"Soymilk"

The lid came off the drum and the sky fell in.

Well... not actually fell. Kàkà knew the sky did not fall, she was not a baby. But that was the shape of it---all at once, grey first and then gold coming up the soft edge of it, and she had not known until that second that she had been waiting for the sky the whole night, curled in the fish and the dark, waiting for it the way you wait for a something you are not allowed to say out loud that you are waiting for. She had been in the drum a long time. The fish-smell was in her hair and her dress and down in the folds of her arms, and somewhere in the dark she had stopped smelling it, which meant three scrubbings to get it out. Four, maybe. She knew about smells. She knew about scrubbings. She had done more waiting than she had done anything else in her whole life, more than sleeping, more than eating, more than talking even---and she had done a very great deal of talking.

The ferryman lifted her out by the arm. His hand went all the way around the top of it with room to spare, and it was not a soft hand and it was not a cruel one either; it was a hand that had decided already and was only carrying the decision out, and he set her on the floor of the boat the way you set down a thing you don't want to break but have no time to be gentle with. Then he went back for Snail.

Snail came up wrong.

His face had gone the colour of cassava flour, that flat dead pale the good brown goes when a body has been sick the whole dark long, and his eyes were too big in it, and he had the red still in his fist---except it was not red now. It was wet through and gone to a dark clot of itself. He looked at her with the too-big eyes. He looked at the ferryman. He opened his mouth and was sick down the front of himself.

It was mostly water. There had not been much in him to bring up, a night and a day with nothing in it, so it was mostly water, and it went over his chest and his shorts and over the red in his hand, and the ferryman stopped.

Kàkà knew anger. She had a whole collection of it, sorted and put away, the way she kept names and counted days on a wall. There was the kind that shouted, which was the least of them, because a thing that shouts is a thing telling you where it is. There was the kind that hit, which was faster, and you learned the signs of it---the breath, the shoulder, the hand going back. And there was the kind that went very still and said nothing at all, and that was the worst kind, because you could not get out ahead of it, and the ferryman was the worst kind. The muscle in his jaw stood up under the skin and worked, and he did not say one word.

Snail started to cry the way he cried, which was no sound at all---just the shoulders going up and down and the mouth open and nothing in it---and Kàkà thought, there, now it comes, and she braced for the something the still kind of anger did when it finally moved.

The woman in white moved instead.

She came across the boat and went down on her knees in front of Snail and put her two hands on his shoulders. She did not look at the sick. She did not look at the ferryman, who was standing behind her being terrible and quiet. She looked at Snail's face, only that, and she said, "It's only sickness. It washes. It's nothing."

And she washed him. Water from the river, a rag from somewhere in the folds of her wrapper, and she did his chest and his arms and his hands one finger at a time, and his neck, and she was not quick about it. She was careful. She did all of it with the ferryman standing over her like weather about to break, and she did not hurry for him, and she did not look at him once.

Kàkà took the red out of Snail's fist. He let it go, which surprised her---he had not let it go for anything---and she leaned over the side and put it down in the river and worked the water through it with her fingers. The red came back. Not all the way. But it came, the way a bruise comes back into skin, and she wrung it and held it up and there it was, redder than the morning, the one bright thing again.

The ferryman tipped the barrels over the side. The fish went into the brown all at once, silver and grey and ruined, a whole night's catch gone heavy into the water, and he said nothing. The jaw kept working.

"I'll carry the cost of it," the woman said. She did not look up from the boy.

The ferryman made a sound. The sound was not a word---he did not seem to keep many of those---only a low thing in the throat, and then he turned back to the oar and put it in the water and they went on.

⁂

The woman looked at her. Then at Snail, who had stopped being sick and was just sitting now, scooped out and empty.

"Are you hungry?"

Now here was the thing. Kàkà was hungry, hungry in the old, deep way, the way that makes you do sums on other people's food without meaning to---a day and a night since the fish Safiya gave her, and not much before that, and her stomach had a whole argument ready about it. And there were maybe forty other things crowding up behind the yes: what do you have, and is the ferryman going to put us in the river, and why did you wash Snail like that, like he was yours, and where are we going, and is it far. All of it came up at once and jammed in the gate.

But she remembered Safiya. She remembered Safiya's hand coming up in the candlelight and stopping and not coming down, and Safiya saying you talk too much, child. She had not been angry when she said it... only tired, which was the worse of the two, because you could do something about angry and you could not do a single thing about tired.

So Kàkà said, "Yes." One word. Just the one. She was practising. It was the hardest thing she had done in days, and that included the drum.

The woman reached into the leather bag at her feet and brought out bread---two small loaves, pale and soft, the kind that comes out of a proper oven somewhere and not off the side of a fire---and a glass bottle with a stopper, and the something inside the bottle was white.

Snail looked at the food and did not move.

