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 4

“Mama,” I said, “it is working. Everything is working. Her daughter’s shop is failing. The whole compound can hear them crying.”

“Good,” my mother said. “Then the battle is finished.”

But there was something in her voice that made me pause. “Mama… what exactly did that egg do?”

My mother was quiet for a long time. In the village, my mother is famous for two things: her prayers and her silence. When she is silent, you wait.

“The egg does not curse, my daughter,” she said finally. “An egg is a mirror. It cannot send anything anywhere. It can only hold what is already in a person’s hand and show them the shape of it.” She paused. “The only power I gave you is the power to look at yourself. Whatever has begun to fall in that woman’s house — it did not come from your mouth at midnight. It was already falling. It was already in her hand, and the mirror simply turned it toward the light.”

“Mama, I don’t understand.”

“If you curse a woman who has done you no evil,” my mother said, “the curse dies in the mirror and nothing happens. But if you curse a woman whose own heart is full of poison, the mirror holds the poison up, and she sees it, and the poison does what poison does. You did not destroy her daughter’s shop, Joyce. You did not. You only stood in the light and let her see what she has been planting all along.” Another pause. “The question now is what you will do with the mirror. You can keep holding it up and watch her burn. Or you can put it down and go build a wall between her and what she has set loose.”

“Mama—”

“I did not raise you to be a farmer of other people’s sorrow, my daughter. I raised you to be a gardener. There is a difference.”

She hung up. I sat in my small kitchen with the phone hot against my ear and the word *gardener* turning over and over in my chest like a stone in a stream.

I could not stop thinking about it. All day at the poultry farm, all evening at my gate, the word followed me. Gardener. I had buried two goats in my garden and I had called it justice. But a gardener does not sow poison in his own soil. A gardener knows that everything you plant — even hatred — grows somewhere. And whatever grew in the soil of my heart was going to grow beside my bitter leaf, in the same ground, under the same sun.

That evening I went to the plantain trees at the back of my compound. The ground where I had buried them was flat, covered in dry grass, invisible to any eye — but I knew the exact place, the way you know the exact place of any wound. I stood over it and I did not know what to say, so I said nothing, and I stood there until the light failed and the first bats came out.

“I am sorry,” I said at last, to the ground. “I am sorry I buried you. I am sorry I made you the price of a war you did not start. You were only hungry. That is the whole sin of it — you were only hungry, and you were the least guilty of all of us, and you are the ones I buried.”

The ground did not answer. Ground never answers. But something in me loosened, the way a knot loosens when you finally stop pulling at it.

“If I could take it back,” I said, “I would not be standing over a grave. I would be standing over a pen. I would have tied the rope myself. I would have fed you myself. We would all still be whole.”

That was the thought that followed me for days: we would all still be whole.

On the fourth day, Amina knocked on my door.

I almost did not open it. We were not friends. We were neighbors who nodded over the fence, two quiet women who minded their business. But she was standing on my step in the middle of the afternoon, looking at her hands, and her eyes were red, and I opened the door because some things you cannot not open.

“Sister Joyce,” she said. “I am sorry to disturb you. But I have no one else to talk to.”

“Come inside,” I said.

She sat at my small table and I poured her water, and she drank it the way a woman drinks when she has been holding tears too long. Then she told me everything.

“Mommy is going to lose everything,” Amina said. “You know she sells foodstuff at the market? Cassava, yam, pepper. It was her business before mine. It was all she had, after Papa died.” She looked up at me. “Then you started planting. Fresh vegetables, straight from your own garden. The women of this neighborhood began to buy from you instead of from her. She watched it happen for a month. She watched her stall grow empty, week by week.”

I went very still. “So the goats—”

Amina’s face crumpled. “She opened the gate, Sister Joyce. I did not know at first. I did not know anything until last week, when she was sick and talking in her fever, and she confessed it out loud. She let the goats in because she could not bear to watch your garden grow while hers died. She sent them into your farm to eat what you had planted. She thought—” Amina wiped her eyes. “She thought if your farm failed, the women would come back to her stall. She did not understand that the thing eating her stall was not you. It was the world changing. It was the market moving. It was the same thing that is eating my shop now.”

“Amina.” My voice came out strange. “Do you know what happened to the goats?”