And I want somebody to tell me that all this is mourning. I want a new god just to curse her for not telling me that you need a midwife for death too. None of this wisdom you come to on your own, so this is it, then, this is how the gods punish me for not having any friends, nobody who I can say, We was women together.
My boy. My boy with the final look on his face that say, No, this is too new, none of this feel like something I know and I don’t like it. I don’t like it, Mama, make it go away, I don’t like it and I can’t stop it, it creeping up my feet and my knees and it is in my belly and rising, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop please Mama. I see all that in his dead face, and even that dead face stubborn, saying to me, Look what you done do. Look what you didn’t save. I look at him, changed into the boy he never become, the most beautiful boy I ever done see, with his skin like coffee a grandmother would make, and lips thin like his father, and a nose so wide it almost flat, and black hair drizzling with gold. I look at him until I realize that he looking at me. And when I try to shut his eyes, the eyelids fight me, refusing to close. No, I will look at you trying to end me and I won’t close, he is saying with his quiet lips. And I push and push and push so hard that it feel like violence to a boy who already suffer too much violence, and the pushing make me scream, Please close, because I can’t bear to see that you see me.
Nobody was murdered. Nobody is dead. No trail of army feet track themselves to my house and no trail of blood leave. Which women had ever suffered this, I ask this man, to tell their children that instead of crying for your brother, act like he never did born? Which mother ever live to tell their children such a thing? Which child can obey it? Which mother? But Keme beg me for a cooler head, knowing it would enrage me to hear that I should put a drape over my grief.
“Itutu, my love. Please. Itutu.”
I want to yell at him what he mean, telling me to be cool when everything already fucking cold like my son’s body, but I let my eyes do it and he turn away. Don’t make me angry, for I would swap it for whatever it is I have now, I say. A cooler head, I beg you, he say. Think of what is before us, Sogolon. We have buried not one, but ten and two. Ten and one and . . . He can’t say his name. He don’t ask if they did come to kill me. Soon widows of the Red Army will cry for their missing husbands. Soon some inquisitor will learn that they were last seen heading for Ibiku district. Soon somebody will wonder who was it they come looking for. I need to explode my sadness. He don’t ask if they did come to kill me. For two days it even work, scooping out woe from whatever hole it settle itself in and filling it with rage. At him, at the children, at the dry ground that won’t break up for graves, at my son with the hole in his chest for charging when all the other children stay still. Then I remember that Ndambi rush them too but I can’t recall if he move first and she follow or the other way. I wish I knew, for it would give me something to do with my tongue. I could say, Stupid girl, you is the one that lead him to it, so why he now dead and not you? Then my head tell me that I could never say such to my child, who was only trying to protect us after the ground swallow their father whole. Protect me. He don’t ask if they did come to kill me.
But I want him to ask, because I want to give him reason to fight me. Slap my cheek or punch my face or beat me with a stick so that I can beat him back and show him who in this house really have the claws. A voice that sound like me say, Surely this cannot be mourning, for all you want to do is break anything that can be broken. I am filling to the brim with something and Keme know that he will not abide by whatever flow over, so he retreat down the side of the hill to roar, and wail, and punch the tree trunks until his knuckles get raw and bloody, and a river flow down his cheeks when he shift. I know he is doing it and I hate him for doing it, for making show, for letting the whole ugliness of mourning out when I have to keep it in. Because there is us and there is them, and they can never know.
“This not right,” I say to him a half moon after. “I don’t know the rules for the dead. I don’t know no ceremony. But the gods must have their way.”
“You know we can’t.”
“We doing something wrong, I tell you. We condemning him to something worse than death.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know we not giving him no peace. A mother know that.”
“Sogolon.”
“No. This wrong and we wrong to do it so. We wrong.”
“What you want us do, Sogolon? Run out in the street and say hark, we have ten and one dead men and one boy, but we blameless? Consider you other children, Sogolon. We don’t want more dead child.”
This should be some sort of relief, he must be thinking. This should make me feel better. But none of this make me feel better. It make me feel vile. So vile that sometimes feeling that I am vile take the place of feeling like I am empty. Or full of shit I don’t want.
It is too much. There must be women who could tell me that this is too much. So much that sometimes it make me laugh until I stupid. Nobody is here to tell me, so I don’t know if a mother have a right to bawl and scream, and hiss, and spit, and hurt the wrong people, and not clean her house, or wipe away her shit, or cook, or clean, or cook too little, or clean too much, or all of these things, or none of these. Two moons after we bury him I walk up to Keme and slap him. He shift a little, sprouting his whiskers and gnashing his teeth, but he don’t hit me back.
“We bury our son with no name. No glory, no notice to the ancestors, no nothing, like he is some beggar you find dead in the street. No, we worse. At least everybody in the village know where the beggar is buried. We bury him with his murderer. No ancestor going find his grave. You hear me, the otherworld will never welcome him.”
“Quiet, woman.”
“Is not me making noise, is him. His bones going rattle and then they going rattle this house. What wicked parents we must be, we deserve to have all our children dead.”
“You really trying to tempt my hand, woman.”
“Tempt to what? To do to me what you do to the trees?”
“I never lay no hand on you.”
“You forget.”
“Quiet, Sogolon.”
But I can’t keep quiet. Much is private, and much I wish I alone did know. But burying somebody is not one of them things, and the only person who keep a death secret is a murderer. The fifth time I say this to the man, he say to me, “Take what you need.”
“Fuck the gods, what you talking about now?”
“You know you have children still alive.”
“I say what you talking about?”
“My chest broad enough?”
“I done with you.”
“You want to beat it now or tomorrow?”
“I say I done with you.”
“But you not. You not done. And tomorrow you start all over again. You going to scream at who, Serwa this time? Or Matisha? Or slap Keme, or tell Ndambi that if she want food so bad to slice and carve it herself or starve? All this rage you filling up your body with. It won’t—”