Kàkà took the bread for both of them, because that was how it worked, and put a piece in Snail's hands and folded his fingers over it, and after a moment he ate. She ate. And she took the white bottle, because she did not know what it was, and not-knowing was a thing Kàkà could not leave alone; it itched worse than the fish-smell.

The white was milk. But not the milk she had had the once---and the once came up on her without being asked, the way the bad ones did: the camp kitchen, the cook's wide back turned, a tin with letters on it she could not read, and she had mixed the powder with water from the wrong jug and drunk it down standing before anyone could see, and it had tasted of dust and the inside of the tin, and she had been hungry in the way that makes thieving feel like only breathing. She had been good at it. She did not like how good she had been at it. She put the once back where it lived and did not look at it.

This milk was not that. This milk was thick and sweet and tasted of something green and far away, and she drank it, and it was the best thing in the world that had ever been in her mouth.

"What is it," she said. "The white."

"Soymilk."

"What's soy."

"A bean," the woman said. "It grows inland, where the ground is dry. You boil it and crush it and strain it, and it comes out like this."

"A bean." Kàkà turned that over. A bean that turned into the best thing in the world. "Beans don't taste like this. I've had beans. Beans taste like... beans."

"These ones don't."

"I like these ones." She drank the rest of it down in one long pull, the whole rest of it, and held the bottle out across the boat. "Can I have more."

The woman's mouth did a something. It opened a little and shut, and she took the bottle and looked at it, and she said, "Slowly. It's dear, this. And it's not only for you---there's the boy, and the long way still to go." But there was no edge on the saying of it, none at all, and a something sat at the corner of her mouth that was very nearly something, and she poured out another half from a full bottle and handed it back, and Kàkà drank slower, or tried to, which was its own kind of hard.

And then the words came. She had held them all night in the drum and half the morning in the wash and the sick, held them the way you hold breath, and now the gate was open and they came---about the bread, the soft kind; about the drum, how the dark in it was the whole dark with no edges; about how Snail had held her hand the entire time in the skiff and not once let go, not even being sick, which was a brave something, a very brave something, even if he could not say so himself; about Safiya and the cellar and the candle and the pipe she'd named Whistler, because a something with a name was a something you could talk to, and you could not be all the way alone in a room you were talking to; about Fire, who slept in her shoes; about the water-bird, the small brown one she had seen with her own two eyes run flat across the top of the river on its feet like nobody had ever once told it the rule about sinking---

"What's your name," she said, because it had been sitting under all the other words the whole time and it got out before she had decided to let it. "I told you all of mine. Well. Some of mine."

The woman went still for the smallest part of a second. Then: "Ésa."

"Ésa." Kàkà said it once, to feel the shape of it. Two sounds and both of them soft, no hard parts anywhere in it, a name you could say in the dark and it wouldn't cut anybody. "That's a good one. It sits nice."

"Does it."

"Names have to sit nice or you can't say them right. Mine doesn't. Mine's all corners." She grinned. "I'm Kàkà. It's not the real one. The real one's Ìsèburukáni---my mother gave me that---but nobody says it anymore and I don't say it either, because---" and she stopped, because the real one led back to the bush and the unit and the man at the checkpoint with the gold tooth who'd laughed and said this one is a crow, she never stops, and she did not want to take Ésa down that road, not on the soymilk morning. "Kàkà means crow. The bird. They called me it because I talk and talk, and a crow talks and talks. I know I do it. I'm trying to do it less." She drank some milk. "It's not going well."

And Ésa laughed.

She got her hand up over her mouth to keep it in, but it came anyway, around the edges of the hand, quiet---clumsy. Kàkà watched it happen. She had made grown people laugh before; it was one of her somethings. But this felt like more than the usual. This felt like she had reached in and tripped something that had been holding still for a long, long time, and she decided right there, with the bottle at her mouth, that she was going to do it again. As much as she could. For as long as they let her stay.

"That's Snail." She pointed with the bottle. "I named him. He's got a real name but he can't tell it yet, so until he can he's Snail, because he was small and slow and shut up tight when I got him, like a snail in its shell---except he's coming out now, look, he came out for the milk." Snail was not looking at any of them. He had the red cloth spread on his knee and was running his thumb along it, slow, over and over, smoothing it where it had dried, watching the colour come back up in it the way the morning had come up, and he did not look at her, but the thumb kept going. "He draws," Kàkà said. "Birds, mostly. He's good. He's good at the wings---the wings are the hardest, anybody can do the body, but the wings are where it goes wrong---"

Ésa had gone quiet.

This was not the careful quiet from before, with the boy and the sick. This was a different one. Her eyes were on Snail's hands on the red cloth, and the laugh had gone out of her face, and something had come into it and then been put away---fast, folded down small, the way you fold a thing you don't want seen---and she reached up without seeming to know she was doing it and turned the gold band on her finger once, around, and was still. Kàkà saw it and did not know what it was. She marked it next to the other things she did not know yet, and kept talking, because the talking was the thing that made the laugh come, and she wanted the laugh more than she wanted to understand the quiet.

