The teacher taught mathematics. Fractions, roots, the rule of three. Thirty-one years at the same desk, in the tin-roofed school behind the market.

They took him on the fifteenth of May. With the children. Three schools in a single night, at Oriire, in the dark before dawn.

Yétúndé waited. She counted the dawns the way you count sacks of rice, without meaning to, only to know how many there were.

The first days the security men came. Then the journalists. Then no one. The radio was left. The radio in the morning, the radio in the evening, the radio that said negotiations and said searches and never said the name she was waiting for.

She cooked all the same. She set out two plates all the same, then took one away, then put it back. The house still had the smell of him in the shirt on the chair, and Yétúndé did not wash the shirt because to wash it was to say a thing she did not want to say.

Then the radio said: freed. Then it said: forty-four. Then it began to read the names, one by one, the man's voice saying them low, the way you say a prayer that never ends, and at each name a house in the quarter opened and cried out, and at each name a mother fell to her knees in the beaten-earth yard and thanked heaven with her arms raised, and Yétúndé held her hands still in her lap and waited for hers, waited for the teacher's name, and the teacher's name did not come.

It did not come because the teacher is not coming back. They left him in the forest. They cut off his head on the twentieth day, they say, to show the others they meant it. He was the oldest. He did not run. Maybe he slowed the line. Maybe he said something. No one knows and everyone says it.

The house was full of people and Yétúndé was alone inside the house full of people.

The women brought her rice. They brought her oil. They held her hands and said the words that are said, that he was a good man, that the children loved him, that God is great, and the words were true and were no use at all, like water sliding off tin.

Then they said the children were arriving. In the afternoon. At the school gate. The trucks were bringing them from the hospital in Ogbomoso, washed, treated, in new clothes someone had bought.

And then Yétúndé stood up.

She took the good aṣọ from the chest, the one she wore for feasts, blue with a yellow border, and she wrapped it around her waist and over her head, slowly, before the chipped mirror, and the women watched her and said nothing, because there was nothing to say to a woman who dresses well to go to the gate where other people's children come home.

She went into the kitchen. She lit the fire. She pounded the iyán in the big mortar, the teacher's, the one he kept outside under the lean-to, and she pounded until her arms hurt, and she made the soup with the bitter leaves, and she filled the pots, all the pots in the house, hers and the ones the neighbours had brought, and she loaded them onto a cart and told a boy to push.

At the gate there was half the town. There was the heat. There was the dust the trucks raised as they came. There was the strange silence of so many people holding their breath together.

Then the trucks. Then the mothers against the bars. Then the children climbing down, small, with big eyes, searching for a single face among a thousand faces, and finding it, and vanishing into an embrace that hid them all.

Yétúndé opened the pots. She put the iyán into the hands of the children no one had yet come for, the ones from the far villages, sitting in a row on the low wall with paper plates, and she fed them the way you feed someone who has forgotten how to eat.

A boy looked at her. He was maybe eleven. He chewed slowly. Then he said: madam, you are the teacher's wife.

Yétúndé said yes.

The boy said: the teacher in the forest made us say the times tables. Under our breath. At night, when we were afraid. He said one times one is one, and two times one is two, and as long as you count you don't cry. We know them all now. We know them up to ten.

Then he lowered his head over the plate.

Yétúndé put the iyán back on his plate. She gave him twice as much. She said nothing. She kept one hand on the back of his neck, light, the way you hold the neck of a son who is eating, and with the other she pushed the food toward him, and around her the gate was crying out all those names come back and she stayed silent inside the cry, feeding the number her husband had saved by counting.