The men carried the dead away, two or three men for each body, blood leaving trails from the square to every hut wherein a departed had once lived.
Jakani and Sakani were the last bodies to be carried away.
They died next to each other, hand in hand. Inseparable from birth to death, their blood flowed from their heads and down between them, parallel at first, before linking and flowing past their feet, diverging and turning upward, toward their heads, thereafter meeting at the top to encircle them. In that red circle they lay until six men came to carry them away, taking care to ensure that the twins never stopped holding hands.
We slept nothing that night.
We needed to wash our dead. And sit with them until their spirits fully left their bodies. Then bury them the next afternoon. How could we make coffins for everyone? We didn’t have enough planks. No one could run to the big market to buy more planks on such a day. Someone said we could bury the children without coffins, but the mothers wailed their dissent—how could they fail their children in life and in death? We had to use bamboos. Coffins made of smooth planks and ragged bamboos. Ugly coffins, but at least our dead had a home in the ground, a semblance of safety before the maggots came.
Did we sing on that procession to the grave? Maybe others did; I did not.
From one end of the procession to the other, coffin after coffin sat atop shoulders, twelve in all. Plus the first twin coffin Kosawa ever made. If only I could be free of these memories: The volume of our collective wailing that afternoon. The sight of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives still wearing clothes stained by the blood of their lost ones. Thula walking behind them, still wearing her bloody clothes too, weeping, her three books in her hands, clutching them as if they were the source of her breath. My cousin Tunis in a daze, his oldest child in one of the coffins, a girl whose first bleed we had just celebrated—what does death gain from such cruelty?
We were returning to the burial ground only a day after leaving it, no longer wondering what our punishment would be for what we’d done to the Sick One. We buried our dead side by side, paying little attention to who owned which plot. We placed the coffins in the earth and asked the Spirit for forgiveness for where we’d gone wrong—surely, we’d gone wrong somewhere; surely, we’d brought this upon ourselves. If not us, then our ancestors—which one of them had committed the wrong that doomed us?
We did not think we would have any tears left by the time we got to Jakani and Sakani’s coffin, but that day we learned that within us lies an ocean. The twins lay side by side in their coffin, their hands still clasped, in the largest coffin our village had ever made. They would walk together to the other land. We would have no one to cure our ailments or intercede with the Spirit on our behalf, not for many years, not until a new spirit child was born unto us; who knew if, who knew when, that would ever come to be?
Austin took pictures of everything: The bullet holes in the dead as they were being washed. The twins’ clasped hands. Parents kneeling by their children in parlors for a final goodbye before the sealing of the coffins. Thirteen coffins waiting in front of thirteen freshly dug holes. Children clinging to their parents’ coffin before they were lowered into the ground, begging them to please don’t go, please come back.
Our families from the other seven villages ran to us when they heard of the news. They came a day after the burials. Austin captured their faces when they went to the square and saw red patches of land where the earth had drunk the blood of our people.
Austin went back to Bézam two days after the funeral and returned in a truck with his uncle’s eldest son and other relatives. The men dug up the Sick One so he could go rest in the land of his ancestors. Austin had a message for us from Bongo; a friend of his in the government had helped him get into the prison to check on Bongo. When Austin came to the hut and told us that Bongo was alive and hopeful of his freedom, Yaya’s tears flowed in silence; she ate for the first time since Bongo’s arrest. We’d been certain that the soldiers had taken the Four to a place where they’d be handed the worst possible death, but Austin told us to eat well and sleep well and try not to worry, Bongo would be home again before long. He looked into Yaya’s eyes as he spoke, Yaya’s hands in his. Though Yaya did not understand his words, she understood his countenance of certainty.
Austin called a quick meeting of the families of all the captured men and told us to be strong—help was coming soon. The moment his
