Song for Night

Dirty Is a Scrunched-up Face and a Palm Waving

This river winds through my journey like an irritant that will not go away, and yet the water will not wash me clean. Not in a symbolic sense, but clean from the dirt here that grits every pore until I sweat mud. Neither will blood, though there is plenty of that to bathe in. It’s not the stench, which after a while becomes bearable. It is the dirt: black soot from everything burning, dust and the loam of the forest, unwashed sex, blood and cordite, smoke, plant and grass stains, and mud for sweat. It all congeals into a second skin that still itches with its newness, like Adam must have felt as God first clothed his naked soul. When my fingernails rake, they first pull away thick flakes of it, then with repetition and increased pressure, skin, then more blood.

I stop by the river and light a cigarette. As I look around, the spot seems familiar. It is made distinctive by the big tree with bright red flowers that we call flame of the forest. They seldom grow this close to a river, preferring to hide deeper in the forest where hunters and startled villagers come upon its flame and are awed by it. It must have been years since we stopped here. Back then the war was only months old and I was still twelve going on thirteen and excited that my pubic hair was beginning to grow out. That’s how you knew you were a man — pubic hair, then armpit hair, then facial hair.

We had made a stop to rest, the whole troop, vultures and all; plus a long train of refugees who had attached themselves to us thinking we could keep them safe. I had no idea where we were, but I didn’t care. It was all still new enough to be exciting. Even then, the dirt was irritating and the vultures in particular. That band of soldiers who had to count the dead were already in the river trying to wash. My platoon and I were lying in the shade of the flame of the forest, and from that shelter I looked around me. Accompanying the refugees were some nuns — probably Irish, it seemed like all the Catholics here were — and they all wore that tight-lipped look that years of enduring Catholicism bestows on the pious, except for one of them. She was wandering around with a curious smile on her face. She looked unhinged. We turned and peered at each other and then back at the nun. We guessed that for her the dirt was more bearable than the debris that had no doubt collected in her mind, befuddling her. It was early on in the war, when the horrors were still new enough to unhinge decent people.

We watched her wander over to an outcrop of rock overlooking the river. She stood there awhile, the entranced smile on her face, and then without warning she leapt off. From that height the fast-flowing water below would be solid enough to knock her out and drag her under, delivering her into the ocean. For a moment though, it seemed like she was suspended in midair like a big black crow, her habit flapping like angry wings, before she disappeared, leaving behind a piercing scream.

Ijeoma shook her head. She was the first to speak: telepathy this time.

“The bird who made the world was like that. A big black thing with a white beak, and it flew over the face of the dark waters; it’s screeching the first sound in God’s memory, waking creation. Just like that.”

We lit cigarettes, the whole platoon in one synchronized but unrehearsed movement, twenty of us in those days, and we sighed in a collective out-breath of smoke before returning to scratching from the dirt.

This dirt will not wash off with water.

Not even in a river.

What kind of God makes a world like this?

“Not God,” Isaiah, our prophet, signed. “Man.”

Ijeoma smiled.

“You know people,” she said. Then she raised her forefinger to God and wiggled her body before bending down to pick up a pebble. Taking careful aim, she threw it at Nebu. We broke into play, throwing tiny pebbles at each other until we were a mass of small stings and lumpy bumps. We were flushed and breathing hard when we stopped, and grateful — for the pain that penetrated that skin of dirt.

On the outcrop of rock over the river, another nun prayed for the suicide. In the distance, John Wayne was expounding on his manual loudly to a group of bored officers.

I return.

Now, sitting here, I realize that was important because it reminds me that even if water won’t wash me clean, hope might.

A mosquito bites me. It is getting dark.