Things They Lost, page 17
Buttercup, let’s go!
Ayosa and her mama brushed past townspeople’s knees. They hurried to the door, cheeks stinging as though Dorcas Munyonyi had smacked them right across the face. She walked closely behind them, chasing. They thought she would follow them out to the churchyard, where she would grind them right into the ground with a tree branch. But Dorcas Munyonyi stopped at the wooden double doors and crushed them shut. They heard her bolt the doors from the inside.
Jesus Christ! Nabumbo Promise said. What came over that woman?
You! Ayosa said. You came over that woman.
Her mama looked at Ayosa, mouth hanging open, as though she was truly gobsmacked. Me? What did I do?
You goaded her. Why did you have to talk that type of talk inside the church? It was disrespectful to everyone.
Even to you?
Yes, Mama. Even to me.
See, I don’t really understand that. I mean, put aside the fact that the woman has been goading me for far longer than you’ve been alive. And put aside the fact that nothing I said in there was a lie. What I want to know is this: What’s it to you, personally? We don’t go to church but once a year, on New Year’s Eve. Tell me why you care about any type of disrespect to the priest and the faithful and that godforsaken woman.
Because… As you said, we go just once a year. I was really looking forward to eating the body of Christ. And drinking the blood of Christ.
You mean that awfully dry communion wafer? And you mean that cheap red wine?
Don’t patronize me, Nabumbo Promise Brown!
Her mama took a step forward. She slapped Ayosa across the jaw. Ayosa, in turn, pushed her mama so hard that her mama slammed into a tree. Her mama launched herself forward, plucked Ayosa off the ground, and lifting her to her shoulders, carried her bodily out of the churchyard.
Put me down! Ayosa screamed.
Not until you apologize, her mama said. There was a cheerful note in her voice, so Ayosa knew that she did not mean it at all, and that all the tension between them was suddenly gone. Her mama said, You’re lucky I’ve got all those birds singing inside of me. Means I can’t stay sour at you for too long.
She put Ayosa down, and grabbed her sweaty hand, and the two of them skipped away from Our Lady of Lourdes. Nabumbo Promise took Ayosa to a diner run by an Indian woman called Bhavna. The lunch special was chicken makhani with kachumbari. They sat down by the window, and the ceiling fan cast shadows in their lassi glasses. A man moved between the tables, hawking a cure for syphilis.
Little Miss, he said, holding out his wares, do your unmentionables pain you?
No, sir, they do not.
The man turned to Nabumbo Promise and asked the same.
Nabumbo Promise rolled her eyes. Get out of my face, she said.
The man moved to the next table.
The irony is, her mama continued, Father Jude Thaddeus was just preaching about forgiveness. Turn the other cheek. Christlike love. Her mama laughed. She said, I will tell you this. There is nothing Christlike about the way the priest and Dorcas Munyonyi love each other.
Bhavna stood at the counter, ladling fried rice into takeaway boxes.
Ayosa stared at the port-wine stain on the tip of Bhavna’s nose. Please-please-please-I-need-you, Ayosa whispered to the port-wine stain. She hoped that it would come to her, maybe onto her forehead, so that it would be the first thing that people saw when they looked at her. Like a doorbell for her face, which people could press if they wanted to.
Are you listening? her mama said.
Ayosa tore her eyes away from Bhavna. She said, Seems to me the townspeople haven’t forgiven you.
Her mama raised her brows. Forgiven me? For what?
For the things that happened.
What do you know about any of that?
Plenty, Ayosa said. I know plenty, Mama.
* * *
It was the middle of July. Nabumbo Promise and Rosette were terribly concerned that their mother had not answered any of their telephone calls. At first, they thought that Lola Freedom was on an unusually long journey. They figured that she was in her red Cessna, attending to an emergency somewhere.
Lola Freedom was a flying doctor. Whenever the telephone rang, she would drop everything she was doing, and she would jump into her airplane and head out to the backwater village where she was being summoned. She loved the dying. She loved to coax them back, loved to caress spirit, to reacquaint it with body. Sometimes the spirit was bent on leaving, and she loved this too. She loved the resoluteness of its departure. The vacant body that remained behind.
