"Òsè"

Past the last checkpoint the fog came down to the water and stayed. He rowed her into it. The world closed to the lamp and an oar's length of black water on either side.

She sat in the bow with the body, facing forward, her back straight. The lamp found the white of her and the white of the cloth she had wound the boy in, and the two whites were the only things in the dark that were not the dark. He kept his eyes on the channel. The white stayed at the edge of them anyway.

Fifteen years on the water had made his eyes work wide. He did not have to turn his head to know a thing was beside him. So he knew her face was not bent to the body in her arms. It was turned a little toward him---his back, his shoulders, the oar going down and coming up. She was watching him row. He felt it between his shoulder blades, a small steady weight, and he gave no sign, and he rowed.

Once her lips moved. A single word, low, not for him. It was not the shape of the invocation; he knew those shapes the way he knew the channel. A name, maybe. He did not know it. The fog took it.

Her breathing did not change. Whatever she was doing to her face, she was doing it without making a sound

The channel narrowed. The reeds gave out and the mangroves came down to the waterline, their roots black and many in the black water, and the mist thickened until the patrol fires on the banks were only a smear of orange that came and went. The water lay flat. The oar was the only sound.

He knew the banks. Off to the right, low in the roots, something shifted its weight and went still. Further on, another. He did not turn his head. He had rowed this water a long time and he knew when it was holding men. Some of them would be children. He rowed. The oar went down and came up, and whatever was in the roots watched the canoe pass and let it pass.

A voice came out of the bank. Young, and it cracked on the second word.

"Who is crossing?"

He did not stop the oar.

"The boat."

A silence. Then the voice again, smaller. "Cross, Ferryman."

In the bow, her thumb stopped against the gold band. The canoe went on into the fog, and after a while the thumb began again.

The mist closed until the lamp lit only a few feet of water ahead of the bow. Then the mangroves fell back on both sides and the water opened wide and went still---stiller than moving water ever is, and out of the fog, low and dark, came the island.

Òsè was not large. A hundred yards of mud and black rock, rising to a clearing, and the clearing was full of the dead. The graves were not made the same. Some were marked with wooden posts gone grey and leaning. Some were mounds of old stone furred with moss, the stones set in spirals, the same spiral the Mouth's men painted on their flag. Some were only low places in the grass where the ground had been opened once and closed again. At the center of it stood one great tree, a baobab, bare, its branches going up into the fog. Things hung from the branches. Strips of white cloth. Kola nuts strung on cord. The dried skeleton of a chicken, turning, slow, with no wind to turn it.

There were no frogs here. No birds. The water did not move, and the fog moved in slow coils, and the air was cold. The basin air is never cold. Not once in all his years on the water.

He had brought the dead here before. He did not like the bringing. The old women said the god's voice was loudest at Òsè, and he had never heard a voice; but there was the other thing, that the water was listening, and had been listening a long time, and was in no hurry.

He ran the canoe up onto the mud and the hull scraped and held. The smell came up off the bank to meet him. Old water, water that had stood without moving longer than the island had carried names, and under it; the sweetish animal smell of the offerings going slowly to rot in the damp, kola and feather and whatever else the grieving had tied to the tree and walked away from. It was a smell that made him want the open water again.

The woman stood. She put one leg over the side and then the other and went down into the mud, and it took her to the ankle and held the fine, ruined sandals, and she reached back into the boat for the body.

She got her arms under it and lifted. The body came up off the floor of the canoe and over the gunwale, halfway---and then her foot went out from under her in the mud.

She went down backward and hard, and the shallows took her with a flat hard sound, loud in all that silence. The black water came up around her to the waist, and the body slid back over the gunwale into the canoe. She did not cry out. Her breath came hard through her nose. She sat there a moment, unmoving, then got up. The mud did not want to give her back. She pushed, it pulled, and she came up heavy and streaming, reached for the body again.

He watched her.

She got her arms under it a second time, and the body came up, and the white cloth gave at one corner and began to come loose, a long fold of it unwinding down toward the water, and she stopped and set the weight against the gunwale and took the loose cloth and wound it back, her fingers going over the fold and tucking it under and smoothing it flat.

He shipped the oar and climbed over the side into the mud. He took the body up out of the boat and onto his shoulder, and the weight came down on him, and it was heavier than its length.

She stood in the mud and looked at him and did not move.

"It's heavy," he said to the cloth.

He did not look at her face. He felt her eyes on the side of his, on the old scar there. Then she turned and went up the bank toward the graves, and he carried the body after her.

She led him in among the posts and the spiral stones, past the baobab and the things that hung from it, to a low place at the edge of the island where the ground fell away to the water. A grave was already open there. The earth was piled beside it, dark and wet. A shovel lay in the grass. She had made this ready.

He went down on one knee and laid the body on the grass beside the open ground. She said, low, "Thank you."

He did not answer. He stepped back.

He could have put the body down into the grave for her. He did not offer, and she did not ask, and he did not leave. He stepped back into the dark under the baobab and stood there, the offerings turning slow above his head, and he watched.

The woman knelt in the mud beside her son and laid both hands flat on the white. She closed her eyes. Her lips moved. Her words, low. They were not the old invocations nor the river women's song.

Then she put her hands to the white and began to move the body toward the open ground.

It went over the edge and down and struck the bottom with a sound that was heavy and soft at once.

She took up the shovel.

She filled the grave badly. The shovel was too much for her arms, and the wet earth slid half of itself back into the hole each time, so that she had to go again and again at the same ground.

The scarf came loose and fell back off her head onto her shoulders, and her hair was under it in two thick braided rows. The mud was up the front of the wrapper and the white was almost gone from it now. She did not weep.

She worked the shovel, and the earth went down and slid back, and she worked it again.

He turned and went back down the bank to the canoe. Behind him the shovel went on, scrape and fall, scrape and fall. The fog came in over the clearing as he walked, and she went to a shape in it, and then to a smudge of dark and white, and then to nothing, and only the sound of the shovel was left of her.

He washed his hands in the water at the boat's side. It was cold and it did not move under his hands and it gave nothing back. Behind him in the fog the shovel kept on.

Scrape.

Fall.

Wait.

Scrape.

He breathed with it.

He got into the boat and sat down to the oar. He did not row. The island stood in the fog with all its dead and its one bare tree, and the things tied to the tree turned on their cords, slow, with no wind to account for it, and the still water lay all around it, and he waited.