Laugh with the Moon (24 page)

S
ickness and Patuma leave to drop off the books at the trading center, and the rest of us head to the hospital. “I must tell you that there is a boy who love me a lot,” Agnes announces as we turn down the path. She plucks a sprig of cow parsley.

“What boy?” Memory asks.

Agnes twirls the stem between her hands. “The boy who left the chicken at my door on weekend,” she says.

“At
your
door?” I ask. That’s a big coincidence! I wonder if everyone here gets a chicken left at their door.

A man rides down the path with a very sick-looking girl slumped over on the bike rack. We press our backs against the jungle vines to allow them to pass.

“It was delicious,” Agnes says, walking on.

My stomach lurches.

“I know this boy must love me a lot,” she says.

“What is the name of this boy?” Memory asks her. “This boy who left you a chicken?”

“The name of this boy is Mr. Wonderful,” Agnes says, and smiles. “Mr. Wonderful is a businessman. On the way to school, I see the wife of Mr. Khumala. She tell me there is a line of customer in the trading center waiting to buy his reeds. Mr. Wonderful feed his family and now me too.”

Memory bursts out laughing. “This is some boy,” she says. “He love Clare as well. She too did receive a chicken gift some time ago.”

Agnes’s brown eyes narrow to tunnels of disappointment.

“Me as well,” Memory adds, and waves to Saidi, who’s squatting beneath a palm tree at the edge of the hospital parking lot. “It is true. This boy love me as well. The past night I find a chicken tied to the cook-fire stone outside the hut. It did not give eggs, so Grandmother and I ate it feetfirst.”

My stomach lurches for a second time. I don’t think I can survive a third.

When we reach Saidi, Agnes asks him straight out: “Did you or did you not deliver a gift for a girlfriend?”

“Or girlfriends?” Memory says, and giggles.

“A gift for my girlfriends?” Saidi stands. “I do have some reeds. Or for the American girlfriend, perhaps she desire a bowl of
mphalabungu
bugs.”

Memory and I laugh while Agnes turns away. But the question still clucks through my mind: if it wasn’t Saidi who left us all chickens, who could it be?

The next day during our math lesson, Memory and I try to uncover the identity of Mr. Wonderful. “Perhaps
Handlebar,” she whispers. “His uncle is chief of Kapoloma village and he can pay for secondary school. Did you not notice? Handlebar forever turn in his seat to search through the doorway. It is as if he longs to observe the rains.” She bugs her eyes at me knowingly and giggles. “However, I think it is not the rains he watches.”

Mrs. Tomasi stops writing on the board. “Chattering birds build no nests,” she snaps at us. But the opportunity to gossip with Memory has stoked a flame in me—one that needs to burn.

A few minutes later, when Mrs. Tomasi is scrawling another equation, I whisper, “It could be Silvester.” Silvester is skinny and small. He doesn’t talk very much, and he has the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a boy. If it’s Silvester who’s crushing on us, that would be cool. “You know why he’s quiet?” I whisper to Memory. “Because he’s keeping a secret! Isn’t that cute?”

Agnes, who is still upset that her chicken isn’t from Saidi, leans over and says, “Some students require advancement of studies. Please remember, some students in this classroom shall go to secondary school. After secondary school, university.”

Mrs. Tomasi whips around again. She clutches the cassava chalk so tightly that it’s a wonder it doesn’t explode. “Girls!” she shouts. “Clean the ladies’! All of you!”

That sure shuts us up. Minutes later, our faces are screwed up with dread as the three of us trudge across the field with buckets and rags to the girls’ pit latrine.

Then the day turns from awful to awfully strange: we bump right into Mr. Special Kingsley.

“You girls are role models for our young children,” he
says. “You do a fine job as teachers. If you keep this commendable work going, I shall find a way to deliver a second thank-you chicken to each of you!”

I gasp.

“And where do you go with these buckets and rags?” he asks.

We role models stand there hemming and hawing until we decide the best answer to give is none at all. The pit latrines get cleaned regularly by students who have misbehaved, and we don’t want Mr. Special Kingsley to know that today the honor is all ours. “Good day, sir,” Memory says.

“Good day, sir,” I repeat.

“Wishing you all the marvels the world can offer,” Agnes adds.

Then we turn on our heels. Without another word, we march away from Mr. Special Kingsley to the girls’ pit latrine, where we try to scrub our mistakes away.

T
wenty-eight days after Innocent died, it’s time to mark the end of the mourning period with a ceremony called
sadaka ya lubaini
. I doubt I can handle any more crying, but of course, I go with Dad. As it turns out, all of Mkumba village is there.

Hundreds of villagers sit on the grass in a circle around a raging fire. I hug Memory and her grandmother, who are sitting in carved chairs beside the village chief. I settle down on the other side of the circle between Saidi and Dad. After the chief slaughters a goat, we all pray for Innocent’s soul. Calabashes full of sweet
thobwa
made from the last stores of maize are passed around.

Memory’s grandmother wears a strip of cloth around her head. She holds up a pair of khaki pants. She hands the pants to the village chief, and she unravels something
else she was holding under her arm. It’s a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt.

It takes me a minute to figure out what these clothes are, and when I do, my breath vanishes. It’s Innocent’s school uniform! Innocent’s uncle Stallard lifts a clay mug full of green liquid into the air. Then he pours the muck onto the clothes.
How dare you!
I want to scream, but my vocal cords aren’t working. Dad leans over. “I remember this from way back,” he says. “It’s a ritual cleansing. Now another boy will be allowed to wear that uniform to school.”

