Dry Season Vegetables
Olajide Omojarabi
At first, Chuks is reluctant to remove the body. There is something about dead bodies and lakes. Like, the body might have released toxins into the water, and he could catch some dangerous disease if he swam in it. Ebola or monkeypox. It is the season of strange viruses living among people. He says the bloated body could burst at a touch, which would mean tampering with evidence the police might use to determine the cause of the man’s death. We all know those beer-bellied, corrupt officers look the other way when a corpse is not that of a big man or a big madam.
Anyway, the body bobs gently until the man’s shirt gets caught on a big, thorny plant growing from the middle of the lake. We stand by the edge of the water and watch the corpse, splayed out and facing skyward, a starfish with a puffed face.
Chuks decides to go in because he’s very good in water. He is the only one of the three of us who can swim and drag another body along. As for Dan and I, the deepest we can go is where the water does not reach past our knees. Chuks plunges in, breaststrokes his way toward the carcass, grabs it by the leg, and swims back with one hand, using the other to guide the body to shore. After spreading it out in the sun, he strips the man of his sopping clothes and tosses them into a nearby bush. Then he snaps a dry branch from a dying mango tree and walks toward where Dan and I are studying the body.
‘‘Been in there for a while,’’ Chuks says, his face already turning ashen from the water he just swam out of.
‘‘How you know?’’
He uses the stick to remove a mass of slimy Spirogyra stubbornly curled around the man’s neck. ‘‘That algae grew. Things do not just grow like that.’’
When he beats the man’s stomach with the stick, it makes a dum-dum sound, as if it is a drum made with a goat’s hide. We do not recognise the man’s face. The thing water has turned his remains into is unnerving. His skin has faded to a pale grey; his eyes yellowed, and his nails appear nibbled away.
It is a quarter past two. Our lunch break ends in 15 minutes. The mining manager is strict about time. Be a minute late, and you’ll see a deduction on your next paycheck.
The lake is a 15minute walk from the mining site. It is a Monday afternoon, and the blaring sun burns the napes of our necks. That is why we are here, away from the fumes churned out by the diesel-powered machines at the site. To splash water on our bodies, even though the lake, too, is suffering under the sun’s rays.
Chuks says, ‘‘The reason he floated. Heat does that to dead bodies in water, you know. Accelerates decomposition.’’
‘‘How then did it come up?’’ Dan lands a gentle kick near a gash, red and raw, on the carcass’s left leg.
‘‘Gas!’’
Dan’s eyes tell me he doesn’t understand the logic in Chuks’ explanation. Me neither. But we end the conversation. He whips out science shit like this all the time. And it always makes Dan and I wonder why he never put that good head of his to use in a lab, or somewhere he’d wear a suit and tie every day.
Heat everywhere you turn. The approaching dry season, the weather forecast on the radio warns, is expected to hit record highs – the hottest in decades. The mining site pumps out the kind of black smoke that the forecaster said is warming the planet at an alarming rate.
‘‘Who cares?’’ The mining manager had said when Chuks told him about the weather message on the radio. ‘‘Maybe you should go work for the weatherman if the sky and air are all you worry about now.’’ Even though the wage is meagre, the mining site is still the best-paying job in town.
Sit around Chuks for too long, and he will start running his mouth about the drying Suez Canal. The drought ravaging the Horn of Africa which is the main cause of endangered species on the continent. How the West generates 70, or whatever, percent of the carbon emissions in the world. The theory of the shape of the Earth.
The manager inherited the mining site from his long-deceased father. A building carefully balanced on a wealth of minerals. Chuks says the Brits built the site during the colonial era and used it to refine stolen natural resources, which they shipped home to make pennies and coppers. Since then, it’s been passed down from one hand to another like a family heirloom. The Lebanese took over production in the 1970s after the long war and turned it into a business, making and selling detergent and perfume. Then came the Chinese, who briefly extracted kusa sand from beneath the land before going out of business and selling it to the manager’s father – a small man with anger issues – who underpaid his workers before succumbing to a sickness that skinned him alive.
Visit the site now, and you’ll notice the patches of renovation it has undergone. The manager once replaced the sun-bleached zinc roofing with asbestos, cutting down a big baobab tree whose broad branches formed a canopy over the building. Down came dozens of hatchlings cocooned in their warm nests, buzzing beehives and wasps’ nests tumbled down, foraging army ants scattered from their colonies nestled under the tree’s roots. Another reason Chuks gives endless lectures on how man is destroying the earth. ‘‘Imagine tearing down a tree that houses all these natures,’’ he’d said. ‘‘Just pure evil.’’
