The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner

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