april 29, 2011 – Dagahaley refugee camp, Dadaab, Kenya.
insomnia’s found me again, brittle, circling thing.
today, after lunch, as is my habit, i lied down in my warm room and let the fans breeze play through my mosquito net. sometimes i’lll fall asleep for a few minutes, other days i just my close my eyes, and let the scenes behind them flash like dreams.
today, my pillow coiled over my head, i remembered a day, when as a boy, i shot a robin. it was early in the morning, and the grass was still wet with dew. i had my little gun, and some bright copper BBs. with them, i was allowed to shoot only two things: targets, and varmints. i lived in the country, and there was little to do that interested me but walking through fields and woods looking for both. my little brother was three years younger, and when you’re ten, and he’s seven, you can only sigh at the complexities of a world that you’ve been able to understand in those interceding three years, and pout when your mom makes you take him along on patrol. “fine. but you can’t shoot.”
the varmints fell into two main categories, gophers whose holes could break a horse’s leg, and magpies who strewed the garbage from our burning barrels across the backyard and terrorized songbirds. moles were also varmints, because they ate our garden, but these i trapped as they blindly burrowed through their tunnels. they were also the only ones i got paid for: a dollar each.
its possible that i never actually got permission from my parents to shoot the magpies, and lumped them into the varmint category on my own. no matter. i only shot at them anyway. they were too smart, and our barrels were in such a wide open space, that even with all my sneaking, i could not get close enough. if i did hit them from far away, the BB would bounce off their thick wings, and they would fly to the trees and laugh at me until i walked away, which is one of the most humiliating things that can happen to a frontier varmint sheriff. with gophers, however, i was much more able to discharge the responsibility given to me to make the field a safer place to graze.
as varmints became fewer, in exactly equal proportions, targets expanded. this is a partial list: telephone pole, telephone wire, telephone wire box, golf ball, the surface of a far away pond, flying seagulls, a hanging rope, my little brother (i shot him in the eye, but i mostly didn’t mean to, and anyway, i made him not tell or i would never let him shoot), raspberries, ears of corn, bugs, bees, mushrooms. and, one day, in the morning, the grass slick with dew, a robin.
i was on my way to the spruce tree, closest to the burning barrels to do my morning magpie sweep, and saw it hopping along, looking for worms that had stayed too late. it wasn’t a varmint, that was clear, but it did look suspiciously like a target, and anyway there was no way i was going to hit it, not from this distance.
i pumped the air into the gun carefully, so the lever wouldn’t clack against the barrel. once, twice, three slow times, drew a BB into the chamber, raised the little gun, and put the bevel of the site on the bouncing bird’s red breast.
pop.
the bird stopped. with him, my heart.
no no, hop.
he turned his head, and fell.
the world rushed in to see what i’d done. i looked behind, to the house, towards my neighbour’s, for a witness to my evil, then ran towards the dead bird.
he lay there, in the soft grass, a bloom of even redder blood on his red chest. i looked around again, then picked him up by a wing. it was warm, and wet from the dew. his eyes were shut by tiny gray lids.
i laid the gun down, held his body against my stomach, and ran towards the thick stand of willows at the bottom of the hill. i arrived, breathless, blood on my hands, my shirt. i dragged the heel of my shoe into the ground until i’d made a robin sized hole, then placed him in there, and with my heart still pounding and no benediction, covered him with loam.
i wiped my hands in the grass, walked back up the hill, found my gun, dried it off, put it back in the garage. my mom saw me coming out.
“jimmy, come here, i need you to bring this to your dad….wait. what happened?” she said, looking at the blood tracked onto my rugby pants.
“i shot a robin.”
“why?”
“i don’t know.”
“you can’t do that.”
“i know.”
“go tell your dad.”
“ok.”
i did. he took the gun away. my brother was smug. but i don’t think he could have known, back then, that is a sin i would still pay for, dozens of years later, thousands of miles away, in a refugee camp, tossing and turning in a hot bed, twenty minutes before the car leaves to a hospital full of the sick and starving, but i do and i’m not sure if atonement for our transgressions that drives us here, or if is the realization that suffering is contagious and can infect our dreams and the same is true of peace and that is why we stay.