⁂

The channel opened and the world fell away on both sides.

Kàkà had not known there was this much water in the whole of everything. Her life had been the tight places---the village lanes, the camp, the cellar, the little channels where the mangrove came in close enough to touch and the green pressed down over the top of you like a lid. This was not that. This was water that went and went, brown turning gold under the morning, out and out until it ran into the sky, and the far bank was a thin grey line so far off it might have been a bank you'd dreamed instead of one that was there.

"That's the river," she said. "The real one. The whole one."

"Yes," Ésa said.

"Ùdò."

"Yes."

It was so big it did a strange something in her chest, half wonder and half a something she had no time to look at, because the wonder was on top and she rode the wonder. But somewhere underneath, where the soldier-part of her lived---the part she did not feed and could not starve---a quieter voice had already counted the open and not liked the count. There are no roots to slip into. No green to go under. Nowhere on all that shining water for a small boat to be a small thing nobody saw.

She talked over it. She was good at talking over it.

Snail was looking at the water too. He had come up out of himself a little more, his face turned out at the open, the red cloth gone slack in his lap and forgotten, and Kàkà watched him watch it, because a something Snail wanted to look at was a rare thing and worth the watching.

"Me and Snail never went on the open before," she said. "Only the little ones. The channels you could spit across." She leaned and looked down into the brown going past. "Can you spit across this one?"

Ésa did not answer that. She looked out at the water a while, at the far grey line of the other side, and something moved over her face that was not for Kàkà and was not an answer to anything, and Kàkà let the question go.

"I talk too much," she said, to nobody, to the water. "Everybody says it. Safiya said I talk enough for a whole village, all of them at once, the babies too. She said if talking was fishing I'd have emptied the river by now and they'd have to send me away just to get a fish out of it." She thought about that. "I don't think that's true. There's a lot of fish." She drank the last of the milk. "But I do talk. My mother said my mouth was a gift. She said a gift is for using---you don't put a gift in a box, what's the use of a gift in a box---so I use it. I use it a lot. Maybe too much for one gift. Like I'm using up somebody else's share---"

And Ésa laughed again, the second time, and this one she did not get the hand all the way up in time, so the start of it got out into the open air before the hand caught the rest, and it was a real laugh, with a whole person inside it.

Because Safiya had touched her too. Plenty. Safiya's hand had come down soft on her head a hundred times, gentle as anything---but Safiya's eyes, when she did it, had been somewhere else. Off over your head. Counting. Kàkà had seen it the last night in the cellar: Safiya's hand going one and then the other onto her and Snail, and her lips moving past the two of them, two and then a three with no child under it, and a four, counting children who were not in the room, who were not anywhere, her hand on you the whole time like you were one of the numbers.

And just now Ésa had laughed, and her eyes had been on Kàkà. Right on her. On the her that was actually there, and not past her at the her-shaped place where some other child used to be.

That was the whole of it. Kàkà didn't have it in words and didn't try to put it in words. One of them had touched her to keep the count. The other one had looked at her and seen the child who was there. She left it at that, and kept talking, because the talking was what made the looking one laugh.

She started in again---a whole new something, about the far bank and whether people lived on it and what they ate if they did---and the ferryman made the hush sound, the short sharp breath through the teeth that she had learned in one morning meant quiet, and she heard it and kept going, because she had not yet read the other something. The thing that had already changed in him while she talked.

Because something had. It was not the grimace---she knew the grimace now, the one that was at the oar and the water and the morning, not at her. It was not the silence, which was only his ordinary weather. This was new, and it was in his back and his shoulders before it was anywhere she could point at, a stillness that was not rest, a thing gone tight and ready, and she felt the wrongness of it half a second before she understood it, the way you feel a step that isn't there---

His hand came across the boat and found her mouth.

It did not grab. It was not rough. It came fast and it came all the way and it closed over her mouth before she had finished the breath she was going to make the next word out of, and it was like a lock going home, and there was no asking in it because there was no time in it for asking. His palm was hard and smelled of river and oil, and his eyes were not on her. His eyes were out on the water.

Kàkà went still under the hand and listened.

At first, there was nothing in it to hear. The water against the hull. The small creak of the boat. Her own heart, going quick and stupid, loud enough she was sure the water carried it. And then, under all of that, low and far and coming---a sound, and her ear had it before her head did, the way it always did, the way it had been trained to without anybody asking her whether she wanted training: two engines, running together but not quite together, throttled down low. Not the fast flat drone of a boat going somewhere. The other one. The slow back-and-forth churn of a boat going nowhere on purpose, quartering the water, looking. Search speed. Her body knew search speed before the word for it reached the front of her mind.

