Laugh with the Moon Read online

  I throw my arms around Agnes. “I love you!” I say.

  “Do not love me,” she replies. “I am not always a nice schoolmate.”

  “Number two student speak the truth,” Memory says.

  “But Agnes is smart,” I tell Memory. “So right now, I love her anyway.” I squeeze Agnes again, and our other friends laugh.

  “We will miss you, Glorious Blessing,” Agnes says.

  “Don’t make me cry.” I take a deep breath. I can’t bear to think of leaving this place. “The show’s the thing,” I say. “We need to turn the Mzanga schoolyard into a real theater.”

  All of us sit there and think together until we come up with a brilliant plan. The most beautiful part of it is that Memory wants back in. “I must help with the play,” she says. “Innocent do want me to tell the story of this chicken.”

  Sickness 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.

  Twenty-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 A
frican 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.

  We 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.

  “There is no leopard,” Agnes says. “It is Mrs. Kaliwo from Kapoloma. She was working in the fields when her baby knocked. She fell here as she walk to hospital.”

  “Aiii!” Mrs. Kaliwo’s voice travels through the thicket to the path.

  Agnes grabs Memory and me by our wrists. “We must tend to the patient,” she says, and tries to pull us with her into the jungle. But I’ve got a better idea. “Help!” I shout. “I mean, I need to get help.” I throw my backpack on the ground and sprint toward the hospital.

  Seconds later I hear footsteps on the path behind me. It’s Saidi. Together, we race across the lot and burst into the waiting room. Mr. Malola is nowhere in sight so we keep going, straight through the double doors.

  We peek into the pneumonia ward. Five patients are hooked up to a single oxygen machine. I shudder as we run breathless inside. A nurse is checking a patient’s pulse. When we tell her the news, she rushes into the hallway, and we follow.

  The nurse opens a closet. Most of the shelves are bare. She grabs a pair of rubber gloves and a couple of rags, and then we’re off, sprinting out of the waiting room and down the path. When I spot my backpack on the trail, I shout to the nurse to stop.

  Branches scrape my legs and face as I lead the nurse into the bush, while Saidi stays on the path to give Mrs. Kaliwo her privacy. Soon we’re blocked by a jacaranda tree that’s growing horizontally across the jungle floor, so I grind my foot into a knot in the wood and hoist myself up the smooth bark to the top of the trunk.

  A hiccupy-pinchy sound pierces the silence.

  There, many feet below me on the other side of the jacaranda tree, is Agnes. She crouches beside Mrs. Kaliwo, her face flickering in the dappled light: light and shade, shade and light. Mrs. Kaliwo’s eyes are closed. Agnes takes a large leaf off the ground and fans her while Memory looks on from a few feet away.

  The nurse climbs over the jacaranda trunk. She takes the baby from Mrs. Kaliwo and wipes it clean with a cloth. It’s a boy! The nurse hands the baby back to his mother. Mrs. Kaliwo’s eyes water as she looks at her baby. It’s totally obvious that she’s never seen anything so beautiful in her whole entire life. “Timutcha Most Miracle,” Mrs. Kaliwo says, and smiles weakly.

  I can’t believe my ears. She just said she’s going to name her baby Most Miracle. Cutest Miracle? Awesome Miracle? Rockin’ Miracle? Maybe. But Most Miracle? Still, there’s no way I’m going to wreck this moment with a grammar lesson.

  Mrs. Kaliwo presses her lips against her baby’s forehead. When she does, something inside me breaks apart, splits apart, right in the middle of my chest. I reach for my pendant. I run my hand around my whole neck. It’s gone! Did it come off somewhere in the bush? Was it stolen by a branch? I need my pendant. I need my mom!

  Before I know it, I’m scrambling back over the jacaranda trunk, grabbing my knapsack from the edge of the path, and bolting away from Saidi.

  “Clare!” he calls.

  I can’t speak.

  Only run.

  Run. Run. Run.

  To the hospital lo
t, where I throw my back against the crisscross pattern of a palm tree trunk and cry.

  As dusk arrives with streaks of grenadine, my mother finds me. She wraps her arm around my shoulder and plays with a strand of my hair.

  “What’s wrong?” she says. “Babies are beautiful.”

  “You’re still here,” I say.

  “And why not?”

  Maybe I’ve made a mistake. Maybe my necklace is in my pocket or my bag. I start to check but she takes my hands and holds them in hers. “You don’t need that old thing to find me. I’m always here,” she says, and touches my heart. “Now, what’s on your mind?”

  It’s not the first time I’ve thought of asking her the question, just the first time I’ve had the guts to do it. “How did you feel when you saw me?”

  “How did I feel?”

  “You know. When you saw me—the very first time?”

  Mom holds my chin in her hand. “I looked at you and suddenly, everything was clear—you were the reason for everything. That’s why we named you Clare. For the clarity you brought to Dad and me.”

  “I thought you named me after your great-aunt Clara.”

  “Well, yes,” Mom says. “That too.” She touches my nose.

  “And how did you feel?”

  “Oh, right.” Mom crosses her arms, leans back against the palm trunk, and stares into the heavens. “Okay, okay, how did I feel? I felt like the happiest woman in the world,” she says.

  No sooner do I sigh with relief than she changes her mind. “No, not in the world.”

  My heart is a hive of stinging bees.

  “In the universe!” she says.

  The bees fly out, dripping honey everywhere.

  Over the weekend, Dad and I follow directions to a shop in Blantyre, where Dad shells out a huge pile of Malawi kwacha for two extremely cool mopeds. He lets me choose the colors, so I pick out one red and one blue. The mopeds were made by the same Indian company as the ones we took, except about twenty years later. Talk about payback with interest!

  While we drive all the way to the lake, we eat the sweet delicious jackfruit we bought at the market in Blantyre. “You know,” Dad says, “we’ll be home in a week.”