Bezila nathi. They mourn with us. But there is no they, only us. This is what come first, a voice that say, At least you have nobody to answer to. Nobody to wish you well or ill. Nobody to split apart the wealth, and no wealth to split. No woman to remark what a curse it is, what a knee-weakening, heart-shaking curse to bury your own who come after you, so unnatural, even though what mother in these lands don’t know the death of a child. Nobody to speak what they think is a balm but is really a razor. For the lion’s family is scattered, and the mother’s family is no family. And yet, I say to myself at night, even that I would choose over nothing. Words no woman think they would say, until the time come to say it. For when the people flock to your house in mourning, people joined by blood or by law, it don’t matter what feeling you carry for them, if you carry any at all. For grief is a burden that don’t care about anything other than we bear it. You don’t need love to withstand it, you need shoulders. I didn’t discover this until now, that mourning is the work of many, and we have only us.
Meanwhile every dead moment, no matter time of day, Keme come at me, pointing his hard thing straight in front. Everybody have their own way to bear what they need to bear, that is what I tell myself, because it feel like wisdom. First I believe it because he seem to believe it. That wherever you find relief, then take relief. So we fuck. We shoo spirits of sadness, who see scandal in people fucking who should be crying. We lock away the children, or send them out into the bush, or just draw a curtain, or close a door, or leave it up to them to flee, so we can fuck. There be no thinking about it, or thinking ahead of it, or even thinking after. I would be walking outside to throw away wastewater and he come up behind me and lift up my dress. He would be set to leave and I push him down right by the entryway and don’t care who pass by in the morning. One time I was cooking for the children because I forget that they all prefer meat raw and he come in with his fingers and start to rub the little me inside of me and I wrap my fingers around his stick, and we stagger like we drunk as our fingers fuck us and the food burn until smoke choke the room. Too often the children have to make their own food because I can’t leave the bed and he can’t neither. All the time we fuck silent, but quietness come between us even when we not fucking. Quiet lurk around us like a whispering enemy, so we start to fuck loud, so loud that two times the girls think some wicked spirit sneak in the room to murder me. They never yet have reason to wonder why they father naked, for all lions naked, but is more than four times, more than five that they see him with it big and stiff and I start to wonder if they start to wonder what is the purpose of that. These children starting to see us like no child should see us, and the little relief from a whole day of whatever this is feel worth whatever we losing with them. Shame, woman. Shame is what you losing, say the voice that sound like me. Shame.
The shame swoop over me like a fever. It infect me so hard that I believe for sure it will infect Keme too. But shame don’t stop the fucking, and I find myself wanting it until I don’t. His want is my want, I tell myself, and he want anything else, even if it is down an alley or behind the stalls of Baganda district or in the bath chamber of a general from the Red Army who wouldn’t raise fuss because we still mourn. I tell myself that he would stop if I tell him to stop, but I don’t tell him to stop. Then one night he yank me from near sleep with his penis rubbing against my back, insisting. I turn over my body but leave my face where it was in the sheets, looking away from him. Keme grunting and snorting but is his whimpering that disturb until I look past him to see Aba crying in the door.
“Keme, Aba,” I say. “Keme, it is daughter. Your girl. Your girl.”
He keep fucking. I finally kick him off.
“I say your daughter right there.”
“So?”
“What you mean so?”
“This bush girl all about modesty now?”
“This bush girl seeing to what your daughter need, since you—”
“I giving her what she need. She need to know how I going to make more brothers. Might as well learn now. Girl, you see how this still hard. This is what man going put—”
“Aba, go to your bed. I soon come.”
“No. Stay.”
“Aba, go to your room.”
Aba turn from looking at me then him then me, and her face wrinkle into bawling.
“Daughter—”
“Don’t call her that. You never call her that before,” he say.
“Aba, go to your room.”
“My fucking girl going stay and watch if I say to stay and watch.”
The wind (not wind) slam the door.
“Watch what? You think I doing this with you? Your head take with devils?”
“We didn’t finish,” he say and rush at me like me is prey.
“Don’t come near me.”
“We didn’t finish.”
“And I say don’t come near.”
He grab me by the shoulders and push me down on the sheets. I feel him reaching to grab himself and slapping it, waking it back up to hard. I can make it happen. I can blow him straight through the roof. I don’t say nothing but he hear something because he look at me, frightened. He roll over beside me. We don’t talk for a long while.
“If . . . if we just have another one we will—”
“You can’t replace your son.”
“He was a lion.”
“Keme.”
“I am a lion.”
He don’t say nothing for a while, but I can hear him weeping as faint as Aba. I want to tell him that this is no pride, this is a family. I want to tell him what I don’t have words for, something about trying to fill an empty jug with the wrong spirits because we so sad to see something empty that we will fill it with anything, but those words feel foolish and wrong.
I am the woman who scream for three days into sheets and furs for I couldn’t have any neighbor direct a magistrate to my house. My mouth stop screaming after three days, but my head scream for two more moons. I am the woman who exchange one heaviness for another every day. The voice in my head say, What kind of a wicked bitch you must be, where you don’t grieve because you have no time. I am the mother with hands too full to shed tears. I am the woman who make her man bury her son’s killer with him.