by Frank Achebe
Though that one had passed, the hunter had pointed out that: ‘Till this very day, native Nāntians do not allow twins to step into the river. They still believe that the river could take one and leave the other.’
The conversation then switched to the mayor. ‘The mayor has a set of twin sons. Or rather, had a twin. One died last year and the other has been sick since with a deathly disease.’
Zach recalled the mention of that.
‘The townspeople believe there is a connection with the river and the fate of those boys. The mayor is a man of modern ideas. He does not seem to subscribe to fantasies. He damns them.’
‘Do you believe in them?’
The hunter chuckled. ‘I do not consider myself a man of modern ideas. I can’t be one.’
That answered Zach’s question perfectly well.
‘Do you believe that the Red Sea was actually divided into two halves?’
It was Zach’s time to chuckle. The other man joined him in the chuckle.
‘I do not consider myself a man of modern ideas as well.’
They both chuckled.
A pensiveness was beginning to appear in Zach’s face. The hunter kept talking and kept losing his attention slowly until he knew he’d lost it fully. Zach’s mind was with the mayor.
They would be going back home, the hunter decided and they started in the direction of the shack. In time, the hunter’s own mind slipped away to his family. Not that they ever left.
However, the thought of Yanda still held its original fear. She would not allow him to bring to them the stranger who had made a great impression on him. She would trash both of them.
Chapter Fifteen: A Long Day In the House of God
The rest of the Saturday was at the shack with the boy. When he finally woke, there was a smile, or rather a deep flush of gratitude on his face tempered with a greater dose of shyness and of course, bodily weakness. There was no other way he could show his gratitude. When the night came, he left and returned with wood for his fire pot. And when it was time to sleep, he offered his bed to Zach who refused by shaking his head with a smile.
The boy was offended at that and Zach saw elements of a fiery temper in his eyes. Just before the boy could storm out of the shack, he forced a smile that calmed everything.
The bed was not much better. It had a slight odour but it was generally manageable. The boy left the room to Zach. He did not come back until the next day. In fact, he did not actually come back….
Thoughts of the mayor kept Zach awake until late into the night. There was something about the mayor that… the bridge.
He found himself on the bridge. He was not walking on it; he was crawling, holding onto the very large nuts and screws that held the floorboards as he did. There was a crowd calling out to him from the other side—and another from the valley that was now endless, that of a woman. He was sweating and dragging his body across the bridge with all the strength he had within him. He was making progress; he was now at the halfway point of the bridge. There was something or someone that was coming from behind. Below, the tide was rising higher reaching up to the bridge from which the large nuts and screws were flying off in wide angles.
The epic moment was too quick and too swift. The rising tide from below, his pursuer from behind jumped…
He woke.
# # #
The nightmare was becoming clearer as was its relation to reality. Zach was not sad at the nightmare itself but rather at his not being able to pick out all the faces staring into his, the ones sneering at him, the owners of the voices calling out to him and the anxiety-laden words they were throwing at him. He was rather curios. He could not understand why he was screaming ‘shut up’ or whom among those he was telling to shut up. He wanted it to happen many more times, so he could make out the big picture as much as he did not want it to happen again.
Time for church. He desperately wanted to go to any church in the town. He could learn something about the mystery that the town was bringing to him. He wanted to feel the people in their spiritual state. It seemed very much a ‘Christian’ town and so the best place to go on a Sunday morning would be a church.
# # #
In 1996, there were three churches in Nānti: the Catholic Parish with its sky-piercing steeple nestling on top of one of the hills that bounded the town from the east, an Anglican Parish and of course, the Holiness Church of Nānti.
Reverend Francis, the parish priest at The Maria Asumpta Parish in Nānti was an intelligent, cheerful and stout man with wide and deep eyes, large and pink cheeks and a light voice that could pass as that of a woman. He was among the few people who owned a Mercedes 300. He even had a Toyota Corolla and a Volvo in addition to that car, which was by the demands of the time, a symbol of affluence. The three cars were very familiar as were their owner in and around the town. Driving by, children and women would call out ‘Father! Father!’ and he would horn and wave cheerfully.
