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If you no wan grow again
I must leave you and go school
Because Vero e don tire!
Tire, tire e don tire!
She sang it all morning until the other children returned from school and then she stopped. She only sang this one when she was alone with Goddy.
* * *
One afternoon Mrs. Emenike returned from work and noticed a redness on Vero’s lips.
“Come here,” she said, thinking of her expensive lipstick. “What is that?”
It turned out, however, not to be lipstick at all, only her husband’s red ink. She couldn’t help a smile then.
“And look at her finger-nails! And toes too! So, Little Madame, that’s what you do when we go out and leave you at home to mind the baby? You dump him somewhere and begin to paint yourself. Don’t ever let me catch you with that kind of nonsense again; do you hear?” It occurred to her to strengthen her warning somehow if only to neutralize the smile she had smiled at the beginning.
“Do you know that red ink is poisonous? You want to kill yourself? Well, little lady you have to wait till you leave my house and return to your mother.”
That did it, she thought in glowing self-satisfaction. She could see that Vero was suitably frightened. Throughout the rest of that afternoon she walked about like a shadow.
When Mr. Emenike came home she told him the story as he ate a late lunch. And she called Vero for him to see.
“Show him your finger-nails,” she said. “And your toes, Little Madame!”
“I see,” he said waving Vero away. “She is learning fast. Do you know the proverb which says that when mother cow chews giant grass her little calves watch her mouth?”
“Who is a cow? You rhinoceros!”
“It is only a proverb, my dear.”
A week or so later Mrs. Emenike just home from work noticed that the dress she had put on the baby in the morning had been changed into something much too warm.
“What happened to the dress I put on him?”
“He fell down and soiled it. So I changed him,” said Vero. But there was something very strange in her manner. Mrs. Emenike’s first thought was that the child must have had a bad fall.
“Where did he fall?” she asked in alarm. “Where did he hit on the ground? Bring him to me! What is all this? Blood? No? What is it? My God has killed me! Go and bring me the dress. At once!”
“I washed it,” said Vero beginning to cry, a thing she had never done before. Mrs. Emenike rushed out to the line and brought down the blue dress and the white vest both heavily stained red!.
She seized Vero and beat her in a mad frenzy with both hands. Then she got a whip and broke it all on her until her face and arms ran with blood. Only then did Vero admit making the child drink a bottle of red ink. Mrs. Emenike collapsed into a chair and began to cry.
Mr. Emenike did not wait to have lunch. They bundled Vero into the Mercedes and drove her the forty miles to her mother in the village. He had wanted to go alone but his wife insisted on coming, and taking the baby too. He stopped on the main road as usual. But he didn’t go in with the girl. He just opened the door of the car, pulled her out and his wife threw her little bundle of clothes after her. And they drove away again.
Martha returned from the farm tired and grimy. Her children rushed out to meet her and to tell her that Vero was back and was crying in their bedroom. She practically dropped her basket and went to see; but she couldn’t make any sense of her story.
“You gave the baby red ink? Why? So that you can go to school? How? Come on. Let’s go to their place. Perhaps they will stay in the village overnight. Or else they will have told somebody there what happened. I don’t understand your story. Perhaps you stole something. Not so?”
“Please Mama don’t take me back there. They will kill me.”
“Come on, since you won’t tell me what you did.”
She seized her wrist and dragged her outside. Then in the open she saw all the congealed blood on whipmarks all over her head, face, neck and arms. She swallowed hard.
“Who did this?”
