Circumstances seemed to be working to keep her there, and his kindness was breaking her down bit by bit. One day she waited until he'd finished eating his dinner. Then she knelt by his chair and offered her hand to him in marriage.

"Adeke, don't play with my heart if you don't mean this," he said.

"Do you want to marry me or not?" she laughed. He spent that entire night touching her face and crying.

News of their marriage was greeted with much laughter. When Adeke went out to the market, the children followed closely behind her, corrupting old play songs to make fun of her.

   Adeke is not wanted in her home
   She is not wanted by her people
   And now Adeke must pack her bags,
   To be married by the Mkokoteni Pusher
   They'll have a wedding in the bathroom...

Mostly Adeke ignored them. After all they were just children, and they were foolish. But sometimes the children kept at it until their words got to her. Then she'd turn abruptly and scream, "He doesn't push the handcart, you stupid little fools. He pulls it!"

"Oh, he is a Mkokoteni Puller then. Sorry, we didn't know!" the children would laugh and keep following her and taunting her with their songs.

The Mkokoteni Pusher got his own fair share of ridicule for marrying Adeke. Other men talked about their experiences with her hoping that he would fight them. He wouldn't fight anyone. He spent his days working, riding his handcart down dirt roads at dangerous speed and shouting, "Move! Move!" He startled people off the paths and refused to be called the Mkokoteni Pusher anymore "Call me Ekrapa or don't call me at all," he insisted. The township hated him all the more. Some people spread rumors that he was a wizard. "How else could he have gotten that Adeke to marry him of all people?" they said. Ekrapa smiled when the rumors reached him. The only words he spoke on the matter were, "Well, didn't they say she was a whore?"

                    ***

Adeke was awakened by something warm crawling down her thighs. It was late at night and Ekrapa was asleep beside her. Her hand impulsively went to her abdomen. Since she'd learned two months before that she was pregnant, her maternal instincts had sky-rocketed and she often felt the need to protect her baby by resting her hands on her belly. She got out of bed, careful not to wake her husband, and went into the kitchen. She was about to light the lamp when a sharp pain in her abdomen made her drop it and cry out. Ekrapa rushed to her. He lit the lamp.

"No no no no!" Adeke screamed at the sight of blood coming down her legs.

Ekrapa reached for a piece of cloth and falling on his knees in front of her, started to wipe the blood off. 

"Call somebody quick!" she screamed at him. He stumbled back trying to get up and when she screamed again, rushed out to fetch his sister.

Two hours later, Adeke lay on her living room floor surrounded by about half a dozen female relatives. The pain had gone away and the women had cleaned her, but they explained to her that her baby was gone. They sat with her through the night, hushing her when she cried and reassuring her that she would have another child. But Adeke would not be comforted. Unable to deal with this misfortune, she took to sleeping on the bedroom floor and would not let Ekrapa touch her. She spent entire nights crying and lamenting her suffering. It broke Ekrapa's heart to see her like that. But when he tried to reach out to her and comfort her, he was met with violent screams and insults.

"What do you want from me?" she'd scream. "Haven't I given you my whole life already? What do you want now?"

Ekrapa stopped shouting on the roads. He dragged his handcart along every day, from customer to customer. The will to joke with his customers and make funny faces at their children left him. He lifted the jerry cans off the handcart mechanically and did not count the coins his customers handed him before dipping them into his pockets. The township taunted his wife every opportunity they got about her miscarriage. They said it was because she'd damaged her womb sleeping with every man that had a coin to his name. Adeke brought home these frustrations and made his house a place he dreaded going back to at the end of the day.

As things got worse at home, he began going into a certain woman's home to drink chang'aa, an illegal brew that was known to damage brains and sometimes rob people of their sight.

One night, he came home crawling on all fours. He'd wet his pants and sat on red soil so that he resembled an animal that had escaped the slaughter house halfway through its execution. He smiled sheepishly as he came through the compound. One of his sisters ran into the house to call Adeke. She rushed out of the house. Seeing the condition he was in, she clicked her tongue and went back in.

"The brown," he called as his older brother helped him into the house and into a chair. "Come to me now, my brown Adeke. Come and hold your husband's hand."

