“How many you think down there?” Fire asked, feeling within himself a preemptive disappointment. There was no figure, he knew, that would make him happy.

“Bout a half grand,” I-nelik said, hearing in Fire’s melancholy a keynote that confirmed his suspicion that he was staging the funeral for selfish reasons. “I didn’t know so many people liked him. But then they always love you when you’re dead.”

Dead. Fire reclined in the vinyl seat, creasing his purple robe.

“If you hungry then drive, then,” I-nelik said, glancing in the rearview mirror at the milling crowd behind them.

“Couldn’t do that,” Fire replied. “Miss Gita asked me to lead the band.”

“But suppose you faint?”

“Is a mind-over-matter thing,” Fire said through a stomach cramp. He laid the keys on the dashboard. “Your mind must be strong in times like these.”

He climbed into the back of the Land Rover and raised his hands, and the clashing sounds were slowly drawn into the surrounding forest, sucked away by silence, the silence of ants digging soil, and roots drawing water, and leaves making life out of sunshine. And Fire forgot his hunger and smiled. Arranged in rows before him was a Pentecostal mass choir, three hundred and twenty-six women from neighboring towns dressed in black robes and purple sashes, fussing with tambourines and hymnals. Behind the women were two hundred and twenty-four rastamen with long beards and white robes to match their headwraps, warming up their instruments—kete and funde drums, cowbells, chimes, and calabash gourds. And behind them, sitting crossways on a mule led by Sarge, who was wearing a too-tight suit, was Miss Gita in a bright red sari trimmed in gold, clutching the urn with her son’s remains.

“I am not a Christian,” Fire said, cupping his hands to project his voice. “And I’m not a rastaman. But that shouldn’t matter, because we are here today in the name of love. And love is bigger than religion. For religion was made by man … and love was made by God. So let us walk together and make a joyful noise and sing that song that binds every one of us who came across the Atlantic in the belly of the whale—‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

He blinked the mist from his eyes and I-nelik gunned the motor and the funde drummers began to beat a call on the drums strapped across their chests.

Boom-boom. Boom-boom.

Then the calabash gourds replied.

Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom-sheke-sheke-boom-boom.

Then the kete drums.

Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom-sheke-sheke-boom-boom-tock. Tock-boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom-sheke-sheke-boom-boom-tock.

As I-nelik eased the vehicle forward the cowbells and chimes began to titter and the women’s voices railed up high and the choir began to dance across the bridge with their hands above their heads, tambourines shimmering, shaking out a sound like rice being poured into a skillet. Sweating, jostling, dipping sometimes then falling back, the procession made its way along the narrow, rutted road, curling around the jungled mountainside, rising and falling as it descended along the edge of the valley, which followed the natural lay of the land designed by the whim of the swerving river. Nine times in the five-mile journey women were picked up and thrown down by the power to froth and wriggle on the coarse asphalt, to rise, lurching and sweating, speaking tongues of remembrance without a scratch on their skin or a speck of dirt on their shining robes.