by Wayétu Moore
“Y beh may-wah manna?” the girl asked.
She wanted to know what we were doing. I giggled. I understood her.
“Drawing,” Wi answered her.
The girl looked down at the broken sticks and pointed at the images in the dirt. “Drawing,” she said. Wi met the girl at the edge of the circle, took her hand, and led her inside the circle of old fruit where K and I sat. K dropped the stick in her hand and ran out of the circle toward the house where Papa lived.
“Drawing,” the girl said again, as she picked up the stick that K dropped and added shapes of her own.
“Yhen,” she said. “Drawing. Yhen.”
“Yhen,” Wi and I said together.
Ajala was the daughter of a Lake Piso fisherman. She said Vai words quickly, and we laughed at the way the words sounded. When the other children saw us play with Ajala, they came to the orange trees, until eventually the orange circle was full of children dodging thrown English and Vai words while drawing in the dirt.
From a distance, K approached us with Papa. He walked quickly toward the circle and it looked like he thought something had happened to me or Wi. When they reached us, Papa peered down at K, who pointed into the circle at Ajala.
“She asked what we were doing,” she said to him, out of breath from the trouble she had gone through to find him. “She asked what we were doing in Vai.”
In August, in our third month in Lai during the rainy season, Wi and I woke up one day to go attend our lessons with Papa. K did not. On either side of her, Wi and I shook her tiny arms and pulled our hands back from her skin as our palms dripped with her sweat. I wiped the fluid on the mattress and looked at her as she lay still, only slightly moving her head and moaning. Her hair was soaked and her dress clung to her skin, showing her gaunt legs and waist. Something was wrong. Water trailed down her face and arms, her legs, and through the thin dress she was wearing. Her lips shivered. She shouted, even though her eyes were closed. Some English words. Some Vai words. For Mam. Things that did not make sense. The shouts widened and her sentences rambled on.
“Ma!” Wi yelled out.
“Ma!” she said, running to the door as Ma rushed in.
“What’s wrong?” Ma asked, kneeling down beside the mattress when she noticed K trembling on the wet sheet.
“She won’t wake up,” Wi answered.
Ol’ Ma unfolded her head tie and used the cloth to wipe K’s body. In days past, K had become whiny, constantly vomiting the rice and seafood that she was fed (all that we ever ate), and she wanted to sit in Papa’s or Ma’s lap instead of playing. We were used to her shadow behind us, or pressing her ear against a whisper that was only intended for Wi and me and getting pushed away—but she had no desire to mimic us that rainy season, she had no need of our secrets.
“Go get your papa,” Ma said, still wiping K’s body and patting her face.
“Papa!” Wi yelled. “Papa!”
We heard movement in some of the other houses as villagers came to their doors and windows to see who and what was causing the commotion. Some looked scared that the drums had found our hiding place.
“Papa!” Wi yelled.
When we reached his house across the circle, Papa had already made it out of his front door.
“What happened?” he asked.
“K won’t wake up,” Wi said. Papa ran ahead to Ma’s house and we followed him. Several villagers who had woken up from our yelling followed us to Ma’s house, where K still lay in a pool of sweat across Ma’s arms. K’s body shook, and she kept saying those foolish things, one after the other, eyes closed tightly. Papa knelt beside her and took her from Ma. As a crowd gathered outside, an elderly man pushed through the villagers and into Ma’s house.
“What happened to the girl?” he asked Ma in Vai.
“It looks like malaria,” Ma cried to the man, exasperated.
The man walked to where they sat with K. He went back outside where he told a few others to prepare a large bucket of warm water and jollobo leaves to bathe her in.
“What’s going on?” Papa asked Ma.
“They want to bathe her in jollobo. It will lower her fever.”
“No. No country medicine.”
“Gus, please.”
Papa held K tightly as her tears and sweat saturated the surface of his shirt.
“Gus, please. At least it will lower her fever,” Ma said, attempting again to take K out of his arms.
