The three of us in attendance excused ourselves and went outside.
On Mr. Fish’s porch, looking at the expanse lying before us—the laborers’ conjoined houses and the empty school; the oil fields with structures jutting into the air delivering black smoke; pipelines running in all directions; our huts in the distance, undignified and slumped on their knees—we deliberated on whether we should accept Mr. Fish’s terms. We wished Thula were there, but we couldn’t write to her and await her counsel: our friends in prison longed to sleep on their beds, eat warm meals, wrap their legs around their wives, and watch their children do homework by the bush lamp. It was for their sake that we agreed to walk back into the house and shake Mr. Fish’s hand, and lay down our matches and machetes. We would give Pexton three months to start giving us our percentages, in cash, delivered on the same day of the month, every month. We would give them a year to start cleaning the river and the air and the land, and if they couldn’t fully clean them, at least stop poisoning them so they might recover by themselves.
The overseer agreed to everything. Of course, he said, smiling. We smiled back. One of us laughed. Was it truly happening? Were we really making a deal with Pexton?
—
The interpreter took a photo of us shaking hands with Mr. Fish as the oilman beamed, grabbing our hands with both of his. We looked at each other, flattered and amused at his excitement. The fact that we had the power to make an important man from America so happy surprised us. After the handshakes we took a group photo, Sonni and Mr. Fish in the center, shaking hands, the three of us and the Sweet One and the Cute One on either side of them. The interpreter, as he took the photo, said it would be sent to newspapers in New York to serve as a testament to the power of dialogues.
Mr. Fish rang a bell, and a servant, dressed in black and white, appeared.
He nodded as Mr. Fish spoke. In less than a minute he returned with a tray of glasses, all filled halfway. We each took a glass. Mr. Fish held his glass up in his hand and said something in his American-accented English that sounded nothing like the English we’d spoken with our teachers at the Lokunja school. His interpreter laughed at whatever he’d just said and we all laughed too. We lifted our glasses high, to imitate the American, grinning like giddy goats. Mr. Fish clinked his glass against Sonni’s, and we began clinking our glasses against each other’s. Mr. Fish drank whatever was in his glass in one gulp. We looked around at each other and did the same. The taste made us crunch our faces, which made Mr. Fish burst out laughing, and soon we were all laughing hard, forgetting we were in the house of an American oilman. We walked out of the house that evening with three bottles of the drink, his gift to us. That night we shared it with all the men of Kosawa as we recounted the story of the meeting, enjoying this moment of unity that had long eluded us. We told ourselves not to celebrate quite yet, but we were prepared, finally, to exhale.
That all happened about six years before Thula returned home.
In that time, we did nothing to hurt Pexton. Oil spilled on our land and we did nothing. Our children coughed and we did nothing. We sat on the bus to Lokunja with the laborers and we did nothing to them. We’d given Pexton our word. We kept it.
We waited for them to keep theirs.
It was while we were waiting that one of us was awakened one night by the groans of his pregnant wife. She did not respond when he asked her what was wrong. Her eyes were wide open, though her mouth was tightly shut. Our friend hurried to his mother’s room and roused her. When his mother also failed in imploring his wife to open her mouth, our friend ran to get the womb doctor, who, with one touch of the belly, said that the baby was coming. The womb doctor touched the belly again, and corrected herself: the babies were coming. His mother began boiling water. Our friend pulled his spear from under his bed and started sharpening it on the veranda, eager to go hunting when the sun rose, grateful for the chance to be far from his hut when his wife finally opened her mouth.
He thought about his babies throughout the day in the forest, and we ridiculed his sudden inability to engage in conversation. On our way home, he imagined, as we all did, that when he returned the babies would be there and it would be a long night of drinking in his hut. But the babies hadn’t arrived when we returned. By dusk, his wife’s silence had turned to groans, grunts by the next morning, shrieks by the time he returned from the forest the next evening. It was then we realized, even before a medium arrived from the first of the five sister-villages to confirm it, that Jakani and Sakani were returning.
—
We don’t know why the twins chose the womb of our friend’s wife over the wombs of all the other fertile young women of Kosawa, though we imagined it had something to do with the fact that she was copiously busted and extra wide of hips. Those hips were not of much help, however, as the
