My New Neighbor’s Goat Kept Destroying the Food I Grew in My Compound — I Warned Her Many Times, But She Ignored Me… So I Decided to Teach Her a Lesson

Chapter 1

The egg was cold as a river stone in my right palm, and at twelve o’clock, when the whole compound had gone quiet in that wrong way, I heard my own voice call her name three times — Beatrice. Beatrice. Beatrice. — and my mouth was not moving. The candle flame bent toward her wall without any wind. I had buried her two goats before dawn, packed the soil flat under the plantain trees, scattered dry leaves over the fresh turn, and no one had come knocking. No one had screamed. But now, in the middle of the silence, the egg turned cold as a grave, and from inside it a voice that was hers — and not hers — whispered my name back: “Joyce. You should have buried me too. Because now I am going to bury you.”

I am the kind of woman who minds her own business. I do not stand at the fence and swallow other people’s news with my palm-nut oil. I do not attend naming ceremonies with a borrowed wrapper and a comment. That is who I am.

So when I decided, in the fourth month of the year, to plant my own foodstuff, I did it quietly. Tomatoes in the red line by the wall. Pepper against the back fence where the sun is cruelest. Mango seedlings by the gate, bitter leaf and pumpkin in the soft black soil along the drain, carrots where the ground is deep and forgiving. Every Saturday morning before the heat came up, I watered them with my own hands. The money I saved went into a tin box on top of my wardrobe, for school fees.

One month. That was all it took.

I came home from the poultry farm that evening — the day’s shift still in my nose, feathers and feed dust — and found my garden torn open like a wound. The bitter leaf was chewed to the nub. The mango seedlings were stripped bare, nothing but pale sticks pointing at the sky. Carrots pulled from the earth and bitten in two, the orange halves lying in the red dust like broken promises.

I stood over it and did not cry, because crying does not replant anything.

“Did rain fall today?” I asked Joshua, my neighbor to the left, leaning over the low wall, watching me the way the whole street watches a woman who has been wronged.

He shook his head slowly. “Sister Joyce, this one is not rain o. Rain cannot bite mango leaf and pull carrot out of the ground like somebody with teeth.”

“Then who?” I said. “Who has done this wicked thing to me?”

“I don’t know o. I was inside my room through the afternoon. But I heard noise around your side. Something chewing. Something that did not stop chewing.”

“Chewing?” The word turned over in my stomach.

“Just monitor the place,” he said. “If it comes back, you will catch it.”

I did not sleep well that night. Every creak of the roof was a mouth.

Three days later I caught them.

I was inside taking off my uniform when I heard it — the tearing, the low grunting, the contented greed of animals that have found an unlocked pantry. I grabbed the broom and ran out barefoot. Two goats stood in the middle of my garden, my carrots dangling from their mouths like cigarettes, my pumpkin leaves hanging from their chins like beards. They looked up at me without shame.

“Get out!” I screamed. “Go on! Leave my farm!”

They bolted, still chewing, straight through the back fence into the compound of the new neighbor, the one who had arrived three months ago with a red headscarf and an opinion about everything.

Mama Beatrice.

I stood breathing hard, watching her two goats disappear into her yard like they owned the road.

So. This was the thing that had been eating my labour.

I washed my face, put on a proper wrapper, and went to knock on her door like a neighbor, not an enemy. I told her her goats had destroyed my bitter leaf, my mango, my carrots, my pepper — the damage in naira and in tears. I asked her, one woman to another, to tie her goats, to feed them well, so they would not come and eat my family’s food again.

She stood in her doorway with her hands on her hips and laughed.

“And so?” she said. “Am I the goat? When you wanted privacy so badly, why didn’t you put a gate on your house? If you don’t want goat to eat your plant, buy rope. Fence your compound. Don’t come and make noise in my ears like a broken radio.”

“Excuse me, ma,” I said, my voice trembling. “Did you hear what I said? Your animals have destroyed the money I spent. Do you not have even one small sympathy?”

“Sympathy for what? For carrot?” She clapped her hands together and laughed louder. “Ah, look at this small girl o! Is it because I am smiling with you that you want to raise your voice at me in my own backyard?”

“Ma, I am not raising my voice,” I said. “I am only asking you to be a good neighbor. Please. If you tie these goats—”

“Young lady, you cannot intimidate me.” Her voice dropped. “I am not the goat, and I will not tie my animals because of one ‘lady’ like you. Take it to court o. Call the police. Call the king. Call the governor. Do whatever your small hand can do.” She leaned forward. “Your tallest ladder is only the step I stand on, young woman.”

She turned and walked back inside and shut the door, and the whole compound heard the latch catch.

I stood in her yard with the word *power* ringing in my ears.

That night I could not sleep. I lay in the dark and counted my losses like a woman counting the dead. All my money. All my Saturdays. All my prayers.

And somewhere around two in the morning, I heard it again.

The tearing. The chewing. The low, contented grunting of animals that had been let out.

I did not get up. I lay still, listening to my garden die, and I understood that Mama Beatrice had opened her gate on purpose. Nobody ties a goat at night and finds it loose by accident. She had sent them. Or she had let them.

Either way. It was war.

The next morning I went to the market and bought what no good Christian woman has any business buying.

And I made a decision I am going to spend the rest of my life carrying.