The manager is not done transforming the site. We know this because the white men are back in town with more sophisticated machinery, more money, and they could easily run him out of business. He wants new sets of drilling equipment. Ones that will dig deep into the earth and fetch him more valuable stones. His eyes are set on a refining machine made in Germany that cleans stones into stainless slates. While the foreign folks hover like predatory birds, waiting for his business to fold, he remains financially constrained.
Dan and I know the manager will never fire Chuks. Besides his main job as a miner, sieving through black sand to find fine stones, he balances the mining site’s sheets every six months, speaks to tax collectors from the local government on behalf of other miners, and helps the manager’s children with their quantitative reasoning homework. Skilled in all trades. So, when he decides to stay back and properly assess the body from the lake to figure out how the man died, Dan and I agree that we could not wait for him to finish messing around with the remains of a stranger. Unlike Chuks, the manager says Dan and I have one foot in, one foot out of his site. One more wrong move, and that’s all it takes.
Dan was let go from his last job at the bakery because he could not tell yeast from baking powder. Left unsupervised, he poured too much of one ingredient into the dough, making the loaves puff up with nothing but air bubbles and taste like raw cassava, forcing customers to boycott the bakery for weeks. He has a stay-at-home wife and two toddlers to feed, plus a small herd of goats in his barn. His wife tends to the garden outback when he’s at work.
As for me, I swear this mining job is the only shot I have at the woman waiting for me to come and beg for her hand in marriage. She gave me six more months to get my act together, or she’d say yes to other suitors. “I’m a woman,” she said, “and you know what that means.” We’re approaching the season when the mining job pays well. Dry land, with no risk of soil caving and burying us alive, means more drilling, and I wouldn’t jeopardise that by chasing after a cause of death that won’t put money in my pocket.
‘‘We’re leaving.’’
Chuks nods, eyes fixed on the man’s body.
‘‘Wait,’’ he says as Dan and I begin heading back to the site. Dan looks at me with the warning that reminds me of the manager’s wrath.
‘‘He didn’t drown,’’ Chuks says. His hands have gathered slime from running them around the man’s head, limbs, and upper body. ‘‘His ribs are broken, same as the blade of his chest. The body was dumped into the water.’’
If we did not know Chuks, that he sometimes pores over those biology textbooks instead of watching foreign movies like us, where detectives and doctors perform grim work on a decaying body, we might say that too much TV had taken the better side of his brain.
‘‘And so?’’ I say. ‘‘Oga, leave that body alone, let us return to site.’’
Soon, the cattle herder will flock his livestock to the lake for water and the ryegrass that grows around it. We know it because they were here recently. The cow dung still stinks despite the sun, as if freshly dropped. The prints of their hooves are clearly etched in the mud. The smell of wet hide lingers in the air, trapped in the stifling heat. It’s been in the news lately: the mass migration of men and animals for water and feed, following the displacements suffered from war and drought. From the Sahel to the northeast of our borders, to the vast lands of our villages. For survival. Animals and men.
‘‘What if he comes with his cows and finds us beside a dead body?’’ Dan asks.
Chuks agrees, gets up, and walks toward the water, where he washes his hands with sand. We arrive at the site five minutes late, but the manager is sleeping on a bench under the jacarandas, shirtless, his hands folded behind his head.
On our way home, we see police officers in their vehicles, driving down the streets. A show of force. When did they return from the borders? They had gone to secure the area from herders trooping into our town with their livestock from neighbouring countries. The cows are invading our farmsteads, eating crops, trampling saplings, and draining lakes. Farmers are complaining that the herds are emptying the irrigation dams meant for their crops. Last dry season, civil unrest broke out between farmers and herders, resulting in the loss of lives and property. For three days, the officers imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on our town.
While the police were away, we moved through town freely, without skulking. No extortion. No sandbags piling up on major roads every evening, no cars pulled over by the uniformed men, begging for handouts to buy freshly brewed beer.
As custom demands, we stand by the roadside and salute the officers as their motorcade speeds by, bathing us in a heavy plume of dust. Now that they’re back, we know we can’t mess with that body like we did today. If it’s still there tomorrow.
