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WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THE end was near. How could we

not have known? When the sky began to pour acid and

rivers began to turn green, we should have known our

land would soon be dead. Then again, how could we have

known when they didn’t want us to know? When we

began to wobble and stagger, tumbling and snapping like

feeble little branches, they told us it would soon be over,

that we would all be well in no time. They asked us to

come to village meetings, to talk about it. They told us we

had to trust them.

We should have spat in their faces, heaped upon them

names most befitting—liars, savages, unscrupulous, evil.

We should have cursed their mothers and their

grandmothers, flung pejoratives upon their fathers,

prayed for unspeakable calamities to befall their

children. We hated them and we hated their meetings,

but we attended all of them. Every eight weeks we went

to the village square to listen to them. We were dying.

We were helpless. We were afraid. Those meetings were

our only chance at salvation.

We ran home from school on the appointed days,

eager to complete our chores so we would miss not one

word at the assembly. We fetched water from the well;

chased goats and chickens around our compounds into

bamboo barns; swept away leaves and twigs scattered

across our front yards. We washed iron pots and piles of

bowls after dinner; left our huts many minutes before the

time the meeting was called for—we wanted to get there

before they strode into the square in their fine suits and

polished shoes. Our mothers hurried to the square too,

as did our fathers. They left their work unfinished in the

forest beyond the big river, their palms and bare feet

dusted with poisoned earth. The work will be there

waiting for us tomorrow, our fathers said to us, but we’ll

only have so many opportunities to hear what the men

from Pexton have to say. Even when their bodies bore

little strength, after hours of toiling beneath a sun both

benevolent and cruel, they went to the meetings, because

we all had to be at the meetings.

The only person who did not attend the meetings was

Konga, our village madman. Konga, who had no

awareness of our suffering and lived without fears of

what was and what was to come. He slept in the school

compound as we hurried along, snoring and slobbering if

he wasn’t tossing, itching, muttering, eyes closed.

Trapped as he was, alone in a world in which spirits

ruled and men were powerless under their dominion, he

knew nothing about Pexton.

In the square we sat in near silence as the sun left us

for the day, oblivious to how the beauty of its descent

heightened our anguish. We watched as the Pexton men

placed their briefcases on the table our village head,

Woja Beki, had set for them. There were always three of

them—we called them the Round One (his face was as

round as a ball we would have had fun kicking), the Sick

One (his suits were oversized, giving him the look of a

man dying of a flesh-stealing disease), and the Leader

(he did the talking, the other two did the nodding). We

mumbled among ourselves as they opened their

briefcases and passed sheets of paper among themselves,

covering their mouths as they whispered into each

other’s ears to ensure they had their lies straight. We had

nowhere more important to be so we waited, desperate

for good news. We whispered at intervals, wondering

what they were thinking whenever they paused to look at

us: at our grandfathers and fathers on stools up front,

those with dead or dying children in the first row; our

grandmothers and mothers behind them, nursing babies

into quietude and shooting us glares if we made a wrong

sound from under the mango tree. Our young women

repeatedly sighed and shook their heads. Our young

men, clustered at the back, stood clench-jawed and

seething....................