Nao Yare Nbadi Yonni

by Sara Hills

My husband is on a bus outside Bolgatanga, windows open to red dust, chickens and goats strapped to the roof, when he first hears the song. The one he says reminds him of our marriage. We’ve been married six years, not nearly long enough that the itch to leave should have overtaken him, but his small handwriting on thin blue paper tells another story.

I couldn’t care less about the state of the road, the paragraphs he expends on pocks, ruts, and the heat; how his seated neighbors bounce and lurch in time to the music from an overloud cassette, punctuated by bleating, by chickens squawking for freedom.

The bus, a grayish-white, reminds him of an old bone we once found while weeding our carrot bed, back when we did things together: dancing as our mirepoix sweated on the stove, drinking each other like cheap thin wine, making room for things to grow. That bone, I was sure, was the head of a femur, a dog or cow, but what did I know of death then, or of any body but his.

The song, he tells me, is incessantly upbeat. His seatmate translates the meaning as ‘You must suffer to gain,’ and I picture him, my once-husband, displaced along the dust-lined road and low painted houses of Tiébélé, their community symbolism, his windswept features. The skin of his neck and arms scarletting in the heat, freckles expanding along his exposed hairline because a hat is only a barrier to life’s experiences.

For once, I lay down his letter without finishing, without searching for buried promises or devotion, and let the cat out, the stray he asked me to stop feeding months ago, watching as it shits in the dense weeds where our carrots grew forked and long like fingers.

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