NEXT DAY, LATE in the afternoon, as the sun was already growing weary and thinking about heading west, Tigua’s family and friends gathered around the burial pit. As William watched the proceedings he couldn’t help noticing that alone of the little she-boy’s intimates, Lucy wasn’t there. Singing cheerfully, Tigua’s brothers lifted the logs from the body. Exposed to the air for two days, the corpse was already in an advanced state of decomposition. The stench was so bad William had to fight the urge to gag. As the brothers lifted the roll of matting, he almost cried out as an arm and a leg fell from it, and then caught himself thinking that, ironically, Tigua had now joined the ranks of the island’s amputees. The matting was unrolled and the corpse was more or less reassembled on the ground beside the pit. A fire had been lit nearby and someone tossed herbs onto it to take away the awful stink of rotting flesh. Managua, Tigua’s father and brothers and a couple of older men produced knives and began scraping flesh from the skeleton, tossing the pieces into the fire. They went about the task in a businesslike way. Nobody spoke, not even when Tigua’s father passed something to Managua. The old man examined it with a wry smile. Peering at the object William realized to his horror that it was the dead she-boy’s penis. The cause of all her problems and her death! Managua tossed it contemptuously into the fire. One of the brothers who had his back to William lifted a hammer and struck something cradled in his lap. A moment later he threw what looked like brain tissue into the flames. Still not a word had passed between these busy pathologists. All you could hear was the harsh scrape of metal upon bone. The heat, the humidity and various worms, grubs and insects that scuttled from the corpse had done most of their work for them and soon a pile of gleaming white bones was all that remained of what had once been Tigua.
One of the brothers picked up a rib bone. He stood up, flourished it and said, ‘Goodbye Tigua. This piece of you is remain with me always for remind me of you.’
The other brothers reached into the pile and each took a bone or two. One of them had a patella, another the humerus. Each said a few words of farewell and departed with his memento of his sister.
‘Come, gwanga,’ Managua called to William. ‘You is help youself. Is be custom. You is take one of Tigua bones for remember she.’
William shook his head.
‘Come, everyone is do,’ Managua urged. ‘What ’bout rib bone, or maybe you is want hip? Is be one left, I is think. No, well then you is take a little piece of she hand, come on, have just one knuckle.’
William didn’t know if it was the smell of putrefying flesh or the idea of handling the little she-boy’s body like this, but he couldn’t speak for fear of vomiting. He couldn’t help recalling that he’d read how serial killers often kept the bones of their victims as mementoes of their kills. ‘It’s – uh – OK,’ he managed to say finally. ‘No, really, Managua, I don’t need anything to remind me of Tigua. I couldn’t ever forget her.’
Managua shrugged and reached into the pile. He took out a tibia. He produced an old bit of cloth from the waist string of his pubic leaf and rubbed the bone carefully to clean it of any last vestiges of flesh. Then he used it to help lift himself from the ground and limped away, clutching it in both hands. Funny, William thought, how he had chosen the bit of Tigua that he was missing himself. He didn’t know how right he was, that this was what Managua always did at funerals, that he had the best collection of tibias on the island.
There were still many bones left and other villagers, lesser friends of the deceased, stood around like vultures waiting for the immediate family and inner circle of friends to take their pick before diving in themselves, as might happen at a wedding buffet, say.
The brothers had all gone. William looked at Tigua’s skull, centrepiece among the diminishing ossuary, and tried to equate its ghastly grin with the playful smile he had known. At that moment, from opposite directions, a hand reached to claim it and a woman’s delicate fingers brushed against a hairy masculine paw. Tigua’s mother raised her eyes and looked into Lintoa’s. He pulled back his hand as though the skull’s dome was red hot and he had been burned. The woman smiled. She took the skull in both her hands and lifted it before her. She leaned forward and brushed her lips against its fleshless jaw. Then she held it out to Lintoa. He raised a deprecating hand. She urged the skull towards him. He muttered something William couldn’t catch and her few words of reply were lost in the sound of the fire, noisy with the crackling of burning flesh. Lintoa took the skull. Ungainly, with it held in both hands as though it were a crystal bowl, he hauled his large frame to its feet. Tucking the skull under one arm, like a cartoon Elizabethan ghost, he walked slowly from the clearing.
It was time for William to slip away himself. There was only so much misery he could stand. And he had a bag to pack.