The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 10

“Gus,” she said, touching Papa’s arm after he put K and me on the floor. “Thank God you made it. Pastor is in the kitchen with the others.” She placed her hand on each of our heads and hugged Ol’ Ma and Torma before leaving.

Papa pointed to an empty corner in the room and Ol’ Ma led us there through the crowd. Torma followed the pastor’s wife and tapped her on the shoulder, as she bent down toward a woman who ranted that her husband was not at home when she and her son left.

“You know where I can find water? For the girls?” Torma asked.

“Go in the kitchen. We ran out of cups, so you can put it in a bag and tie it,” she said, shaken.

I searched through the breaks in the crowd for Papa. First for his body. Then for his voice. In the kitchen Pastor and a few deacons sat down at the table in front of glasses of water that shook when the drum beating and the gun beating was too loud outside. Pastor looked young, like Moneysweet young, even though we all called him Pastor, and he always wore a shirt made of country cloth with colors that looked like a kaleidoscope. One of the deacons could not sit still in his chair, as if his okra stew was taking too long to arrive, and the rough hairs of his chest were wet, and you could see it all because his shirt was unbuttoned. His glasses had thick frames that rode up and down his nose with each word.

“You all good?” Pastor asked Papa. One deacon stood up and shook Papa’s hand.

“Yeh,” Papa said. “Moneysweet gone. Torma and Ma with us.”

“Good.”

“They were past the bridge when we left. The bullets reached the house.”

“The people serious. War is here,” the deacon said, folding his hands at the table.

Torma handed Papa a plastic bag of cold water on her way back to the living room. He took the bag and cut through the corner with his teeth to drink.

“What do you make of it?” Papa asked.

“Me, I going. Some boy passing told me people going to the ETMI to wait. The government set up camp there already,” a man said.

“That’s not far from here,” Papa said of the school. Outside the windows, carloads of escapers filled the streets. Some were barefoot, like they had dropped everything they were doing and left. Others had suitcases or bags of belongings, the things they could not live without spilling out of the plastic. Ol’ Mas balanced bundles of clothes and other effects on their heads, their children and grandchildren running behind them.

“No, it’s not far,” a deacon affirmed.

“How many people you got here?” Papa asked Pastor.

“I didn’t count. They come and go. The house is open,” Pastor said.

“We can go toward the river,” a man shouted. “Another boy said they got ships leaving for Sierra Leone.”

“You go toward the river you have to pass too much bush. Rebels them in the bush looking for people to recruit to fight,” a man argued. “Your children not safe. They will kill you and take your children.”

I saw Papa sit down. I did not understand what they were saying. It was the language the old ones spoke, foreign words and meanings, and I only wanted to see Mam.

“The people already set up refugee camps in Guinea and Ivory Coast is what I hear people saying on the road,” a deacon said. “It will be safer there for those of you who got children.”

“You go through all that trouble and what happens if they kill Doe next week?” a man argued. “This thing will not last. Hide small and the thing will be over soon.”

“It’s different-oh,” Papa said. “This is not small thing. The rebels on the road near the bridge. They’re young boys with guns too big for their own self to hold. They don’t look all right.”

“Yeh,” some others agreed.

“That’s big thing here. Not next week thing-oh. If you can leave the country, go.”

“Ah!” a woman shrieked in the living room as a loud bang outside shook the picture frames in the display case she sat underneath. Seconds later, another blast sounded in the distance.

“Where is Mam?” I asked close to my Ol’ Ma’s chest.

“We going. We going to her.”

With the third drum, glass shattered in the den and screams flooded the house.

“They shooting,” a deacon said, rushing out of the kitchen. Papa followed him and came to us.

“Let’s go,” he said to Ol’ Ma.

“Where?” she asked, lifting us from the ground.

“The ETMI. The school,” he said.

“Yeh, go,” Pastor said to Papa. “We will meet you all there.”

Papa took us from the corner where we huddled with Ol’ Ma and Torma. Everyone was rushing again and it confused me. Who were we running from? The dragon? The prince? We hurried out of Pastor’s front door in a greater hurry than when we walked in. The road north out of Caldwell that would lead us out of Monrovia was a long and narrow cement road with tall weed bushes and sugarcane fields on either side.

“Papa, where we going?” I asked him.

“Away,” he said, eyes glued to the road and the people who slowly flooded it.

K remained in Papa’s arms and laid her head against his shoulder. She looked as confused as I felt, as more people crowded the road. Wi and I walked on either side of Ol’ Ma and I squeezed her hand in my fingers like the bread dough Korkor once allowed us to play with when she became too tired to yell at us to stop running around the house. Men, women, and children peeked their heads out of the sugarcane fields before walking out onto the road to join us. There were some who were barefoot, and their walking became jogging when any noise or crack sounded in the distance. Many women traveled with mountains of belongings tied into bundles on their backs and heads,