, as we sat in one of our parlors, pondering all that had come to pass since Konga asked us to rise—she seemed a new version of herself. A soft aura of madness encircled her, as if something of Konga’s now lived within her.
—
Our guns might have remained hidden in the forest forever, awaiting Thula’s blessing for us to use them, if one of us hadn’t returned from visiting a relative in another village to find his son dead.
We could not say if this child died of Pexton’s poison—he didn’t have a cough or a high fever, but he had been vomiting for two days. What we could say was that he might have been spared if Pexton’s poison hadn’t caused the herbs used to cure stomach ailments to wither. We could say, without equivocation, that Pexton killed him the day our soil became too toxic to sustain the medicinal herbs that once grew in abundance.
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