Lola Freedom loved flying, and she loved being a doctor. It was a great wonder that she had managed to weld the two professions together. She ran a nonprofit called Wings of Freedom, which solicited funding from donors abroad. She used this money to maintain the Cessna and to buy medical supplies. She also used it to make significant donations to public offices that might someday be useful to her: the police and the church and the magistrate and the provincial administration. Lola Freedom believed in preventative medicine. She paid bribes and called it philanthropy. She created a long roster of favors that she could call in at the drop of a hat.
And so, between the maintenance work for the Cessna, and her duties as a physician, and her schemes as a philanthropist, Lola Freedom was immensely busy. She was hardly ever at home. That’s why it took a while for Nabumbo Promise and Rosette to grow apprehensive over their unanswered telephone calls.
Still, after three months straight of radio silence, they decided to go home and visit. They thought that maybe their mother had fallen and broken her hip. That she was writhing by the staircase, saying, Lord, I know I don’t deserve it, but send those girls back home to me. Nabumbo Promise hoped that this was true. She wanted to see her mother’s humiliation when they found her sitting in a pool of her own excrement.
* * *
Rosette had Lola Freedom’s jalopy with her. When she’d received the news about Nabumbo’s sepsis, she had returned home briefly from the convent. She had borrowed their mother’s jalopy and driven off to the comatose Nabumbo Promise. Their mother hardly drove anymore. She was never sober for long enough. She was never even sober when she flew her little plane across the sky.
Now they hopped into the jalopy, with Nabumbo Promise at the wheel, and began the journey back home to see their mother. Four hours into the trip, at a place near the halfway point to their mother’s house, Nabumbo Promise started to grow drowsy. Rosette was fast asleep beside her, head bobbing against the window, her nun’s veil covering her face.
Nabumbo Promise lit a cigarette. She switched on the radio. The station was closed for the night, and there was nothing but static. She switched off the radio. She drove in silence for several kilometers, hoping to God that their mother had some painkillers nearby. She still remembered her busted knee, remembered that anguish deep inside the bone. It was not the sort of suffering she wished on anyone, not even her mother.
Suddenly, the jalopy swung. Nabumbo Promise startled. She saw that she had fallen asleep and veered off to the side of the road. She steered it back to the left lane. Then she lowered the window so that cold air could smack the sleep out of her eyes.
She began to hum. She bent down, tried to reach the bucket bag at her feet. To retrieve another cigarette. She could not find her pack of Sportsman.
Shit! she whispered.
And she bent even further, digging among the kerchiefs and coins and condoms and prescription medications and hair ties at the bottom of her bag. She tossed aside her spare pair of spectacles.
There it was!
Her fingers grabbed the cigarettes. She took one out and stuck it between her teeth. Now she dug around inside her pocket for the matches. She let go of the steering wheel, and she struck a match and brought it to the tip of the cigarette. She closed her eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled. Sighed.
And then.
A scream.
Edging out as though from a beast ensnared in a hunter’s trap.
She tore her eyes open.
And she saw two women. They looked like spirits. They looked like the undead. Like the unburied. They wore white tunics and yellow turbans. They carried goatskin drums, which they beat as the jalopy careened toward them. They beat those drums and sang a dirge.
Luwere-luwere-luwere.
It is finished.
Hand yourself back to your maker.
Nabumbo Promise stepped on the brakes, and the momentum threw her and Rosette forward. The next few moments were a blur of dust and burned rubber and guttural howls. Nabumbo Promise and Rosette were rattled about like clay dolls as the jalopy soared above, crashed back down, and shuddered to a stop.
* * *
First, Nabumbo Promise looked over at her sister. Rosette was shell-shocked but otherwise unharmed. Next, Nabumbo Promise stuck her head out the window. The two women lay facedown in the road, their goatskin drums beside them in the dirt.
