Deborah Wheeler: Mother Africa

Willamette lay in the dust. Her lungs wheezed and her whole body hurt. She told herself, They’re gone, it’s okay, it’s over.

From a few feet away, she heard sobbing, then shouts. Someone touched her arm. Her vision cleared a little. She recognized Stephen, looking down at her. He called, “She’s okay!” There was something wrong with his voice.

Jagged electric heat shot through her. Adrenaline. Mama always said it was the best thing for asthma. Gotta breathe to fight that tiger, Wil, she’d say.

Willamette sat up. The strange men were gone. Dad crouched on the ground, his back toward her. Joseph, holding the rifle, stood beside him. Shadows hid his face. She could see Mama’s legs sticking out. There was something spooky about the way they splayed out, so graceless and loose.

Willamette scrambled across the dust. She could hardly see. Tears had sprung into her eyes out of nowhere. Stephen tried to catch her in his arms, but she slipped by him. Then Dad turned and when she saw his face, she stopped.

“Don’t look.” Dad’s voice belonged to someone else. “She was protecting the boy.”

Willamette didn’t dare say anything or she’d break into a hundred pieces.

“That goddamned kid!” said Joseph. “I wish we’d left him where we found him. I wish we’d let them have him. Mama might still—might still—”

“Hush up!” popped out of Willamette, just like Mama would have said. She took a deep breath. “Stand aside.”

Dad hesitated. His eyes made jerky little lost movements. Stephen came around and put his arm around him. “Let her, Dad. Mama always said Wil had good instincts. Strong instincts.”

Stephen, who teased her and raced her and beat her purple, standing up for her now?

One part of her was screaming and another had gone numb and cold and gray. Yet something silent and powerful coursed through her. Her legs stopped shaking. The earth itself seemed to rise and hold her up. Slowly, as if each step had its own secret meaning, she moved to Mama’s side.

Mama lay on her back, one arm outstretched, fingers curled to the sky. The other arm cradled the boy against her full soft breasts. One half of his skull had been blown away.

Mama’s eyes were open, peaceful like a house when the people have all gone to sleep. A dark trickle ran from one corner of her mouth. Willamette wanted to touch her finger to it, to see if it were real, but a spell had come over Mama, a stillness, a sacredness.

She thought of laying Mama in the warm rich African earth. She thought of going on without her. She thought of the way Africa had renewed itself, the animals and the sky, the grasses covering the scars of bombs and plantations. She wondered if some of that aliveness might seep into Mama’s bones, might seep into her own.

The men would do the digging, metal shovel blades slicing through the living soil. They would weep, outwardly and inwardly, because it was the need of men to weep. They would turn to her and ask, “How can we go on without her?”

She would lead them, even as Mama had led them. To keep their promise, to bring life to the villages again.

The vision faded, like the night mist burning off in the stark African sun, and she was once more a girl on the brink of womanhood who had just lost her mother, but no, she would never be a little girl again, she would never be the same. Whenever she spoke, she would hear her mother’s voice ringing through hers and another voice, deeper and resonant with things she could almost feel and never imagine, and she would know that Mother Africa had left its terrible mark on her forever.