A Coffin For His Mother

It took one Polaroid instant photo to erase twenty-five years. There wasn’t even a face in the photo – just hands. Hands holding a large leopard tortoise. Hands with a small piece of mango dangling from the thumb. Hands smeared with the red ochre earth of Kenya.

The memory snuck up on me as I slipped the photo out from between the pages of a novel being dropped off at a church yard sale. Years ago, it had become a bookmark, its significance and trauma minimized. In the flurry of illness, packing, leaving and resettling the old had been left in the dust.

The picture was taken where I worked for eighteen years. The hands were the hands of a boy who had shown up at my door. Word had spread in the community that I collected tortoises. Ten decorated shells already inhabited the reinforced chicken wire pen, scrabbling for lettuce in my back yard.

On the back of that photo, those hands had written: “for moma’s cofin.” I stared at those words as long as I stared at the image. I couldn’t even remember his face or his name. The shame of that washed over me afresh.

The smell of charcoal drifted through my senses, then chai, then jasmine. A boy called to do a man’s duty stood desperate to see if someone would help him do what no one should have to do. The burden of the task was even heavier than the gift he offered.

It was a Saturday, early. The knock was so quiet I almost missed it as I cut up a fresh fruit salad in the kitchen. His sad brown eyes captured me as he held out the tortoise. “Please,” he said. “My momma died and I need to buy a coffin.”

“Pole!” I answered (sorry). “Where did you find the tortoise?”

“In the valley. There was a bigger one but four of us couldn’t lift it. This is all I could bring.” His arms were struggling to hold his prize aloft. The arms and legs swam through the air as the tortoise struggled for freedom.

I nodded toward the ground. “You can set him down,” I said.

“He will run.”

The rickety wheelbarrow with rust holes in the bottom had clearly been borrowed to haul the prize an hour from the valley, up the steep trail, to our home halfway up the forested hills. The lone wheel, half-deflated and angled slightly on its axle, couldn’t have made the trip easier. It wouldn’t have been a simple duty to restrain this animal eager to escape.

The valley below hosted a dozen dust devils dancing between the two dormant volcanoes. Brown, dry, dead. The parched earth spoke of a year of famine and it would not be easy to dig a grave for a coffin. “That’s a long way to bring a tortoise,” I said.

“It was for my momma,” he said. He set the tortoise down and knelt on it as it flailed in the dirt.

“Tell me about your momma.”

His lip quivered as his eyebrows knit together. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “She worked hard in the hospital shamba (garden) so she could feed us.”

“How many in your family?”

“Six. I am the oldest. She died with the seventh.”

“Where is your father?”

“He left to find work when I was young.”

Some questions are better left unasked and unanswered. “Wait!” I told him. I dished a bowl of fruit salad and fetched the money I assumed would cover the cost of a coffin. He was still kneeling on the tortoise when I returned. He accepted the bowl and wolfed down the fruit, using his hands to shovel it into his mouth. He reluctantly returned the empty bowl.

“That’s the finest tortoise I have seen in these parts,” I said. “Bringing him all the way from the valley has taken hard work.”

“I went early this morning, before light,” he said. “I heard about the large tortoise and wanted to bring him for you. I’m sorry I couldn’t find the strength to lift him. Perhaps if you bring a truck we could still find him.”

“This one is enough,” I said. “You are the man in your family and your momma would be proud of how you are honoring her. How much is the coffin for your mother?”

He fished into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. He was a good businessman. I scanned the crude numbers scrawled in pencil, smeared with dust, and fading in the creases. “You will need to welcome your friends and neighbors,” I said.

“The aunties will bring the food,” he said. “All I need is enough for the coffin.”

“I guess this isn’t the time to bargain.”

He bowed his head. “They said you would be fair.” He picked up the tortoise. “I can carry him around the back for you.”

“Wait!” my wife called out. “We need a picture.” It was that picture of little mangoed hands around a great leopard tortoise which erased the years. The memories pulled at the deepest parts of me.

“Can we take him now?” the boy had asked.

“Yes!” I said. “Let’s introduce him to the others. He is larger than most and will no doubt cause trouble for me. I’m not sure I can find enough to feed him.”

The boy, become man, hauled his squirming gift around to my tortoise pen where I accepted it and placed it with the others. Extending the wad of shilling notes to him I nodded. “A gift for your mother’s coffin and the needs of your family. You have brought me a gift from God worth more than I can pay. You have given me your trust, your hope, your friendship.”

“What do you have there?” someone at the yard sale asked. “The trash bag is over there if you need it?”

“No!” I said. “Of all the treasures people may find today in the things you’re offering, this is the greatest for me.” Tears streamed down my face as I found a grassy spot in the shade and remembered. I wish the picture had captured his face. I wish he had written his name.

Still, I had been someone who made a difference once upon a time in a place far away. I had bought a tortoise so a boy could buy a coffin for his mother. Now, perhaps, I could find the strength to buy that coffin for my own momma.