How Beautiful We Were

to treat a sick man? He was our healer and deliverer from all physical manifestations of malicious spirits; he may have failed in saving our departed friends and brothers and sisters, but with those of us still living he had succeeded. He had lowered our fevers and made ointment for our rashes, given us cough remedies squeezed from leaves, cleaned out poison that had accumulated and was causing pain in our ears. He healed children from villages where the medicine men were mere mortals claiming to be something more—men born in single births, on ordinary days, after routine labors, nothing about them notable. Sakani could heal any sick person except those who the Spirit told him had run out of their allotted time, and even for these dying ones, he offered relief from what might have been an excruciating exit—he gave them a potion that allowed them to go softly and tenderly, unaware they were bidding farewell to this world.

From what we overheard, our men had stood outside Sakani’s hut and called for him to come help the captive. He’d appeared at the door and, in as few words as he was willing to waste, told them that he wouldn’t do it. We couldn’t understand his decision, much as we pondered. Was it because his duty was to heal us, not our enemies? Was that the direction the Spirit gave him when he received his powers at birth? Like his brother, he never explained himself—his ways were not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts.

Visiting each other before dinner that evening, we discussed a new detail we’d learned: when young men had arrived at Woja Beki’s house with the Sick One on the back of one of them, Woja Beki had a bowl of soup ready for the invalid. We heard Woja Beki had assisted the young men in placing the Sick One on his sofa. He’d taken off the Sick One’s socks so his toes might breathe, and unbuttoned his shirt so that air could flow into his chest. One of us mentioned that she’d heard from her sister, whose best friend was a cousin of one of Woja Beki’s daughters, that Woja Beki had spent all night at the Sick One’s side, rejecting his wives’ pleas that he take a rest while they kept watch.

—

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?

—

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