"The School"

They left the children at Gárá in the early morning, the mist still down on the water and the waystation's cooking fire putting one grey thread of smoke up into it.

Tatu came down to the dock to take them. She was a big woman in a wrapper the colour of dried palm-frond, big hands, a low voice she kept for the children, and she took them one at a time the way you take eggs: a hand laid flat on each head, a word said private, a tip of the chin toward the long house where the others were already up and moving in the grey.

There was another woman helping at the cooking fire, younger than Tatu, thin as a reed, stirring a pot with one hand while she held a baby on her hip with the other.

"Námi's taking the western run today," Tatu said.

The young woman raised two fingers toward Ésa without leaving the pot.

"If the water behaves."

"It never does," Ésa said.

The woman laughed.

"Then I'll argue with it."

She went back to stirring.

Àdúkẹ́si went first and did not look back. Tólúyibi went second, the leg dragging, the eyes still going round the place, pricing it, and he did not look back either.

Then Snail.

Snail would not let go of Kàkà's hand.

She had to take his fingers off it one at a time, the way you work a root out of wet ground, and she talked the whole while she did it, fast, too fast, the words coming out of her in a flood with no shape to them--- "it's only a little, it's only for a little while, Tatu's got proper food, real food, not fish out of a barrel, you'll see, you'll get so fat I won't even know you---" ---and her hands were shaking and his face was screwed up tight and not crying, not quite, and the red cloth was crushed against his chest in the other fist.

And then he held it out to her.

The red. He pulled it off his chest and he held it out to Kàkà while his mouth worked and nothing came.

She did not take it.

She folded his fingers back over it instead, both her small scarred hands closing his around the red, and pushed it to his chest where it lived, and she said nothing about it, and he let her, and the cloth went back to being his. Then he turned and walked up the dock to Tatu and did not look back, and it was the bravest thing Osogó had seen on the water in a long time, and the boy was seven.

Kàkà stayed where she was, down on her knees in the mud. Ésa went to her.

"You're not coming with us," Ésa said.

"I know." Kàkà wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. "The next ones are bad. Fárá's bad, the patrols are thick. I know. You said all of it already."

"I did."

"Everybody says they're coming back." Kàkà was looking at the mud, not at her. "Safiya said it. The boy who taught me the gun said it. My mother didn't even bother to say it, she just---" She stopped. "People say it. And then the river has them, or the soldiers have them, or they just don't come, and you sit, and you wait, and nobody comes."

Ésa knelt.

She knelt in the mud in her white wrapper, right down into the wet of it, the way she had knelt at the grave on the island with the dead boy under her hands---Osogó had been there, he had watched her do it, and he watched her do it now---and she took the child's face in both her hands and turned it up so Kàkà had to look at her.

"I'm coming back," Ésa said.

Kàkà looked up at her a long moment and then she nodded, once, and got to her feet, and brushed at the mud and only spread it.

"I'll mind the others," she said. "Tólúyibi wants to fight everybody. I won't let him. Àdúkẹ́si won't talk but I'll talk enough for both of us." She glanced toward the long house. "I'll mind them."

"I know you will."

She looked over at Osogó, who stood by the boat, waiting, and pulled the screwed-up face she'd pulled on the dock at Tékéla.

"Don't let anything eat her," she said. "There's crocodiles in the deep swamp. Big ones. We saw. They eat people."

"She won't get eaten."

"You don't know that. Papa."

"Don't call me that." He shipped the oar across the gunwales. "And I know the swamp. The crocodiles and I have an understanding."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "What understanding."

"They don't trouble me. I don't trouble them."

She thought about it. He watched the whole machine of her turn it over.

"That's not an understanding," she said. "That's just two things ignoring each other." She hitched the strap of nothing on her shoulder, the old soldier-habit, the weight that wasn't there. "One day one of them stops ignoring. That's how it always goes."

And she turned and walked up the dock to the long house, her back straight, her head up, and she did not look back.

He had nothing to say to that.

Snail was waiting for her at the door. He took her hand. They went in.

He pushed off. The canoe came around and the channel took them and Gárá went back into the mist---the long house, the cooking fire, the one small figure that came out and stood in the doorway and watched the boat go and got smaller and then was gone.

Ésa sat in the bow. Her back straight. Her thumb on the gold band, turning it.

"She'll be alright," she said. To the water. To nobody.

He rowed.

The boat was light. Too light. It rode high and wrong with the weight gone out of it, and he put the oar down and brought it up and his hands took the count the way they always took it, the strokes folding into the swollen knuckles, and somewhere under the count his ear went looking for the other thing, the running stream of her, the bird that walked on water and the name of everything that floated and the why and the why and the why of it, the sound that had been under every sound for days---

And there was nothing there. Just the oar. Just the water. Just the frogs starting up in the green.

