I move my mother into the sun, and I hear a chicken. A low chicken chuckle and a scratching rustle. In the silence, these things shout. My mother is safely propped, loose-mouthed on her blanket. Next to her, my little brother, Bébé, stands stirring the dirt with his big toe. I put my finger to my lips for silence and I creep around the corner of our house, towards the busy chicken scrabbling.
There is more to this than you would think. Do I kill the chicken now? Do I catch the chicken, keep it and search for its eggs? Obvious, you might say, but I would do anything, now, to be invisible, to be as if we had all died, to pretend there is no one here rather than we three. A chicken can be a dangerous thing.
My village once had chickens, and cattle, once harvested fruit and vegetables. Once had villagers. But now they lie and rot, harvested first in a sudden day of screams and swinging knives and blood spraying in arcs and leaps and gouts and spatters on the dust, and now by worms under a layer of soil. We, who, along with my mother and Bébé, had been so piled with the bodies and coated with their blood as to be taken for dead, managed later to bury my friends and my neighbours, my father and my cousins – we five who dragged all the swollen bodies stiff as rubber tyres with a thick, swarming, buzzing following of flies to the old clearing. That was before the others wandered off, first one, then two, then the other, in the night, in the morning, in the afternoon, with fly-blown wounds and faces broken and blank, shuffling towards the trees. Slipping into the trees. Swallowed by the shadows with their heads lolling. I saw the last of them go, and turned back into the silence and my mother, sitting loose-mouthed, and my brother stick-thin and dusty, his nose running and his eyes crusted and pink.
I kill the chicken. I take it back to my mother on the blanket, and I lay it on an old tin plate in front of her. She doesn’t move, as she hasn’t moved since that day, unless I have moved her, into the sun or into the house to sleep, or away from her mess so it can be cleaned. It’s as if I wasn’t there. I murmur to her, every day, to cover the silence here, this collection of empty spaces and the earth dark with splashes in overlapping layers inside huts and outside at their doorways, splashes that wash fainter with each rain.
I search for eggs, and find three. I give one to Bébé, who cracks it open and sucks. I crack one for my mother and tip her head back a little, feed it to her sip by sip until her mouth and throat are sticky. It’s hard to tell if she swallows. I wipe her with the cloth I keep tucked at my waist. I eat my own egg.
I fetch the small carry bag from the house. I sit down and start to pluck the chicken and put the feathers into the bag. My father used to say, watching my mother pluck birds: ‘Never waste, girl. Waste is a sin. Your mother would keep the bird’s eyelashes if it had any,’ and she would giggle.
I pull at feathers. My father was a little man and it didn’t take long to kill him. He ran from the field and straight to where big men slimy and shiny with sweat and grease and blood were using my mother one by one until she was loose and limp as my rag doll. Then I saw through the old crack in our wall how the blood splashed from him to her.
I stop pulling at feathers to breathe, my face damp and sickly cold. For days afterwards my mother rubbed at herself, little rapid movements, washing movements maybe. But then this passed, and the trembling, and then there was no light. Her face was filled with darkness and there was nothing. I had nothing but a mat to lie her on, as the stuffing and feathers from our destroyed bedding blew softly away to the forest. I look at the feathers in my hand. I hear a sigh and my mother slides to the side to lie still, strangely unchanged though I know she’s gone at last. I look at Bébé. He is looking at her and I can see he doesn’t know.
‘She’s dead, Bébé,’ I say, because my mother always said that little children don’t know enough to guess. Bébé’s eyes fill and his face squeezes up. It’s all in silence, a little wheezy, because we have learned to make very little noise. ‘It’s better, Bébé, you know, because she was unhappy,’ I say, and he nods but the crying goes on like mime. He bows his head, his shoulders shake and he looks very small. His loneliness makes me alone, and I get up, wipe the feathers still clinging to my hands and go to him.
