The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 2
They say the water well was a ground-level brick structure with concrete lining similar to most wells in Logan Town. It was a hand-drawn well with a bucket that dropped quickly in and out. As the bucket rose, Mam would grab the handle and pull it toward her small body to empty the water into her own plastic bucket. Once, alone in the yard, Mam peeked over the well and sang into it, as they say she always did, and the well threw an echo back up. “Dance with me,” she sang, and the well repeated her words, spitting a familiar voice onto the yard. She laughed, and while raising one of her hands to cover her mouth, Mam lost her balance and fell into the well. Darkness smothered her and the water below swallowed her body. The bucket rose and Mam spat the coldness out of her nose and mouth, gripped the rope, and yelled so that someone would hear her. As the bucket ascended, she heaved what she could out of her system and yelled again, scraping her fingers on the inside walls for something she could hold on to. The bucket fell again, and this time she did not know if she was moving or still, if the darkness was her end; the sunlight was so close and yet it mocked her in the distance. When the bucket resurfaced from the water, Mam’s grip on the rope loosened, and when she opened her mouth to yell, nothing came out. She stretched out her hands, expecting to scrape the concrete walls, to fall again and be lost forever in the Logan Town shadows, but instead, as the bucket rose she felt a coarse palm wrap around her right wrist. Her head lay limp on her shoulder as her body was raised out of the well. It was a Ghanaian neighbor, Mr. Kofi, whom Mam was known to taunt through her window as he walked to work every day. “Thank you,” Mam whimpered, barely conscious. From then on, Ol’ Pa made sure he sent at least two daughters or granddaughters to the well.
I turned five that day so I knew that I could now be called to go too.
“But you say I can wash them today,” I said, turning from the pink and yellow birthday fixtures on the table back to Korkor. “You say I can wash them.”
“And I let you wash them, enneh-so?” she said, placing the greens into a bowl on the counter. Korkor wiped her hands on the lappa tied around her waist and came to me. She took my hand and led me to the den and I dragged my feet so that my white dress shoes scraped the floor behind her.
“Torma!” Korkor yelled out. “Torma, come get this girl.”
In the den, Torma sat with my sisters, Wi and K, in front of a game of Chutes and Ladders.
“Come,” Torma said, taking my fallen fingers. “Come play, small girl. Be on my team. I winning,” she assured me.
Torma was a teenage Vai girl from the village of Lai, a third cousin, another caretaker who boarded with us after Mam left. Papa paid for Torma’s education in Monrovia, and she, in turn, took care of my sisters and me in Mam’s absence. Korkor mentioned once that the girls from Lai made good mothers. I cried the night she moved in and told Papa that I did not want anyone else to come be my “mama.”
“She will not be your mama. Mam is coming back. She will be your friend.” When Torma stepped out of Papa’s pickup truck, she was introduced as “your cousin from Lai. Your big sister.” She kept to herself mostly, and alongside Korkor if she was not at the table reading or “taking care of lesson.” Over time the same orange shirt she was wearing on the day that I met her became faded and stained with spilled food. Finger paint remained splattered between the buttons, no matter how many times she washed it.
“Look, we winning,” Torma said as I knelt in front of the board game. K, a three-year-old with a charming round face who knew the power of being the youngest of the three of us girls, parked in Torma’s lap as soon as she sat back on the floor. She would turn four in only two months and looked to have been coerced to behaving with a party of her own. She twirled the barrette that stopped one of her pigtails between her fingers and smiled toward Wi, my six-year-old sister who concentrated on the board. The den was decorated with colorful helium balloons and metallic streamers taped neatly onto the folds where our walls met.
“Where my papa?” I asked Torma.
“Your papa outside with Moneysweet and Pastor,” she said, and sucked her teeth as I bounded out of the room and onto the porch deck of our yard.
Papa sat in a deck chair beside the pastor of our church, a man who always gently shook my hand when he saw me. The reflection of their water glasses speckled the plastic table where they sat. It was a warm day, and the leaves of towering palm trees swayed above us amid a vast field of freshly watered grass. A radio rested on the rail of the deck and the exaggerated harmonies, the clashing of cymbals and drums, filled the surrounding yard. Papa’s and Pastor’s smiles bent to the rhythm as it vibrated the metal antennae. Moneysweet sat on a stool near the table and peeled a mango plum with a sharp knife. The sweat from his orange, square head descended both sides of his face in the sun, and upon