His hands kept counting. There was nothing for the rest of him to do.

⁂

They took the deep channels.

The main water was too hot. The checkpoints had thickened after Tékéla, the patrols doubled, the scarred one's barrier still sitting across the north channel like a bone in the throat of it, so he took the old ways instead---the water the maps had never bothered to name, channels so narrow the mangroves shut overhead and the daylight came down in green poles to the surface and broke there. The water was black and still and went down a long way. Things lived in it that had been living in it a long time.

He rowed. She sat. The silence between them was not the silence of the first night, when she had been a stranger in white with a dead son in the bottom of the boat and a fist of gold. This one had things in it now. Tékéla. The paper with the wax on it. The soldiers at the boat and the girl's wrong laugh and they're with me. The story Kàkà had told the soldiers and then told again, louder, where he could hear it---the one where he was her father and hated to say it. Gárá. The empty bow. All of it riding in the boat with them, unsaid.

"How long have you known these channels," she said.

"Since I was a boy."

"Your father taught you."

"I never knew my father."

She was quiet a moment. A mudbank slid by on the left and a crocodile lay on it with its mouth open to the green light, old as the mud, and it did not move as they passed. It watched them go by with one eye.

"Kàkà said hers was a ferryman," Ésa said.

He did not answer. The oar went down and came up.

"She talks about you when you're not there. She has theories. Why you don't speak. Why the soldiers' eyes slide off you. What you were, before." A pause. "She asked me if you'd been a soldier. I told her I didn't know."

"I was a soldier."

She looked at the side of his face. "I knew that."

"How."

"You weren't an accident, Ferryman. There are tens of men on this water who could pole a canoe through a checkpoint in the dark. I didn't take the first one I found."

"Why did you take me."

She looked out into the swamp, at the black water and the hanging coils of the snakes and the green going on and on, and she did not answer him. The gold band went round on her finger, once, and she let the question sit in the boat and did not pick it up, and he understood he was not going to get it---not today, maybe not at all---and that the not-getting was its own kind of answer, one he had no way to read.

He rowed a while.

"Did she tell you i walked into the river," he said.

"She did."

"I did." The oar went down. "Past the deep shelf, where it drops. I meant to stay under. I had stones." Down, and up. "It put me back on the bank by morning. I don't tell it to people. There's nothing in the telling."

She did not say why. He had half-braced for it and it did not come. She only sat with the fact of it.

A crocodile went off a bank somewhere behind them, a slide and then a sound like a stone going under, and the rings of it came up the channel and rocked the boat and passed.

"That was after," he said.

She turned her head.

"Before the river," he said, "I was the old Hook's. His executioner."

The gold band stopped.

He caught it. The thumb gone still on the band, the breath held a beat too long and then let go even, and then the turning started again, smooth, like nothing, and her face when he glanced at it was the face she wore at checkpoints, the still one, the door shut behind it. He did not know what he had touched.

"I was six when they took me," he said. "I was good at it before I was eleven. I was a monster at thirteen. I didn't flinch and I didn't miss and I didn't ask whose name was on the list. They had a name for me then, too. It wasn't this one." Down, and up. "I was a child and I was the worst thing on this water. That's the truth of it. Not a soldier. A soldier points his gun at the man pointing one back. I pointed mine at the ones already on their knees."

She said nothing for a long time.

The mangroves closed back over the water and the light went green and the silence came down again. But there was a door open in it now, and the open door let a small cold air in, and neither of them moved to shut it.

⁂

They put in at a mudbank where the channel widened into a small lagoon, and they made the camp together without talking about it.

He dragged the canoe half up the mud and she steadied it. He cut a flat place in the reeds with the machete and she cleared it with her hands. He gathered the dead wood that would burn without smoking and she built it into the shape it needed, close and low, the way a woman builds a fire who has built a great many of them, and he struck it, and it caught. None of it was said. Two days on the water and a body learns another body's reach---where the hand will be, which end of the thing the other will take---and the learning was a kind of talk, the only kind they'd had that cost nothing, and the fire came up small and orange between them and neither of them had said a word to make it.

It was a risk, the fire. But the dark on that water was full of the things that slid off the banks, and the fire was the smaller risk, and he had made the trade a hundred times.

They ate dried fish and the last hard heel of the Tékéla bread. Ésa took a bottle from the satchel---palm wine, off Tatu's shelf---and pulled the leaf-stopper with her teeth and drank and passed it across the fire. He drank. It was sweet and rough and sat warm under his ribs. He passed it back. The frogs were a wall of sound. The mosquitoes were worse. The smoke leaned one way and kept them off.