Papa refused again as he gently wiped her face. He stood up, cradling her wet and trembling body, and walked outside and through the crowd to the back of the house, where several men and women poured boiling water from a rice pot into a tub of water from the village well. They then dropped jollobo leaves, each twice the size of their faces, into the large tub of water. Wi and I followed him as he moved toward it. The villagers surrounded the jollobo bath, and Papa, now trembling himself as K continued to melt in his arms, knelt down in front of it. Two women knelt down beside Papa, but he shook his head and blocked their hands.
“I will do it,” Papa said with a breaking voice. He peeled the thin white dress over her head, taking care. Her sweat became his, and he held K’s body over the tub of floating leaves. He lowered her into the water until her legs hid underneath the dark green plants.
“Lay her down to her neck,” Ma said, kneeling beside Papa. She dropped her hands into the water and cupped her palms for a small amount that she sprinkled over K’s head and hair. Ma did this several times, stroking K’s hair. She then took a leaf from the bath and rubbed it against my sister’s arms and legs until the water turned too cold for them to keep her in it.
“Where?” I heard Ma ask in a loud voice.
“Junde. I already asked the fishermen to use the boat,” Papa insisted. “I just came to tell you. I’m going.”
“What? If you go, the people will kill you. You hear the radio. It’s worse out there now,” Ma said, following Papa to his house across the circle. “They almost killed you coming.”
“She’s been sick for one week. If I don’t go—” He stopped. K still was not eating and every night she screamed those rambling sentences as the family gathered in Ma’s house and watched her sleep. Wi and I stayed by K’s bed, sorry now for pushing her away. Her body lay still except for the times she was screaming, and many visited her bedside during the week to offer prayers and good wishes as she slept.
“Gus, please,” Ma pleaded with him as he gathered a shirt and shoes from his bed and placed them in his backpack. He climbed back down his ladder to where Ma still stood, now crying.
“There was a clinic I saw while we were in Junde. Maybe I can find something there,” Papa said, walking out of his house and back across the village circle.
“You scared. I scared too. All these people, everybody scared. But you can’t go back in war,” she yelled after him.
“She needs antibiotics, Ma,” he argued.
He approached Ma’s house, where Wi and I sat on the porch, watchers of K’s body.
“Papa’s going away for small, yeh?” he said into my eyes. “I’m going to find medicine for K.”
Wi nodded.
“Listen to what Ma says, yeh?” he said.
“How long?” Wi asked.
“For small small,” he said. I ran inside the house, where K lay asleep. I fought through the thick smell of her sickness for my slippers. I looked near the door, where they usually sat in a pile beside Ma’s prayer mat. When I did not see them there or anywhere on the floor, I searched the porch.
“What you looking for?” Ma asked me, but I did not respond since all of my attention was required for the hunt. When I did not find them there, I ran around Ma’s house and searched the ground for them, almost bursting into tears, at the time lost in my pursuit. It was then I remembered that the last time that I had seen them they were near the mattress where K slept. I hurried back inside the house and knelt beside the mattress. I crawled around it until finally I saw the backs of my slippers protr
uding from underneath the mattress. I grabbed the shoes and put them on, flustered that I had taken so long to find them. I ran out of the house and off the porch.
“Tutu! Where you going?” Ma yelled behind me as I dashed through the village circle toward Piso.
“Tutu!” she called, running after me. At the edge of the village I pushed through the bushes, scraping my arms on sharp, loose branches.
“Tutu!” Ma yelled and I heard multiple footsteps behind me. Still I continued toward the shore of the lake. I pushed the last shrub out of my way and ran to the shore, where in the distance Papa floated in a canoe along the still water toward Junde.
“Wait!” I said waving my arms. “Wait!”
Papa looked up and made a face so that even from a distance I could tell he was not pleased. Ma and Pa reached me, panting together from the long run.
