They grabbed my friend Lulu’s sister, whose limp made it hard for her to run as swiftly as the rest of us. Take us to the madman, they said. Lulu’s sister took them to the school compound, where they found Konga snoring. They hit him in the head with their guns. Wake up. Konga woke up to feel his blood flowing from his crown to his mouth. Austin had trailed them there. Crouching behind a classroom, he took a picture of Konga’s face, dazed; the Leader’s expression, disdainful; he’s pointing at the madman, undoubtedly telling the soldiers, that’s him, that’s him. Austin took a picture of the Leader’s palm pressed hard against Konga’s chest, his nostrils flared, his eyes gleaming with contempt as he all but said, I thought you were untouchable, go ahead, show everyone what will happen to me now that I’ve touched you.
The soldiers put their dead friends in their truck and took them away along with our men: Bongo, Lusaka, Woja Beki, Konga. When we were certain the truck had left, we started coming out of our hiding places. Some of us collapsed, running down the hills. Thula rose up from among the dead, covered in blood. From the forest and hills we all returned, to cradle our dead. Our wails reached the yonder world when we saw who the dead were, all of them lying around Jakani and Sakani. Eyes open. Mouths open. Blood oozing out of pierced bellies. One of my friends and her only child. A neighbor whose daughter was recovering from a long illness. Thula’s age-mate had a hole in her chest. Children held their dead parents’ heads and wept. Girls fell upon their siblings’ bodies. Mothers buckled in shock; the rest of us held them, drying their tears while we cried, begging them to be strong, even though there was near to zero strength left in any of us.
The men carried the dead away, two or three men for each body, blood leaving trails from the square to every hut wherein a departed had once lived.
Jakani and Sakani were the last bodies to be carried away.
They died next to each other, hand in hand. Inseparable from birth to death, their blood flowed from their heads and down between them, parallel at first, before linking and flowing past their feet, diverging and turning upward, toward their heads, thereafter meeting at the top to encircle them. In that red circle they lay until six men came to carry them away, taking care to ensure that the twins never stopped holding hands.
We slept nothing that night.
We needed to wash our dead. And sit with them until their spirits fully left their bodies. Then bury them the next afternoon. How could we make coffins for everyone? We didn’t have enough planks. No one could run to the big market to buy more planks on such a day. Someone said we could bury the children without coffins, but the mothers wailed their dissent—how could they fail their children in life and in death? We had to use bamboos. Coffins made of smooth planks and ragged bamboos. Ugly coffins, but at least our dead had a home in the ground, a semblance of safety before the maggots came.
Did we sing on that procession to the grave? Maybe others did; I did not.
From one end of the procession to the other, coffin after coffin sat atop shoulders, twelve in all. Plus the first twin coffin Kosawa ever made. If only I could be free of these memories: The volume of our collective wailing that afternoon. The sight of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives still wearing clothes stained by the blood of their lost ones. Thula walking behind them, still wearing her bloody clothes too, weeping, her three books in her hands, clutching them as if they were the source of her breath. My cousin Tunis in a daze, his oldest child in one of the coffins, a girl whose first bleed we had just celebrated—what does death gain from such cruelty?
We were returning to the burial ground only a day after leaving it, no longer wondering what our punishment would be for what we’d done to the Sick One. We buried our dead side by side, paying little attention to who owned which plot. We placed the coffins in the earth and asked the Spirit for forgiveness for where we’d gone wrong—surely, we’d gone wrong somewhere; surely, we’d brought this upon ourselves. If not us, then our ancestors—which one of them had committed the wrong that doomed us?
We did not think we would have any tears left by the time we got to Jakani and Sakani’s coffin, but that day we learned that within us lies an ocean. The twins lay side by side in their coffin, their hands still clasped, in the largest coffin our village had ever made. They would walk together to the other land. We would have no one to cure our ailments or intercede with the Spirit on our behalf, not for many years, not until a new spirit child was born unto us; who knew if, who knew when, that would ever come to be?