"The Dead Are Always Looking Backward"

The shovel stopped, and she did not get up.

He sat in the canoe with the lamp turned low and watched the place where she was. A smudge of dirtied white, down beside the mound. The baobab stood over her with its hung things, and the dried chicken turned on its cord, slow, and the fog held it all close, and she did not get up, and she did not get up.

On the post nearest the water a child's sandal had been tied with wire, small, the strap rotted through. His eye found it and went back to the fog.

He reached into the bow for the fish. The deserter's fish, dried hard and salted, wrapped in a cloth gone damp with the night. He unwrapped it, and the smell cut through the cold dead air of the place---smoke and salt, the river's old gift, and the fog took the smell and would not carry it off the way air should, but held it close around his head.

From the bag at his knee, soft and dark from his hands, he took the wrapped leaves. The grey salt. The red-brown pepper that grows wild in the creeks. He was not careful with the pepper. He wanted it to burn.

He poured palm oil from a cut bottle, the kind the companies ship by the pallet, and worked it into the fish with his fingers, and ate.

He did not hurry it. The fish was tough and good. The cold did not reach him; he had been cold in places that made this place a kindness. The pepper came up on his tongue and bloomed there, and he chewed, and watched the fog, and the woman was a shape in it, and then she was less than a shape.

The fog thickened, and there were others with her.

Shapes.

These were not people. They were the shapes of people, moving the slow way the fog moved and not troubling it, so that the baobab stood clear behind them and the hung things turned through the place where a body should have stopped the eye. One was bent. One was small.

He went on eating.

A voice came up out of somewhere a long way back, worn down almost to nothing---do not be afraid, they are only looking, they will not---and the rest of it was gone, had been gone thirty years, and he chewed and let it go.

Then one of the shapes was down on its knees.

A woman's size. A woman's bend in the back. Down in the wet ground with both arms out into the dark---and it was in him before he could shut it out.

Then... smoke. This was not the flat chemical sweet of the flares. This was thatch, and the smoking-racks, and a whole year's dried fish going up at once. The smell of a place that had been his.

The hard flat knock of the rifles. The sound he would know from any other sound on the earth.

The mud red and churned.

A pair of hands coming up out of the low wet ground, reaching---

The pepper was still burning on his tongue.

He was back. The fish was finished.

He wiped his hands down his kaftan. He took up the bailing-tin and ran it round the bottom of the canoe though there was nothing to bail, and trimmed the lamp, and set the oar where his hand would find it. The boat was right. He made it right again.

Where the kneeling shape had been there was fog, and then there was the woman, getting to her feet.

She came slowly, out of the fog and back into herself, and the white was gone from her, only mud now, and the dark wet of the grave-earth up the front of her. She did not look at the mound again.

She stopped at the water's edge with her back to him and stood. Her head moved slowly towards the bushes, the treeline, the bushes again, back along the clearing to the baobab and the rows of the dead---the way a man reads ground he means to come back to.

He could not see her face. The fog had it, and the dark, and her own back turned. Whatever it did, it did without a sound, and he sat in the boat and did not know, and would not know.

Then she waded out.

He stood and took up the oar and let her see him do it. She looked at him a moment. There was mud drying on her cheek and she left it. Then she came through the shallows and put her hands on the gunwale and pulled herself up and in, and it cost her, the wrapper heavy with water and earth, and she got over the side without grace and without asking, and he did not reach for her. She settled in the bow with her back straight and faced the open water and did not look back at the island.

He pushed off.

⁂

The fog let go of them past the mouth of the lagoon. The cold went out of the air. Off in the dark the frogs started, first one and then the whole wall of them, and the water woke under the hull and began to move, and the basin took them back.

He rowed. She sat. The lamp burned to a thread. Far to the south the flare stood up again, red, where it always stood.

The wooden platform came out of the dark and the two of them were still on it. The boy on a stone with the rifle across his knees. The girl against a tree, her arms folded. They had not moved in all the hours he had been gone, and they straightened when the canoe came in.

He laid the boat against the boards. The girl stepped down to bring the woman up.

The woman did not move.

"My name is Ésa," she said to the water.

Osogó's face was still but his eyes flicked towards her direction.

"I will need you again."

She did not ask it. She set it down between them the way she had set down the gold, and waited for nothing, and looked for no answer.

He gave none.

The girl took her arm and brought her up onto the boards, and the boy stood and shouldered the rifle, and the three of them went up the bank and the bush path took them in, and the dark closed over the place where they had been.

He stayed where he was.

The gold sat heavy in his pocket.

Ésa.

He stood a while longer. Then he put the oar in the water, and the canoe came around, and he went back the way he had come.