“You are going to stop making jokes about me,” I say quietly. I’ve learned that quiet words are often more frightening than loud ones. “Today especially, you and your friends are going to leave me alone. Is that clear?”
He nods, trembling slightly.
You’re turning into the bosses, whispers a little voice in my head. I shake off the thought. I’m not like the bosses. I only do what I have to do to keep Seydou safe.
Seydou’s not in danger here, comments the voice.
I feel my gut twist uncomfortably and I step away, letting the boy go without putting a mark on him. He scrambles to get his machete. His friend loops an arm around his shoulder and they run off into the trees, both of them shooting me ugly looks as they run. From up ahead I hear Ismail’s whistle. This is far enough; we’re to start here. I turn to find a group of likely trees to work on, furious with myself.
I find the wildcat standing behind me, the machete gripped in her left hand. In the scuffle, I had forgotten about her for a moment. Forgotten that I’m going to have to spend the day making sure that she doesn’t get cut like Seydou, as well as making sure she doesn’t run away.
I stare at the ground, chest heaving, finding it hard to breathe. I want to yell. Tell her I have no room in my life to protect her, that I’m too busy trying to protect Seydou and, even with just that, I don’t always do the best job.
A pull on my left wrist makes me look up.
“Come on,” she says softly. “Let’s get to work.”
I try to settle into my usual routine of cutting pods, but the mismatched tug on my left wrist every time the girl moves is making it impossible for me to sink into my empty place and lose myself in the work. Since her chain only reaches so far, we have to work on the same tree, one on each side, or on two trees that are really close together. We also need to time our swinging, even though she’s using her left hand and I’m using my right. Otherwise, we run the risk of cutting each other or twisting our wrists.
She’s a sloppy worker. Like when I tried to teach her to shell—only three days ago, though it feels like years—there’s no power behind her swing and her blade wobbles from side to side when she chops. When she throws the pods into the bag we’re dragging behind us, the stems are mangled and splitting, not cleanly sliced like mine. Even so, we’re making good progress. She doesn’t get distracted like Seydou would and even though she’s slow, the bag is filling much faster than it would if I were working with my brother. It reminds me just how young he really is.
I grind my teeth and keep chopping.
Because of my earlier outburst and because of Ismail’s different work style, we’re all pretty spread out. Khadija and I could imagine we were alone in the world if we didn’t hear the steady chopping of the other boys. After about three hours of working I feel a different movement through the chain. I look over and see Khadija using a fold of her dress to wipe at her palm.
“Mun kéra?” I ask.
She looks up.
“Nothing’s wrong, I guess. I’m getting blisters.” She looks at her hands again.
I grimace in sympathy. I remember my first week of working in the fields. The long days of nothing but the same motion over and over again raised blisters really quickly. I had been surprised because I was used to farmwork, but we never had fields so big, and we grew many different crops to keep us fed. Not trees upon trees of cacao pods.
“The harvest months are the worst time for blisters,” I tell her. “When they’re waiting for the pisteurs, the bosses make us work longer than normal. Other times, we still have to cut pods, but we get to do other things too. We spray the trees to keep the bugs off them, chop down dead trees, plant new ones, clear the ground . . . the work is different enough. It’s only when they’re due for a pickup that we do nothing but chop pods all day long.”
“What are pisteurs?”
“Not what. Who. The pisteurs are the ones who drive their trucks along les pistes, the little trails around here, and take the pod seeds we’ve harvested. They bring money and stuff the bosses need. You can pick cacao all year round, but twice a year, a lot of them come ripe at the same time. This is when the pisteurs visit and the bosses get really nervous, because they only get paid for what’s fermented, dried, and ready to go.”
Khadija wipes her hand and the handle of her machete one more time and grips it again.
“Lucky me for my timing,” she says dryly.
I surprise both of us by laughing.
“Well,” I say, feeling generous, “Moussa said the pisteur would be coming by tomorrow or maybe the day after. So, after that, things will get better for a few months, until he’s due to come by again . . . Of course,” I add with a wry smile, “there are only two months of the year when we pretty much can’t harvest, so you’ll get used to this pretty quickly. For now, wrap your sleeve around your hand. It helps a little.” I hold out my hand in front of her, showing her the hard shell of my palm and fingers. “Soon you’ll have calluses and won’t even feel it anymore.”
She looks at me as I settle my machete into my hand. My fingers wrap around the handle and lock into a hold made comfortable from long hours of practice. I swing it around idly a little, then pick up the sack we’ve been dragging between us. It’s time to move on to another section of the grove. The remaining pods here are still thin and stumpy, not nearly the length or roundness that I need. When I straighten again to suggest we walk on for a bit, I’m shocked to see there are tears in her eyes.
“Mun kéra?” I ask again.
“It’s just . . .” She looks away over the trees and scrubs her wrists into her eyes. Then she drops her hands to her sides. “I don’t want to get calluses,” she says.
I’m a little thrown off by this, because I hadn’t pegged her in my mind as a girl who would cry over losing soft hands, but before I can open my mouth, she corrects herself.
