The Evolution of Man

Chapter Four Two Broken Things: Learning to Mend She did not finish her story that first night. She got as far as Tobenna’s wife and the first whisper of witchcraft before her voice gave out entirely, not from emotion, but from the simple physical exhaustion of a body that had nearly died and was not yet ready to carry the weight of its own history. Chinaka did not press her. He banked the fire, checked the poultice he had packed against the rope wounds on her wrists, and told her to sleep. She obeyed without argument, which told him more about how depleted she was than anything else could have. He sat up alone for a while after her breathing deepened, listening to the forest settle into its nighttime register. An owl somewhere to the east. The occasional crack of something large moving through undergrowth at a respectful distance. The stream, always the stream, threading its patient sound through everything else like a silver needle through dark cloth. He thought about what she had said. A woman who does not give her husband children is already halfway to being accused of something. He had heard variations of this his entire life, had heard it said about women in Udelu the way weather was discussed, as though it were simply a condition of nature rather than a choice that people made. He had never, until this moment, sat across a fire from one of its consequences. He watched her sleep, noticing how the lines of pain and worry on her face started to ease. He felt a special kind of anger, the kind that comes when someone is too worn down by their own struggles to get angry for themselves, but somehow finds the strength to be angry for someone else. It was, he realized, the first thing he had felt clearly in a very long time. She was stronger by the fifth day. Not strong, she would not be strong for some time yet, but strong enough to sit up without assistance, to eat the broth Chinaka made from boiled roots and river herbs without having to be encouraged, to turn her head and follow the movements of birds through the canopy above them with something approaching genuine interest. On the fifth afternoon, she watched him work. He had gone out along the herb trail in the morning and returned with a fresh collection of several varieties of leaves, two different roots, and a piece of bark he had been experimenting with for its apparent ability to draw infection out of wounds. He laid them out on a flat stone near the fire and began processing them with the focused, methodical attention she had noticed he brought to everything. “Where did you learn this?” she asked. “Here,” he said, without looking up. “In this forest?” “Yes.” She was quiet, watching his hands. They were careful hands, she had noticed, not delicate, but precise, the hands of someone who had learned to pay attention. “How long have you been here?” He considered. Time in the forest was not the same as time in the village. “Close to twelve months,” he said. “Perhaps a little more.” “Alone?” “Yes.” She let a pause develop, and then, carefully, because she had learned the hard way that questions could be weapons, “What brought you here?” He did not answer immediately. He finished stripping the bark he was working on, set it aside, and picked up a root. Then he said, without drama and without self-pity, in the same even tone he might have used to describe a route between two villages, “I came here to die.” The forest filled the silence that followed. Ogomuegbulam did not gasp, or recoil, or offer him any of the reflexive consolations that people reach for when they do not know what else to do. She looked at him steadily, this woman who had herself been left in a forest to die, and said: “But you did not.” “No,” he agreed. “I did not.” “Why?” He looked up from his work then and met her eyes across the fire. “I am still trying to understand that,” he said honestly. She nodded, as though this were a perfectly satisfactory answer. And somehow, between two people who had each been discarded by the world that was supposed to hold them, it was.