Nabumbo Promise pulled at the latch, started to scramble out. Before her feet could touch the ground, Rosette grabbed her arm, gripping it hard with her cold fingers. She did not say a thing.
Nabumbo Promise paused. She wiped her stinging nose with the back of her hand. She let her head fall forward, onto the steering wheel. Rosette climbed out. She walked round the hood to the driver’s side. Nabumbo Promise inched away. Now, with Rosette driving, they started moving away from those motionless women. Their dirge still rang in Nabumbo’s ears. She wondered if, through some instinct, the women had known of what was waiting on the road. If they had been singing the dirge for themselves.
* * *
Nabumbo Promise poured her some lassi. Ayosa drank it. She ate the chicken makhani and red rice that Bhavna brought. Then she ate a plum sorbet. Then she ate a nut haluwa. She could taste some rosewater and ghee in it, as well as another potent flavor that she could not quite put her finger on, and that slightly repulsed her.
She and her mama did not say a word to each other through the meal. They were both thinking of things that had happened. Thinking of the Yonder Days.
* * *
Nabumbo Promise and Rosette said nothing to each other the rest of the way. They said nothing to each other even after. As soon as they pulled beside their mama’s house, Rosette ran off to her little shack by the river.
Nabumbo Promise got out. She stood still for a long while, relishing the crisp morning air, the far-off smell of donkey dung, the cackle of geese in the valley. She sat on the wooden porch steps, the gentle sun shining in her eyes. She thought of years gone by. Thought of the time after their mama returned them from the orphanage. Thought of how she and Rosette sometimes sat like this on the porch steps, next to each other, saying nothing at all.
Just watching the crazy-birds that made that jolly anna ha-ha-ha sound. Watching those russet feathers and golden hackles. Those slick sickles and heavy wattles. Wondering where these birds could possibly have come from. Wondering how many women the birds had eaten whole. She’d seen those birds nowhere else but here, in this yard, under these sycamores. They were nasty, mocking birds. They knew all your secrets and laughed because of how pathetic you were.
And she thought of how sometimes Rosette would go to the woods and catch a wild fowl. This was the year before Jentrix the apothecary came and squatted on their land, so there was no one watching over them, no one bringing them soups or bread still warm from the oven. Rosette would carry back the fowl by its wings, and Nabumbo Promise would press her palms over her ears so as not to hear the terrible squalling as Rosette broke its neck. Rosette plucked the feathers and boiled the fowl, and they ate salted meat for supper, still sitting on the porch steps. Then Rosette would grab her musket and return to her little shack down by the river.
Now Nabumbo Promise looked at her mama’s house. The screen over the kitchen window was ripped, flapping about in the breeze. She stared at the trees surging with fruit, at the wasps scurrying under the awning. She got up and entered the house. Her mama never locked the doors. No one ever came this way.
Nabumbo Promise walked through the kitchen, to the corridor. She swept her eyes up and down the stairs. Nothing was amiss. Her mama was off in her Cessna for sure, which Nabumbo Promise was glad for. Although she had entertained it briefly, she did not particularly enjoy the thought of being her mama’s caregiver. She also did not wish to argue with her mother about the fact that she had run away from the convent.
She made herself some bitter coffee in the moka pot. She drank it out of an empty jam jar because she could not find a single clean mug in the cabinet. She thought of what to do with the day. Clean, for one. Her mother’s house was a pigsty. Nabumbo Promise marveled at how something that had felt ordinary to her growing up could seem so bizarre now.
Had they really lived like this? With the dishes in the sink stacked all the way up to the ceiling? With empty glass bottles on the curtain boxes and window ledges, crammed under the kitchen table? With trash in the corner, which, judging from its state of decay, had been there for months on end? With dirty dishes stored in the cabinets, because there was no more space for them in the sink?
But first, she would nap for a while. They had driven all night. Her knee throbbed where she had once busted it. She placed her coffee jar back in the cabinet. She took her bucket bag and climbed up the stairs. Shuffled down the corridor. She had to walk past her mother’s bedroom to get to hers.