At Chuks’ house, his mother prepares porridge and complains bitterly about us coming to their home every evening. “Keep bringing them here,” she says, “and we’ll soon run out of food and water.” When the dry season nears, clean drinking water becomes scarce. As soon as the rain stops, the wells start to dry up. Boreholes sunk deep into the ground produce water that tastes like rusty metal. We buy drinking water at almost the same price we pay for provisions from the supermarket. This is why Chuks’ mother doesn’t think we’re good for her son. She believes we influenced him to take up that godforsaken job, wasting his good brains, inhaling all that dust.
She’d always wanted him to go to school, finish his studies, and get a decent job. But Chuks believes school is a blatant waste of time and money. Dan and I think he’s smarter than most of the teachers we know. He wants to save the planet from men like the manager. He dreams of starting a tree-planting campaign, dreams of the day he’ll have some money to become a florist, selling those pretty flowers with sweet petals, the colours of a song. He wants to bring green back to the town. Already, he’s a member of an association for windmills and clean energy.
Chuks has brought us to his house because he has a new theory about the body by the lake. “It’s almost dry season,” he says. “If the body stays outside too long, it will break, and the rancid smell will attract people.” Dan and I nod, pretending we already know this. Chuks talks as if the body is a mess we made and must clean up before anyone else finds out.
‘‘Also,’’ he says, wide-eyed, ‘‘we can cash out big time with that body.’’
It’s a dead body, I think. I’ve heard stories of freshly harvested organs used for money rituals. Not bloated, decaying bodies, though. With Chuks, however, you can be sure that his sleeves are full of tricks that can give life to wilted stalks.
That evening, on the prime-time news, the Central African countries are beginning to shut down their borders. Ebola hasn’t been declared a pandemic yet, but the speed with which it’s spreading leaves us horrified. On the TV, after the newscaster trigger-warns us, we’re shown the footage: physicians in hazmat suits, noses covered with N95, carrying bodies wrapped in white plastic bags, stained with so much blood it sips out. Chuks’ mother says it’s all the more reason he should stop bringing people to their house. “That evil thing spreads through the air,” she says. “Touch even a lifeless body that died from it, and you catch it.” She says this as if she saw her son earlier in the day, fooling around with that man’s body. She sprinkles saline water on the floor of their living room from a silver vial, as if chasing something demonic, and flings open their windows, airing the house to the evening breeze, adding that the virus spreads faster with heat.
Next day, on our way to work. Chuck’s body is the same colour as yesterday, after swimming out of the lake. He says his mother forced him to bathe with saline water, even though he knows it’s a bucket of nonsense. He would’ve run the full pail down the drain, but water is too precious to waste. Had to do it to stop her from yapping all morning.
We see the posters everywhere. Of a missing person who must be a big man. On poles, on tree trunks, on the walls of abandoned buildings. A message from the police quarters. The posters are printed in colour, in black and white. He’s been gone for six days now, the message under the picture says. He was last seen wearing a brown button-down shirt and faded blue jeans. He’s five-foot-nine, light-skinned, with a head full of hair. Anyone with relevant information should contact the nearest police station. Or the man’s family at the number provided. A handsome reward awaits that person.
We rip a poster off the bark of a tree and huddle around the paper. We know the guy on the poster. His mother sells iced, sealed water in small plastic bags every dry season. We compare his face to the body by the water. The guy on the poster is slimmer, with a sharp, carved jawline. His eyes give you a look like they could slice through you if you stared too long.
We walk to the lake before reporting to the site. Chuks drags the body out of where he’s shoved it, still covered with mango leaves, kneels beside it, turns the face this way and that, and says it’s the same man from the poster. The corpse now reeks of something badly spoiled. We are holding our noses. A dozen green flies buzz around it in a dizzying, zigzag tune. ‘‘It’s him,’’ Chuks says, pointing at the corpse and the poster. Dan and I look at each other, as if we aren’t sure. Chuks senses our hesitation, runs into the bush, and brings out the clothes he peeled off the man’s body yesterday.
‘‘See? Jeans and a buttoned-down shirt.’’ He drops the clothes and runs towards the body. ‘‘Look at his head, the curves of his lips.’’
‘‘Ok, Mr Right. So? Report to the police that we found the body?’’ Dan nods in agreement to my question. Chuks covers the body with the leaves. ‘‘We are running late for work.’’
When the dry season fully hits, the lake, which is at the end of town reserved for mining and dumping sites, becomes one of the few remaining sources of water for domestic use. Soon, the town will begin trooping here to do their laundry, wash their dishes, and fetch water for cooking and cleaning. Later in the season, fog appears from nowhere and hangs in the atmosphere, coating the leaves, rooftops, and windows with dust so smooth it feels filtered. The earth cakes up, shrinking waterbodies until they turn to bare land. Even our skin isn’t spared. Our bodies crack open; the soles of our feet become so sore we walk on tiptoes.
