How to Bury Your Shape-Shifting Mother

How to Bury Your Shape-Shifting Mother

The Old Higue’s Son

Sometimes when I lie down, I feel sad and lonely. I think how my momma must have hollered when they were beating her with the pinta broom. I can’t use pinta broom no more. I stop sweep my yard. When I go feed the chickens wallowing in their own mess out there, I can’t look at them. There was a time when chickens were my passion. I groomed them and took them to compete in fairs all over this country. That was before things started going downhill around here. It’s January and things are still going downhill. 

It started last month when the men arrived in the evening. I was standing on the veranda, playing the game I’ve been at since I was small, willing the sun not to go down. If the sun goes down, it means tomorrow is here and tomorrow means more work. When you live in the country, all you do is work. Even chickens are a kind of work. The men were doing their work riding in on donkeys to tell me my momma dead. They drove me to the next village over, and sure enough she dead out like they said, but I could only tell it was her from the collared shirt, soaked red in places. She didn’t have a face left. All our old women wear collared shirts tucked into oversized skirts, but I used to make her pin a kerchief to her blouse, just like the girls in primary do. We had to take those kinds of precautions with her. That’s how I was able to say to the men what they wanted to hear, so they could get her off their hands, you know? 

That’s from the beating, the man carrying a bag of groceries said. His wife was going to make pumpkin curry and roti with tea for dinner.  It was a popular dish in our village. He showed me the brooms they’d used. They asked if I wanted to take she home and I thought about how much work it would be to heist her and walk for both myself and her in that heat. I couldn’t wait to crawl underneath the mosquito netting and catch a five. We were already in the season for mosquito netting. Half of the night already gone. 

I took her back for Dadi’s sake and mumbled an apology to the strangers. Many of them, excepting the mothers and babies, had come outside and made a big fuss over me. I hadn’t made it into town to get a haircut yet. I could tell my long hair disturbed them. Plus, I had feathers sticking out of everywhere. They wondered if I was an accomplice, but my English put them at ease. Cut-up English means advancement. The truth was I’d gotten no further in school than any of them. I shook my head like I’d seen Dadi do whenever his shirt wasn’t ironed properly or his rice was cooked too hard. The man with the groceries called for his wife to bring me a glass of lime water for my troubles. She emerged from a house that looked like mine. I could see how my momma got confused. His wife was too pretty to live in the country. 

I asked Dadi if he wanted me to run out to buy oil. Everywhere was closed but the family of one of my school friends owned a shop. I could knock at any hour and he would give me what I want. He slept in the back of the shop because of thief-man. The smell will wake the whole village, Dadi said. He didn’t want people to know it finally happen. He wanted them to know on their own time. He was the kind of man to see things through, in his own way. He didn’t want to leave her on the veranda overnight because of the strays, and nowadays you have to watch out for people. 

But no one was going to miss her. That’s why I think the two of us made such a show of things. Dadi dug and I lifted the sack and tossed it in and we sat right there, in our backyard by the rotting dungs tree, looking into the abyss that the body had fallen into, a body now indiscernible in the darkness. He cried and I cried, and then we cried more. Starting was hard, but once we started, it was easy to keep going, too easy, and we had to keep looking sideways at each other to make sure the other wasn’t taking it too far, hadn’t toppled over into despair. For good measure I threw in my watch. Dadi gave me that watch when I started primary school. My wrists were too small, so he bore extra holes in the band with his pocketknife and while he was cutting he said, Whatever they teach you, don’t take on, because taking on is how people trip out. My momma didn’t always stay so. She take on and then she was only good for cooking doubles and selling them by the roadside, but then she couldn’t do that either and Dadi said one day she was going to walk into the wrong village and they was going to—my wrist felt naked and strange. I had to keep touching my hand to make sure it was still mine, keep looking sideways to make sure Dadi was still there.