Her mother’s bedroom door was ajar. Nabumbo Promise stopped in the corridor and stared in. Saw that her mother was right there, sitting in the blue farmhouse rocking chair, facing the window, as though watching the rumpled sky, as though listening to birdsong. Her yellow hair, which she bleached on the last Sunday of each month, was stiff as fodder.
Lola Freedom? Nabumbo Promise said.
Her mother was silent.
Nabumbo Promise stood still for a few moments, half expecting her mother to turn and hurl the nearest object at her for interrupting her quiet time. That is what she always called those hours spent in her rocking chair, with a bottle of cognac in her lap. She would hurl a lampshade or flashlight or watering can. Anything she could reach. One time, their mother had to give Rosette stitches in the middle of the night after the water jug that she threw split Rosette’s bottom lip. Their mother sewed it back crooked, and the next day, jumped in horror when she saw the lip. She said, Did Jentrix the apothecary practice her whipstitch on your face?
Nabumbo Promise stepped into the room and gagged. She reached for her handkerchief and pressed it to her face. She ambled closer to the rocking chair, touched her mother’s shoulder, and leapt back when her mother fell apart like a pile of wooden blocks. The crazy-birds watched from the window. Jolly anna ha-ha-ha, they guffawed.
* * *
It began to rain the type of bitter rain that seeped into houses and drowned drunkards and sleeping babies. Nabumbo Promise went down to the kitchen. She stood at the window, eyes submerged in hot tears. She saw Rosette emerge through the woods. Probably the river had swollen up and the water was knee-high in her shack. Rosette struggled against the gray gale, periodically stopping to hold on to sycamores and wattle trees so the terrible swirling currents would not fling her down the hill. She finally reached the veranda, sopping wet, her habit and veil completely soaked, her spindly limbs askew like the mangled spokes of an umbrella.
Rosette patted herself down to make sure she was all there—a rain like that sometimes pilfered body parts. She hunched over, palms on the wall, and kicked off her sodden clogs. Then she let herself in, shrugged off her coat, and hung it on the nail behind the door. Rosette looked at Nabumbo Promise, and even though Nabumbo Promise said nothing at all, Rosette immediately knew. They had spent years next to each other, sitting in Stubborn Silence. They knew the different textures of each other’s quiet. They knew which one was bare and which one was bursting at the seams.
Rosette brushed past Nabumbo Promise. She ran down the corridor. Bounded up the stairs. She returned five minutes later, breathing slow, breathing heavy. Wordlessly, Rosette filled the steel kettle with water and set it on the stovetop. She was singing that awful dirge.
Luwere-luwere-luwere.
It is finished.
Hand yourself back to your maker.
Nabumbo Promise froze.
It was for their mother, the dirge.
The women with the goatskin drums, the ones whom she had knocked over with the jalopy, they were singing that dirge for Lola Freedom.
* * *
Buttercup, come back to me!
Ayosa blinked. Her mama leaned forward and touched her hand. What were you thinking?
About Lola Freedom. How you found her dead.
Her mama frowned. I suppose there is still talk all over the town about that. Do you believe that I did it? Murdered her? That’s what some townspeople think. That’s what Dorcas Munyonyi was yelling at me about in the church.
No, Ayosa said. I know you didn’t do it.
How do you know?
You’re all kinds of awful, Nabumbo Promise. Just not the kind to kill her own mama.
Nabumbo Promise frowned. I’ve killed other people, though.
I know.
You know? What do you know about that?
You killed your brother, Maxwell Truth.
Her mama furrowed her brow.
The two priestesses with the goatskin drums, singing the horrible dirge, you killed them too.
Her mama hung her head, half in shame, half in confoundment. How did you know?
I remember things.
You can’t remember things that happened before you were born.
Can too.
Her mama sucked her teeth. Look, I’m not about to argue with a—
Aphid of a child? Arachnid? Sorry red louse?