Chuks says the season is strange because the wind comes from the Sahara, and it’s harsh and brutal, laced with desert sand. Sharp like a blade. The dryness of the wind makes dead stalks on fallow farmlands spark, igniting mammoth wildfires that, every year, threaten to turn our houses into smouldering ruins.
It’s also the season of ghosts. Last year, a dry season so mean that even the heavens, which made the weather, pitied us and sent down an unseasonable rain in January. Just to cool the heat, just to quench the land’s thirst. It poured down in slants, the showers, pelting our windows with hail. That evening, Chuks’ mother told us she saw the ghost, clad in a white satin robe, walking in the flash floods like Jesus. It happened fast, she said, swearing to God. At first, she thought it was that kind of lightning that strikes during a heavy storm: quick and cold, striking tree trunks apart. But she knew what she saw. And she’d be damned if it wasn’t the spirit of a dead person.
At work, the manager asks if we’ve seen the poster of the poor bastard plastered all over town. He’s a soulless trash bag who speaks ill even of the dead. Cares only about himself and the rocks we drill from the ground. But how dare you bite the hand that feeds you. So, we mostly nod and smile, even at his dark, dirty jokes.
Chuks looks at us after the manager brings up the missing guy. The machine this morning sounds like it’s grinding stones into dust, so the manager has to raise his voice to be heard. And while he does, Chuks keeps giving us that look, as if to tell us to resist the urge to open our mouths.
“It’s good money,” the manager yells, shrugging. “Life-changing.” He knows this because we all know that the standard reward money for finding a missing person – dead or alive. Good thing is, it’s not the police offering the reward; it’s the missing guy’s family. We know the police lie, steal your information, plant evidence on you, and say you committed the crime.
During lunch, we sit on the rock beside the lake and eat yesterday’s bread with chilled bottles of Coke. The earth takes on a strange kind of fineness just before the season becomes dry. There’s a soft wind that rustles dead leaves on the ground. The lake is settled, clear like glass, and beneath it lie scorched plastic bags, bloated toads, seaweed. The sky is bleaching into a bluish-white hue. Near the water, the hawks are beginning to gather. Doing numbers on the meat that once was a man seems possible.
‘‘We can’t just leave him there like that,’’ Dan says.
‘‘I’m working on something.’’ Chuks stands up, startles a bird into flight by throwing crumbs of bread at it. ‘‘I’ll let you guys know my plans tomorrow.’’
We’re about to close when we hear the news: an Ebola case has been reported in the commercial city. He came from another country, but where he’d flown in from is uncertain. The reports are hazy, and all we can do is guess. He’s being quarantined in a facility in the city. Authorities are working to contact all 105 passengers who shared the flight with him. The physicians who attended to him are also in quarantine. The radio announcer reporting this has opened the studio lines for listeners to call in and share their opinions.
‘‘How can a health minister be so useless?’’ The first caller says. ‘‘Why didn’t they shut down the borders when the first case was reported in another country?’’ Another caller wants to know what steps to take to keep safe. “I have five children and a pregnant wife, and an aged mother,” his voice blares from the speaker. For now, the radio man says, we must not panic because no case has been reported in our town yet. Just maintain a distance from strangers. Don’t eat strange bush meat, like monkeys and grasscutters, wash your hands under a running tap. He reels out the symptoms before going for a commercial break: fever, headache, sore throat, nausea and vomiting.
That evening, Chuks says his mother wouldn’t be happy to see us, so Dan and I take another route home. On the way, Dan begins to complain about his urgent need for money. With the dry season approaching, he needs to give his wife money to buy new water tanks for storage, grains before they become scarce and expensive, hay for the goats, and fertiliser for her vegetable nursery out back.
After he finishes listing his money goals, I tell him, sorry, man, and head to the house of the girl waiting for me to ask for her hand in marriage. She speaks to me through the window, pressing her face against the louvres. She says Ebola is in the country and knows how much I, and the other boys, fool around with nature and strange things underground. She asks if I’ve come to see her parents to tell them about my intentions for her. She tells me I can’t come in if I’ve only come to run my mouth because her father has a rare liver condition and might die if he contracts any virus. She asks me to come back when I’m ready to say the right words. As I make my way home, I pass the missing man’s house. I’m tempted to knock on his gate and tell his mother that I might have information that could lead us to the body. But I’ll wait for Chuks. Tomorrow is just a night away.