“I mean, I don’t want to stay here long enough to get calluses.”
I stare at her. The whites of her eyes are red and underneath them is puffy, but the fierceness that’s been missing for the last two days is back.
“I hate it here,” she says simply. “I don’t want to learn how to be better at work I hate doing in a place I hate being. I don’t want to think about what it would mean for me to have hands like yours. I can’t imagine living here that long.”
I consider that for a moment.
“The bus drivers in Sikasso told us it would just be for a season, also,” I say, finally. “We didn’t come here thinking we’d live here this long either.
“I hate it here too,” I admit. “But the faster you get used to it, the better off you’ll be. You’ve seen what happens when you try to run away. They catch you and bring you back.”
She flinches when I say this. Then, after a moment, she asks, “What happened when you ran?”
The images rush at me from a place in my mind where I’ve tried to crush them down. Me, grabbing Seydou by the hand and pulling him through the darkness as we ran from the camp, our hands slippery in each other’s grip from the fresh blisters we both had. The chest-pounding terror of hearing the whistles behind us, the sign that we’d been missed. Running so hard I thought my lungs would explode from the effort, dragging a gasping Seydou with me as I saw the beams from the men’s electric torches bounce off the branches of the trees around us. The heavy hands falling on us as we ran out of air and energy, shoving us to the ground, binding our hands, smacking us around as they dragged us to camp. And then, the worst of it. Moussa and the other bosses tying me up, off to the side, and making me watch as they whipped Seydou senseless with a bike chain. They forced him to say, after every lash, This is Amadou’s fault. This is Amadou’s fault. I knew he was being forced to say it, but that didn’t make any difference. Every time I see the scars crisscrossing his back, I hear the echo of those words in my head.
“What
happened?” she asks again, jerking me out of my memory.
“They caught us.” My voice is rough as I say it. “I didn’t run again.”
“What did they do to you when they caught you?” Her arms are wrapped protectively around herself and her eyes are far away, probably remembering what they did to her.
I don’t want to talk about it. It makes me sick to my stomach to even remember that night.
“Nothing.” I surprise myself, hearing my own voice. I give a hollow laugh. “They never touched me.” I know my smile has turned ugly.
She looks at me for a long time. I don’t know what it is she sees but finally she says, “They knew what to do to break you.”
It’s a harsh statement, but probably true.
“It’s okay,” she whispers, and I’m startled to feel the warmth of her hand on my arm. “I think they know what to do to break everyone.”
“Did they break you?” I ask.
She looks away, but doesn’t take her hand from my arm.
“I don’t know,” she says finally.
I’m not sure how to tell her a part of me cries inside to think that they may have broken her. I’m not sure how to tell her, again, how sorry I am that I didn’t do anything to stop it, even though I know it wouldn’t have made a difference. I shift my arm to hoist the corner of the bag onto my shoulder. Her hand falls away.
“We should move on and try to get this bag filled before we stop for a midday rest.” I start to walk, but I only make it a step or two before I have to turn around. She hasn’t moved.
“Amadou.”
“What?”
She holds up her wrist.
“I want you to know I’m not going to try to run today.”
“What?”
“I heard what Moussa said to you this morning.” Her face is serious. “I want you to know that, even though I don’t want to be here, I’m not going to do something that would put Seydou in more danger.”
I feel a tightness inside that, for once, isn’t due to feelings of guilt or fear or anger. The wildcat is looking out for Seydou too again, like she did when he was sick and she stayed with him.
I’m startled to realize that that’s how I’m thinking of her now: as someone who takes care of Seydou, not someone who betrayed him. As one more set of hands to keep my cricket safe. I wonder whether we could ever be a team. A little family, just us three, sharing things and looking after one another. I want to tell her how much it means to me to have someone to trust so that I’m not all alone, but the words won’t come.
Instead, I nod.
She nods back, picks up her machete in her blistered hand, grabs the other end of the sack, and follows me into the trees to find another section to work in until dusk.
When the day finally winds to a close, I find that, though she hasn’t been able to keep up with my pace, Khadija has worked hard without stopping, and as we walk in the direction of camp, each balancing a large sack filled with pods on our head, I’m confident that, as a team, we’ll come in above quota.
On the main path we merge into the middle of the line of boys, each staggering under the weight of their day’s work. The boy I pushed against a tree this morning stays well clear of us but the rest act normally, talking and joking. Khadija and I don’t say anything to each other or the rest of the boys, but as we walk I notice that I no longer feel the irregular pull of metal on my wrist. Over the course of the day we’ve learned to walk perfectly in step with each other. For some reason, this makes me smile.
We’re still a little ways off from camp when I first hear the crying. I wrinkle my forehead, trying to place the sound—a monkey? A bird? Beside me, I feel Khadija stiffen. It’s definitely coming from the camp. My heart plunges into my stomach as I wonder if it’s Seydou. I walk faster. Khadija matches my pace, not complaining.
