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by Will Ferguson

  No such markings warned of a sorcerer's abode. Theirs was the magic of vengeance, not justice. Poison, not persuasion. "The

  diriguo-keme operate in secret," Nnamdi's father warned, weaving shut a rip in the net. "They gather snake venom and stir up spells; they can even twist the weaker gods to their will." Unlike diviners, the women and men who became sorcerers did so by choice.

  "No agreement with Wonyinghi ever includes evil," Nnamdi's father said as he wound in the last of the netting. "We are born good, we choose evil. Life forces these decisions upon us." And it often came down to that elemental struggle between buro-you and diriguo-keme, between diviners and sorcery. "The trick," said Nnamdi's father, "is to know the difference."

  Thus ended the day's lesson. "Time to go, "the boy's father said.

  The sound of church bells had brought out his English.

  The views held by Nnamdi's father were very different from those of the local minister. Or rather, ministers. There had been a succession of them. Mr. Baptist had stomped off the year before, abandoning his post and wishing ill will and lightning strikes on

  "ye of little faith." Mr. Anglican had failed as well, and now Mr.

  Methodist had stepped into the fray with a determined vigour and a thick Lagos accent. He'd landed in their village like a wandering

  teme. Among missionaries, it was apparently a point of pride to be posted in the "far wilds" of the outer Delta, in amongst the

  "remote" and "fearful" tidal Ijaw. Although, as the villagers liked to point out, it was Lagos and the rest of Nigeria that was remote and fearful, not them.

  Mr. Methodist beseeched and behooved his congregation—his very words, "I beseech and behoove you"—to put aside their childish belief in diviners and sorcery. "Wonyinghi is NOT God Almighty! And Satan is not merely chief diriguo-keme."

  Of course not, thought the villagers. Satan was a serpent. That part made sense: a spitting cobra or a black mamba uncoiling in the shadows. But the lesser demons of the Bible? The various imps and minions? Surely those were diriguo-keme.

  "You cannot assuage Jesus with a few twigs or with feathers cast by witchery, or with a leaf stem tied a certain way. Jesus is NOT another word for Wonyinghi, of that I most definitely can assure you. To begin with, Wonyinghi is a female. A fee-MALE."

  "But Jesus is all things! Is what you said." A few of the men in the congregation liked to torment the minister with their queries.

  The women were too polite to bait him. Poor Mr. Methodist.

  "No," the Man of Cloth would sputter. "Jesus is—is a man like you or I."

  "No one worships me!" a voice called out to laughter in the back.

  It was Ijaw laughter, a language the minister did not speak.

  "Jesus is man and God. He is both."

  "Woman as well?"

  "No! Most absolutely not!"

  And so on.

  Nnamdi's mother would trudge to church every Sunday, dragging Nnamdi along like a captured mouse on a string. Mr.

  Methodist would then deliver his book-slapping sermons in rolling Lagos rhythms punctuated with loud exhortations. He didn't speak English in the proper Ijaw fashion, which made him hard to follow at times. You had to strain the flow of words as though you were trapping fishes. The Ijaw of the outer Delta had been speaking the King's English (now the Queen's) since the days of the palm oil trade, so to hear some fleshy-faced Yoruba pastor from Lagos mangle the language was hard on their ears. "We must be polite," his mother said, scolding her son for snickering. "He be tryin' his best."

  Mr. Methodist had once been a wretched sinner himself. "I was lost in Lagos, but now am found! I was blind, but now can see!"

  "Ah, but that be easy, gettin' lost in Lagos," one of the men said, not impressed. "It's very big Lagos, bigger than Portako, I am told. Anybody can get lost in Lagos. Is not a feat." Portako was the local name for Port Harcourt, the standard of all that was urban and enormous in the Delta states.

  "But the streets in Lagos dey runnin' straight," someone else shouted back. "Man has to make an effort to get lost in Lagos. In the Delta, dey no street signs, no streets even! It is easier to get lost

  here. But getting lost in Lagos? That takes work. That is a true feat."

  "You never even been to Portako, what you know about anything?" This was someone several benches back.

  This was followed by a loud digressive discussion on the merits of creeks versus streets, and how one might best navigate the latter, at which point Mr. Methodist had to shout and pound a fist on his pulpit to regain their attention.

  Wonyinghi may have been aloof, but the lower gods were not.

  They were everything that humans were, multiplied a hundredfold: petty and jealous, moody and mean, tender and kind. Nnamdi's father followed a lesser deity, an oru of the forest, one that calmed fears and protected children. He maintained a small shrine at the edge of the woods: tin roof and a dirt floor, carefully swept. The

  orumo of forests and the owumo of the river? "Reflections of each other," he explained to his son. "Like in your mother's mirror. But which is the real?"—and here he switched to English for emphasis—

  "the tree or the tree in the water?"

  Nnamdi's father rarely came to church, and when he did, it was usually only in penance for a night of palm wine or a promise broken. It was Nnamdi's mother who needed assuaging, not Jesus Almighty.