“Wait!” I said once more, stomping my feet on the shore until the sand jumped and stained my shins and knees. Ma touched my shoulder to turn me around and I collapsed against her, while Papa yelled something at me that sounded like what Mam said before she left. “I will be back.”
TEN
Ol’ Pa saved all of his words for the times he knew it would matter the most, when after a question was asked everyone in the room became silent and their gaze floated toward the ceiling and sky. Otherwise he remained quiet—watched people as they spoke loudly and laughed with each other. Even sitting, he seemed taller than all of the other men in the village. He sat with his hands folded in his lap and listened to war commentary in both Vai and English, from Papa and the other men in Lai. A few days after Papa left, when it was still dark outside, I was shaken awake by Ol’ Ma. She did not have to say anything. I knew what it was. I ran out of her house to the edge of the village where Papa stood, and I hugged him until my arms hurt. He looked so tired, but he had come back.
“I told you,” he said while I cried. “I will never leave you for too long.”
After Papa successfully returned from Junde with medicine for K, which completely healed her, he and other men made trips out of the village to retrieve food and other things from abandoned stores and houses in the small town.
Pa had made one trip before with Papa, after we ran out of food and Papa believed that it was the seafood from Lake Piso that was making us sick.
On this trip Pa planned on going to Burma, where he said he could find supplies, many in the same place, so Papa would not have to continue going in and out of the village when we had needs. Pa came into Ol’ Ma’s house one August morning as we sat with her for our sewing lesson. They brought back strips of cloth from a recent trip, and the girls and I took turns with Ma’s spare needle, making what we decided would be a dress for Mam.
“Look,” K said to him, showing the stitch she had just made in the arm of the garment. Pa inspected it and handed it back to her.
“Very good,” he said to her. Ma noticed a burlap sack on his back and touched it to see if it was full.
“What you doing with that empty bag?” she asked.
“Going to Burma to find more food for the children,” Pa answered.
“Burma?” Ma asked. “What’s in Burma?”
“I will get more things than in Junde. I will come back soon,” he said and the lines in his forehead sunk as he explained.
“Who’s going with you?” Ma asked, standing up with him.
“Nobody. I will not be gone long. It will be better to go alone,” he said. “People see you walking in group they will think you rebel.”
Ma nodded, but she looked like she did before Papa left on a trip outside the village. He kissed her face as I had seen Papa kiss my mother.
He then knelt back down in front of us and stretched out his hands for us to hug him.
“What you want me bring back for you?” he asked us with serious eyes.
“Peanuts. I want some peanuts,” I answered.
“You girls want peanuts?” he asked. My sisters agreed.
“Okay, my geh. I will bring your peanuts.”
He stood up with the burlap sack hanging from his back and walked out of Ma’s house to Lake Piso. He turned around and his wrinkled skin creased as he looked at Ma, and he waved. We watched him disappear behind the bushes that covered the lake.
“Come now, you girls. Come finish your dress,” Ma said, pulling us back into her house.
We sat in front of the dress with zigzagging stitches across the front.
“It’s a pretty dress,” K said, caressing the cloth in Wi’s hands.
“Mam will like it,” K said to Ma.
“Yeh, she will like it plenty,” Ma said. I grew excited at the memory of Mam’s face and how it would wash over with joy when she saw the dress.
“Where is Mam?” K asked Ma.
“Mam still in America,” she said.
“When is she coming back?” K asked, biting her lip as she looked up at the ceiling and followed it back down to Ma’s face.
“Soon. She will be back soon and we will all go back to Caldwell. Yeh?” Ma said, trying hard to maintain a straight voice and face. K looked down at the dress in Wi’s lap. She had stopped stitching and we were all looking up at Ma for an answer. Ma continued to sew, periodically looking in the corner at her prayer mat, mindful of the time.
On the following night a barefoot fisherman walked to Ma’s porch where she sat plaiting Wi’s hair.
“Hello, Ol’ Ma,” he said. “You know when Ol’ Pa coming back? He took my boat.” Papa walked up behind the man with a lantern in his hand. He came to read to us and wish us goodnight, as he did every night before we slept.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” Papa asked Ma.
