Akai had told her family that the child’s father was a senior officer who was preparing his army to come for her. She said he had told her to wait for him. She said it was the custom of Boltons to see the children only after they could run. To her family it was an absurd custom. Still, they made arrangements to welcome the stranger into the family.
They waited.
And waited.
They waited.
In spite of the sheep and money, the larger Akai became, the more shame-nurtured silences deepened.
Akai’s beloved stepfather became a laughingstock among the elders. He started calling her section of the family “the outsiders”—this man who had fought almost to death anyone who had tried to do so before. He moved Akai and her mother out, to save face. He did so in tears. Akai said Hugh would claim her, with more cows than had ever been seen in the land.
Akai’s mother set up a homestead two days’ walk away from their real home, near Elemi. There were goats and sheep and a donkey. That was where Akai gave birth. She did not know there would be twins.
Ewoi, the boy.
Etir, the girl.
Caramel-skinned children with large gray eyes.
“Twins are bad.”
There was a tussle, the midwife arguing with Akai and her mother about the terrible portent of this birth. “Nothing good has come today,” she screeched.
“Touch them, I’ll break your neck,” Akai vowed.
Akai’s stepfather — after a raid, on his way back home — left a red calf. It was his way of honoring the children.
Akai Lokorijom loved the calf, which took to sitting with her and following her on long walks. And as the twins grew, there were days when everything was almost good.
1960 collapsed into 1961 as a single, entrenched desiccating drought season. Everything burned. Everything struggled to breathe before drying to death.
Akai’s brother came to take the red cow to join the other livestock, which would be driven to other pastures, in the heart of Ethiopia. He left them two camels, for milk.
In the heart of the drought, Akai fought with her mother over a water jug. She needed the water for her children. Words became a blow. Akai’s mother slapped her to the ground. Told her to stop dreaming. Said she was a mere curse that had tainted life from the moment she was born.
Akai did the unthinkable. She backhanded her mother.
Her mother took her by the head and spat out a dirge: “You are dead.…”
So Akai left, with a bundle of her few things. Her mother packed the twins, too, tied everything to the camel, and pushed them away. “Go and die,” she hurled.
Akai was on her way to Kalacha and Wuoth Ogik, having circumnavigated the brackish lake, when the already fragile camel crumpled on the arid land, groaned, and died.
Akai fell where the camel lay. She spent the day cutting it up and storing its stringy pieces in the folds of her dress. She fed the children with its blood. She walked a full day with the twins, but then she hurried back to the dead camel. When she got there, she found grunting hyenas scavenging the carcass. She backed away. At a safe distance, she fled, carrying the children.
After that, she strapped her crying children, one to her back, and the other to her front. Unthinking, she hunted for liquid, pursuing mirages, trusting that at least one would yield water.
Water.
She scrambled into dried-up water holes. Her breast milk dried up. The sun seared Ewoi’s and Etir’s skin red. They were dry-mouthed, thirsty.
“One morning they stopped crying.”
Akai’s voice is cracking.
Ajany’s eyes are extra wide.
Akai bit into her wrist to feed her children her blood, but her teeth slipped off her skin, her strength fading. Ewoi fell out of her arms, convulsing on the ground. Akai saw, with all her life, how truly small the baby was, how light her arms felt without the extra child. Ewoi tried to cry. Akai adjusted Etir and walked away, leaving Ewoi behind. In the near distance, a hyena howled. Akai walked on. Never looked back; the first stone veil dropped over her face. She walked the paths of hills that were dry, handsome, and still unyielding.
She stopped in the night beneath a hillock made of rocks with giraffe etchings carved into their surfaces, with their heads piercing clouds. Etir was looking into her eyes. She picked up a sharp-ended rock and started scraping her wrist. Then she managed to tear the skin at the back of her hands with her teeth. She placed the vein near the child’s mouth. Etir tried to drink, but his mouth stopped moving. His eyes remained half closed; his body still. Akai placed the child at the base of that hill and walked on. She walked through the night, into the Chalbi Desert, where she collapsed and waited to die.
It was not death that came, but water. Rain had fallen in the northern hills. The desert used to be a lake. A flash flood raced through a laga and dragged Akai downstream for two kilometers. She crashed into a rock. She let go. The waters swept her to the edge. They paraded carcasses of the newly dead. After an hour and a half of this, the floods receded. Akai waded out of the laga, its sand and mud squelching beneath her feet, located Mount Kulal and the Hurri Hills, and walked southeastward. Akai showed up at Wuoth Ogik to die.
A barbet twitters. The Wuoth Ogik courtyard gate lies open and swings in intermittent phases.
Akai points. “That’s where I walked through.”
She had sat on the ground to wait behind the shadows of the vessels into which water poured from the roof when it rained.
The green Land Rover drove up with an antelope tied to its chassis, streaks of blood washing down the window. Hugh Bolton in drab tan khaki jumped out first and headed toward the house. Nyipir, who had been driving, reversed the car and parked it next to the boma.
Akai waited for Hugh to unlock the house door before she stepped into view.
Nyipir had pulled out a rifle, which he leaned against the car. He put a foot on the step, using a knife to cut down the creature. Just then he heard Hugh shout, “Whore! Whore! Whore! Ngikakumok! Rain preventer!”
Nyipir cocked the rifle, thinking Wuoth Ogik was under attack by rustlers. Then he saw Akai Lokorijom, swaying, shuffling, and emaciated. Heard Akai say, “My father wants his bride price.”
“Whore-whore-whore.”
“They were two,” she said to Hugh. “Their names Ewoi and Etir.”
“Liar! Liar!”
“I leave them on the ground for you to bring.”
“Ngikakumok!”
Akai said, “We can keep the bones.”
Hugh had rushed at her with his small army knife. She fell on the ground, not defending herself. “Two babies,” Akai repeated.
“Prostitute, monkey, slut, slug. Ngikakumok!”
Hugh’s penknife slashed at her arms, shoulder, stomach, aiming for her womb. Akai stuck to him. He had raised his knife over her neck when Nyipir clicked the rifle’s hammer into place and shot Hugh in the head. He reloaded the rifle, stepped back, and shot Hugh in the throat.
Akai says, “Such a man does not die easy.”
Akai looks toward Nyipir.
She glances at Hugh’s cairn.
Suffocating memories. Akai will not speak of how Hugh’s blood spattered them.
Nyipir had pointed the rifle at her, but she had thrown herself into his arms, kissed his face all over, and pleaded in a whisper, “Help me.”
The flood-of-blood night, sweating through fear. They carried Hugh’s body into the car with the antelope still on its roof. They drove as far as they could before the car got stuck, moved the body between them until they reached a red hill with fissures and overhangs, where they pushed Hugh through a twisted tunnel that became a cave, took him deep into the earth, found a chamber where they could sit and breathe. It was dark. It was cool. There, Akai straddled Nyipir, tore off his clothes, covered in Hugh’s blood. “Help me.” Forgetting who she was, what they had become and done. Akai and Nyipir did not leave the cave until mid-morning of the next day, while what was left of Hugh bled to death next to them.