by Jennifer Juo
***
The night passed slowly. The loud drone of the insects seemed to drown out Winston’s calls for help. Eventually, his leg bled so much, he grew tired and almost unconscious. Winston lay on the ground in the thick bush. He could feel ants and flies swarming his bloody wound. Would anyone ever find him? He realized he would not get out of the forest by himself, and he had no idea what the juju doctor had in store for him. Maybe the trap was all part of the plan, leaving him to the natural hazards of the forest, a foreigner who knew nothing about surviving in a tropical jungle. It would be so easy to let him just perish naturally. No curse was necessary. He was that helpless. He knew Simeon would have a rescue team out. They should have found his leather satchel by now, dropped near the entrance to the forest. But would the witch doctor and his men thwart them as well? Winston supposed the men in leaves were meant to be spirits and would probably scare Simeon’s fellow villagers. The last image in his mind before losing consciousness was the playful, ringing laughter of his son.
***
When he woke up at dawn, he saw Simeon and other villagers peering down at him on the forest floor. They took Winston to the nearest hospital in Ife. His leg and ankle were bandaged and stitched up. His wife looked shocked when they brought him home. He must have looked pale and weak. The night in the jungle had frayed his nerves. But she went straight to work. She put him to bed and made him a clear ginger and chicken soup. She undid his bandages and cleaned his wound, a tangled mess of bloody lacerations. Even he couldn’t look at his wound. The doctor had prescribed antibiotics to stave off the infection, but they didn’t know how well his leg would heal. In the scale of things, this didn’t worry him. He had his leg, it could have been much worse.
Sylvia spoon-fed him some of the soup. She seemed to be trying too hard as if…as if she were guilty of something. Of what, he wondered? When it came to their relationship, they were both guilty parties as far as he was concerned. He ate her soup like an obedient patient, saying nothing. He still felt unsettled. She put her hand on his cheek, but he flinched under her touch.
For several weeks, they were held captive by his injury. While he healed, she barely left the house, not even going to volunteer at the clinic. He assumed he was her patient now. A few times the phone rang and she answered, but Winston couldn’t hear what she said.
“You’re good at this,” he said one afternoon, complimenting her ability as a nurse.
“I’ve learned a lot. He’s taught me…” her voice trailed off at the mention of the young doctor. “I should go back and get my nursing degree,” she continued.
“It would just be a piece of paper now,” Winston said.
“It would give me something to fall back on,” she said. He knew what she was implying, in case something happened to him.
“You’re right, you should sign up.” Then he added, “I requested an armed guard to come with me on my trips.”
She was silent for a moment. He thought she was amassing her argument for him to quit his project and leave Africa. But to his surprise, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she hesitantly reached out for his hand. He let her rest her hand on his for a brief moment. He thought maybe she had given up on arguing her case. He was relieved, but somehow he also felt hurt and he didn’t know why. He didn’t want to leave, but he couldn’t help wondering why did she suddenly not care anymore?
“I’m glad, Winston,” she said finally. “About the armed guard.” She didn’t mention his son, but he knew this was what she was thinking—that he was willing to risk dying and hurting his son.
He turned and faced the window, away from her. His son—he felt his heart constrict.
She put her hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go make you some tea.”
His wife left the room, and he gazed out at the forest beyond the garden. Innocuous-looking green vines and trees, but underneath he knew real dangers lurked, waiting to pounce.
Chapter 21
His leg healed, but the injury left him with a slight limp. It didn’t bother him though; it was a necessary casualty, a small cost in his mission to drive hunger from the world. In the fall of 1980, a few months later, Winston followed the harvest procession as the villagers walked through the dense sacred forest. Simeon and the villagers danced as they made their way through the forest, celebrating their record harvest. Winston’s armed guard followed him closely. Winston didn’t like being back in the dark, brooding forest, it brought back memories of that terrible night. He looked down at every step, fearing a rusty trap hidden in the undergrowth.
The procession came to a shrine, an old mud palace in the middle of the sacred forest, once belonging to a great oba or king. A village elder, dressed in a white robe, offered a white kola nut and a white pigeon to the shrine along with a mountain of maize. Everyone could see the seeds worked miracles.
Suddenly Oluwa was beside him. “I take your seeds now,” Oluwa said.
“Uh…good,” Winston said, slightly taken aback. “You will not regret it.” He thought Oluwa was their sworn enemy. Did this mean he had joined their side? Did this nullify the juju doctor’s spell, that is, if Oluwa was behind it?
“Dat is good news, ma brotha,” Simeon said. “I myself have cleared more land. My farm is de biggest in de village. I also buy big American tractor.”
Simeon left out that he had borrowed money to purchase the tractor. Simeon had also bought the village’s first generator powered by diesel gasoline. He was building a new house, the first house in the village with electricity.
