Becoming Ebony

Requiem for Auntie

8 Requiem for Auntie When the dead first arrive in death, their eyes stand naked and wide and bare to the bone. This gaze numbed my girl eyes the day they brought my Auntie home. As the dead in the land of the living made a big fuss to welcome her, I rushed out of bed in sleeping gown, no slippers, into the parlor I ran behind my father, carrying white sheets for her. Up the cold dew-wet stairs, I ran. They are keeping her upstairs in our unfinished upper floor, I thought, to wait for the funeral car. I could feel the cold night shadows creeping. My stepmother’s muffled sobs up there, something gone wrong, in the dark where my father tiptoed, carrying white sheets and the silence. There is no silence, I say, like the silence of death, no loneliness that surpasses the loneliness when your Auntie has left her body, and the living are left searching for something to do. Now the town lay halfway between sleep and death, between Monrovia and the dark, meandering of the Mesurado, whose tireless going and coming leaves one empty of words, leaves the river banks bereft. You can hear the Mesurado going to the ocean, 9 and then returning. That fruitless rushing of a river. My Auntie laid out upon a blue mattress in the parlor of newly laid concrete tiles, a dim lamp burning over her head. She must not feel the cold tiles against her skin, I imagined, but we know that the dead cannot feel, that their skin loses its feeling at the departure of the soul. I watched my father’s fruitless making of the bed, laying his youngest sister down, though wide-eyed, she stared. What is she looking at, I wanted to ask someone. What is it that the dead see, that the living cannot know? My father stood there like a wet bird standing in the stillness of shallow water. The mysteries of this world are not in the living. The mysteries of this world are in the dead cold of death, in the weathered things of this world, in the silence that the dead refuse to take along when the dead leave. I saw my stepmother rush to shut those eyes, pressing closed my Auntie’s eyelids. You could still see the thin line where her eye-liner was now a birthmark. My stepmother went from one leg to the other, stretching my Auntie’s legs, her still polished toenails, stretching out my Auntie’s arms. There used to be Sundays when she had come walking down that road, bringing gifts under her arms for us children, and we’d run to meet 10 her partway. Today, only a nylon gown shivered around my skin, my teeth rattling. My stepmother stood now, wiping the water running down her own cheeks, then breaking out wailing loud, po-po-wlee-oh, the Grebo cry, and yet I stood there, two o’clock, the neighborhood asleep. What if my Auntie had died at noon or at dusk, bringing in the evening’s hurried feet and cars, with Monrovia hollering for her? Me, standing there, the cold dew stairway, the sleeping houses, the swamp and the river— so many real people at rest in an unreal country. ...