We promised ourselves that we would find a new name for the Sick One, as an act of atonement, after Kosawa regained its freedom. It would be a great name, a name we might even be proud to share with him if we were to happen upon him at a place and time when he no longer had any power over us.
We never did get the opportunity to come up with this new name, for he died on Woja Beki’s bed while we were at school. He died in our collective arms.
Our fathers’ time in our huts that evening was brief—after returning from the forest, they hurriedly ate and bathed and left for Woja Beki’s house, to spend the night with him in his parlor; they couldn’t leave him alone with the remains of a stranger. Even if Woja Beki was no longer fully one of us, he still was our blood, and our fathers could never punish him and his family by leaving them to sit by themselves beside a withering corpse.
Our mothers gave our fathers fruit bowls so they would have something cool to eat during the long, hot night ahead of them. As they bade us good night and stepped outside with stools and their bags of nourishment to walk over to Woja Beki’s house, our fathers appeared older and sadder than we could recall. We’d never seen them look so lost, so confused. Only when we became older, only when we got close to the ages they were during that period, did we realize that what they bore on their faces that night wasn’t grief at the Sick One’s death but the deepest sort of dread, not for themselves, not for what would befall them now that a man had died by their doing, but for us, their children, for the ways in which we would suffer for what they’d tried to do for us. Only when we became parents did we realize how we could harm our children in an attempt to clean out for them the smothering decay of this world.
—
We imagined that our fathers sat in silence around the body all night.
Not knowing the custom of the dead man’s ancestral village, not knowing the best way to handle his remains, meant nothing could be said to it all night—our fathers wouldn’t dare wrong the corpse of a stranger. If the Sick One were from Kosawa, there would have been singing around him all night, every able-bodied adult present. Jakani and Sakani would have cut off all his hair, and his nails too, which they would burn, the ashes of which they would take to do something we would never know. For this stranger, none of this could be done—his spirit could obey the laws of his land and no other laws. So, in silence, sitting on their stools, our fathers must have waited for the hours to pass, allowing the dead man’s spirit to leave his body fully and go where it needed to. When a touch confirmed that his body had lost all its warmth, evidence that his spirit was gone, Woja Beki and the men must have started the conversation on what to do with the body.
—
We stayed up late that night with the rest of our households. Together with our siblings, we asked our mothers and grandmothers question after question. We wanted them to assure us that our village had done nothing wrong, that our fathers hadn’t done to Pexton what Pexton hadn’t already done to us, that the Sick One could have died in his own bed, that Woja Beki had done everything he could to heal the Sick One. Perhaps the Sick One’s disease was incurable. Besides, was the death of one Pexton man more tragic than the deaths of all our friends and siblings combined? We wanted our mothers to convince us that all was well, that such things happened, and that the Sick One’s family would one day stop mourning for him when they realized that they’d never get answers to why he vanished. They’d have to stop crying just as we’d stopped crying for our fathers and uncles who vanished, and even if they cried forever, would their tears ever flow hotter than ours? We wanted our mothers to reassure us, again and again, and they did so, but we couldn’t be sufficiently put at ease, for we could see the doubt in their eyes.
—
Our sleep that night was only slightly less disturbed than it was the night this all began.
The next morning, while we were struggling to cast aside our fears and do our morning chores, we learned that Lusaka and Bongo and Tunis had just returned from Bézam with a young man with light skin and stringy hair. We could barely eat our breakfasts, fatigued as we were and concerned about what the arrival of this young man meant.
By the time we left for school, our fathers had gone to meet and welcome the visitor from Bézam and hear from Lusaka and his group what had happened on their trip, and, later, to make a coffin for the Sick One.
Walking to school, we discussed what some of us had heard our parents whispering: that the Sick One was the young man’s uncle. The news befuddled us. Had the young man come here to save his uncle, or did he learn we had his uncle only when he got here? During recess, few of us went home to eat. We sat on the grassy field and told ourselves that the young man’s being the Sick One’s nephew did not mean he would kill us in revenge.
—
After school, we followed the procession to the burial ground to bury the Sick One. There was no singing, only