  And although Mr. Methodist may have cast Jesus Almighty as the greatest of all the orumo and owumo, greater even than Wonyinghi, Nnamdi's mother hedged her bets just to be safe.

  Hadn't she performed her own version of the tenebomo rites when Nnamdi had climbed his first palm-oil tree? It was no small thing, the climbing of palm-oil trees. Slip, and you might crash through the forest's lower canopy, bounce hard, break bones, dislocate shoulders, be left dead or, worse, crippled. After they'd climbed their first tree and cut their first bundle of palm nuts, the ones used to make cooking oil, many young men refused to go back up, choosing to tap wine palms instead—in leech-infested swamps, but on the ground at least. You didn't have to climb wine palms.

  So the women in the village would perform the tenebomo rites after that first climb: to dispel fears and calm the hearts of boys on the brink of manhood. Nnamdi's own mother had taken part, kneading palm oil into his calves and thighs, his heart still pounding from the climb, as the other women moved around him in a slow circle, waving palm fronds up and down and whisper-chanting to him, "You won't be afraid, you won't be afraid anymore." He had felt his fears dissolve with every turn of the women's steps.

  And didn't his mother quietly ask her husband to petition certain deities when she needed help, just in case Jesus Almighty's hands were full with other things? Whether to silence a rival at the market, or quell a rumour or cure a boil, when Jesus turned the other cheek it was time to call in the orumo. Hadn't Nnamdi's father always helped, never made a comment?

  Love complicates a marriage. It tangles up everything, like a flotsam net in water, snagging paddles and poles alike. Best avoided, really. Nnamdi's mother was from another creek, where they spoke a dialect his father compared to talking with a mouth full of mashed yams. She had come to the market in Nnamdi's village and had never left. His father said: "When I met your mother, she was already my wife, she just didn't know it. We didn't meet. We found each other. She wasn't looking for palm oil that day, she was looking for me."

  Nnamdi's mother always laughed at this, but she never challenged it, either.

  CHAPTER 51

  Between spearing tidewater fish and keeping the village generators running, Nnamdi's father could have afforded to take a second wife, but he never did. Nnamdi s mother liked to say, "I am his senior wife, his junior wife, his favourite wife, his not-so-favourite wife."

  She would chuckle in that low rich way of hers, like the bubbles in a pot of pepper soup slow-boiling on coals, while his father smiled, crooked and quiet. Nnamdi had never heard his father laugh, but he scarcely remembered him ever
not smiling.

  Nor did his father dance.

  Fetes were often staged for the owumo. The river gods, lurking in murky currents and hiding in the undertows, needed to be entertained, placated, and prodded—no matter how much the church officials objected. The village depended on it. And when the masquerade dancers with masks as long as their bodies, headpieces carved in the shapes of fish and fowl, moved to the heartbeat of drums in jerking steps and sudden starts, a form of elated madness took hold. Nnamdi had seen his uncle through the eye sockets of a mask, but his uncle wasn't really there anymore. A teme had taken temporary hold of him. "We become the masks we don." This was the magic of masquerade.

  "Some of us are dancers, some diviners," his father explained. "It depends entirely upon the agreement we entered into at conception.

  But if we are quiet enough, we will hear it. We will hear our calling."

  Some are drummers, some are weavers. And some are weavers of words. There was what you did to live—throw nets, grease generators—and what you did because you must. Nnamdi's father was a storyteller, and storytelling was something that chose you the way an owu might choose a priest, or a wife might choose a husband. And with property passing down through the wife's side, the choice of husband was every bit as critical as which owu you decided to honour. Did your future husband have other wives?

  Could he support other wives? And if so, what property did these other wives bring to the table?

  Children played their own version of dancer and mask, holding up pieces of wood in front of their faces, chasing each other, shrieking and yelling, running to the gods, running from the gods.

  And when the gods had been successfully tired out and the heat of day had begun to subside, when the gas flares hissed and the winds shifted and a metallic taste filled the air, the children would gather around the adults in the main square.

  Palm-wine music and moonlight tales.

  In the muggy dusk, insects flitted about as birds staked out their noisy and competing claims to various treetops. The village's packed-earth perimeter kept the forest back and snakes at bay, but the crack of branch and rustle of leaf signified forest creatures whuffling about in the underbrush.

  Adult voices, singing softly, the verses ending only when another song began. The children scooted closer. And closer. They would listen to the songs until one of them mustered the courage to cry out "Egberiyo!" which meant "Story!" The men would stop their singing and look to Nnamdi's father. With a practised sigh, as though accepting a great imposition, he would ask, "Egberiyo?" to which the children would cry, "Ya!"

  Nnamdi's father did this every time, drawing out their excitement, until at last he would begin. The tales he told always started the same way: "Once, in times gone by..."

  The repertoire was wide-ranging: "The Tale of the Fat Woman Who Melted Away," "The Story of the Rooster Who Caused a War Between Two Towns," "The Boy Who Fell in Love with the Moon," "The Girl Who Married a Ghost," "The Story of the Young Woman and the Seven Jealous Wives," "Why the Bat Is

  Ashamed to Be Seen at Daytime." It might take hours for his father to uncrate a tale, with many detours along the way, and as the children grew drowsy he would occasionally stop to ask, "Egberiyo?"