The dry season this year strikes us like a fever: sudden, forceful. That morning, there’s a mystery in the weather. A heavy cloud hangs low, so thick that our town is steeped in warm darkness. The sky is filled with flocks of black doves travelling in unison, their coos sounding like a call for concern. I stand by the door, wondering if the manager will consider shutting down the site on a morning with such bad weather, when two policemen show up at my doorstep.
‘‘Mr. Kojo?’’ The one wielding a baton says.
‘‘Yes sir.’’
‘‘You need to follow us to the station. We have questions about the death of Majek Bello.’’
The name sounds like that of the man by the lake. The flies from the body seem to have followed me home, leaving trails behind. I’ve heard that when a person is under arrest, they need to keep quiet once the police cuff their hands behind their backs and take them to the station. Speaking out might only complicate your case. The other policeman, with crooked shoes, reminds me of this.
I am in a dingy, low-lit cell at the police station, the smell of disinfectant from a nearby toilet heavy in the air. A ceiling fan creaks slowly, circulating the stale smell and heat. The police here are judges and juries in their own court. Suspects have no access to state or pro bono lawyers. The officers beat confessions out of you, torture you until you admit to a crime you didn’t commit. Quick footsteps shuffle past the hallway; the deep voice of a man barking orders filters through the cell’s walls and the iron door. I hear loud, racking coughs, endless sneezes, and hacking throats. I hear a woman cussing out another person for spitting on the floor, calling him a dirty pig. Are they sick with Ebola, or am I just suffering from frequency illusion after hearing the virus’s symptoms repeated endlessly on the government-sponsored adverts about the disease on the radio?
When the door to the room opens, a man stands in the doorway, his giant frame blocking the light from the reception. He walks in, closes the door and pulls a chair from the table where I’m sitting.
‘‘Mr,’’ he says, flipping through the file before him with the flashlight on his phone. ‘‘Aha. Mr Kojo from the mining site. Tell me. Who are your friends in this town?’’ His hands are folded on the table after asking the question, looking at me.
With the police, every word you say can be used against you as evidence. I think about Dan and Chuks. I’m not sure where they are, if they’re also under investigation. The police seized my mobile phone when they stormed my house. I tell him about them.
‘‘And what can you say about the body by the lake?’’
I tell him how we stumbled upon it, and how Chuks swam in to bring it out.
‘‘And why didn’t you report to the police?’’
I want to tell him that Chuks thought it wasn’t a good idea to report it yet, because money might come from it. But I understand this isn’t mine to tell. So, I shrug and say we didn’t report it because we didn’t kill the man. The officer laughs so hard he begins to cough. If I remind him of the number of our men the herdsmen have killed over grazing fields and water, he’ll snap at me. He’ll double whatever punishment he has planned for me for trying to teach him his job.
He stands up from the seat. Paces the small of the cell. ‘‘What do you think about this weather?’’ he asks, referring to the dry season that has just hit our town.
I adjust the cuffs around my wrists. They’re starting to itch my skin. I tell him how the heat rots harvested fruits, poisoning their juices; how it gnarls the stems of vegetables; how it warms chicken eggs until they hatch, as if brooded by the mother hen.
‘‘Good,’’ he says, fishing out a stick of chalk from his breast pocket. He gets up, draws a small rectangle on the linoleum, and stands in it.
‘‘You see the size of this box,’’ he says, ‘‘that’s how small the cell you’ll be locked in is. This is how you’ll stand, sit, sleep for the remaining years of your life. We call it the dark dungeon. Bad bunker. You’ll sweat until your body runs out of water. You’ll beg for air. Imagine being buried alive in a coffin. That’s what it feels like in the dark dungeon.’’
He steps out of the box. Sits at the table, deepens his voice. “We go turn you into dry season vegetables. One of you from the site went to the victim’s home because of the money, abi? Said he found the body. How’re we supposed to know you all didn’t kill him?’’
He’s about to step out of the room when I tell him to stay. ‘‘I can tell you what I know.’’ I say this even though I don’t know what I know, even though I’m not sure whether what I’m about to say will set me free or implicate all of us. He removes his hand from the doorknob and returns to the table, smiling. “I’m listening.’’ The officer turns on the flashlight on his phone and begins jotting down notes as I start to give my statement.
Olajide Omojarabi’s essays and stories have appeared in Guernica, adda, Off Assignment, Ploughshares and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
*Image by Ye Jinghan on Unsplash