He’s quiet after a while and we sit cuddled together with my mother’s shell crumpled beside us. Far away in the trees an animal whoops, but here there is silence and it is, I realize at last, the silence of emptiness, just as my mother’s silence was of emptiness, and emptiness has no hope and no hope has no future. I look around at all the little houses that were my neighbours’ homes, and they stand like blank faces frozen in a scream. They’ll stay that way because they’ve lost their hope and their future. I can feel Bébé’s warm skin, the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes. I can see my other hand where it rests on my knee. It’s a little hand, but hard with work, and I held it over Bébé’s mouth while I watched our father dying, and when I saw the men turn toward the house I held him with it on my hip as we slipped through the doorway so they wouldn’t find us, and I pulled him with it into the mound of bodies that lay still warm and dripping slowly into the earth, so that we looked like the dead.
I pick up my mother’s body. She’s so light. Nearly vanished to nothing, and maybe that was all she wanted. I take her to the clearing where the others are buried and I give her her own private place, and later Bébé and I sit with each other, think a bit, talk about both of them, sing in nearly-tuneful whispers the songs she used to sing as she beat the husks from the grain.
I wrap the chicken. I tie the neck of the little bag that carries the feathers. I gather up the bits of vegetables that I can see; some are still lying in the field in the mud. There are blankets, and my doll and Bébé’s doll, the matches, some clothes, there is a simple snare my father made for catching wild birds and small animals. There is the water bottle, and some water in it. We walk toward the trees and away from the village that has lost all hope.
It is cooler here, but the heat still hangs heavy without a breeze. There is a body. I know this man: he helped to bury my father and my cousins, I helped him to bury his wife and three children. His neck is cut and it’s black with busy flies. It’s cooler here but very still and we are blinded by the fronds and leaves and bushes. There is no seeing what’s behind them. I am walking slowly because what I can’t see is all around us. Bébé is on my hip and I hold him tight. Every sound makes me turn a circle. The whole forest is whispering.
I can see the back of their heads. They’re filthy with other people’s blood, talking, chewing on other people’s food. Bébé and I slip into a bush, breathing so small and quiet it’s as if we are taking the air in through our skins. We’re wrapped around each other like leather thongs around an ankle. The men finish eating and move off, twigs snapping under their feet, branches snapping as they swing their great stained knives to clear their way. The silence folds over behind them. There’s a soft rustle because Bébé has started trembling and he’s wetting the ground between his feet. I’m trembling too, and sickly cold with sweat once more, and suddenly there’s a clutching and a rush from my empty stomach and I retch again and again and again. It hurts because my stomach has nothing to give.
Then I’m quiet, I feel loose. I’m light and loose with tiredness. I think: we’ll stay in this bush until dark, and walk in the night. We’ll drink water and eat some of this raw chicken and a piece of gritty yam, and sleep in the shadow under this bush, listen to the birds scratching and to the nonsense of the stream nearby. My father used to say the stream spoke a lot of nonsense.
At dusk I fill the bottle at the edge of the stream. At night we begin our walk along it.
It’s a long walk in the dark. Sometimes Bébé walks with his thin fingers in mine and sometimes he’s on my hip. Once, we stop so I can find Bébé’s doll for him, feeling for it at the bottom of the sack. I know his doll from mine because his has shorter hair and one eye.
We don’t talk much. What is there to say? I am thinking: we are walking from nothing in the dark in the direction of nothing and I don’t know why. I try to find the reason in the feel of Bébé’s fingers. I try to feel I belong to the soft padding of our feet. The night around us has become a soup of shadows – the darkness that we move through, and the deep, full lightlessness that crowds so close on either side. We are walking because that’s all that is left. I don’t know what else to do, but I don’t know why we are doing it.
Sometimes Bébé murmurs to me: ‘Where are we going? Will we be long?’ So I say: ‘We’re going somewhere better,’ and ‘Not too long’. It’s a chant, a charm against the black shapes of the night, and it has no meaning beyond that. He falls silent, and with our feet padding and scuffing I think: This is too much for me. Too much, too much, too much, too much… but that’s another chant that has no meaning.
Think about the small sounds of our feet.
There’s more air between the shapes; the trees have pulled back and there is sky. The lighter pillows are clouds and in between are the tiny silver sparks of stars. And ahead a mound of thick blackness that puzzles me, until I remember the hill my father and I traveled to once long ago.
