The birds alighted from the trees and did not return for six months. The roosters went silent for a year. The bravest hunters of the valley disappeared for weeks on end, slaughtering everything on four legs that had the misfortune of crossing their warpath. Since that morning and to this day, no one in Toglet has ever slept peacefully through the night. And how could you after the carnage they found that morning in that house? The heap of bones, entrails, heads, eyes, hands, feet, hearts, and brains which had once been the farmer and his family. Every part in its wrong place, sliding out onto the kindling woman’s feet in a tide of warm black blood.
“And God spared you,” said Abba Dabo, voice quivering with emotion. “Eat your bread, child. Eat.”
Every night they would sit near the fire, still and silent, as his mother added wood and the servant girl stirred the wat. The boy, his two older brothers, and his father crouched on low stools around the glowing pit, transfixed by the red tongues of flame lapping the pot. By this time of day, all were light-headed with fatigue and hunger from their endless work on the land. His father spent the daylight hours supervising his two older brothers while they navigated a plow through the soil, stumbling in their black rubber boots as they whipped and insulted the annoyed oxen, who dragged the heavy steel blade through the furrows. His mother tended to the homestead with the servant girl, sorting grain, plucking garden herbs, milling, churning, butchering, and sweeping. The boy, because he was so young, had the relatively easy task of herding the sheep. All morning and into the hottest part of the afternoon, he ranged across the hills with expert footing up and down the ravines, in search of grassy swaths and clear streams and only a walking stick twice his height to keep him safe. He was not old enough to do much else. When the flock grazed, he often sat under the shade of a tree, making up little songs in his head.
Steam from the simmering pot of shiro wat was dizzying. It rose into the rafters of the gojo, enveloping them. Pools of excitement formed in the backs of their mouths. The boy watched the servant girl pour a pitcher of crystalline well water over his father’s hands, gnarled and brown and tough as wood. Most in the valley could not afford the extra food and space that came with hiring a servant girl, but his father was not like most in the valley. He nodded to the girl that he was finished, and she moved on to his oldest son, then his second oldest, then his wife, and finally the boy, who was last in all things.
At the start of every meal, his father would lead them in the same prayer and instruct them to begin eating, but they knew to wait until he had taken his first bite to follow suit. As the boy began to nibble politely on a second helping of shiro wat, a serving just as humble as the first, the rumble of his father’s voice broke the placid silence.
“Did I tell you to begin eating?”
The boy stopped chewing. He was confused and scared. His father had a quick temper and had punished him for odd things before. Not fully closing his eyes over prayer, taking injera with his left hand, chewing with his mouth open, chewing with his mouth closed too tight. The boy knew to keep quiet, knew that to say anything out loud, to mention the unfairness of it, would only make matters worse. If he protested, his father would punish him more severely for having done so.
“Get up,” said his father, glaring. “Sleep outside tonight.”
The boy had food in his mouth still, but he was too upset to keep chewing. He felt like spitting it out, but he knew the waste of it would only bring a lashing with the ox whip. He kept the unchewed food in his cheeks and stepped from the warmth of the firelit room into the cold echoing chamber of night.
On the dirt floor of the shed behind the house, he lay awake beside the ox plow, unswallowed food fermenting in his cheeks like the bad feelings in his chest. This was supposed to teach him a lesson. But what was the lesson? It never came. His punishment never meant anything. He could never predict or understand it. The lesson that night was supposed to be about self-restraint, as it often was. So the boy silently scolded himself for his selfishness. He had a reputation, after all, for not knowing how to control his urges, for being greedy. He grew self-conscious about his desires, ashamed of his wants, his longings. He no longer knew what he desired. He no longer ate food without being told to eat. His father’s lessons taught him nothing but shame as he sat in the ox-plow shed. The air in there was stuffy, and the smell of rust, manure, and soil was pervasive. The hoot of owls, the distant growl of mountain lions, and the hiss of other unseen nocturnal creatures prowling the land slipped easily through the shed’s porous metal walls. The boy never slept well in the shed, but he knew that his pain was the point.
“He hasn’t known a day of hardship!” he heard his father bellow. “He is not grateful. I will make him grateful.” And come morning, with bits of injera still rotting in his cheeks, the boy would be grateful, but not in the way his father could have imagined.
That was the night the hyenas came.
Not long after, an American couple became very serious about adopting the boy. When Abba Dabo told them how the boy’s family had died, the wife began to weep uncontrollably.
“Well,” said the husband, trying to lighten the mood, “it looks like we have no choice.” They were in their forties and had attempted to use nature and science to have children of their own, but with no luck. A terrifying absence had opened inside their lives that only a child could fill.
Abba Dabo nodded gravely and warned them about how long the adoption process in Ethiopia could take. Four, five years sometimes. He shrugged and sighed out words like “corruption,” “bureaucracy,” and “red tape.” But Abba Dabo knew it was too late. They were already using a recent photo of the boy as the background for their laptop screens. The absence in their hearts was already filling. They would not be happy again until the boy was theirs. Abba Dabo was a master at telling orphan tragedies to the foreign families who came to him. The boy’s bus ride to the city from Debre Birhan, where he had stayed with distant relatives, became a weeks-long odyssey on foot. He conveniently skipped the part about the farmer, the whore, and the part about the abuse the boy had endured at his father’s hand. Foreigners often balked at the first whiff of narrative complexity. So he kept it simple, kept all the orphans and their families as innocent. They were just the victims of bad luck and cruel circumstance. In Abba Dabo’s version, the hyenas had spared the boy because they had glutted themselves on his five other family members. (The servant girl had become a sister.) When Abba Dabo quoted them an estimate for how long it might take and how very expensive it might be to process the boy’s paperwork, the wife blew her nose and said, almost embarrassed, “Is there anything we can do to help speed the process?”
It took effort for Abba Dabo to keep from smiling. Oh, Americans. When they have their hearts set on something, they want it right then and there. He tried to look surprised, but of course this was precisely the response he’d been hoping for.
“It is possible,” he said. “But it won’t be free.”
Praise God, Abba Dabo said to himself once he’d crawled into bed that night. There were repairs he needed to make around the place. The cranky baker who delivered the bread was threatening to stop if he failed to pay him again. There were still wheels to grease, officials to keep happy, and important people to make look the other way. It had never been easy running a place like this.
And he hadn’t even begun to think of his own needs. Yes, he’d been able to buy some new shirts after the Dutch couple paid him a little extra to expedite the adoption of the deaf girl. But what about all the other children who did not get adopted, who needed food and medical care and shelter and clothes and tutors? The overhead was unimaginable, the pressure constantly overwhelming. Was it a crime to daydream about a new pair of dress shoes? Or a new suit? Was it wrong to go online some nights and browse airfares to Thailand? Where was the harm in that?