Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [65]
You’ve seen the way birds gather, landing in ones and twos and threes, until there is a whole flock where a short while ago there had been an empty patch of land. People were making their way down to the wharf like seagulls gather to greet the fishing boats as they come in. The noise from the direction of the wharf gradually thickened and swelled until it reached our ears as we sat in class. Until the nuns rose and closed the shutters telling us the sun was too bright that day.
By mid-morning Marie wasn’t yet back from the market.
Lunch was late. I left the girls waiting outside the dining room and slipped away into the road. Not through the main gate, but at the back of the latrines as though I were going to the garden. By now the number of people in the lane was not so great. I joined them on their way, not quite running, not quite walking, as afraid of what was ahead of them as of being left behind.
The sea was laden with bodies. A shoal of strange fish. Those not dragged down by the currents rolled face down in the water. Except one fat woman who floated face to the sky, as serenely as a maiden bathing in a lake. Men in canoes were dragging them out one by one, until somebody had the bright idea of casting a fishing net and landing them all in to shore at once.
Marie!
I pushed through the knots of people gathered on the beach and on the quay. I felt like I was rushing through a dream too fast, waiting to fall into wakefulness. Anybody who had anybody still out there was standing staring out to sea, the water licking at their ankles. The spectators and ghoul-mongers stood up on the new wharf.
I ran down to the shore where the bodies were laid out on the sand. I searched for Marie among the faces of the dead. How ashamed I am now to remember my relief as I gazed at each body and did not recognise Marie. I passed weeping fathers, husbands, sisters, mothers, without a second thought. And after I had trawled the dead I searched through the living. I ran this way and that in the dimming light, peering into the smudged features of strangers’ faces. I found her in neither place.
In time I walked back to the convent and there she was. Lying in our bed. Sister Anthony was bent over her, rubbing her chest with brandy.
Over the days that followed the corpses bobbed up like corks. People had been trapped under the hull of the boat when it capsized. Young men with cloths wrapped around their faces loaded the bodies into barrows and wheeled them up the lane, past the convent. The dead were mostly market women. The water had bleached their skin. The motion of the waves had gently stripped them of their clothing. Hungry fish had nibbled away their fingers and toes. A terrible, sickly perfume arose from the corpses; it invaded the island for many weeks to come.
Every time I heard the rumble of wheels I slipped away to stare. The other girls thought I had a sick mind. I didn’t care. I was driven by the need to know. But the state of the bodies made it impossible to tell. In the end I never knew whether Ma Cook was among them. Or whether Kassila had dragged her down to the bottom to keep her there with him.
The coroner’s report said it was an accident. The change in the wind had shifted the tides and so the position of the sandbank. The boatman had failed to navigate the dangerous new currents. Despite a life working on boats, he never learned to swim and had perished along with the rest. The account was assembled from the stories of the survivors, among them Marie.
And for three Fridays in a row there was no fish for lunch. Just boiled yams and roasted plantains.
The villagers gathered on the beach, on the cusp of darkness. Above me, on the broken boards and the few upright poles of the old jetty, seagulls alighted one by one. The beach was no more than forty yards long, a steeply curved semicircle of sand in