VISIT TO THE VILLAGE

CHAPTER 2 The Women of the Fence Morning came whether Adeng wanted it or not. She had not slept. She lay on the reed bed with her father's notebook under her arm, listening to the four women breathing on the floor, and watching the gray light slide under the door. When the first c**k crowed, she thought of her mother lighting the cooking fire, and for a moment she was so sure she could smell the smoke that she opened her mouth to say, "Mama, I'm awake." Then the hut came into focus. The smoke-blackened roof. The strange beads swaying from the pole. The heavy woman by the door, watching her with tired eyes. "You did not sleep," the woman said. "My name is Nyibol. I am the first wife of this house. Come and wash. Then you will eat." "I want to go home." "I know." Nyibol lowered her voice so the others would not hear. "Child, if you run, they will catch you. I ran too, when I was your age, and I carry the mark of it still." She turned her left arm over, and Adeng saw a long, shiny scar from wrist to elbow. She did not ask. She did not need to. The compound looked different in daylight. It was larger and more ordinary than she had imagined: seven huts inside a thorn fence, a granary on stilts, a cattle byre stretching toward the back. Children chased a goat between the cooking fires. A girl no older than ten balanced a calabash of milk on her head without spilling a drop. It was the noise of a place where people lived, and that was somehow the worst part. Everything here was normal, and Adeng was the only thing that was wrong. They brought her to the old man, who sat under the same tree with a blanket over his knees. His name was Mading, though no one said it to his face. They called him Baba, or the Chief. Adeng stood with her eyes on the ground. She had decided in the night what she would do. She would give them nothing. She would not call him husband or sir. She would be a stone in the middle of the yard. "She is thin," the old man said to the room. His voice was dry, like wind in dead grass. "Feed her more. I did not pay a hundred cows for a bird." A few people laughed. Nobody looked at Adeng. "Perhaps she is simple," said a lean man with a sharp nose, the old man's son, Deng. He managed the cattle and most of the decisions his father was too tired to make, and he had a way of smiling that never reached his eyes. "She is frightened," Nyibol said quietly. "It will pass." "See that it does." They talked about her as though she were not there, so Adeng listened, because listening was the only power she had. She learned that her uncle's name was spoken here with respect. A man of his word, they called him. The phrase burned in her chest like a coal. The first days were work and watching. They gave her tasks to prove she already belonged: fetching water, grinding grain, sweeping the yard. She did them all without a word. The women never left her alone. Wherever she went, one of them walked a few paces behind, and at night they slept across the door of her hut. They were not unkind, and that made it harder to hate them. She counted the days by scratching tiny lines inside the cover of her father's notebook. By the seventh night she had seven lines, and she finally did the arithmetic she had been avoiding. A few weeks, her uncle had said. There would be no few weeks. There would be no going home. She understood it then, not as a fear but as a hard, cold fact she could hold in her hand. Panic needs hope to feed on. Without hope, there was only one clear question: What now? On the ninth day, Adeng tried to run. At the back of the compound, beyond the byre, the thorn branches grew thin where the rains had washed the earth away. She waited for the afternoon heat, when the women dozed in the shade, then rose from the grinding stone as if to fetch water and walked slowly toward the gap. The thorns tore her dress and her arms as she pushed through. Then she was out. The bush stretched before her, golden and empty, and she ran with her bundle clutched to her chest, until her lungs burned and the compound was a smudge in the distance. She had gone perhaps two miles when she heard a motorcycle. She dived into the tall grass, but the engine slowed, and through the stalks she saw boots, then the face of Deng, smiling down at her. "Ah," he said softly. "There you are." He did not shout. He lifted her to her feet as easily as a sack of grain. "Do you know how many girls have tried this? Every one. And how many have succeeded?" He pulled her toward the motorcycle. "None. Every herder knows our cattle. Every village is a cousin of ours. You could run for a week and meet no one who would not send you back." She rode back in front of him, watching the road fall away behind her, and the thin thread of hope she had been carrying snapped. They did not beat her. That was what she would never forget. Nyibol led her to her hut, cleaned the thorn cuts with warm water, and said nothing. Achai, a younger wife, brought a bowl of soup and set it beside the bed. It was the kindness that broke her. The tears came, not the wild ones of the first night but a slow, silent flow, as if something deep inside had cracked. Nyibol sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders, and Adeng leaned against this woman who was a jailer and a victim in the same body. "It is not forever, you know," Nyibol said at last. "I do not mean the fence. I mean the grief. It changes shape. You will carry it, and one day you will notice that it is carrying you." "I don't want to carry it." "No one does. But we are women of this land. We carry what we are given. That is our curse, and also our strength." Three weeks passed. The rains were beginning, and the afternoon sky hung heavy and purple. Adeng was peeling cassava in the doorway of her hut when Nyibol came across the yard with an odd expression, half pity, half caution. "A trader from the south has come," she said. "He carries a message from your mother." The world went very quiet. Adeng followed her to where a thin man in a sweat-stained shirt waited with his hat in his hands. "Your mother heard what has happened," he said. "She wept for two days. Then she sent me. She said to tell you three things." "Tell me." "First, she did not know. Your uncle told her it was a visit, and she believed him, God forgive her. She would have died before she let this happen. She wants you to know this above all things." A sob rose in Adeng's throat, and she pressed her fist against her mouth. "Second, she is trying to find a way. She has gone to the chief, the church, and the police. They say the bride price has been paid and it is a family matter. But she says to tell you she will never stop." "And third?" The man's voice softened. "Your sister Achol cries for you every night. And your mother says, 'Tell my daughter that I remember the letter A.'" Adeng could not speak. Her mother, who could not read, had remembered the lesson in the ashes, the beginning of her husband's love for his daughter's mind. You are a beginning, her father had said. "Tell her I am alive," Adeng said at last, her voice cracking and then steadying. "Tell her I am not broken. Tell her I will find a way home, however long it takes. And tell her," she added, as the man turned to go, "that I am still reading." She did not yet know what that sentence would come to mean. She knew only that every night she traced her father's words by lamplight, and that reading was the one thing they had not been able to take. That evening the rain broke and fell in gray sheets across the compound. Adeng sat in her hut with the notebook open on her knees, and Nyibol sat by the door mending a basket. "You are a strange girl," Nyibol said. "What does it say?" Adeng looked at her father's handwriting. A girl who can read can never be fully owned. "It says that this is not the end." Nyibol studied her for a long time. The lamplight flickered across her scarred arm, and the rain drummed on the thatch. "Then you had better learn to survive the middle," she said. Adeng nodded. She closed the notebook and held it close, and for the first time since the car had turned the corner in Nimule, she let herself imagine, only for a moment, what it would feel like to go home.