Nab'hia - Part 2: Secrets and Silence

Read Part 1: Thief of My Heart, here.


Nab'hia's presence had been strange.  We had seen her regularly for years.  She would come to see my mother all the time.  She would sit with her in the morning when my mother rocked on the porch.  Or while my mother tended the chickens and the goats in the barnyard I would hear the two of them talking softly and intently.  It was funny, because Nab’hia spent so much time around my mother, and they should have seemed like good friends, but I always knew that they weren’t.  Sometimes, just as my mother was leaving for the village, Nab’hia would show up on the road, arriving from where ever it was she came, and take my mother’s arm, offering to walk with her.  I knew that my mother never wanted Nab’hia there, though she never said so.  When my mother would return, she would look years older, and her skin would take on a greyish tint.  I would offer to help her sometimes, or ask her what was wrong, and she would always yell at me for asking.  Sometimes she would even hit me.  Usually Nab’hia would come ‘round the next day and ask me how my mother was treating me.  It was funny how she would know to ask, because I would be so angry with my mother, especially if she had hit me, and I would always tell Nab’hia. 

            Then Nab’hia would find my mother and secrete her away.  I would see them at the edge of the forest, their black bodies blending into the shadows of the tree trunks, or sometimes Nab’hia would take her into the lean-to shed where we kept our goats and pig.  And then she would make my mother scream.  My mother’s screams were like the dark and wild screams that came from the jungle in the nights when the air was so hot and heavy that you would think it was a living presence marching right down out of the mountains, looking for you, coming to strangle you.  I never knew what Nab’hia did to her or what she said to make my mother scream like that, but there was some small, smug part of me that remembered the feel of the bones in the back of my mother’s hand as they connected with my soft cheek and smiled inwardly.  The more Nab’hia came and made my mother scream like that, the more my mother hit me.  And the more my mother hit me, the more I longed to tattle on her to Nab’hia.  It was like a game to me, and I was a small, selfish child with a darkened heart.

            But after that day when Nab’hia took that piece of my heart out of my chest, we didn’t see her for years.  Sometimes I’d catch my mother standing on the edge of our little porch, staring down the mountain road, a wary look in her eye, and I knew that she was wondering where Nab’hia was.

            My mother and I never got along, and Nab’hia’s absence didn’t change that.  Perhaps it was the presence of Josue, and perhaps the presence of my Gécy after him, but once Nab’hia left, my mother stopped hitting me.  I still longed for someone to tattle to about her, though, when she made me angry, and my foolish, darkened heart did not grow any wiser.  It was as if that piece of it that Nab’hia had taken out was a piece of my humanity, my compassion.  But then, if it was, it was really a piece that I had never had, because I had never cared much for anyone the way that I cared for myself.

            But when Gécy turned twelve, Nab’hia started to turn up at our home again.  I was coming into the yard with an apron full of eggs, when there she was, moseying up the mountain road, as if the last time she had done so were yesterday.  She had let herself into our home without asking and sat down at our table.  Gécy was in the village, at the missionary school there, but Nab’hia seemed to know all about that.  “You watch out for those people, Karine,” she said to me in her soft, hissing voice.  “They fill your head with lies.”  She had asked my mother how we all got on, and my mother told her that we did fairly, and so she turned to me with her cunning yellow eyes and asked me how my mother was treating me.  She had stopped hitting me, I told Nab’hia, but she still called me names.  Quick as a snake, Nab’hia whipped her arm out and caught my mother’s shoulder blade between her fingers.  “Now why do you do that?” Nab’hia asked my mother, who whimpered like a child under her grasp.  “Why do you name something that does not belong to you any longer?  You should know better.”  And as quickly as she had taken my mother up, Nab’hia’s hand was back on her lap.  It was almost as if the incident had never happened.  It had been disquieting, to say the least.  There was always a small, selfish part of me that enjoyed getting under my mother’s skin, that enjoyed having something to pin on her.  But I did not like to see her small and shaking and cowering in her chair.  I did not like to see Nab’hia looking at me with that smug expression, as though she and I shared some secret that my mother could not be part of.  


Continued in Part 3: How Beautiful are the Feet (posted 12 May)