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.
I sit against the wall with my brother on my lap, watching my mother cry, her hand on her belly. I yearn to dry her tears, but I yearn even more never to see her tears again. Mama’s crying has known no pause since the ten-day mark—so much does she cry that Yaya warns her that the baby will be born withered up if she doesn’t do a better job of holding on to her liquids. But then, when Mama stops crying, Yaya begins, singing a woeful, discordant solo about the fate of a child born to a dead father, and then Mama is back to crying, and it’s then I walk out of the room, because none of that is of any use to me; I’m better off spending my time thinking about the chances that Papa is alive, the odds that he’ll stay alive until I’m old enough to go to Bézam and rescue him, bring him home, hear him laugh, watch him make Mama happy and teach Juba how to be a man.
“My dear sisters and children, are these tears necessary?” Woja Beki says, rising from his sofa. “Are there any corpses in front of us? What are we crying for? We don’t know the full story yet, but Gono and I will get to the bottom of all this, I assure you.”
Looking at Woja Beki’s face, I wonder why he was ever born, considering there’s an infinite host of unborn begging to be born, considering most of the unborn would be decent people if given a chance at life. Why does the Spirit keep on cursing the world with the existence of the likes of Woja Beki? I hate him for how he lied to Papa, and how he has no shame about lying to us, how he can look at us in our despair and fling untruths at us, rubbing pepper and scorching embers into the very wounds he inflicted.
I hate how, because of him, two days after the meeting in his house, Mama’s grief pushes out our unborn before it is ready for this world. Mama screams when she sees the baby—its body is so small it fits in her palms—and her friends implore her to be strong, to let go, to bear her burdens like a woman. No one tells Mama that there’ll soon be another baby—without Papa sleeping next to her, Mama will never have another baby.
Yaya barely has a voice left to cry with as we walk to the burial ground to bury the baby on top of my grandfather Big Papa. It doesn’t seem that long ago when we walked this same path and crossed the small river to bury Big Papa. I still remember his casket at the front of the processional, balanced on the shoulders of Papa and Bongo and four other men, behind them Mama pregnant with Juba and holding my hand, three women holding Yaya, reminding her of how blessed she was to have shared decades with her husband, the rest of the village behind us, singing: All lives must end, may your life never end.
No one sings for the baby; our baby never had a life. There is no processional to the burial ground. Just a dozen of us. Our baby’s body is not worth making a coffin for—one of our relatives holds it in her arms, wrapped in a blue sheet.
I promise myself that afternoon that someday I will make Woja Beki and his friends in Bézam pay for what they’ve done to my family. I know nothing about how a girl makes men pay for their crimes, but I have the rest of my life to figure it out.
—
Later that week, Bongo leaves with three men to search for Papa and the others in Bézam. Before he goes, Yaya falls to her knees. She begs him not to leave her childless, the worse curse that could befall any woman who’s ever carried a child. Bongo promises her that not only will he return, he’ll return with Papa’s body, with or without life in it.
In Bézam, Bongo and the others sit on the steps of government buildings and promise parcels of land and goats to anyone who can offer them useful information. They sleep in an abandoned roadside shack, and from first light to dusk they walk up to anyone with a semblance of friendliness and ask questions, and give descriptions, but they only get headshakes. They roam a city so massive and frenzied it threatens to rip apart and swallow them at every turn. Eight days after their departure, they return empty-handed.
Still, night after night, Mama and Yaya sit on the veranda waiting for Papa, losing more flesh to despair. They take turns being the weaker woman—some nights Yaya feeds Mama with my help; other nights Mama and I feed Yaya. Many nights I feed them both, with Bongo’s help if he’s home. I force myself to eat a banana whenever I can—one of us needs to have a basic level of strength at all times. Only late at night do I consider my own pain, when I hope everyone is sleeping; it is then
