Lai was our hiding place. Mam had told us many stories about her visits there when she was a small girl. The rooster and the sun fought, each morning, over which one would welcome the day. The hum of Lake Piso was a part of every conversation, both during the day and in our dreams. The houses in the village formed a circle around a sandy plot of land, where the villagers frequently met. There were two large orange trees in the corner of the village, close to the lake, Piso, that flowed back to Junde. Behind the houses were woods, full of cotton and kola and ironwood trees, that had to be crossed in order to get to a vast forest, and if you walked that forest for long enough you would reach the Atlantic Ocean, which Vai legend claims was the same beach where old Vai kings did business with German and Portuguese people. When we got to Lai, we saw that Mam’s family from the city was already hiding there. My cousin Cholly was Papa’s roommate. And Ol’ Pa Charles, Mam’s father, a man so tall he made Papa look like his son when he stood beside him, and who always patted my head when he passed me. Torma was home in Lai now, and she joined her family and lived across the village in another house.
On July 29, 1990, a group of boys dressed as Hawa Undu’s soldiers went into St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, where six hundred civilians were hiding. It was two in the morning. When the first shot was fired, those who were hiding quickly arose from the bare floors where they slept and scrambled for an escape from the compound. But as the lanterns were lit in the dark, they found Hawa Undu’s soldiers surrounded them; all the men, women, and children were attacked with guns, grenades, and swinging machetes. On the following day the remains of the six hundred were paraded along the streets and burned. Hawa Undu decided on that day to speak to the BBC.
“I will not step down!” President Doe said. “It was rebels dressed in army uniforms that killed the civilians at the church. Charles Taylor’s men did it. Not army soldiers. Rebels killed them. But no rebel can kill me. Only God can.”
The BBC also said that 375,000 Liberians were now in Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
The voice from the small radio was muffled, but loud enough for the small group of men surrounding it to hear. They set the radio on the window of a tiny wooden chicken coop. One of the men stood near the radio and held the edge of the antenna between two of his fingers, twisting it periodically for improved reception. Papa was with them, sitting on a plastic stool close to the outside walls of the broken-down shack. And he looked like he was trying to make a serious face, the kind of face someone makes to hide something serious. Only a few of the men had spent enough time outside of Lai and bordering towns to know English well. Most only spoke Vai, but they crowded around the radio because every other man in the village was doing so. When the man on the radio paused, one of the villagers repeated what he said in Vai. Papa kept his journal with him, a leather-bound book now worn to shreds. While sitting with these men, Papa wrote down words and phrases they were saying. He asked questions when he did not recognize a word, and the villagers took turns telling him the answer.
In the mornings, the front door swung and the smell and sound of the lake rushed to our resting bodies, while Ma laid a mat on the front porch. The rooster from the coop crowed, and she knelt down on the mat and lowered her head several times, murmuring phrases to herself that I did not understand. Ma boiled a small pot of water from Piso and set it on the porch to cool before we rose. We changed into dresses that Pa had recently sewn for us from cloth the villagers gave him, and we joined hands and ran across the village circle to where Papa had already risen and was reading, waiting for us to join him. The girls and I climbed a lumber ladder to his loft.
On those mornings, Papa tutored us in what he had learned, the new words of the small village. We were quizzed on the meanings of words and he made us talk to each other in Vai. The process left me bitter when Papa shook his finger at me for creating words he called foolish and unserious. After our Vai lesson we were given math problems, simple addition and subtraction that we completed with stones he collected from the outskirts of the village.
After we completed our lessons we returned to Ma’s house, where we ate small cups of white rice with her and took turns telling her about our morning lessons.
“Ay-yah,” Ma would say, laughing and touching our faces and cheeks like Mam would. Ma was regaining her strength and weight back from the weeks we spent walking, when she had been reduced to merely skin, bones, and a faint wheeze as she struggled for breath in the sun. Lai was where she was raised, and where Mam was raised before her family moved to the city, the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of Vai chiefs whose graves sat at the edge of the village toward the woods for everyone to see.
“Go now,” she said after we were finished eating. “Play,” she said, urging us to join the other children in the circle.
“Yeh, go.” Pa playfully swatted us out of Ma’s house. “Go meet the other children.”
We could not fully understand what the children were saying, or they us, so we wanted little to do with them. Our favorite place to gather was between the orange trees, where we had a clear view of the village children as they played in the circle. They chased each other, busied themselves with hand games to which they sang along in Vai, and ran in and out of the houses. They had lived in Lai their entire lives.
While playing, Wi gathered the spoiled oranges left scattered underneath the tree and with them made a circle that surrounded us. When the circle was complete, mud and weeds rested between Wi’s fingers and she came to where K and I sat in the middle with sticks.
“What is this?” Wi asked, drawing two circles attached to one another by a crooked line.
“What is this?” K asked after studying Wi’s drawing and emulating the exact same thing in the dirt.
“That’s the same thing I drew!” Wi said, annoyed and offended.
“No it’s not,” K argued.
“Both of them jah-oe,” I said laughing, pleased that I had found a way to use the word I had recently learned meant “ugly.”
“Jah-oe, jah-oe, drawing jah-oe,” I teased them until Wi pushed me. I continued laughing at her nonetheless. A village girl ran to us from the circle across the village where the other children played. She watched us carefully first; she smiled at the fun I sounded and looked like I was having.
“Hello,” the girl said, pulling the strap of her dress up her arm and over her shoulder. She was barefoot and her hair was parted into small cornrows, like ours. We looked up at her but continued what we were doing—Wi pushing me, me dodging her pushes, and K smiling at what she genuinely believed was her original artwork.
“Hello,” the girl said again. Wi met the girl at the margin of our orange circle.
“You speak English?” Wi asked. The girl covered her mouth with her hands as she laughed and looked down at the ground.
“Hello,” the girl said again.
“Jah-oe,” I shouted at her. I rolled over in the dirt, overcome with laughter. At first she looked surprised, but the girl then covered her mouth with her hand and laughed. Wi laughed also, then walked over to me and pulled me up from the dirt.
“Stop, you will get dirty,” she said. I sat up, still showing my teeth.
“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 protruding 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.”