Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Nowadays the Dead Don’t Die

LOOKING FOR BIG game, I had walked all day with the spearman Enoch through the low prickle bush and the bulging head-high termite mounds in the sand hills, kicking through clusters of black pebble-like scat. I could see frantic bird prints, and the scoring, like finger grooves, of the light gravel by thrashing snakes, but saw no animal larger than the hares that had left that scat and the marks of their pads in the sand among the blowing grass. No tracks of lions or hyenas, not even dogs.

“I will tell you,” Enoch said, sounding ashamed, almost fearful. Then he explained.

We were asked, my brother and I, to take the elder, Noah, to the hospital at the boma, sixty-five miles away, in my brother’s vehicle. It was a road of potholes and detours, and halfway there, shaken by the ruts, his swollen belly paining him, Noah died. This was the beginning of everything, though we didn’t know it. At the time it was just a body to be disposed of.

Noah had no family. This was a problem. Among our people death is the occasion for a day of old specific rituals, first the washing of the body, smearing it with ocher, then wrapping it with herbs in a blanket, some chanting by the other elders, and finally carrying the body into the bush, where it is left to be eaten by animals, the lion, the leopard, the wild dogs, the hyenas. Dogs can be fierce in packs, but hyenas are the most thorough and will return to eat everything but the blanket.

We say, “The day the old woman disappears is the day the hyena shits gray hair.”

The family pays for the funeral, and this includes the cost of the blanket, the strings of beads, the twists of herbs, a clay pot of beer, and the red ocher — smearing. The total can be a cow, or a month’s wages for someone who works at the boma.

“He’s dead,” my brother said, stopping the car.

But Noah did not seem completely dead. We heard a rattle rise from his throat to his nose, the last of his life bubbling from his lips, and very soon he was silent and so skinny he seemed deflated.

The day was ending in a low portion of reddened sky, and we sat by the roadside, thinking the same thing: that he had no family, no one to bear the cost, and that the hospital at the boma would not compensate us for the journey, because he had died on the way. He was dead, and so he was ours.

Sitting on this verge of the bush road in previous years, we were usually passed by a speeding vehicle, a Land Rover on a night drive, hunters who’d use lights. Or creeping past us, the shadowy figures of poachers, rifles slung across their backs, heading into the last of the day, that red skirt of light and the gilded trees. We saw none of these men as we hesitated here. We were used to their movements, because we were hunters too. We sat as though in the heart of a dead land, only a few baboons creeping toward a tamarind tree, to climb it for the night. But hunting had been bad, so we used our hunting vehicle for transport, as a bush taxi.

We couldn’t go farther. And what was the point in carrying the dead man to his empty hut in the village?

“That tree,” my brother said. I knew what he meant.

A fever thorn at a little distance looked important, singular in its size, a fiery witch tree among the tufted scrub.

Without discussing the matter we dragged the body from the back seat. It flopped like a sack on the stony ground. We arranged it, stretching it out, and with each of us holding an end, we bumped it through the bush to the thorn tree, where we let it drop near the rounded tower of a termite mound. I was uneasy with the face upturned, and so I rolled the body onto its belly, its nose in the dust. It was warm under my hand, and a brownish liquid ran from the mouth.

“We should eat something,” my brother said.

We had brought bread and chicken meat and fruit for the trip, but neither of us could swallow. Even a sip of water choked us, though we were thirsty.

Back in our village, no one asked what had happened. Noah had no family to inquire. People assumed that we had brought him to the boma, that we had been paid. We didn’t volunteer the information that he had died, that we’d dragged him under a tree and left him.

After a week, feeling guilty, we drove back to the witch tree to make sure he’d been eaten. But he was swollen and stinking, still whole, his body bursting his shirt, his bracelets cutting his flesh, ants on his face and scouring his eyes. Fearing that he’d be found, we dug a hole and buried him, thinking, Where are the animals?

Burial in a hole was something new to us, but a necessity. The body broke apart like overcooked meat as we tumbled it into the pit.

From that day, things began to go wrong. The first was the vehicle, problems with the motor that made no sense — leaks, belts decaying and breaking. Milk thickened and went sour when I drank it. Clay pots cracked like biscuits, the thatch roof rotted, my cows stopped eating and two died, my youngest son developed a fever. My brother’s experiences were no better, leaks, cracks, decay, and illness visiting his hut too.

My son died. It was a sadness, the fever worsening until he coughed out his life. And he was part of my wealth, a forager and a herd boy. My brother’s wife was found with another man. She had to be beaten, and she was too injured to cook or work after that. The guilty man was ordered to pay a fine — a blanket, a cow, a purse of money, a thickness of copper bracelets, a gourd of beer. But he vanished into the bush, and my brother’s wife had to be sent back on her bad leg to her family in disgrace.

My son’s was the first death in our village in more than a year. He was buried in the traditional way: the usual ceremony and the body left in a field for the lions and hyenas. But a week went by and my son had not been eaten. I was so sorry to see him bulging in the blanket and disfigured, rotting there, like Noah under the witch tree.

We concluded that so many animals had been hunted and poached and driven off there were none left to eat our dead anymore. Or was it that we’d buried Noah, whose spirit was still among us, blaming and making trouble?

My wife was sorrowing; even the chief was at a loss. But I said, “We will bury him.” We made a hole for my son and pushed him into it, as we had Noah in that first hole.

After that, there were many — buried bodies in the holes underneath the earth of our living places.

It was the only answer, but not a good one. We do not burn bodies as the Wahindi do. We prayed for the animals to come back, we used medicine, we left meat for the animals. The meat became infested by ants and flies. It seemed nothing would go right for us in this new ritual of burying, because in the ground they were with us, uneaten and angry.

The loss of the animals marked the beginning of the ghosts. And now nothing dies, the dead are always haunting us, and we spend so much time trying to settle their spirits, it has become our constant occupation, but without success, with no animals left to eat them, nowadays the dead don’t die.