When it seemed safe, or at least light enough to see, the women emerged slowly from the huddles of their homes and temporary shelters in search of their men. They found what remained – scattered in the streets, behind barricades, under cars and trees, stones still clutched in tightly clamped fists.
Abra had watched her mother and the others do what needed to be done. They’d cut great wounds into the already scarred earth. They’d gathered what they could of their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. They’d clung to each other for strength and when one of the women fell – consumed by the sea that threatened each of them – another took her place; the wails of the fallen carried gently away on the smoke-filled wind. Finally, when night came at last and the village grew silent, the women had returned to their homes to wash their hands, to feed their children and to bury their faces in wet pillows.
Days and days passed and soon the once unmistakable mounds in the earth began to settle. Some women had managed to place small markers of wood or stone on the spots where the ground had swallowed the thing that had been taken from them, but many had not, and soon grass and reeds began to grow over those places – changing the disfigured landscape into something more benign, but no less painful. Still, they all lowered their heads and hushed their voices when passing that spot on their way to the river or the market. And sometimes mothers and grandmothers would chastise young children for calling out to one another or for playing games in the grass, calling that field a “holy place.” Abra bowed her head too and lowered her voice, but she could see nothing holy about what had happened there.
One night as she lay in her bed, Abra heard her mother’s voice in the other room. When she stepped, barefooted into the archway, none of the women sitting around the fire noticed her there. Her mother was rocking back and forth, her head in her hands:
“I couldn’t find them.” She repeated through great, heaving sighs. “I couldn’t find them.”
The other women told their own stories of struggling to remember the places where they had buried the person they loved. They could remember placing flowers on his chest. They could remember putting a photograph in his pocket. They could remember seeing the last bit of his hands being covered with dirt. But they could no longer find him among the grass and reeds and other living things that flourished in the soil now rich with decay. An older woman in the corner began to tell a fable that Abra had heard many times before about the changing seasons and life springing from death. But as she looked at her mother’s shoulders slump, the words held no meaning.
That night, Abra slipped out into the darkness and walked the blackened path to the field where she had watched her mother bury her father, her brother and an uncle – a small satchel clutched in her hand. Like her mother, she could no longer remember exactly where they were buried, so she walked with her eyes closed until the earth felt right beneath her. Then she knelt spreading the contents of her bag in the cool grass. She took the two pieces of wood and laid them in front of her – her black eyes burned in the darkness. Her hands worked quickly as she hammered them together into the symbol she’d seen so many times. (It was sometimes stamped on the side of the flyers that fell from the sky along with pallets of grain and meal. It was sometimes carved in the air by the priest who said he had come to their village to teach the children to read and to dig an irrigation system, but who often seemed more interested in saving than in helping them. And it was sometimes painted on the helmets of the men who carried guns and stopped to give the children sweets or invade their homes at night in search of others who, like her father, had tried to protect the life they’d always known). When she was finished, she raised the makeshift cross into the air and with a loud guttural cry, plunged the thing into the earth.
Unlike those who had left their own crude markers, now hidden in the tall grass, Abra didn’t care if people remembered where her father, her brother, her uncle or all the others were buried. She only wanted them to remember why.
