The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 23
In the mornings, the front door swung and the smell and sound of the lake rushed to our resting bodies, while Ma laid a mat on the front porch. The rooster from the coop crowed, and she knelt down on the mat and lowered her head several times, murmuring phrases to herself that I did not understand. Ma boiled a small pot of water from Piso and set it on the porch to cool before we rose. We changed into dresses that Pa had recently sewn for us from cloth the villagers gave him, and we joined hands and ran across the village circle to where Papa had already risen and was reading, waiting for us to join him. The girls and I climbed a lumber ladder to his loft.
On those mornings, Papa tutored us in what he had learned, the new words of the small village. We were quizzed on the meanings of words and he made us talk to each other in Vai. The process left me bitter when Papa shook his finger at me for creating words he called foolish and unserious. After our Vai lesson we were given math problems, simple addition and subtraction that we completed with stones he collected from the outskirts of the village.
After we completed our lessons we returned to Ma’s house, where we ate small cups of white rice with her and took turns telling her about our morning lessons.
“Ay-yah,” Ma would say, laughing and touching our faces and cheeks like Mam would. Ma was regaining her strength and weight back from the weeks we spent walking, when she had been reduced to merely skin, bones, and a faint wheeze as she struggled for breath in the sun. Lai was where she was raised, and where Mam was raised before her family moved to the city, the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of Vai chiefs whose graves sat at the edge of the village toward the woods for everyone to see.
“Go now,” she said after we were finished eating. “Play,” she said, urging us to join the other children in the circle.
“Yeh, go.” Pa playfully swatted us out of Ma’s house. “Go meet the other children.”
We could not fully understand what the children were saying, or they us, so we wanted little to do with them. Our favorite place to gather was between the orange trees, where we had a clear view of the village children as they played in the circle. They chased each other, busied themselves with hand games to which they sang along in Vai, and ran in and out of the houses. They had lived in Lai their entire lives.
While playing, Wi gathered the spoiled oranges left scattered underneath the tree and with them made a circle that surrounded us. When the circle was complete, mud and weeds rested between Wi’s fingers and she came to where K and I sat in the middle with sticks.
“What is this?” Wi asked, drawing two circles attached to one another by a crooked line.
“What is this?” K asked after studying Wi’s drawing and emulating the exact same thing in the dirt.
“That’s the same thing I drew!” Wi said, annoyed and offended.
“No it’s not,” K argued.
“Both of them jah-oe,” I said laughing, pleased that I had found a way to use the word I had recently learned meant “ugly.”
“Jah-oe, jah-oe, drawing jah-oe,” I teased them until Wi pushed me. I continued laughing at her nonetheless. A village girl ran to us from the circle across the village where the other children played. She watched us carefully first; she smiled at the fun I sounded and looked like I was having.
“Hello,” the girl said, pulling the strap of her dress up her arm and over her shoulder. She was barefoot and her hair was parted into small cornrows, like ours. We looked up at her but continued what we were doing—Wi pushing me, me dodging her pushes, and K smiling at what she genuinely believed was her original artwork.
“Hello,” the girl said again. Wi met the girl at the margin of our orange circle.
“You speak English?” Wi asked. The girl covered her mouth with her hands as she laughed and looked down at the ground.
“Hello,” the girl said again.
“Jah-oe,” I shouted at her. I rolled over in the dirt, overcome with laughter. At first she looked surprised, but the girl then covered her mouth with her hand and laughed. Wi laughed also, then walked over to me and pulled me up from the dirt.
“Stop, you will get dirty,” she said. I sat up, still showing my teeth.
“Y beh may-wah manna?” the girl asked.
She wanted to know what we were doing. I giggled. I understood her.
“Drawing,” Wi answered her.
The girl looked down at the broken sticks and pointed at the images in the dirt. “Drawing,” she said. Wi met the girl at the edge of the circle, took her hand, and led her inside the circle of old fruit where K and I sat. K dropped the stick in her hand and ran out of the circle toward the house where Papa lived.
“Drawing,” the girl said again, as she picked up the stick that K dropped and added shapes of her own.
“Yhen,” she said. “Drawing. Yhen.”
“Yhen,” Wi and I said together.
Ajala was the daughter of a Lake Piso fisherman. She said Vai words quickly, and we laughed at the way the words sounded. When the other children saw us play with Ajala, they came to the orange trees, until eventually the orange circle was full of children dodging thrown English and Vai words while drawing in the dirt.
From a distance, K approached us with Papa. He walked quickly toward the circle and it looked like he thought something had happened to me or Wi. When they reached us, Papa peered down at K, who pointed into the