What he didn’t know was that word had spread about how he had mistreated the elders, and no one wanted to help him. Wonde began dangling money in front of people passing by. “You could get all of this if you do a quick errand for me,” he coaxed. “Come on.” But everyone ignored him, even those on their way to labor for a week for much less than he was offering them for that day.
“I cannot believe that no one wants money for a simple errand,” he grumbled after many more failed trials to entice someone with his wad of cash. After an hour or so, Miller walked by and Wonde took out even more cash, wiping his sweaty face that was used to the air-conditioned car and office but not the sun and humidity that drove away the fresh air of morning.
“Young man, take this money for a small errand. Be smart.” Wonde held out the money, his voice exhausted. Miller walked toward him, nodding. Wonde explained his demands and gave him a note to deliver, and Miller nodded again, pocketing the money. Then he tore up the note and threw the pieces in the air before walking away. Wonde stared in a stupor of disbelief, so used was he to getting his way with every inhabitant.
It was then that Wonde began the trek to the mining site. Everyone was at work, so he couldn’t catch a ride from one of his workmates. Passenger vehicles passed him, and as if the dust, too, wanted some revenge, it rose thickly and coated his stocky face. He coughed and spat on the ground and cursed, and he walked as though his feet had forgotten their natural tasks. For days, that story of Wonde was told all around town. It made the people laugh. It made them believe, too, that the world still had an arsenal of consequences for those who disrespect the elders and the land.
Miller handed the money over to Colonel and described the surprise on Wonde’s face when he tore up the note.
“I wanted him to follow me for his money so I could take him into the forest and deal with him there,” Miller said as he pulled out more of the money he had in his pocket. Colonel tried not to smile, even though he loved the story. The two of them had done things that bonded them so much more than they could ever say to any of the other youngsters. Often they reacted to the same sounds and acknowledged each other afterward. This act today, though, this handing over the money to Colonel without him asking for it or even having knowledge of it, was the birth of the two of them becoming partners in future actions.
“This is yours and you can do whatever you like with it,” Colonel told Miller.
“I know, man, and I have decided to hand it to you. You can decide how to use it best for the group. Also, I will only get into more trouble with that money in this town in particular,” Miller said, looking up the guava tree for that one fruit he had been waiting to ripen. Colonel held back another smile. He knew exactly what Miller was referring to, a habit to manage memories of the past. They agreed to add the money to the small pile they were saving to pay the school fees of the others. They sat quietly, and Colonel patted Miller’s shoulder before he disappeared into the night for his regular walk at the edge of the bushes around town, making sure that even the light from the moon, let alone the lamps, didn’t deliver his shadow from the night’s dark embrace.
* * *
Everything was in disarray during the preparations for full-scale mining to commence. Huge trucks, bulldozers, and other monstrous-looking machines came from out of nowhere and in full speed traveled down roads to start digging. They provided no proper passage for the travelers who had no other means but to walk, so with the persistence of bare feet finding a way around the roadblocks, people made paths in the bushes by the roads. But the mining vehicles rolled on in groups, leaving a thick fog of dust. It took minutes to be able to see where you were going, whether you were in the bushes or on the road.
Bockarie had started making his children Manawah, Miata, and Abu leave for school with him earlier than usual to avoid these dangerous commotions that now came with daylight. Benjamin, however, waited until it was bright outside. “What difference does it make, man? At least I can see them coming and run for my life.” He laughed.
One morning, as Bockarie and his children walked in the last brushstrokes of night, they heard boys shouting in agony down the road. Bockarie, trailed by his children, ran as fast as he could toward the cries. As they came to a halt, gasping, they saw what had happened. A young boy, sixteen years old, one of Bockarie’s students, had stepped on a live electric wire in the dark. The blood in his body had been sucked dry and his remains looked as if he had died a very old man. By the time his friends pulled him from the wire that continued to spark, burning his peeled flesh that had been left behind, it was too late.
This was the first death since life in the town began after the war. The boys just stood there weeping, and whoever came along did the same. A few men screamed at the vehicles passing by; others threw stones at them, breaking their side and rear windows, but the vehicles didn’t stop. As the group grew—students, teachers on their way to school, mothers and fathers who had come to see what the commotion was about—the more agitated the crowd became. They began uprooting electric poles and destroying anything with the mining company’s logo on it.
Bockarie put his arms around his children. It was the only way he could assure them that they were safe, since it could have been any of them. Benjamin came strolling up a while later. Nodding to Bockarie, he joined those shouting at the vehicles carrying the foreigners and local workers.
Before too long, three vehicles with police officers in riot gear pulled up. They threw tear gas into the crowd until the group dispersed, coughing, with burning noses and eyes. There was no school that day. Under the cloud of tear gas, a group of men took the body of the boy with them back to town, where the police chief and his men patrolled the streets, announcing through a megaphone: “Watch where you walk on the roads and there will be no deaths or problems.”
The police did nothing further. Instead of investigating what had happened, they blamed the boy who died for his carelessness. They neglected to mention the fact that there had been no danger signs alerting the presence of live electrical wires, or that the wires should have been covered in the first place.
The mining company’s work continued uninterrupted. The town grew tense with the people’s quiet fury. The atmosphere was so stiff that the wind didn’t move, and for the rest of that day it felt as though something was about to break. The police, sensing that something might happen, issued a direct warning that anyone caught sabotaging the mining company’s equipment would be arrested.
In near silence, the town formed a procession to take the boy’s body to the cemetery. But to make matters even worse, it was impeded by another procession, that of mining company machines. The local men operating the machines stopped to let the mourners continue. But soon one of the foreigners pulled up in his vehicle. He was exasperated and ordered the men back into their machines to proceed. Otherwise, he said, they would be sacked. The men argued that the procession would take only a few minutes to pass and that he should have respect for the dead. But he was already on the phone calling the police, who arrived immediately in two trucks, with batons and rifles with live ammunition this time. They began pushing the crowd out of the way so the machines could pass.