Adeke looked at him as though he were a bucket full of excrement and went into the bedroom. He fell in and out of sleep on the chair, mumbling Adeke's name, and wetting himself again and again. When he awoke, the sun was shining brightly through the open door. He started out of the chair and almost slipped on the wet floor. Panic seized him as he felt his pants and the events of the previous night began to come back to him. He went into the bedroom. The bed was neatly made. Adeke's clothes were neatly folded in the wooden box at the end of the bed. It was the kitchen that unsettled him. The pots and calabashes were all clean and there were no signs of any breakfast having been made. Adeke always made porridge first thing in the morning, even when she was angry and had spent the entire night crying.

He cleaned the mess on the living room floor and, taking a bucket of water into the outdoor shed they used as a bathroom, took his first bath in a good number of weeks. There were still no signs of Adeke when he came from the bathroom. Too embarrassed to go into his sister's house to ask after his wife, he pulled a chair and sat at the door, looking pitifully towards the gate.

Adeke came back in the evening. Ekrapa ran out to meet her but curled back, ashamed, when he saw the unwelcoming look in her eyes. She walked past him into the house and went straight into the bedroom. She lay down facing the wall and did not say a word when he asked where she'd been.

He took some money out of his savings box and went out to the butcher's. Meat had not been prepared in that house for months, but he was at his wit's end. He did not know how else to reach his wife. Ever since they suffered the miscarriage, Adeke had shut him out of her life in every way she could. They operated as roommates, with barriers between them that prevented conversation past the very basic.

He prepared the meat as best he knew how. The sweet aroma filled the room and traveled out through the compound, attracting a herd of children that came to play at his doorstep. He gave them each a small piece dipped in gravy. He'd bought only a quarter of a kilogram of beef, and he had to be careful not to give it all away before his wife ate some. He sent the children away and went into the bedroom.

"I made you some meat," he said.

Adeke lay stiff and said nothing. He went back to the living room and brought back a plate of ugali and beef stew. He saved none for himself because he didn't have the appetite for any food with the tension between him and his wife.

"I'm sorry... for everything," he said. "I wish things could be better."

Adeke sat up in bed. Dried tears lined her cheeks. She'd lost a lot of weight and her collar bones protruded conspicuously. Her hair stood carelessly all over her head. 

"What I need, Ekrapa, is not meat," she whispered. "I need for my life to be normal. I need to go away, somewhere, where I can live like a normal human being. I need to be able to go to the market without children taunting me with crazy songs about you, and women laughing when I pass. I need to forget about the pregnancy I lost and find hope that maybe...," she sniffed, "maybe there's a God out there that thinks I'm worthy of having a baby some day."

He held her hand and squeezed it.

"That, Ekrapa, is what I need," she said, "and I cannot find it here, in this township where people know nothing but pain and stinging humor."

"I know you suffer, Adeke," he said. "I suffer too. But it is God's will.

"What can we do?"

"What we can do is leave!" she raised her voice. "God's will is not good enough for me right now. I need a better deal than this."

He brought his face down and buried it in her hand for a moment, then looked back up into her eyes. "Where would we go?" he said.

"I don't know," she said. "Anywhere but here. We could go to Nairobi, live in the big city where we can disappear in the crowds, forget all the terrible things that have happened to us here."

"But... what would I do in the city? They have running water there."

It was a hopeless plan. Even if Ekrapa could find something to do in the city, he could not raise enough money to get them there. Adeke knew this, but she could not seem to help herself. She nagged and cried and refused to speak until Ekrapa began to feel like he was losing his mind. He had to find money to take them to the city, or he would never have a moment of peace at home. It pained him that Adeke was unhappy. He had to find a way to get them out of the Township. He had to find money. Leaving his entire family behind would be a worthwhile sacrifice, if only so he could bring that smile back to Adeke's prematurely aging face.

For the first time since the drunk mentioned it, Ekrapa allowed himself to give serious thought to the insurance idea. Was it really possible? Could someone really pay him hundreds of thousands of shillings for getting hit by a car? But why had this man never tried it himself? Ekrapa convinced himself that the man was a weakling. He'd been drinking chang'aa his entire life and he was so weak he could hardly walk even in his most sober moments. Ekrapa was not like that. He was used to hard work and his body could withstand pain. If he had to break a bone to make Adeke happy, then that is what he had to do.

