to use words unless I must. Papa says it’s because I was born with four eyes and four ears and a quarter of a mouth better suited for smiling than for talking. On this evening, I have even less need for words, and I can’t stop grinning, overwhelmed as I am with love for my village and its people. I listen to the laughter of my friends, and watch young men heading to the square to laze and linger and smoke mushrooms—the breeze is perfect for such an activity—and I can think of no better place to have been born in than Kosawa.

The next morning, while eating breakfast, I ask Mama if there’s a plan for what the village will do with the captives, and Mama tells me that Bongo and Lusaka and the rest of the men are going to have a meeting later in the day to map a strategy, what to do if the soldiers don’t soon arrive. My friends and I wonder, on our walk to school, and during recess, what the strategy might be. Would our men kill the captives? I hope they kill Woja Beki first, give him the worst possible death for betraying his own.

After my afternoon chores, I go to the square to meet my friends, and we take turns doing each other’s hair under the mango tree. Again, I let them do the talking. Sometimes they yell at each other, because one friend wants to be heard above another, what they have to say is just too important, which confuses me because listening is far more enjoyable than fighting to be heard. Papa is the only one I ever truly yearned to talk to, because our conversations were like the rustling of leaves, slow and gentle, followed by silence. Now that he’s gone, I prefer to spend more time alone in my head, pondering why the world is the way it is, wondering if the Spirit will one day decide to redesign it.

On the third day of the Pexton men’s captivity, Yaya is taking a nap, and I’m sitting with Mama and Juba in the parlor. We are eating when we hear it, the sound of an engine over the noise of our chewing, something chugging down the narrow road from Gardens.

It’s a sound neither loud nor bothersome, but it needn’t be to be noticeable, because ours is a small village, too little for noises of certain sorts to find hiding places. Even with the oil field nearby, cars seldom arrive in Kosawa, for there is nothing past us, nothing but trees and grass as far as one can travel, which is why the sound of an approaching vehicle is enough to make us pause and change the direction of conversations, speculating on who’s in the car and what they’ve come for.

The food in my mouth turns to garbage.

I look at Mama. Don’t just sit there, I want to scream at her. Stand up. Lock the doors. Lock the windows. Do the triple knot you did the night of the meeting.

Yaya ambles out of her bedroom. She looks at us and walks to the veranda. We all stand up and follow her outside, palm oil from my food dripping down my fingers.

The men of Kosawa are coming out of their huts. They have nothing in their hands as they move toward the car—no machetes, no spears. Bongo is probably at Lusaka’s hut, likely discussing the minutiae of the anticipated conversation with the soldiers. But shouldn’t a conversation with soldiers involve weapons? I’m tempted to ask one of our neighbors this as he rushes to the square. I want to tell him that he’s forgetting something—he and the other men can’t go out to meet soldiers empty-handed even if they’re hoping for a polite conversation—but as more men come rushing past our hut toward the square without weapons, none of them with the countenance of men about to collide with their doom, some of them chatting and laughing with one another, slapping each other’s backs and rubbing their own bellies to show how well their wives had just fed them, I decide a new form of madness has descended upon the men of Kosawa.

What did Jakani and Sakani do to them right after the village meeting? The twins were supposed to prepare them for the soldiers’ arrival and everything that would ensue, but it seems that, somehow, whatever ritual they did had the reverse effect.

Mama and the other mothers step off their verandas after the men disappear from sight. They whisper, holding toddlers by the hand, babies on their hips and backs. In silence, they start walking toward the square. Though confused, we children follow our mothers, for, surely, they wouldn’t ever lead us to doom. We walk in twos and in threes. I inhale, I exhale, half unable, half unwilling to envision the scene we’ll find at the square.

The soldiers are out of their car by the time we arrive. They survey us as we approach. They assess the mango tree under which Konga isn’t napping. Where is Konga? I’d asked Mama, but she’d said that no one knows; no one has seen him since the night of the village meeting. He had sent around word for all the men of the village to meet him in front of Jakani and Sakani’s hut, but he never showed up there, leaving the twins to preside over the rest of whatever happened that night, things we’ll never know.

The soldiers look around at the square—at the dusty front yards and slanted thatch roofs of the huts that surround it; at the paths diverging from it; at the powdered earth rising as Yaya and other grandmothers and grandfathers approach with hands gripping canes, walking at the pace of toddlers, none of them in any rush for life or death.

I’d imagined there would be at least half a dozen soldiers, but there are only two, both dressed

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