The weekend after the captivity, while our fathers rested and our mothers did chore after chore, some of us loitered in front of Lusaka’s hut, hoping to hear the Pexton men and their driver crying and begging for their freedom, likely having realized that we would never let any soldiers find them. Our mothers repeatedly yelled at us to leave the area, even as they frequented the hut, to take meals to Lusaka’s wife so that she wouldn’t have to shoulder all the burden of feeding the hostages. We knew our mothers went to Lusaka’s hut not only to deliver the food—we usually ran such errands for them—but also to ask Lusaka’s wife if she could let them into the makeshift cell so they could spit in the Pexton men’s faces, tell them what despicable creatures they were, slap them, kick them, bang their heads against the ground for all the children Pexton had killed.
Lusaka’s wife never allowed our mothers into the room to do it. She said no even to the mothers whose departed children still appeared in their dreams nightly, clothed in white, with tears in their eyes, speaking no words but showing every desperation to understand why they were dead, longing for their mothers but unable to touch them, the space between them never narrowing no matter how hard the mothers ran toward them for a hug and an up-close look to ensure they were well-fed in the world beyond.
“I don’t think it right to mistreat the men on top of what they’re enduring,” Lusaka’s wife told our mothers. Her duty, she said, was to keep them alive by feeding them. Still, she confessed, she couldn’t stop herself from fantasizing about the best way to make them suffer a pain similar to the one she daily bore, the unbearable grief she would do anything to be free of for a moment. She’d thought about putting poison in the captives’ food, she told our mothers, but she didn’t want their deaths to be quick. She’d thought about letting them starve to death, but her husband and the village men would never allow it, and there really wasn’t much she could slyly do to harm the captives, since her husband and the elders had frequent meetings in the parlor to devise their next steps.
It was at one such meeting that the elders decided to forbid all the members of Woja Beki’s household from going past the village entrance or visiting another hut; keeping them at home was the only way to guarantee that they wouldn’t run to Gardens or the district office to report the ongoings. We were in support of the measure when we heard about it—we’d always despised the two children in that house who were our age-mates; we had been excluding them from our games long before the dictate. It grated us how they loved to talk about sitting on “couches” in their “living rooms,” and eating with “ferks.”
As for the rest of the family, the village’s abhorrence of them had so grown that even Woja Beki’s third wife, Jofi—who used to bounce from hut to hut spreading news about whose husband had looked at whose wife in an unsuitable manner, and which young woman would likely never find a husband if she didn’t change her snobbish attitude, and whose sick child would probably be spared, may the Spirit be thanked—even she, who used to visit grieving mothers to swear by her ancestors that her husband would not rest until he found a way to avenge their children’s deaths, speaking in that shrill voice of hers we so hated as she sat in our mothers’ kitchens with a plump body covered with clothes from Bézam, even she had been banished by the entire village, now that our hatred for her family had been laid bare. The days when she used to beam as she dragged her thick ankles around Kosawa, pretending she didn’t know our mothers rolled their eyes after she left their company, those days ended the night of the village meeting. Now she and her co-wives hid from our wrath behind their brick walls unless it was absolutely necessary to step out.
Day and night, our mothers monitored the movements of all three of Woja Beki’s wives with a ferocity we’d never seen before. Their viciousness surprised us, considering they did not have the cold hearts of our fathers and they would never have encouraged such a behavior in us, turning our backs on our friends. But we reminded ourselves that they had buried children, and one of our aunts would bury a child four days after the village meeting, the baby she’d held up to show the Pexton men during the meeting. How many children had Woja Beki’s wives buried? None. How many children in that house drank the well water in its pure state? None. In addition to the clean water Gono brought from Bézam, the family had a machine that removed all impurities from the well water on the occasions when they had to drink it. None
