Loose Ends — Chapter 28: The Soil and the Harvest

Chapter summary

Folasade recognises her own teachings in Karo’s menace, packs for Lagos, and confronts inherited culpability.

FOLASADE

Thursday, dawn Folasade woke at half past four on a mat in the back room in Isara, with the cockerel next door clearing its throat and the first grey showing in the window. She lay without moving. The weight in her chest told her she had been dreaming of the compound again.

She did not dream of the funeral. People think that is what a woman dreams of. She dreamed of the Fridays. The Mercedes at the gate at dusk, the envelope on the table, the smell of his cologne, the sound of his shoes in the corridor. She dreamed of the little girl in the doorway in her nightdress, watching her mother wait.

She lit the kerosene lamp. She prayed, as she had prayed every dawn for sixteen years, face to the east, palms open. And as she prayed she noticed something. For the first time, she was not asking for anything. She was only listening.

Bolu’s call had sat in her chest since Wednesday, small and hard. Call me before you speak to anybody. Folasade knew those words. She had said such words herself, once, long ago, to a man in a Mercedes. They were the words of a woman who is building something in the dark and does not want it looked at.

At six o’clock she picked up the phone.

“Karo, are you eating?”

“Yes, Mummy.”

“Mama Bolu called me.”

She heard the breath on the other end, and the rain, and she heard something else, a kind of careful quiet, like a child holding her breath behind a door.

“She says you have not been sleeping. She says you smiled at her in a way she remembers.”

“Mummy, I’m tired. It’s school.” “Karo.” Folasade closed her eyes. “I have seen that face in my own mirror. I did not like it then.”

“Mummy.”

“Whatever you are about to do, ask yourself who will pay for it.”

“Nobody, Mummy. Nobody will pay.”

It was said so lightly, so kindly, so full of love, that a woman who did not know her daughter would have wept with relief. Folasade did not weep. She said, “I love you, my child,” and the girl said it back, and the line clicked, and the dawn went on getting lighter in the window, indifferent as a tax collector.

She sat on the mat with the phone in her lap. She thought, with a calm that frightened her, I did this. Not the girl’s hands. Not the girl’s plan, whatever it was. But the soil. A woman who tells her child a thing is fair, when she knows it is not, is planting something, and the harvest is never what she ordered.

She got up. She took the old canvas bag from behind the door and packed a wrapper, a head-tie, a sachet of salt and a Bible. She would finish the cassava on the far side of the farm, she told herself, and take the first bus on Friday. She owed it to Bolu. She owed it, if she was honest, to somebody else too.

A tall woman in black lace with a gold watch, who had not raised her voice. Folasade had spent sixteen years not thinking about her face.

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