After death had called a ceasefire on the island, a friend of my grandmother’s came to the house to ask for a boy to accompany her to the south village, for she didn’t want to go there alone. The woman was a distant relative of my grandmother and had no children of her own, or if she had them, they were in the same place as the fathers of all the children in our house. It seemed a lot of fathers of children on our island were in that place that you went to by boat. My grandmother could not deny the woman such a favour, so she told me to go with her. I was to live with that woman for as long as she stayed in the south village, I was to accompany her to her plantations and give her someone to talk to. The time of year was approaching when most families moved to the settlements to spend a few months there, planting and harvesting, but that year many families chose not to go. They preferred to stay in the big village and cry for their dead. Therefore, anyone who went to the southern settlements on their own, without company, would have a miserable time, especially a woman. The bush was a lonely place, its atmosphere thick with the sorrow that had spread throughout the island. And in such an atmosphere, it wasn’t uncommon for the spirits of the dead to make their presence felt. In such circumstances, a woman was easily frightened on the plantations. Whenever she heard a sound, especially the cry of the bird with the black and yellow feathers, she’d see it as a sign that the spirits of the dead were present, and this would unnerve her. But if she had a boy to accompany her, she’d mutter something under her breath and go on with her business, or she’d perhaps recall someone close to her who’d died and recognise that someone in the form of the bird with the black and yellow feathers. That bird represents the spirit of the dead on our island and is never eaten.
So, somewhat reluctantly, I accompanied that friend of grandmother’s to the south village. There were very few people there and, if it wasn’t quite as desolate as we’d expected, the people who were there were very spread out, meaning there were lots of gaps in the village, gaps filled by the sorrow that extended over the island. Walking about the south village, you’d see a closed-up house, two sticks criss-crossed over the door at right angles. You’d pass that house and see another one just the same, with two sticks in the same position, and another, and another, and another. And because you knew the village you knew whose houses they were, and you knew that some of those houses would never be opened again, or at least not for many years, because their owners had perished, taken away by that wave of the cholera. Somewhere in the big village cemetery there would be a †, and most likely no other details, for whoever planted that cross probably didn’t know how to write, not even a date. You’d see another house shut up with sticks and, outside it, you’d see the stone tripod of the fireside but no pot boiling with banana-leaf parcels. And beneath the house’s jambab’u roof you’d see the stones the owners sat on when they were in the south village, and you’d see how the stones had become coloured with age, a sign that nobody had sat on them for a long time. And you passed another house, and another, and another, and in the next one a friend of yours used to live, a friend you’d never see again. They told you he died of the cholera and you couldn’t go and see them bury him because you were only a child. And if you cried out in the south village, you heard an echo at the other end of the village, as if the emptiness dispersed your cry so that it might reach those who were no longer there, those that might have been present in the form of a black and yellow bird.
I went to the settlements with that friend of grandmother’s and in the south village I found a boy I’d met before. We weren’t exactly friends, because we didn’t live near one another in the big village, but in the south village any company was welcome. That boy was a little older than me and he’d gone with his mother to the village for the same reasons I had, although in his case the woman he was accompanying to make sure she wasn’t lonely was not his grandmother’s friend but his own mother. It was highly likely his father was in the place you went to by boat. Being typical boys, we wanted to be like men and act like men, men who’d been taught how by real men: we wanted to fish. But back then, nobody had any nylon in a strongbox. If our mothers had kept any hidden away, they’d have given it to us, for they knew that the south village was a place with beaches and that a little fishing made life more agreeable in the solitude down there. As we were only kids, nobody expected us to go out fishing in canoes. And they didn’t expect it because in the south village the waves broke onto the beach with such ferocity that going out to sea was no easy thing. What’s more, where the waves broke was not even really a beach but rather a rocky bay. The waves crashed against the rocks with such ferocity they seemed angry about something, about the place they’d been sent to die. So going out in a canoe from any of the south village shores was quite something. To fish at our age, we had to go and stand on the rocks and cliffs that jutted out to sea. There we’d throw out our bait, watchful of the waves that broke over the rocky headland, making sure we weren’t dragged in by them. But as I said, we had nothing to throw out to sea to tempt the fish with. In previous years we’d tied together strips of plastic we found in leftover bits of rubbish. By tying them together carefully, strip by strip, we managed to get enough length to reach the depths the coastal fish liked to swim at. And on the end of our fragile fishing line we attached a hook, made out of a rusty bedspring from a mattress found at the rubbish dump. The rest came down to our fishing expertise. But the years went by and there was no more leftover rubbish to take strips of plastic and springs from. By then, not even the adults, not even the men who fished for a living, had anything to fish with. So in the southern settlements we longed for fish. We ate cassava, or whatever else was gathered from the plantations and given to us to eat, but we ate with little enthusiasm for we were unable to moisten whatever it was with sauce, the water that had boiled with something tasty. We had to do something about it. It would have shamed us not to do anything about it, little men that we were. So we weighed up our options. We could try and catch crayfish from the river or go out hunting and try and hit a bird with a stone mid-flight. There were very few seabirds on that coastline and the chances of our hitting one of them with a stone were slim. Indeed the effort involved would probably have left us hungrier for fish than when we started. As for the crayfish, there were not many people in the settlements but there was someone who threw stones at you whenever you went in the river. Whoever it was couldn’t be seen, and it was frightening to expose yourself to the stone-throwing of a hidden stranger. Another option was a type of wild hen that could be found in certain clearings in the south of the island, but we’d never heard of anyone catching one by any means other than with a rifle. So there were things that could be boiled as a substitute for fish, but all of them were beyond our reach. And so our hunger for fish continued, until we saw a bird up in the mountains. The bird was large and it made its nest in the hollows of trees, but it could be reached by hand with relative ease. It may have been a kind of fowl, for it bore some resemblance to a duck, and although it nested in the mountains, mountains we could see from the south village, it fished in the sea, flying back to the nest with things it caught to feed its chicks. The more we watched the bird, the more encouraged we became, because although the bird was a good flyer and a high flyer, it seemed to have difficulty taking off. It made its nest wherever it found a hole but it had to build a ledge to launch itself from because it was too ungainly to take off directly from the ground. Which meant that if we snatched it from its nest and threw it to the ground, it wouldn’t be able to escape. Another encouraging factor was that, although it was a wild bird, it didn’t avoid human contact. In fact it was so unconcerned by humans you could go right up to its nest without it flying away. To catch that bird, that sea-hunting fowl, we wouldn’t need sticks or stones or a rifle, just enough agility to climb up a tree with a hole in it, a hole with a feathered tail sticking out. The bird was white, completely white, and its tail was long, sometimes as long as the bird itself. What made the tail special was that it consisted of one single feather; one long white feather, poking out of the nest. Now that I think about it, I remember that bird was thought to be very nervous, so nervous that if you saw it flying over you and screamed, it would fall to the ground. I never saw this happen, but I remember screaming at it as a child, trying to make the bird that lived in the mountains and fished in the sea fall from the sky and land in my mother’s cooking pot.