but was seen by reliable witnesses lifting a wheelbarrow over his head. He loved a toilet house, especially
when you were in it. (As good a time as any to mention that the only toilet house that locked from the inside was the principal’s
private one. It would have been considered tantamount to a coup d’état if anyone else shat in it.) Tomo’s ferrety, chicken-greasy
fingers in your pockets. He ate everything. He noticed everything, understood everything. I remember his eyes staring at me
through the slats of a chair, just his eyes, holding me, knowing me, hating me back. We were jealous of him. Of what his eyes
had the privilege of seeing in person. An outside shower, the spigot in the back of the principal’s house. Tomo sits in the
muddied sand while she… she… she . . .
I’d try to hold him tender—my false hands—and his body would seize. And that thing. All babies do this, but Tomo did it with
particular vengeance. That thing they do. You’d be playing with him, or think you were playing with him, having a good time
making gurgling noises and chasing him around, and then he’d fall over and he’d raise his head and think about it a moment,
make the calculation. Decide whether it was in his best interest to cry bloody murder. In my case he always wailed like the
tornado drill at Wainscott Elementary on North Clifton in Cincinnati. The way he could turn it on, turn it off. Blast. Modulate.
Blast.
Upside-down in his car seat, his feet where his head should be (one bootie on, the other long gone), that big head dangling
down. How those eyes never seemed to bother with seeing anything superfluous. Like your lying-ass smile. He sneered right
through you. He couldn’t talk yet, and maybe this was the true source of his power. Words would only get in the way of his
seeing the essentials. Who would hate a baby?
We said Mavala Shikongo never laughed. It wasn’t true. It was that only he could make her do it. I mean laugh. Laugh like
a banshee, as if she had the whooping cough, uncontrollable seal barks you could hear all the way from the principal’s house.
Small, easy things like brushing his hair with a toothbrush, like stuffing a little mashed potato up his nose, would get her
going with her croaking.
45
LATE DUSK
G oats skitter in from the veld through the late dusk, the blue light like falling smoke. Pohamba’s asleep, his early evening
nap. I take a tub of Rama out of the food cupboard and scoop the margarine out and toss it onto the garbage pile beyond our
fire pit. One of Antoinette’s roosters, the one with the spiky tuft of green hair, immediately converges, stunned—never has
such a mother lode been delivered with such nonchalance. I leave him to his wonder. I walk up the road toward the principal’s
house. She’s sitting on a bench outside her door, stirring pap over an open fire. Tomo sits up from rolling in the dirt at
her feet and glowers at me. I hold up my empty tub.
“Anybody home? We’re out of margarine in the quarters, wondering if —”
Mavala jabs her thumb toward the window. Beyond the curtain I can see the fuzz of the television. The principal can’t get
any reception from Windhoek, but he and Miss Tuyeni like to sit there and pretend they’re watching the shows they read about
in the paper.
“My sister and her husband are being entertained,” Mavala says. “Would you like to sit and wait, Teacher?”
Her feet are bare. It’s either bare feet or heels. Immense attention is paid to Mavala’s footwear in the quarters.
“I asked if you’d like to sit, Teacher.”
“Sure.” I sit down next to her on the bench. She leans over the pot and stirs some more, then sets the spoon on the bench
between us. She crosses her legs one way, then the other. Then leaves them uncrossed.
“You know, I wouldn’t be so fat if I was home working in the mealie fields. In the north, you strap a baby on your back and
go to work in
Cher Etan, BWWM Club
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