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 babies elbowed and kicked and pressed in an attempt to clear a path through her to re-enter our world. The volume of her cries was evidence that the discomfort she was in was not one a body made of flesh was meant to sustain. Just as one of our grandfathers had told us was the case when Jakani and Sakani last arrived, the woman stayed in labor for seven days and nights, her pain rising daily, so that by the fourth night no one in Kosawa could sleep, not the crickets or the birds or the beasts of Kosawa, not any creature with a singing voice, most of whom joined the laboring woman after every sunset, a whimpering chorus around her anguished cries, which came accompanied with her blood spilling, dripping off the mattress and forming the shape of a face as it touched the earth, the shape of Jakani’s and Sakani’s faces in the days when they went around healing and interceding for us.