The village elder cleared his throat, and the procession turned to see him perform the divination rite of the harvest ritual. Winston watched, full of apprehension. Just six months ago, his life had been at risk in this same forest. The place felt haunted to him now. What would the future bring? As he looked around at the village men, he couldn’t help wondering, which of these men had dressed up in leaves and chased him in the forest? He knew it had to be some of them. He felt a fear rise up in him, a tightening in his chest.
The village elder cut a yam in half and then cast the two parts on the ground, how these fell would determine the destiny of the community, predicting success or failure of the crops for the next year. Everyone assumed the yams would fall facing up, indicating continued success. But when the elder cast the yams, the two halves tumbled onto the ground, one landing face up and the other face down—the future was uncertain. Winston felt as if a stranger had moved into his mind, making himself at home, upsetting the careful placing of his things. He didn’t like this uncertainty, this messy roommate. Too much of his life had been decided by the vagaries of chance. He wanted to have everything mapped out, a concrete plan, not this.
The procession returned to the village for a large meal, a goat slaughtered for the occasion, pounded yam. When night fell, Simeon invited everyone to come to the yard in front of his house.
“Ma friends,” he said. “I present you a show.”
In front of his half-built house, he positioned a medium-sized television screen. He pressed the switch with a flourish, and suddenly the latest Nigerian soap operas beamed right into Simeon’s outdoor living room. The villagers laughed in delight and clapped. Everyone forgot about the ambiguous prophecy of the harvest rite. For now, life was good.
***
In the spring, the villagers planted again, hoping for the best. But by next summer in 1981, Winston met with Simeon and a group of worried villagers under the thatched canopy.
Simeon complained, “De fertilizer it cost too much dese days, eh. I try to buy it, but de man charge too much, eh. Who he tink he is?”
“How’s that possible?” Winston asked. “The fertilizers are subsidized by the government.”
“I dunno. De man come from de city. He in de suit, always walking around tinking he is some kind of god, tst. Just because he wear a suit. It’s not even new, eh?”
“Who do you think these city slickers are?” Richard asked, turning to Winston.
“I d
on’t know,” Winston said, shaking his head. “But looks like they’re buying the subsidized bags for cheap and then reselling them at a profit.”
“Dat cockroach, because of him, I no buy de bag dis year, I no have de money,” Simeon said.
Other farmers echoed Simeon’s complaints.
“Bloody hell,” Richard said. “Look, the seeds here are bred to respond to a very precise mix of inputs. It’s like baking bread. You can’t leave one ingredient out. It won’t work.”
The villagers looked at Richard, confused.
“They don’t bake bread,” Winston said. He looked over at Simeon, he seemed nervous.
High on the past several successful harvests, Simeon had borrowed money with the expectation of continued bounty. Winston knew Simeon needed a decent harvest to pay back his loan. He couldn’t afford the seeds to fail to perform their magic. The juju doctor’s spell was still present and doing its deed despite Oluwa’s adoption of the seeds. Winston could feel the curse’s undertow, pulling them down. Was Oluwa playing both sides or was he up to something, Winston wondered?
Simeon invited them to stay for dinner as usual. Winston protested, but Simeon insisted, and he didn’t want to offend him. Richard took out his spam sandwich. Winston got up and walked over to watch the women, pounding the yam, tossing their long sticks up into air as they beat the yams. They took turns, singing and arguing in the process. Abike, Simeon’s wife, dressed in a bright purple wrap and green rubber slippers, crouched on the ground, sifting the pounded yam over a red plastic tub. He knew this pounded yam was being prepared especially for him. If it were not for the guests, they would not bother with all that effort. They would have had gari instead, the substitute made from a bag of powder.
Abike served the steaming pounded yam with a spicy fish stew, but she did not look at Winston when she handed him his plate. She resented him, he realized. Of course she would. Even if Simeon didn’t believe in the curse, Abike probably did, just like his wife.
“I will request an armed guard for you and your family,” Winston said, speaking directly at Abike.
“Why we need dat?” Simeon said. “We okay. No one botha us.”
“It won’t do no good, de spell will take us when dey want,” Abike said, quietly
“I still think it’s a good idea,” Winston said, but they both ignored him. He wondered if maybe they felt uncomfortable trusting their lives to a guard they didn’t know, a stranger from another tribe.
Winston sat down and rolled the pounded yam into a ball, dipping it into the spicy fish stew. He felt Abike’s hostility throughout the meal. He could feel her glaring at him when he wasn’t looking. In the back of his mind, he knew she was right to doubt him.
***
A few months later in October, Winston drove his jeep along the cracked tarmac road, littered with moon-like craters. There was no life on either side of the deserted road, only the African bush, trees swamped by vines. The outline of the bush was irregular-shaped like the curve of Winston’s own life, spiking in all sorts of random directions he hadn’t planned on going.
Winston watched the women harvesting the meager ears of corn on Simeon’s plots—baskets full of nothing when he had promised everything. The fields were full of withered, dry, brown maize stalks. Without the potent supply of fertilizers to feed the addiction of the man-made seeds, Simeon’s maize had produced only a few shriveled ears of corn.
