But it wasn’t only the curses we strove to avoid; it was also the blessings we yearned for. We knew what a blessed life looked like, and though our parents were not living it with Pexton’s claws deep in their throats, we knew it was possible when times were good, and that it involved a loving family foremost, good health, an abundance of food, laughter, and sunshine. We made our oaths trusting that keeping them would cause blessings to overflow in our lives. We went to bed that night believing the promise of the Spirit that we would soon be free, and we would flourish, and soar on wings like eagles.
We do not know if Woja Beki passed around his family’s umbilical-cord bundle to his wife and children. It is possible he did, because when one of our aunts noticed Woja Beki’s third wife, Jofi, a couple of days after Woja Beki was released, whispering and gesticulating near the path into the forest with her visiting sisters, our aunt told one of our grandfathers and our grandfather relayed it to Lusaka, who went to Woja Beki and demanded to know what his third wife was saying to her sisters. Woja Beki had called for Jofi, who swore to the men, upon the grave of her father, that she and her sisters had only been discussing the upcoming death celebration for their grandmother. Woja Beki assured Lusaka that his wife was telling the truth, and that he and his family would never tell the village’s secret, not on that day or on a day in the future when people started breaking promises with no concern for consequences. He was still one of us, he said to Lusaka.
* * *
—
The Sick One remained in Woja Beki’s house, and every night we prayed for him, and for Lusaka and his group to hurry back from Bézam with the medicine that would put us all at ease. One of us had a dream in which the Sick One was a fat man, smiling as he informed us that he was back at Pexton and preparing for the next village meeting. Hearing about such a dream did not make the rest of us happy—we did not want the Sick One healthy, so he could be free just yet; we wanted him returned to Lusaka’s back room, so our fathers could proceed with whatever plans they had. We were desperate for relief from our fear of death, which had been exacerbated when one of our younger sisters died the day Lusaka and his team left for the capital. This younger sister’s death had been sudden—neither her rash nor her cough was severe—and from this we inferred that death had grown more ruthless lately. The Sick One needed to live for it to be tamed.
We promised ourselves that we would find a new name for the Sick One, as an act of atonement, after Kosawa regained its freedom. It would be a great name, a name we might even be proud to share with him if we were to happen upon him at a place and time when he no longer had any power over us.
We never did get the opportunity to come up with this new name, for he died on Woja Beki’s bed while we were at school. He died in our collective arms.
* * *
OUR FATHERS’ TIME IN OUR huts that evening was brief—after returning from the forest, they hurriedly ate and bathed and left for Woja Beki’s house, to spend the night with him in his parlor; they couldn’t leave him alone with the remains of a stranger. Even if Woja Beki was no longer fully one of us, he still was our blood, and our fathers could never punish him and his family by leaving them to sit by themselves beside a withering corpse.
Our mothers gave our fathers fruit bowls so they would have something cool to eat during the long, hot night ahead of them. As they bade us good night and stepped outside with stools and their bags of nourishment to walk over to Woja Beki’s house, our fathers appeared older and sadder than we could recall. We’d never seen them look so lost, so confused. Only when we became older, only when we got close to the ages they were during that period, did we realize that what they bore on their faces that night wasn’t grief at the Sick One’s death but the deepest sort of dread, not for themselves, not for what would befall them now that a man had died by their doing, but for us, their children, for the ways in which we would suffer for what they’d tried to do for us. Only when we became parents did we realize how we could harm our children in an attempt to clean out for them the smothering decay of this world.
* * *
—
We imagined that our fathers sat in silence around the body all night.
Not knowing the custom of the dead man’s ancestral village, not knowing the best way to handle his remains, meant nothing could be said to it all night—our fathers wouldn’t dare wrong the corpse of a stranger. If the Sick One were from Kosawa, there would have been singing around him all night, every able-bodied adult present. Jakani and Sakani would have cut off all his hair, and his nails too, which they would burn, the ashes of which they would take to do something we would never know. For this stranger, none of this could be done—his spirit could obey the laws of his land and no other laws. So, in silence, sitting on their stools, our fathers must have waited for the hours to pass, allowing the dead man’s spirit to leave his body fully and go where it needed to. When a touch confirmed that his body had lost all its warmth, evidence that his spirit was gone, Woja Beki and the men must have started the conversation on what to do with the body.