After the chief leads a prayer in Chichewa, four men wearing white pound on their drums. And suddenly, everyone is dancing, including Memory and her grandmother. I used to think that happy people dance and sad people cry. But now I see that people aren’t like stitches on a hem. They don’t always follow a pattern. They don’t always weave in and out, holding the pieces of their lives together in the way you might expect. Sad people can laugh and dance, and that doesn’t mean they’re suddenly fine. And happy people can cry, and that doesn’t mean they’re not okay.

It depends on the moment.

It depends on who they are in the moment.

It depends on absolutely everything.

Now Saidi, Agnes, and Dad dance along with Memory and her grandmother and most of the other villagers. I sit at the edge of the crowd, chomping on my pendant and catching salty tears on my tongue mixed with smoke from the fire. Night colors march onto the field one by one, like members of a funeral procession.

Mom’s wearing a simple red dress, and she’s dancing. She loves to hula, merengue, salsa. But African dancing? She’s not that good. “So ask her,” Mom says, out of breath
.

“I can’t.” I hug my knees to my chest
.

“Yes, you can. Your friend has been through this too many times. She is young, but she is wise,” Mom says, and then she spins away from me and disappears into the waist-high field grass at the edge of the clearing
.

I spend the rest of the ceremony working up my courage. I know Mom is right. Memory has traveled this path before. So, once the flames die and the dancing stops, I help Memory carry pots to the river to clean up from the feast. I’ve been waiting for her to ask me, but she never has. I’ve been wanting to tell her forever. I know it’s time. Time to tell her my secret. Time to ask for hers. After all she’s lost—her mother, her father, and her brother too—how does she still have the strength to wash dishes by the river? I’ve got to know.

“My mother died,” I say.

Memory swishes the water around inside the pot with her hand. “The pot is a bother,” she says, fingering the chip on the edge of the clay. She takes the rag off her shoulder and dries the pot. “I must ask Grandmother to repair.”

“Memory!” I say, hurling her name across the river.

She stops and stares. “I cry every night,” she says. Now it’s night, so she cries. She doesn’t wipe away a single tear, and there are hundreds. They
plink, plink, plink
onto the surface of the water.

“Sometimes, when I don’t cry out loud, I can still hear myself cry inside,” I tell her.

“Sounds like rainstorm,” she croaks through her tears.

“It does,” I say.

“Yet you must remember this,” Memory says.

I lean forward. I must know how she does it, how she wakes up every morning, draws the water, sweeps the floor, cooks the
nsima
, goes to school. How she keeps on going when it seems impossible.

“Even the mourner must stop and laugh with the moon.” She hands me the chipped pot.

“Laugh with the moon?” I lift the cloth ring off a nearby rock and put it on my head. I set the pot on top.

“Inde,”
she says. “Innocent was the sun. He is gone with my parents. Each night I watch the moon. The moon is our light in the dark. In this moonlight is the light of my family.”

Memory stacks the other pots on her head. Then she grabs my hand, and together, we walk back to the hut where my father is waiting. Still waiting for me.

W
e put the finishing splashes of color on a rather large ear of maize for the pneumonia ward. Then we get to work on the last mural—a mother and baby wildcat for the maternity ward. Saidi and Agnes mix the dyes while Memory and I sketch on the cardboard with charcoal. Memory has learned to draw in proportion and she’s even begun to add flourishes like curly eyelashes on our cat. “Excellent detail!” I say.

She steps back and beams at her work proudly.

Then we both get down on our knees, and as we continue sketching, we talk about the play. It’s less than a week away and Felicity, our new lead, still doesn’t know her lines.

“I feel as if a warrior sends his spear into my belly each time I think of the play,” Memory says.

“Me too,” I groan.

A while later, I’m dipping a rag into the dye when I notice Mr. Malola clomping toward us across the dirt. “Clare,” he says, “your daddy cannot leave the hospital at this time. He requests that you walk back to the village with your friends. He will fetch you after dusk.”

Memory looks at me and we giggle, because we love hanging out together in the village at night, especially when there’s dancing and drumming in the clearing for fun. So after we admire our fifth and final masterpiece for the hospital, we clean up our materials and set out on the path to the road.

Saidi announces that he’ll cook us something delicious for dinner. “
Inde!
We shall feast,” Memory says. “At last we can purchase the mopeds!”

“After those caterpillars, I’m not so sure I want to try Saidi’s cooking,” I say.

“Saidi is a man,” Agnes says. “He probably cannot find the water, never mind boil—”

We stop in our tracks. Something’s thrashing around in the bush at the edge of the path. Whatever it is, it’s big and it’s close. We hold our breath and listen to the low moan.

“Leopard?” I whisper.

“Rhino?” Memory gasps.

Saidi’s eyes are wide. He pulls out his pocketknife, but I seriously doubt it will help fight a beast this large. It’s only Agnes who is fearless. She pushes aside the branches with her bony hands and ventures into the unknown.

I’ve heard people say time can stand still, yet I never knew what they meant. But this is what happens: Time stands still. There is no short time. There is no long time.
There is no time at all, until the twigs snap and Agnes crunches back over the baby palm leaves to the path where the rest of us wait.

“Ndi mai Kaliwo akumudzi,”
she says.

“English!” I squeak.