He asks me to buy him drawing books and crayons every time I go to the big market. Morning, afternoon, evening, there’s no way of knowing when he’ll feel an urge to draw. He has filled a dozen books with pictures. He draws things I don’t understand—a man’s face with features scattered all over, mouth on the forehead, nose on his cheekbone; fishes and trees in the sky, standing in the place of clouds; the sun and the stars falling down. I ask him why he draws that way, why he can’t draw things the way they are. He says he doesn’t know. He can’t explain, but I know it’s grief.
I see his heartache when he goes to Yaya’s bed and lies next to her. He’s eleven, an age by which every boy in the village has gotten rid of his yearning for affection, busy as they are preparing for their rite of passage into manhood, but Juba is not ashamed to tell his friends that he’d rather not come with them to make new slingshots so they can go bird hunting, he’d rather spend the afternoon with his grandmother. I hear him say it and I know it’s the pain. I see it in how eager he is to help me feed Yaya, how he rushes to fetch a cup of water for her, how gentle he is when we roll her from her side to her back at least four times a day so she doesn’t get infected with bedsores. I hear it when he asks me if Yaya will ever walk again, why her legs stopped functioning the day we returned from Bézam with the news. I tell him that heartbreak is the worst malady.
* * *
FOR THE FIVE YEARS BEFORE Thula left, I woke up every school morning and fried eggs for her and Juba, two eggs each. No one in Kosawa eats eggs on a regular basis—chickens lay eggs only so often, and it’s best to leave the egg to one day become a chicken and feed an entire family than to break it and barely fill one stomach—but I made sure my children ate eggs, because Malabo believed they were good for the body, and he wanted me to feed them to his children as often as I could. During those five years, I bought the eggs in the big market, using the money the people from the Restoration Movement gave us. It was the money Pexton gave, after the Restoration Movement fought them on our behalf.
The fight happened in America, so we didn’t get the joy of seeing the look on the Pexton people’s faces when they realized they’d lost a battle to us. But my cousin Tunis told me that he heard from someone in Lokunja that there hadn’t really been a battle, that Pexton had gone to the Restoration Movement and given them money to pass on to the people of Kosawa alongside their condolences after news of the massacre reached America. Pexton wanted to show how much our suffering pained them, they wanted to demonstrate their commitment to work closely with the Restoration Movement to improve our lives, but everyone said that they’d only given us the money so that the insults being flung at them on both sides of the ocean would cease, and all the people who had stopped buying oil from them would resume doing so, and Pexton would be able to say, Look at what we’re doing, we’re helping the people of Kosawa, so how are they not benefiting from our presence?
Pexton claimed they had nothing to do with what the soldiers did that day. They said all they ever did was pay the government for the right to drill our land—why should they be responsible for our government’s incompetence? His Excellency must have been furious when he heard that, his people must have made threats, but we heard nothing of that—they needed to be united against us. Pexton wanted more of our oil. Our government wanted more of their money. His Excellency wanted more of the world’s finest things. Eight years after the massacre that left Thula unable to speak for eleven days, Pexton is still on our land.
* * *
THE FIRST TIME THE RESTORATION Movement came to see what was happening in our village, they were represented by five people—the Sweet One and the Cute One; a man who looked like he could be from our area but was from the neighboring country; and a man and a woman from America, both around my age and wearing brown shorts and hats with strings tied around their chins, their faces approaching the hue of a ripe apple.
They walked around the village and saw the pipelines and the places where crude oil had spilled over the years. We took them into the forest, and they saw farms that had been rendered useless after fires; they examined the shriveled-up products of our soil. They took pictures of waste floating on the big river. They pointed at leaves with holes and said it was from acid rain; they explained to us that our rain long ago stopped being pure water. We led them to see the graves of the children; we saw their lips moving as they counted the smallest mounds. They looked toward Gardens and saw the gas flares.