Winston walked back to the village. He heard a rustling of leaves in the corn fields and sensed someone following him. He turned around, but he only saw the dried corn husks swaying in the breeze. He started to walk as quickly as he could, the sweat running down his face, but his bad leg slowed him down. Suddenly, a man appeared out of the dry corn fields and stood in front of him. It was Oluwa, Simeon’s brother-in-law. Winston noticed he held a machete in his hand.
“Come and see my fields, sah,” he said mysteriously. “It grow and grow.”
Winston didn’t trust Oluwa, but he followed. They came to Oluwa’s fields, and Winston saw the women harvesting the maize, their baskets full of corncobs.
“Did you buy the fertilizer?” Winston asked, dumbfounded at Oluwa’s successful harvest while Simeon and all the other farmers had suffered.
“I don’t need da fertilizer. I do what my fatha and grandfatha do,” Oluwa bragged. “Those dat grows under de crown of de acacia tree is always de most plentiful. De roots, dey go deep deep and bring good things to de top.”
Winston looked at the majestic acacia trees interspersed throughout Oluwa’s field. Oluwa had taken the miracle seeds, but he hadn’t cleared all the trees like Winston had told the villagers to do. His farm looked more like the traditional West African fields—the maize mixed with trees and other vegetables, creating a multi-layered effect. Oluwa’s land stood in great contrast to Simeon’s plots—the monotonous, flat, single-crop maize fields reminiscent of American farms. Winston knelt down to take a sample of Oluwa’s soil.
“I show you dis to warn you,” Oluwa’s voice suddenly turned dark. His eyes bulged out and his lips curled. “We do betta without you. Stay away, you only bring trouble trouble to our village, eh.”
Winston stood up and tried to say something, but Oluwa, shouted at him, waving his machete.
“Go away, you hear, eh? You go bring bad tings to our village. You hear, eh?”
Winston realized it was the same words the juju doctor had threatened him with— you bring bad tings to de village.
Winston turned and started walking as quickly as he could with his bad leg. He looked back, Oluwa did not follow. Instead, he just stood there staring. Winston kept walking away, but inside, his mind was in chaos. What if the juju doctor’s prophecy was true? He was afraid of what might happen to the village in the end, he couldn’t describe or understand this feeling, but he felt it nonetheless.
Back in the laboratory on the compound, Winston discovered Oluwa’s soil was naturally rich in nitrogen. In the absence of fertilizers, the acacia trees were doing the same job. Winston was promoting the fantastic inventions of Western science, but was this at the cost of the knowledge passed on by generations toiling on that same orange dirt? He sat down in the dusk of his laboratory, the odor of the chemicals invading his lungs.
SYLVIA
Chapter 22
Black was the color of rain clouds, an auspicious color, a source of life. Rain nurtured the dry soil in which crops grew. Because of this, black was the color of fertility. Long ago, Yoruba brides wore black on their wedding days, not white like the Europeans and not red like the Chinese. Brides, wrapped in black, were creators of new life.
Sylvia paid good money for black cloth at the market due to the labor involved and the amount of indigo required to dye the cloth so dark. Young village women collected indigo leaves, pounded and dried them into balls. Older women crouched next to deep blue holes of dye in the ground, dipping the cotton cloth into the hole over and over again until it turned from light blue to black.
Sylvia pinned flimsy brown paper patterns onto the black material and cut it into pieces of a summer dress. She hummed one of her favorite romantic Cantonese pop songs while she sewed with her black Singer machine. As Winston recklessly risked his life, she felt like he was pulling further and further away from his family. She could understand him waging his cold war on Lila and her, but how could he do this to Thomas? Who was this man she had married? She spent more and more time with her lover, who was real and by her side.
She wore the black dress even though Winston and the children accompanied her to the clubhouse party. Ayo’s eyes followed her across the room. It was the summer of 1982, and they had been seeing each other for over four years. Ayo had been engrossed in his work at the clinic and establishing himself as a doctor, so an affair, a relationship without commitment, seemed to have suited him.
Sylvia saw her lover go out of the clubhouse doors on to the dark patio. Before their affair, she and Ayo had always searched each other out in public. But
now that they met in private, they avoided each other anywhere else. The expat compound was like a small town. Gossip mushroomed among bored wives trapped inside the compound walls. So she waited ten minutes and then followed. She found him waiting outside. He kissed her against the wall, his hands feeling her body through the black material.
Ayo led her to the changing rooms by the dark pool. They made love, sitting on the bench in the changing rooms, she on top of him, so he could see her silhouette in the black marriage cloth. He leaned on the screened window of the changing rooms with shuttered slats, the moonlight throwing white stripes across her dress and her face. No one could see in, but sounds carried. They made love as the party spilled out onto the poolside outside their window. They could hear the distant laughter and screams of children pushing each other into the pool.
“Marry me,” he said.
But she didn’t have time to respond. She heard a commotion outside, a child was in trouble. Lila.