He went to a chang'aa place the drunk frequented and tried to get the man to reassure him of the safety of this scheme.

"People do it all the time, don't they?" Ekrapa asked.

"Oh, brother," the drunk said. "I know many people who've gone done it already. Some of them lived to enjoy the insurance money."

"Some of them?"

"You know, some of them were chopped up so bad you couldn't tell which part was the head and which part..."

"But that only happens in the cities, where vehicles move fast, right?"

"The vehicles here move like snails, man. That thing they call an ambulance at the hospital... a dying person can walk out of it, go into a hotel, take hot tea and mandazi... still the vehicle will be there when they get back." he laughed and knocked over a tumbler as he got up to go relieve himself in the bushes behind the house.

Ekrapa thought about the piece of land his ancestors had owned that the township now considered public property. What if he fought the businessmen that had built on it and made them give him some money for it? His father had tried this and almost got chopped to pieces by young thugs the businessmen hired to teach him a lesson. That was too risky.

The truck that supplied the shops in the Township came in every Wednesday at five thirty in the morning. The next Wednesday, Ekrapa woke up early and took a long bath in the outdoor shed. He put on his best pair of trousers and a green shirt he kept under the mattress. Adeke watched him questioningly. When he did not volunteer any information, she asked, "Where are you going?"

"To work," he said without looking at her.

"You take a bath, and put on your best clothes to go to work?"

"It's a special assignment today," he said and walked swiftly out of the house.

He waited in front of a shop almost an hour before he heard the truck coming down the path. The streets were silent, and save for the small lantern lights coming from the shops, everything was dark. Ekrapa did not allow himself to think of anything but the hundreds of thousands of shillings the insurance company would give him after he was hit. And the smile on Adeke's face when he told her they'd finally be able to leave the township.

He watched the truck come down the slope. It was an old truck with a rumbling engine whose vibrations he could feel in the pit of his stomach. It came fast. But he could not back out. This was his only chance. His heart pounded painfully and he paced about waiting for the truck to reach him. Tears formed in his eyes and for a second he thought about running back home. But there was nothing to run back to if he could not do this. When the truck was a few feet away and he could clearly make out the face of the driver, he closed his eyes and jumped on the road.

He felt a heavy thud, as though he'd fallen and landed on a rock. But he did not stop falling after the thud. He was falling upwards, and then downwards. His vision blacked out when he hit the ground. For a few seconds, he felt pain, so much pain he could not breathe through it. Then his whole world blacked out.

He could not tell how long he'd been out. The pain was still there when he came to, but somehow he felt better able to bear it. The orange sun was just coming up in the horizon. There was a crowd, bigger than he'd witnessed in the Township before, at the side of the road. Then he heard her voice; his Adeke. She was shaking him violently and screaming.

"Come back! Come back now, Ekrapa. What shall I do without you? Where shall I go? Come back you, please... coooome back, pleeease."

Ekrapa coughed. Blood oozed out of his mouth. He was not in pain, but something seemed to be struggling in him. When he tried to open his mouth, his head fell back and he went limb in her arms.

"It's enough!" Adeke screamed when they told her he was dead. She grabbed handfuls of dust and threw them up towards the sky. "I tell you, it's enough! Take me now and finish it!"

The township stood back and let her mourn. Even those that were pleased with what had taken place refrained from throwing words around. Ekrapa's body was still warm. Adeke kept feeling his chest for a heartbeat. When her voice had gone hoarse from wailing, she looked absently up at the sky, shaking her head, sometimes crying, sometimes smiling.

 Someone tried to pull her up, but she would not move. She sat by the roadside, holding the body for hours. Then suddenly she started to wail again. People surrounded her and watched her, first with pity, and then with fear for what she might do to herself. But soon she went completely quiet and sat there like one that did not know where they were or what they were doing. She rocked the body and whispered to it. And when they came to take it away, they had to wrestle it out of her arms.

Click here for Part I of the Handcart Puller in case you missed it.