Bébé asks: ‘What’s over there?’ And I answer: ‘A big hill, and I’ve been to it with dad. There was a strange town, strange people, and some big houses painted white. I held tight to dad’s hand, because I was only little. There were many trees and ferns and dad said that at the very top the air is sweeter and cooler. But we didn’t go that far.’ Bébé and I peer through the night at the big black hill.
It makes no difference where we walk. I look up at the hill only because it’s there in front of us. It’s dense and black but I know it’s only a hill. It’s so black I can’t focus, so I stare unfocussed and my feet move on, one after another. Bébé’s head bobs against my shoulder, though I know he’s not asleep. I stop and squint – there is a light, I can see a light, so faint it makes my eyes hurt to see it and I wonder if it’s really there. A steady yellow light, close to the top of the hill. A quiet yellow light, far away.
People, maybe, who aren’t afraid to show light.
Because I have stopped walking Bébé lifts his head. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks, but I say: ‘Nothing’s wrong. You see that light?’ I can feel him searching the night. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We’ll go there, to that light,’ I say. ‘That’s where we’re going?’ I nod. ‘Yes.’ He is sitting straighter now, his head forward, and I am walking again, and there’s a strength to it because this is what we are doing: we are walking that way.
As I walk through the darkness, I think about the light. There is nothing to say if it’s a good light or a bad light, but it has a story, it is a story, and everyone needs a story as they travel through the night. My feet have a place to go to, and we have a story to take us there.
Birds are talking, and though it’s dark I can see leaves and the outline of trees against the sky. The night is graying and things have edges. The sky is mauve and then a watery blue and I feel tired, tired and heavy, weighted all in a moment. It’s all I can do to find a bush for us, thick and shadowy and safe, where we eat our raw chicken and drink our water and lie back against the sack and drop like stones into sleep.
When we wake up it’s that thick colour of late afternoon. We drink water and I unwrap the chicken, but it smells now and ants have found it. I throw it off into the bushes and find Bébé a chunk of root to chew while I climb a tree for fruit. They’re ready and sweet and I am shaking because I need it so much, as the juice runs down my chin. There are some in the sack for later; we wash ourselves in the stream as the sky streaks like flame and night washes everything in violet.
I stand with my feet in the water and watch the hill through the trees turning from wooly green to black, my stomach frightened tight, my eyes watering with the search. I will not move until I know. The birds have stopped their goodnights; all colour has gone and night has come, but I can’t look away from there. That blank space, just there, before the top of the hill meets the sky. Until the light flicks into life, suddenly, warm and yellow, and I take a breath, realise I haven’t been breathing, and all my muscles sing with the relief.
We walk and we walk, but I can see the light and my thoughts are more steady. When we stop to eat and drink I promise to search later for meat, other fruits, maybe catch a fish. I wonder if I can catch a wild bird. I think: If I do this in the gray of dawn or evening, the smoke from a fire might go unnoticed. But thinking this clenches my stomach again with fear. I have never felt so alone as now. I look up at the light. I squeeze my eyes up – there are more lights, two, maybe three: weak, winking cousins to the stronger yellow light that has let me use it, so far, to bring us this far.
The air is cooler and sweeter, the dark is graying into dawn. We finish the fruit and drink water. When I wake up I’ll catch a bird and we’ll wait for the gray of evening to light a fire while I pluck the feathers and save them in the little bag, and then we’ll cook our food.
I catch myself thinking: one day we’ll have a pillow.
We sleep on a mat of old leaves and moss in the shadows of ferns, with a blanket. I hold Bébé and my doll, he holds his doll and I can hear his quiet breathing.
Evening is falling and we’re eating. I close my eyes because there has never been anything like this. Bébé is licking every part of his fingers, and I do too, and I run my tongue around my mouth and when we finish I stop a moment, eyes closed again to catch that pleasure in my mouth before it’s washed away. I glance up at the tiny lights twinkling up on the hill. I am fed and I exist, my brother exists, there, with his little greasy face nearly smiling. What next? What happens after we reach the lights?
I’m thinking as the night spreads around us. I’m thinking what we will need to go on. The lights have been good to us because we’re here now, and stronger. But this much is clear: it’s not good to hope for too much, and it’s not good to hope for too little.
First, we’ll see whose lights these are. I take a breath and I get to my feet.
© J. Crozier