“Why are you doing this, my brothers? You are supposed to protect us,” some people said, stretching their arms toward the policemen they knew very well.
“Would you let this happen if it was your brother who had died, or your child?” the older women pleaded. A group of men shielded those carrying the coffin, batons hitting their backs, so that the boy’s body wouldn’t fall out in the commotion. The policemen succeeded in pushing the burial procession to the side for the machines to go ahead. They even fired a few rounds in the air.
The mother of the boy let out a wail that was covered by the sounds of the machines roaring by. The women tried to console her, pulling her along when her feet were unable to hold up her body. She swung in their arms, allowing her feet to touch the ground every now and then as though to assure herself that she was still here on this earth.
The machines continued on, the men operating them in tears, helpless and filled with sadness. It was a day that already felt too long, and every hour made the world heavier. Men stood around hiding their faces because they couldn’t do anything to help.
Later that same day, Wonde came to the funeral home with a bag of rice for the boy’s family. He dropped it off in the yard from the back of his Toyota and left without greeting the mourners. The gesture made the equation clear: the company and the minister of mines felt that the lives of the people of Imperi were worth one bag of rice each. Sadder still, the family had no choice but to take the rice and use it. And Rogers, the father of the boy, soon afterward sought employment with the company as a general worker, and later as a driver of one of their trucks.
As usual, that night the bar in town was filled with the foreign workers and, also as usual, Wonde. The men from Imperi who worked for the company were all at the burial house, paying their respects. But the music from the bar and the boisterousness of the chatter drowned out the prayer being said for the boy. While Colonel and Miller watched, Sila came to the bar and pleaded with the owner to turn the music down, which he did. He then turned to the men: “Please, just for this night, could you bring your voices down for the burial house not far from here?”
But the men ignored him, and one of them told the bar owner that if he didn’t turn the music back up, they would all leave. The men started shouting at him, “Turn it up, man, what is wrong with you, trying to stop our enjoyment?”
Their voices grew even more raucous than the music, so the owner turned up the music to appease them, the only small contribution he could make. One of the foreigners stood and pulled one of his hands up inside his shirt to mimic Sila’s stump. No one could say where Ernest had come from, but suddenly he was there, shoving the man into tables, spilling beers, and breaking a chair. The foreigner staggered to his feet and was about to throw punches at Ernest when Sila stepped between them, as did the bar owner.
“The next round is on the house, gentlemen,” he said and escorted Sila and Ernest outside. No words left Sila’s lips, but before he started back for the burial house, he looked Ernest in the eyes. It was the first time. Ernest walked into the night toward the river where he usually went to sit on a rock, away from everyone.
“Wonde and his friends are very disrespectful. They are preventing God’s ears from hearing the dead boy’s mother and her prayers,” Colonel told Miller, his eyes getting red with anger. He asked Miller to follow him to the shed he had built in the back of their house that contained things he collected for purposes that Miller found out as they went along. He handed a rubber hose and some jerry cans to Miller. They walked back toward the bar. As they got nearer, Colonel made sure that they remained unseen and crept closer to the vehicles parked outside. Moving from one vehicle to another, he opened the petrol tanks and, using the rubber hose, sucked the petrol into the jerry cans. They made several trips to store the petrol in buckets, and when they were done, he took a gallon or more of the petrol and walked toward the mining site.
Miller didn’t ask where they were going; he just followed. Colonel knew where the electrical grid was that connected the power to the living quarters of the men at the bar. He also knew that the light for the bar was connected to that same grid. Why couldn’t the mining company offer the same power to other houses in town, or to the schools, for example? Colonel instructed Miller to make several piles of dry grasses. These he carefully soaked with petrol and threw into the inner part of the fenced electrical grid. Then he struck a match.
Colonel and Miller ran rapidly away from the sparks that flew out and exploded the wires. Soon enough, darkness took over the hills where the quarters were, along with the bar and even some of the offices. When the men at the bar came out to get into their vehicles, they couldn’t start them, and they had no way of reaching anyone, since the lights were out. They called on their radios for help, but it took hours before a bus could be found in the dark and dispatched to fetch them.
It took a week to get power back up and for the bar to be operational again. During that time, the town’s nightly natural sounds slowly returned—the crickets, the laughter of older people staying up talking, the vigorous orchestra of the frogs, the call for prayer. Colonel, who still rarely slept, listened to all the sounds. No one knew how the power failure had come about, though Wonde suspected Miller, but he didn’t know the boy’s name or whose son he was. Some of the workers suspected Ernest but had no proof. He, too, was not the son of anyone working for the company—or of anyone alive, for that matter. Usually in such cases, Wonde would sack the father or threaten to do so to get the outcome he desired. As a result, he and some of the foreigners became a bit afraid, though they still took liberties, as a mind accustomed to arrogance has limited space for remembrance.
Once the company resumed operations, the sounds of mining once more drove away the natural sounds of Imperi and the town returned to its crooked road. The machines were everywhere again, especially the ones the locals called “belle woman,” meaning “pregnant woman,” which they indeed resembled. Many vehicles were getting pregnant from the land and all that comes from it. They gave birth at the docks where ships carried the benefits somewhere else—riches generated from their land, which they would never taste, to places the people of Imperi would never know. They settled for the immediate but temporary enticements. They no longer believed they had control over anything in their lives; desperation became their master. But desperation does not lay foundations. And the elders struggled, as their presence and importance faded, to find words that might reach the ears of whatever God or gods were in the hearts of those in charge.