• • •
David had warned me never to confuse my clients’ lives with my own. “If your life is falling apart,” he said, “don’t think you can make it better by trying to save someone else’s. And the same is true the other way. Be grateful when you’re happy. Being miserable isn’t required.”
He had one expression taped to his door: “Why do [we] [they] think we can save them?”
And underneath that: “Depending on your mood, circle one.”
My life wasn’t falling apart, but I believed an important part of it was coming to an end, and I wanted Rose, with her photo albums and stories, to show me the brightest possible version of what that end might look like — not now, but twenty, thirty, fifty years in the future.
As soon as I turned onto her street, I knew I had made a mistake. The neighborhood, and in particular that block, had been emptying out rapidly in the past two years, as some of the older stores downtown began to close. The families who lived in this neighborhood worked in those shops, or in places that depended on their owners, and so they were the first to feel the loss. There had been at least three “For Sale” signs visibly displayed on front lawns the first time I visited Rose, and now here was a fourth, which I could tell even from the opposite end of the block had landed in front of Rose’s house. I continued on anyway. There was a chance that Rose was there; in order to believe that, I avoided answering the obvious question: where would an eighty-something-year-old woman with no close family go after her house was sold?
• • •
I parked across the street from her house, even though there were no cars in front of it. Rose’s home could have fit comfortably on the first floor of my mother’s. It was short and narrow, a sturdier, brightly painted version of a shotgun shack. The two windows on either side of the front door had been boarded over, as if the house had been blinded. It was hard to imagine someone had lived there recently, or would do so again anytime soon.
“Is this where you wanted to go?” Isaac asked.
I didn’t want to answer him directly.
“This was where my client Rose lived.”
I was afraid the state of the house said something about me as well.
“And where is she now?”
“She was very old,” I said. “In her eighties. She was the one who told me to go to Chicago.”
We remained parked across the street a while longer. My claims of caring, and not just for Rose, felt fraudulent. David knew when her file was closed, and had chosen not to tell me. It was part of the agreement we had struck almost a year ago. As long as I had Isaac, I had no funerals or hospital visits to attend to.
Isaac placed my hand on the gearshift. He thought I was mourning.
“I think this means that we should definitely go to Chicago,” he said.
ISAAC
A slow, winding parade of tired and wounded refugees invaded the village on the fourth day. They emerged into the clearing shortly after dawn from a footpath on the eastern edge of the village. There must have been more than a hundred of them, but at least half were children, and as far as I could tell from behind the fence of my compound, many of the men and women were injured and could barely walk. Most of the village came out to witness their arrival, including the man and boy I was staying with. The man had an old rifle gripped to his chest, his son a pickax that he dragged behind him. When the boy saw me, he dropped his grip on the ax so he could wave to me with both hands as he said, “Okay, Daniel.” His father turned to grab him by the collar, but by that point it was too late. A dozen other children standing in their own compounds had picked up the call and were waving with both hands, each shouting either “Okay, Daniel,” or “Hello, Daniel.” Their voices were a reminder of my place as a curious stranger — not totally welcome, but easily tolerated. It was a privileged perch. The previous evening, while trying to write for the fourth or fifth time the most general observations of what I had seen and done that day, I finally understood why my father had called me Bird: nothing made me happier than looking down, and in that village, that was all I had to do. I watched the old women pound maize in the morning while the children dug for ants and beetles and the men set off for work, either to their farms or back to town. When the children shouted hello to me that morning, I could hear the imaginary perch I lived on break.
The man who had brought me to the village turned his attention briefly toward me, as did the other men from inside their own compounds. Every one of them was armed — a few with guns, the rest with machetes, hoes, and axes — and I felt certain that when they looked at me each was thinking a variation of the same thought: Why have we let this man stay with us for so long?
I waved to the boy and his father. Neither acknowledged me, nor did anyone else in the village. Everyone was focused on the newest arrivals. They were a threat — both foreign and desperate and twice as dangerous as a result — but what to do with them remained, at least for those few minutes, uncertain.
The man who had brought me to the village stepped forward. As soon as he did so, a decision was reached. Every other man in the village came forward and joined him. They formed a parallel line of defense, twenty men strong, through which no one, regardless of how desperate, would be allowed.
The townspeople could have held their position until the crowd retreated back into the forest; they could have threatened the refugees by firing once in their general direction. But neither action would have solved the problem of what to do with that mass if they eventually returned, whether that evening or the next. Isaac was wrong: the problems were everywhere, and growing by the hour. New victims and killers were being bred far from the battlefields.
The men in the village knew what they were doing. They had planned for this, or lived through it before. They spoke among themselves briefly, and then those with guns fired into the crowd without pausing to aim. The intent was to kill everyone, and so it made no difference who died first.
Among the refugees, those capable of running did so without looking back. I saw maybe a dozen women and children flee into the bush. Those who couldn’t simply stood there, or sat, or draped themselves over the bodies of those who had just been shot, and waited to die. The few able-bodied men among the crowd attacked with knives. They were fired upon. None of them were hit, though two women behind them were. Had they stayed together, they might have stood a greater chance, but each man charged on his own, and each was quickly surrounded by three men from the village, and cut down slowly with machetes and hoes.
Every man in the village took part in killing those left huddled at the edge of the forest. They did so with hard blows straight to the head. I could tell by the way they slung their weapons that they were farmers. Once they had finished, the men lined up again and marched into the bush. They would kill the ones they found, and leave the rest to die on their own. I didn’t stay long enough to hear them tell the story. The women and children began to drag the bodies into the forest. As they did so, I tried to write down what had happened. I thought of counting the dead, but I was too far away to do so. I tried next to describe one of the bodies, but all I could see was death — no eyes, no face, just a blank emptiness I didn’t have the stomach to look at closely. When that failed, I tried to describe a woman dragging what looked to be an old man through the grass, but before I knew what to write, she was gone and then walking back, empty-handed. By the time I finally turned away from her, it was almost over. The bodies were hidden in the forest, which would swallow the remains before anyone knew to look for them. I had no names, not even of the village, which was too small to have existed on any map. And so I did the only thing I could think of. I waited until no one was watching me, and then left. As I walked back to Joseph’s village, I drew a map of the route. I recorded every bend in the road, and the few forks that I came upon, along with sketches of a few long-abandoned thatch-roofed homes barely visible from the path. It was far from poetry, less than a journal, and worthless as history.