She knew this sound. She knew it the way she knew her own name, both of them. She had heard it come up the channel in the dark the night the unit took her brother, the twin churn getting louder while she lay in the reeds and bit down on her own arm to keep from making the sound that would have her found. She had heard it the night she ran. The sound meant the world was about to turn over. It had always meant that.

And she understood, all at once and too late, what the open water had been. Why the soldier-part of her had counted it and not liked it. There were no roots. No green. Only a small boat sitting up on all that shining like a fly on a plate. And the ferryman had known it the whole morning. He had been reading the banks the entire time---the whole while she talked and drank the sweet milk and made the woman laugh---his eyes going to the treeline and back, the treeline and back, the looking she had marked and not understood. He had not been ignoring her. He had been watching the only thing worth watching. She had thought he wasn't listening. He had been listening to the river.

Ésa's face had gone to stone. "What do we do," she said, and it was almost nothing, but the fear stood up inside it.

The ferryman was already deciding. Kàkà could see it move behind his eyes, fast---he looked at the water, at the mangrove coming down close on the right hand, at the children.

"Can you swim," he said. To Ésa.

A breath. "Not well."

He looked at the green wall of the roots, close now, black fingers going down into the brown. "Take them under. Into the roots. Hold your breath and don't come up till it's gone."

"They're children, we can't---"

"There's no time to argue about it."

And there wasn't. He had the boat coming round already, driving it in toward the bank where the mangrove grew down thick and the roots made their black cage at the waterline, and the sun was full up now and high, and the water under it was clear in the shallows. Too clear. Clear enough to see down into.

Ésa took Snail up in her arms. Kàkà took Ésa's hand without being told, her fingers finding the woman's and closing, because the hand was there and she was not going under without holding on to something. They went over the side.

The water was cold.

Ésa was beside her with Snail held up against her, and Snail's eyes were squeezed shut and his face was white and he had already taken his breath and was holding it, small and tight and expert, the way a boy holds a breath who has had to do it before, who learned somewhere that being under and quiet was a thing that kept you alive. Nobody is born knowing how to do that. Somebody had taught him too.

The ferryman drove the canoe in among the roots, hard, and the green came down over it---leaf and root and shadow---and the boat went from a boat to a dark shape to nothing at all.

Kàkà went under.

The brown came up over her head and shut. She could not see---a hand's width of murk and then nothing, silt and green dark---and she kept her eyes shut anyway, because there was nothing to open them for. She had Ésa's hand. She had Snail's leg against her arm, the small kick of his held-still fear. And over them, getting bigger, getting nearer, the twin churn came on, and then it was on top of them, the water itself shaking with it, the sound coming down through the river and into her teeth and her chest and the bones behind her ears---and she held. She did not move. She was good at not moving. She held the breath down small the way Snail held his, and the engines ground overhead, slow, quartering, looking, and a something brushed her shoulder in the dark---a root, a branch, a hand, she did not know---and she did not flinch and she did not let go and she did not come up.

The churn began to go. Smaller. Off east, going away, taking the shaking of the water with it.

And her chest was burning. And the light was going funny behind her shut eyes, the edges going bright. And she could not hold it. She had held it as long as a body holds, and her body was done holding, and the holding broke---and her hand came loose from Ésa's, she did not mean it to, the fingers just opened the way a fist opens when the body takes its orders back---and she kicked up toward the grey over her head and broke the top of the water and pulled the air in, all of it, a great tearing breath---

She came up alone.

The patrol was a churn going small and fading, almost gone. The roots stood up black all around her. The morning came down through the leaves in broken pieces and lay in coins on the water. And the boat was not where it had been. And Ésa was not beside her. And Snail was not, and the ferryman was not, and there was root and shadow and the pieces of light and the brown water moving and no one in it but her.

She turned in the water, slow, slow, careful not to make a sound out of her own turning, because a sound was a thing that found you. The roots went away in every direction and looked the same in every direction. She did not know if they had been taken. She did not know if the boat had gone deeper into the green where she couldn't see it. She did not know if she had come up wrong, in the wrong gap of the roots, a little way off from where they were---that they were close, just there, just past the next black tangle. She did not know anything, and the not-knowing was the whole world.

"Ésa," she said. It came out at almost no sound at all, the size of a breath, the most careful word she had ever made.

Nothing came back.

The river took the name off her and gave it back smaller, in the water moving past her ears. Ésa. Ésa. Going nowhere.

She did not move. She held still in the cold brown with the light coming down in pieces, and she breathed through her mouth the quiet way, and she made herself small, and she waited---because she knew how to wait, and she knew how to hold still, and she knew how to be alone. She had always known how to be alone. She was the best there was at it.

She had never once, in her whole life, stopped being afraid of it.