"The girl," he said. "Kàkà. She calls me Papa."

Ésa's mouth moved. "I heard her."

"I told her to stop."

"She won't." She drank. There was a thing at the edge of her voice that was nearly the laugh, the small surprised one. "You understand that. She'll never stop. You could put her on the moon and she'd find something up there to call Papa and tell it about birds."

He looked into the fire. The wine was warm in him. He turned a thing over and over and then let it out, low, the way you set down a weight you've carried too far.

"I've sent children under the ground," he said. "I don't know the number. My hands know it. I don't." Down went the wine, came up. "A man like that has no business being called father by anything."

She did not rush to tell him he was wrong. That was the thing about her. She let it stand true in the air a while, because some of it was, and the lie would have insulted them both.

Then he did the thing he had not done before, not once, in all the hours on the water. He asked her something that was hers.

"Your son. What was he like."

She did not answer at once. The fire ate a log and a knot of sparks went up and died in the dark. He thought he had gone over a line, reached into a thing that was not his to reach into, and he had half-decided to take it back---

"He used to sing while he drew," she said. "Under his breath. He didn't know he was doing it. He'd be down in the dust with his stick going, and there'd be this little song coming out of him, no words to it, just a sound, the way water has a sound. You could come up behind him and he'd not even know you were there." She was looking at the fire. "He did it the morning of the day they took him. I heard it through the wall. I didn't go in. I had bread on. I thought---there'll be tomorrow for going in."

She stopped.

The fire cracked. He did not fill it. He had learned that from her, on the island, kneeling at the grave---that you do not run into the place where a thing like that has just been set down. You let it sit.

After a while she drank, and passed it, and her voice when it came again was level.

"I poured the wine," she said. "For thirteen years. In a compound where men sat at a long table and decided which villages. I kept their glasses full. I smiled when they wanted smiling at. I told myself a woman in my place had no choices." The band went round on her finger. "I had them. I made them. Every day, for thirteen years, I made the same one, and I'm making the payments on it now, and the payments don't come to the end of it, and they won't, and I know they won't."

"It won't bring him back," he said.

"No."

"It won't make you clean."

She looked at him across the fire. "No."

"Nothing does." He said it to the flames, not to her. "I've tried all of it. The river was only the last thing I tried."

She let out a breath with something in it that was almost the laugh, but bent. "And it wouldn't even keep you."

"It wouldn't even keep me."

And they sat with it, the fire between them and the stars thick on the black water, and no hand went across the gap, and nothing more needed saying.

⁂

They came to Sárán on the afternoon of the second day.

A small place, quiet, set where the mangrove gave up to higher ground. The madrasa stood at the middle of it, or what the fire had left of it---a long low building of mud-brick with the roof burned off and the walls run through with black, great streaks of it climbing the brick like smoke that had been stopped and made to stay. Two years, Ésa said. The Mouth's men had done it two years back.

Mbenza met them at the dock. Small, old, sixty at the least, white hair cropped close to the skull, a stick in her hand she did not lean on, and eyes that took the whole of him in one pass and kept what they took. She shook Ésa's hand. She looked at Osogó a long, level moment.

"The Ferryman," she said.

"Yes."

"They talk about you like weather." She turned. "Come."

She took them past the burned shell to a door at the back, half-shut behind a fallen beam, and the door gave onto stairs going down---old stone worn into hollows by feet---and at the bottom of them was a room lit with candles.

The walls were shelved, and the shelves were full of books.

They were not shop books nor printed. They were books made by hand---paper stitched with twine, covers cut from cloth and bark, the pages filled with a small careful ink, line on line on line. Mbenza had copied them herself, she said, one at a time, over four years. A book for letters. A book for sums. A book of the old stories, the ones from before the war, before the oil, when the river had a different name in people's mouths.

Six children sat on the floor with slates. They were sounding out words. A boy of nine or so read aloud from one of the stitched books, his finger going under the line, and the girl beside him put him right on a word he stumbled at, and the young woman among them---a teacher, eighteen maybe, one of Mbenza's own from before---leaned in and said it slow, and the boy said it after her, and got it, and grinned.

Near the foot of the stairs a length of rope disappeared through a hole in the wall and ran up toward the burned shell of the madrasa above. One of the older girls sat beside it with a book in her lap and her hand resting on the rope.

Osogó looked at it once.

"What's that."

"Bell," Mbenza said.

"I don't hear one."

"You don't want to."

The old woman watched the children a moment.

"One pull means strangers. Two means soldiers."