“The man is asking for Pa,” she answered. “He will come back soon. He should have come this morning,” she told the fisherman.
“Yeh, if he is not back by tomorrow night, we will send some boys to go look for him,” Papa said, and it was clear he wished he had gone with Pa on this trip. The fisherman nodded and left the house.
“Pa coming tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yeh,” Ma said, wiping her face. She squeezed the lappa and settled on the floor where we sat. She looked into our faces as though they were road maps back to her love; she inquired silently and glanced about the wooden walls of her small house. He was neither there nor in our faces, not on the village circle or near the coop.
“Don’t worry, Ma. We will go look for him tomorrow,” Papa said. Ma untied the head tie from her head and cried into the aloe-scented cloth as her thick black hair fell to her back.
She met Pa when she was a teenager, they said, in those days when she could finally walk to the market in the evenings while her younger sisters and brothers continued working on the farm. The Vai people had been in Cape Mount for hundreds of years then. Pa was at a market stand selling the garments he’d sewn, the most crowded stand since he was so tall that it was hard to miss him. Ma had passed him while holding a friend’s hand, they said. They made sure their hair was fully covered as they approached him. He saw her pass and pointed directly at her.
“You,” he said with a voice as tall as him. “You will be mine.”
“But wait,” she answered in Vai. “Don’t I have a choice?”
Ma giggled and ran away with her friend. Some days later when she returned home from the farm, Pa was waiting there talking to her parents.
“He says he loves you. He says he wants you,” her Ma had said as she pulled her out of the room. “Do you want him? Do you love him?”
She had not seen him since the day she met him at the market.
Ma peeked into the room as Pa sat with his hands on his knees, nodding as her father questioned him. Her father was a chief, and she knew that the business of her marriage was a serious one. But there was this big, tall man, handsome, brave, and special even, she had said.
“Yes,” she said quickly.
Pa was made to convert to Islam to take Ol’ Ma’s hand in marri
age. They had eight daughters and one son, three children dying before ten years old. Pa moved with her, almost right away, from Ma’s village. Ma’s father had not sent any of his daughters to school. The women were supposed to work on the farm with their many children while the men sat underneath palaver huts with their neighbors to discuss politics.
“I do not want a family on a farm,” he had told Ma when she became pregnant with her first daughter. And against Mam’s grandfather’s wishes, Pa took his children to the nuns at Catholic schools in Sierra Leone and Liberia, begging them to see his daughters through. As they grew, they would travel to London and France, to America and across Africa to “learn book.” The Ol’ Ma had educated daughters—something in her old age she was most proud of—a mold finally broken by that big man she knew at once she loved. He had changed her, as great loves do. And she had changed him—his only wife, his princess. And where was he now? How could he leave her now?
The next morning Papa left with a cousin and two other villagers in a canoe headed for Junde. The entire village knew now of Pa’s disappearance and they stood on the shore of the lake to bid Papa and his cousin a safe journey. Through the traffic of villagers, as I stood underneath Ma’s hand, I thought of Pa’s shoulders and how they turned toward us on the day he left. It was my peanuts that he went to find, a simple wish I wanted to take back, and begged God that Ma would not remember. When day broke again, a woman near the lake yelled out for Ma. With her head unwrapped, something that I rarely saw her do, she rushed out of her house and across the village circle to the lake, where a canoe came toward her in the water. Some villagers woke up when they heard the yelling woman and followed Ma into the clearing, holding their lappas as they ran onto the shore. But the same number of men who had left on the previous day returned, fatigued and distressed by the unsuccessful search. Ma looked like she was still looking for someone else in the canoe, long after the last man stepped onto shore. The hands of villagers covered her back and shoulders. They gave water and a helping hand to Papa and the other men who were in the canoe. When Papa reached her, Ma fell into his arms, almost throwing him over with her grief.