  To which they would reply "Ya," to show they were still alert, were still clinging to the waking world.

  Several years had passed since the oyibos had first arrived at the edge of the village. Compensation payments for the gas flares and the tarlike seepage from nearby wells helped pay for the monthly shipments of cooking oil from Port Harcourt. There was more time for moonlight stories now, just as there was no longer the need to climb palm-oil trees.

  Wine palms were still being tapped, though. More than ever, in fact. But the milky drink was now distilled into gin—a stronger kick for young men with little to do. It might take eleven pails of palm wine to produce a single pail of gin, but oh, it was worth it, for the fire that was concentrated in that flammable drink was like swallowing thunder. These young men in their sweat-stained undershirts and loose-hanging shorts hung back from the storytelling, watching their own childhoods fall asleep to moonlight tales as they drank glassy-eyed from jars—drank in the orange shadows of gas-flare flames, to the hiss and sigh of escaping heat being drawn directly from the earth.

  When the story was finished and his young audience was in slumber, Nnamdi's father would end with a final, forceful statement: "Egberifa." The story is over.

  CHAPTER 52

  Moonlight tales and palm-wine music.

  If nothing else, the oil company bulldozers had opened up the views. You could see gas flares above the jungle far into the distance, thin towers plumed with fire, the flames uncurling, illuminating the underside of clouds. One such tower had been built on the very edge of Nnamdi's village, and when the winds shifted, the air tasted like tin.

  A humid swamp, exhaling fire, the Niger Delta was webbed with countless creeks and endless channels. But the Shell Men had found Nnamdi's village anyway, had tracked satellite photos and followed footsore surveys to get there.

  They had changed the very nature of night. Nnamdi was now thirteen or fourteen and was having trouble sleeping with the eerie glow of gas flares and the heavy thumps underground. A muffled heartbeat in the earth below.

  The oil men had cleared seismic lines through the jungle so that they could search for oil without drilling. They would carve out a grid, clearing the forest in strips, and then plant detonations at the cross points. In this methodical, mathematical manner they could read the shock waves that bounced back the way a diviner might read signs in the toss of sticks or the colour of a moon. The oil men could chart the unseen, decipher what lay hidden below.

  These underground explosions had caused cracks to appear in the cement walls of Nnamdi's home, hair-thin fault lines that only got bigger. He would lie on his mat under the mosquito netting and listen to the dull thuds of Shell Men chasing the echoes of oil.

  He could feel the vibrations under his mat, would watch orange shadows play along the walls, would dream of hearts buried in oil.

  There were times when Nnamdi scarcely seemed tethered to this world. "Your soul got lost in the clouds on the way down," his mother would scold. "You were entangled in stars at ya birth."

  "Leave the boy in peace," his father would say. "It's the agreement he made before he was born."

  "Egberiyo!" the children would cry.

  "Egberiyo?" his father would reply.

  Nnamdi's father had started to incorporate the gas flares and seismic surveys into his nightly narratives. "The Story of Lightning and Thunder," for example, was now turned upside down. Originally, Thunder had been an old mother sheep, and her son Lightning a ram; you could see tufts of their wool caught on trees, in the small clouds that formed after a storm. But now their arguments raged underground as well, flaring up in bursts of raw temper, exploding above ground.

  South of the village, more tales were unfolding. The oil companies were building a Road to Nowhere. The raised hump snaked its way through the squelchiest of the mangrove marshes, forcing a path from the clustered wellheads at the village edge to flow stations in far-flung swamps where only screeching monkeys and coiled snakes dwelled. Nnamdi and his father had followed this muddy scar a ways through the forest, had marvelled at the sheer determination of it. Work crews blocked their way farther down, though, with armed guards standing, rifles ready, behind mirrored sunglasses. So they never got to see the end of nowhere.

  As they walked back, Nnamdi's father had pointed out how the roadbed blocked the water from seeping across. "Do you see how it's backing up on this side, and draining on that? The road is acting like a dam. This side will flood, that side will wash away. Not good for fish or forest." And so it proved. The wine palms died on one side of the road, and the fish drowned in the loam-rich waters on the other.

  The cooking oil continued to arrive in ever larger tins.

  Soon the lagoon behind the village was all but dead. Fisherm
en still made the trek, out of habit more than anything, pulling what few gaping mudskippers they could from the oil-slicked flats.

  Orphan fish, gills opening and closing, clogged with crude.

  The diviners had failed; all their rattle-shaking dance steps and eye-rolling visions could not bring the bounty back. And try though they might to shift the blame onto broken pacts made with the past, these intermediaries of the gods had fallen from grace in the village. "The owumo have been silent. Why? Have they left us?

  Do you even know?" This was the accusation, unanswerable and spiked with venom.

  In the lagoon, a shark had rolled in on one of the tides, already dead and covered in crude. This was taken as a sign, but of what?