* * *
—
We stayed up late that night with the rest of our households. Together with our siblings, we asked our mothers and grandmothers question after question. We wanted them to assure us that our village had done nothing wrong, that our fathers hadn’t done to Pexton what Pexton hadn’t already done to us, that the Sick One could have died in his own bed, that Woja Beki had done everything he could to heal the Sick One. Perhaps the Sick One’s disease was incurable. Besides, was the death of one Pexton man more tragic than the deaths of all our friends and siblings combined? We wanted our mothers to convince us that all was well, that such things happened, and that the Sick One’s family would one day stop mourning for him when they realized that they’d never get answers to why he vanished. They’d have to stop crying just as we’d stopped crying for our fathers and uncles who vanished, and even if they cried forever, would their tears ever flow hotter than ours? We wanted our mothers to reassure us, again and again, and they did so, but we couldn’t be sufficiently put at ease, for we could see the doubt in their eyes.
* * *
—
Our sleep that night was only slightly less disturbed than it was the night this all began.
The next morning, while we were struggling to cast aside our fears and do our morning chores, we learned that Lusaka and Bongo and Tunis had just returned from Bézam with a young man with light skin and stringy hair. We could barely eat our breakfasts, fatigued as we were and concerned about what the arrival of this young man meant.
By the time we left for school, our fathers had gone to meet and welcome the visitor from Bézam and hear from Lusaka and his group what had happened on their trip, and, later, to make a coffin for the Sick One.
Walking to school, we discussed what some of us had heard our parents whispering: that the Sick One was the young man’s uncle. The news befuddled us. Had the young man come here to save his uncle, or did he learn we had his uncle only when he got here? During recess, few of us went home to eat. We sat on the grassy field and told ourselves that the young man’s being the Sick One’s nephew did not mean he would kill us in revenge.
* * *
—
After school, we followed the procession to the burial ground to bury the Sick One. There was no singing, only an omen in the form of a coffin. The entire village gathered around the grave, dug in a corner of Woja Beki’s section. It was then, as we surveyed the faces, that we saw the stranger with stringy hair for the first time. He was the only one who wept as the Sick One’s body was lowered into the ground.
Kindly as he looked, we couldn’t understand why this young man, who lived in Bézam and therefore worked for Pexton or the government, hadn’t run to Gardens to tell the overseer—a friend of his, most likely, since they were both American people—that we’d killed his uncle. Why was he allowing the men to bury his uncle in Kosawa? Why wasn’t he taking his uncle’s body back to Bézam? He seemed unhappy to be in our village, his eyes bloodshot and often downcast and avoiding ours, but at no point did he look at us angrily, or in disgust. He was merely alone in our midst.
As one of our grandfathers offered last words over the lowered coffin, telling the Sick One to travel safely to his ancestors and find it in his heart to forgive us for failing to restore his health, we looked at our mothers, our eyes full of tears, our bodies split into equal portions of fright and grief and shame. We could tell from our mothers’ faces, and their trembling hands, and how tightly they held our youngest siblings to their bosoms, that they too were in fragments. Had we asked them to explain what was happening, they wouldn’t have been able to answer. All they knew was what our fathers had told them, that the Sick One’s nephew was on our side, he’d come to see our suffering so he could tell the world about it and by so doing bring us the changes his uncle couldn’t. It made no sense to us why the Sick One’s relative was on our side, but, then again, simplicity fled Kosawa the night we obeyed a madman and took three representatives captive.
The young man, whose name we gathered was Us-things, smiled at us as we were departing the burial ground. We wished we could hug him and tell him that all would be well, but Bongo took his attention away from us, because he wanted to whisper something into Us-things’s ear. We hoped Us-things would stay with Bongo in the back room of the Nangi family’s hut, and we hoped that our friend Thula would eavesdrop, put aside her taciturnness for a bit, and tell us all there was to know about the American.