The closer we get to camp the more sure I am that the sound is human. However, the cries aren’t the fevered shrieks that Seydou was letting out yesterday when Moussa splashed him with water and I start to hope, quietly, deep inside, that Moussa kept his promise and was able to do something.
We break from the trees into the clearing and at first I think I’m right. Moussa has made a fire and is standing in front of it, arms crossed, staring into the flames. Beside him is a small, hunched figure that must be Seydou. The fire blocks my view of them, but the fact that he’s sitting unsupported is such an improvement that I turn to Khadija with a smile.
“Look! He’s sitting up!”
She doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring at the pair by the fire, her forehead wrinkled in concern.
“Amadou—” she starts, but I don’t want to hear it. I veer off, dragging her with me to the storage lean-to, where I drop our sacks, then spin around and trot to the fire, not even waiting for Ismail to come and tell us whether or not we’ve made quota.
“Seydou!” I call, but he doesn’t answer me.
It’s only as I get closer that I can see something is wrong. Though he’s sitting up, Seydou isn’t acting normally. He’s twisted himself into a tight knot, and he’s rocking back and forth, seemingly unaware of what’s going on around him. I run over to him, Khadija only a half step behind me, and I pull him into my arms. Seydou falls against me, keening. I use the fact that I’m bigger to force him to uncurl his body, trying to get a look at the wound and see if it’s doing better.
And that’s when I see that his arm is gone.
10
For a moment I can’t process what I see, can’t understand what’s happened. I hear a gasp and feel the weight of the air shift beside me as Khadija falls to her knees next to Seydou. She reaches out and touches his face lightly.
“Oh, Seydou,” I hear her whisper, “what did they do to you?”
I want to scream at her. What do you think they did to him? Don’t you have eyes? There’s only a rag-wrapped stump of his arm left past his elbow. You can see what they did to him! But I don’t because some part of me realizes that screaming would be ridiculous. She wasn’t here with him all day; she was with me.
Seydou pulls out of my arms and crumples to the ground. I let him go, spinning to face Moussa, who hasn’t moved. My wrist jerks when I do, and I hear Khadija’s hiss of breath when my action pulls her onto her feet behind me, but I don’t even care.
“What did you do to him?” I shout. A small part of my brain registers that the only words that make it out of my mouth are almost the exact ones that Khadija used just moments before, but I can’t seem to come up with any others, so I use hers and let my volume speak my anger.
Moussa glares at me.
“What needed to be done,” he says. His voice is tired and annoyed.
“You . . . you . . .” You took his arm, I want to say, but the words catch somewhere in my chest and won’t come out.
“It had to be done, Amadou.” Moussa is still talking in that quiet, I’m-the-elder-here voice, and hatred for him washes all over my skin, burning like spilled pesticide. “His wound was festering. He didn’t have another day in him. If I had left his arm on, you would be coming home to a corpse.”
An acid feeling twists inside me. The gratitude he’s trying to make me feel mixes with my rage, creating poison in my belly.
“You cut off his arm!” I finally scream, the words breaking out of me, tearing big holes in my soul as they do. Moussa stares at me as if I’ve lost my wits.
“Of course I did. What did you think I was going to do when I told you this morning I would take care of it?”
And then I can’t help myself. I curl my hand into a fist and punch Moussa in the face with all the strength I have.
Of course, after a stunned moment of cursing and grabbing his bleeding nose, Moussa does the same to me, repeatedly, and then tosses me again into the toolshed, the evening resting place for all problem children, locking it behind me.
&nb
sp; I lean over in the corner, with my head tipped forward so I’m not choking on the blood from my nose, and spit until it clots. I lift my hands to my face to wipe off the mess and it’s only when my left wrist jingles as I do so that I realize Khadija is still chained to me.
“Why are you here?” I manage, my words muddy because of my plugged nose.
“Because I’m still attached to you, silly,” she says.
I look at her sideways.
“Apparently this time it’s my fault for not stopping you.” She gives a half smile.
And I don’t know why, but for some reason this strikes me as the funniest thing I’ve heard in weeks and I start laughing, deep belly-clenching laughs that make me bend double and force tears out of my eyes. Khadija seems surprised at first, but then she laughs softly along with me.
“It’s really not that funny, you know,” she says after a while.
I huff some air through my nose to clear it.
“Yeah, I know.”
For a while the two of us just sit there, our backs along the wall of the shed, our chained hands resting on the floor between us, listening to the sounds of dinner and cleanup happening outside. No one opens the door to give us any food but I wasn’t really expecting them to. As the shadows deepen, Khadija’s eyes begin to dart around the shed and she picks at a tear in her skirt, making it worse.
“They sound extra busy tonight,” I say, to get her mind off the things she’s thinking about. Her hands still. I tip my head to the side and listen for a moment, trying to identify the chores being done. “Sounds like they’re collecting the seeds from the drying racks and filling burlaps. The pisteur is due tomorrow.”
“You know, I never thought you’d hit him.”
The Bitter Side of Sweet Page 9