She pointed with the stick.

"Three means leave the books."

Nobody in the room looked up. The boy kept reading. The girl beside him corrected another word. Mbenza's eyes stayed on them.

"We've never needed the third one."

Osogó stood at the foot of the stairs and watched.

There was a book on the shelf nearest his hand and he took it down. It was light, lighter than it looked, the twine of the spine rough under his thumb. He held it, and turned it, and looked at the marks on the open page, the small ranked marks the boy on the floor was pulling words up out of one at a time---and the marks were shut to him. They had always been shut to him. He turned the book in his hands, and it was not better, the marks still shut, and he understood he had been holding it upside down, and he turned it right and set it back on the shelf.

Mbenza had seen him do it. She said nothing. He said nothing. She looked back at the children.

He watched the boy read. He watched the girl help him. He watched the candles stand straight up in the still air of a room under a building they had burned to the ground, and the children in it learning the letters the war had forbidden and the sums the war burned schools for, the things the war wanted dead---and a girl missed a word and the boy beside her crowed about it and she shoved him and the teacher said again, sound it again, patient, and they bent back to it. And he stood and watched and said nothing, because there were no words in him that would not have come out smaller than the thing in front of him.

Beside him, Ésa was watching him watch them. He felt her eyes.

"What," he said.

"Nothing," she said.

She told him about the Sisters then, low, while the children read---how there was one in every village on the line, how they passed the children hand to hand down the water like a bucket-chain at a fire, how none of them had a god in common or a tongue in common, only the work, only the canoe coming through the mist with a child in the bottom of it. Mbenza here. Faidana at Tékéla with her yams. The blind one at the shrine. Tatu at Gárá with her big hands. Safiya in Kulún. A net of women the war could not see, because the war had never once thought to look at women as a thing that could fight it.

He listened. He watched the children. He said little.

Ésa stayed below an hour. He waited by the boat. He had waited his whole life; he did not mind it.

When she came up she had a child's slate in her hand. On it, in chalk, a bird---the wings too big for it, the beak gone crooked, a bird drawn by a hand still learning what a bird was.

"A girl down there drew it," she said. "Gimi."

That was all she said. Not the girl's age, not what the girl wanted to be, nothing else. She looked at the chalk bird a moment, the crooked beak, the wings too big, and then she opened the satchel and laid the slate down inside it, careful, flat, the way you put away a thing you mean to keep, and drew the flap over it.

Osogó watched her do it. He did not say anything. He did not say the boy in the barrel draws birds. He did not say your son drew them in the dust with a stick. He knew both things, and he held both things, and he let them stay where they were, unsaid, in the boat between them, the way she had let his river stay unsaid two days back. Some things you carried for a person by not naming them.

She climbed in. He pushed off. Sárán went back behind them---the burned walls, the hidden stairs, the candles, the children who could read.

⁂

They were on the open channel, turning east toward the water that ran to Fárá, when a canoe came out of the mist to meet them.

A small boat, one woman paddling it, young---twenty, not more---and her face was wet and it was not from the river. She brought herself alongside and put her hand on the gunwale and spoke to Ésa low and fast, the words too quiet and too quick for him to catch over the water. He watched Ésa's face while the woman talked.

He watched it change.

The woman finished. She pushed off without another word and her canoe slid back into the mist the way it had come, and was gone.

Ésa sat in the bow. Her back straight. Her thumb on the gold band, not turning it now, only holding it. She did not speak for a long time.

"A boy off the western line," she said at last. "Nine. They caught them at the crossing---the patrol. He didn't---" The oar went down. "And the Sister who had him, the one carrying him, she---"

The sentence stopped. It did not finish. It came up to the place where the thing was and it stopped there and did not go on, and the not-going-on was the whole of it, and he understood, and did not make her say the rest.

The mist came in over the water. The frogs had gone quiet somewhere behind, the way they did when the light changed.

"Who was she," he said. "The Sister."

"Námi." Her voice had gone flat and level. "Someone who trusted me. I sent her the route. I told her it was clear."

The oar went down and came up.

"How many more," Ésa said.

It was not a question, and he did not answer it, because it did not want answering. He rowed. The mist drew in around the boat and shut the green away on both sides, and the warmth of the place behind them---the candles, the stitched books, the children's voices, the slate with the crooked bird going down into the satchel---went out of the day the way a lamp goes out of a room when you carry it into the next one. The cold came up off the water to take the place it left. In the bow the woman sat with her thumb still on the band, and her face had gone back to the one he had met on the broken jetty, dry-eyed over the dead, and she said nothing else, and neither did he, and the boat went on into the mist toward Fárá.