* * *
—
The interpreter told us that Mr. Fish had met the previous week with the district officer in Lokunja about releasing our imprisoned friends; the meeting had gone well. No mention was made of the truth about why our friends were in prison—the interpreter said nothing about the fact that the government’s official story was as false as a snake walking on four legs. Our friends weren’t in prison because they’d been caught at the big market without their tax receipts. Their tax receipts had been taken out of their pockets by soldiers who proceeded to rip them up in front of the entire market, their eyes declaring: We did it, what can anyone do to us? What could our friends have done as the soldiers handcuffed them and dumped them in cells? Who in Bézam cared for the truth that our friends had been framed because the soldiers suspected we were behind the attacks on Pexton’s property?
We seethed, but we could say nothing.
At our friends’ trial, no one who’d seen the tax receipts being ripped had been willing to step forward in their defense, so the judge levied a sentence of one year in prison and six months of taxes. We told our friends, as they were being led away by the prison guards while their wives and mothers and daughters cried out for them, that days might be long, but years were seldom slow. Once more, from what little she had, Thula sent us the funds to pay the fines.
* * *
—
During the year our friends were in prison, monthly, sometimes weekly, as often as we could, the rest of us burned a parked car here, dislodged machinery there, sent a letter threatening to kill everyone at Gardens if Pexton did not leave. Twice, we accosted a bus full of laborers on the road between Lokunja and Gardens. Our machetes pointed at them, we demanded all the money they had. We showed them no compassion, though they pleaded, saying Pexton paid them too little, they needed every bit of money for their families—could we find it in our hearts to be merciful to them for the sake of their children? How could we respond to such drivel except with slaps? Pexton’s whores talking about children—nothing disgusted us more.
We made the bus drivers give us the oil from the engine, so we could use it to burn something else owned by Pexton. With raffia bags covering our faces—soiled and oily bills in another bag—we asked the laborers to listen up. We told them that it was time they thought about returning to their villages. We let them know, in case they’d never considered it, that they were our enemies by virtue of eating the scraps off the plates of our enemies. None of them would survive the reckoning coming for Pexton, we warned.
* * *
IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE Sweet One who told Thula about the attacks and threats on the laborers, for we made no mention of it in our letters. Zealous as she was, she was still a woman incapable of inflicting bodily harm, and we’d worried that our going after the laborers would cause tension between us. And, as certain as sunrise, it did. Every time she heard about it, she wrote asking us to stop, saying that was not the plan, the plan was to get their attention, let them know that we mattered and we were angry, the plan was never to kill—what were we thinking? We assured her that we’d kill no one; we merely wanted to instill fear in the laborers, cause panic in Gardens, make them think we’d stop at nothing. She would not be convinced. What if we’d killed the laborer we’d badly beaten? she said. Blood on its hands was the last thing Kosawa needed. The laborers are not our enemies, she argued, Pexton is. In some letters she threatened to withdraw her financial support from us. And there were indeed months when the Sweet One brought us no envelopes from her. Then, just as we were about to start wondering if she had changed her mind and was no longer one of us, we received an envelope, along with pleas to remember that the laborers were fathers like us, men with families for whom they were making hard sacrifices.
* * *
—
In the third year of our attacks, Pexton informed the laborers that it would no longer allow them to bring their wives or children to Gardens. The directive was late and inconsequential: the women and children had begun leaving more than a decade before, after three children passed away around the time our friends started dying.
We had heard of the Gardens children’s deaths when they happened, but we never considered that they were for reasons similar to the death of our friends. For years, we’d believed that, between the clean water the children there drank, and the American medicine Pexton had for those living in the settlement it had created around its wells, no one at Gardens would ever suffer our fate. The Sweet One and the Cute One were the ones who told us the truth that no American medicine, no matter how potent, could cure a child of years of accumulated toxins.