Back Dam
The mother’s wails break the momentary hush. Everyone’s eyes turn towards me as if urging me to do something. In this low, damp space the stench of rooster and chicken feces is overwhelming. I am lost in the stench, paralyzed at being erroneously chosen to calm this situation, knowing that whatever I say or do will be reported to the entire town the next day. The students have created their own oral version of a celebrity gossip magazine where my boyfriend Craig and I continually make the front page, one of the headlines frequently announcing, “MISS AND SIR GOT ICE CREAM CONES LAST NIGHT.”
I can use their language freely, eat plantains and dahl pourie and move my hips to the music like they do. I can give the shunned homeless our leftover food and buy the children books. I can listen to my landlady as she tells me how her druggie husband gives her black eyes. But Devina’s shell silences me. The adults all continue to stare. I am after all, their children’s reading teacher. Can’t she say something…something spiritual even? Surely she is Christian. My skin begins to feel as hot as the pepper sauce they pour on their food.
My mind scans my few encounters with the Bible, feverishly trying to grasp onto any passage, any word. I usually dodge their invitations to church, pretending I pray at home. I am not familiar with the two most prevalent themes of life, religion and death, nor do I know now how to politely excuse myself from this unspoken responsibility. The only limp body I’ve ever seen is that of my friend’s grandfather who died when I was thirteen. I remember his large, waxy flesh overflowing the coffin’s sides. My instinct had been to push the ungainly sight back in and close the lid.
Devina lies instead like a packaged doll patiently awaiting a new home with a soon-to-be happy child. A ray of sunlight filters through the low roof and illuminates her tranquil face. A sense of calm washes over me. Maybe this is meant to be. Eventually she would have grown up only to become intertwined in the constant struggle to survive and live daily with the effects of intermittent violence plaguing this tiny nation. But maybe she would have been one of the few to have broken free.
I am about to arbitrarily string three numbers together as a suggested hymn but to my relief Eshauna speaks up instead and suggests one to sing. Usually feisty and comical, her face is determined as she opens a hymnal that the missionaries have given her. She sings confidently and unwaveringly, beautifully even. She has done this many times before. See Miss, this is the piece of us that we don’t bring to the classroom, her music says to me. Death is familiar, as natural a part of their daily lives as the plentiful mango trees that cover the lush landscape.
The song ends and the faint trace of a soca beat bullies its way to our ears through the thick air. People begin to wipe their sweat with handkerchiefs. Mouths start moving.
“Gyal was a sweet thang,” says Agnes, the janitor at our school.
“Me love she bad bad,” a round-bellied, inebriated uncle cries.
“Nah mind how pumpkin vine run, he must dry up one day,” Devina’s grandmother laments.
Her mother looks my way again, her presence pleading with me to say something, anything, to validate Devina’s existence. But the grandmother has said it best.
“She was beautiful,” I manage to utter, speaking of this moment. Devina’s small bones, smooth flesh, and sleeping lips attest to the subtle beauty underlying death’s ugliness, an ugliness only seen to those left behind. In a drunken purge of secrets, my mother has told me that she would commit suicide were I to die. Devina’s mother, on the other hand, nods her head as if she could lie down and sleep.
A throng of women are preparing the celebratory meal in the kitchen, a meal meant to honor Devina’s short time with us. A whiff of curry glides past my nostrils as Devina’s older brother emerges, a bottle of Guyana’s prided El Dorado in hand. He unscrews the cap amidst the singing and then pours a bit on the ground in reverence to the dead. He fills Ms. Correia’s plastic cup and then mine with an equal amount of rum, finishing the rounds. I take a sip, relishing its sweet pungent taste. We all look at Devina and collectively raise our cups to the sky.