There was no way for us to have known that in Kosawa.
No one from our village ever held a proper conversation with a laborer. In our childhood, we never spoke to the children in Gardens, not even when we sat next to them on the bus, full as we were of hatred for them, partaking in the scorn our parents had for theirs. They looked and acted like us, but they weren’t children like us—they were Pexton children. Only these years later did we learn that, though they hadn’t died as often as our friends, they had died still, and their parents had wept too.
The Cute One told us that, after the first half-dozen or so deaths in Gardens, mothers began packing their belongings and fleeing whenever any of their children started coughing. Following the mysterious disappearance of a child a year after we started our assaults, the women and children who remained were gone within days.
By the time we went to Bézam to welcome Thula home, Gardens contained only men, broken and longing for home, yet still holding on to visions of wealth for the sake of those they loved. The school sat empty, teachers gone alongside the children. The only teachers left there were the teachers for the Kosawa school, all of whom were freshly out of their training program. Even Teacher Penda had fled; he left with a goodbye neither for us nor for our nieces and nephews, whom he was teaching at the time. We couldn’t blame him for acting as if we were his enemies: given a chance to burn Gardens to ashes with him in its confines, we wouldn’t have held ourselves back to spare his life.
* * *
—
The laborers’ tribulations became increasingly evident to us after all their wives left. We heard them coughing on the bus, the exact cough Wambi used to have. We saw their eyes watering, like ours used to. We heard about rampant drilling accidents, which resulted in deaths so gruesome body parts had to be packed in plastic bags. Many were the men who survived accidents and returned to their villages with missing arms and legs. We heard reports of their nonaccidental deaths too, but if these deaths were because of the men’s proximity to the poison, we never knew—Pexton would never have wanted us to know. What we knew was that, for every dead laborer at Gardens, there were ten men in distant villages waiting to replace him, raring to partake in the riches from America. Gardens was always full of men dressed in oil-stained uniforms, covered in dust, dreaming on.
In the months after we escalated our attacks, we saw in these men’s eyes how acutely they feared us. They might not have recognized our faces, which we always masked during our incursions and ambushes, but they had to know it was us—no one else in the eight villages hated them as much as we did. If our eyes caught theirs—say, at the bus stop—we looked downward and pretended to examine our fingers. Yet they struggled to breathe around us. How could they not? Their woes were many: they had Pexton standing above them, barking at them to drill to the last drop or go home; we stood in front of them, hiding nothing of our detestation; toxins swam within them, preparing them for a death they could only hope wouldn’t soon arrive. Their wives and children were afar, waiting for money for sustenance, praying to their ancestors to make the men as prosperous as those who had worked at the oil field decades before and returned to build brick houses. Until then, though, their wives lived husbandless lives, their offspring grew up like fatherless children, their parents died without a farewell.
How often did the laborers question the value of their lives? Did they cry at night in regret? Whenever we saw one of them at the bus stop with a packed trunk, having decided that the prospect of riches was no match for a simple life of love and quiet, we knew not whether to admire the man or scoff at his weakness in fleeing.
* * *
A MONTH BEFORE THAT FIRST meeting with Mr. Fish, the men of Kosawa had an assembly. The Sweet One and the Cute One had called for it, telling us that there was an incredible development they wanted to inform us about, the breakthrough we’d been waiting for.
They told us that the Restoration Movement people in New York, having grown tired of Pexton’s broken promises, had filed papers with an American court to force Pexton to clean up our land and waters and start sharing its profits with us; the Restoration Movement intended to argue that because Pexton was profiting from our land, we were entitled to a portion of whatever the company earned from the oil it sold. But Pexton was under a new leadership that was determined to show the world that fairness was at the core of their business. The new leadership had decided it wanted no court case—they were ready to work with the Restoration Movement to finalize an agreement. Under the agreement, we would not be receiving an envelope of cash, as had years ago been given to our mothers and fathers. We would receive, instead, a percentage of all the money Pexton made from our land from that day forward. We’d get a percentage every single year.