Father Francis was close to his retirement. In fact, the Nānti pastorate was to be his last. He was not a native but he was welcome in the town as Catholic priests are everywhere in the south. He however had a seminarian on a yearlong apostolic mission in the parish that was accusing the priest of something sinister. He was talking but not too loud though.
The Roman Catholic ecclesiastical order was very well Roman as it was so many other things. It incorporated the traditional elements of Roman, language, culture, law and politics. And for its own conservatism, those were untouched by modern European Romanticism. One of the things one dealt with when confronting the Catholic ecclesiastical orders, represented by the cult of priesthood was the ‘Omerta’, the code of silence.
For Jonas, it was easier for him to talk for he was a native and a very sensitive person. Some of the younger people in the town were youths he had grown up with. He and four of his friends had gone to a seminary school in a faraway town. Only he had managed an ordination while his other three friends had failed out on the way. That circle was however kept and he constantly complained to them of Father Francis. It was easier for him to do so that since he still considered them part of that order.
‘He keeps picking offenses with me over insignificant things. Like the other night, he shouted at me for not coming up at eleven o’clock to open the door to him.’ He had complained to them.
‘Him?’
‘Yeah him, Hanshin. He takes him as his own son.’ Hanshin was the other seminarian on the same apostolic mission as he. He was not a native. He was more ambitious and self-imposing than Jonas.
‘Why is he so particular about him?’
He shook his head. They needn’t ask him for they knew themselves why.
Jonas had sighed, sipped from the bottle of juice they had for him and continued, ‘Every man has his own weaknesses. Father Francis’ own is…. It was part of why they brought him here. They did not want a scandal in the larger diocese. Here is somewhat muffled. Besides he’s too old to keep up with the tempo of the bigger and larger pastorates.’
In ’96, such sin—or rather ‘weaknesses’—had not yet entered into the public’s list of easily forgiven sins.
‘They sleep together?’
‘Well, not really. From what Hanshin told me himself. They masturbate together. He told me he hasn’t gone in yet. But I don’t know…. Don’t say I told you.’
There were moans and cracks of dismay.
‘Hanshin is not… that thing….’ He wouldn’t say the word. He just looked up and they nodded. ‘But you know him now. He’s an ambitious and insecure person and he would do anything to win anyone’s favours. He lacks the patience of waiting his way to the top. Promises have been made and Father Francis has what it takes.’
‘Promises?’—‘What promise?’
‘Yeah, Europe. He promised to get him a placement in Europe when he graduates. Germany or Rome. That’s where Francis himself studied.’
‘What about you?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I have
to wait out the year. December. I don’t have any personal thing against the man. I have never stood in his way. I just want him to let me live. I have my own weaknesses to deal with.’
# # #
The St Mary’s Anglican Parish was on the frontier of Nānti and its western neighbour. The cathedral served the two towns. But it was a ‘Nānti parish’.
The Chaplain was a talk, dark, and vague middle-aged man. He was a quiet man who had been subdued in both domestic affairs and church business by his wife who was head of the church council.
The parish was not as big as the Catholic parish. But the stately and mean woman was bent on making it bigger, anyway she could, guided by nothing more than her female ego. In August, she was insisting that for the next end-of-year thanksgiving service, ‘the people would be mobilized to buy their faithful minister a new Mercedes 300.’ They would have to start raising the money now!
# # #
The Holiness Church of Nānti was where Zach ended up. He actually had the Catholic parish in mind when he set off. But he had woken later that eight o’clock and into his reflections and lousy preparations had entered almost another hour. On his way, he had met a crowd of people carrying chairs and holding bulletins coming in his direction. There were not much going in the opposite direction. So he made a mental deduction and arrived at the conclusion that he would have to change his plans.
He asked questions. The Anglican Church was quite a walk from his own position. But he wanted to take it. However, on his way, as he made it up through the boulevard, he noticed what was a tall and rusty signpost that said: ‘Holiness Unto God: Avoid the Wrath of God and Make Heaven, Worship With Us…’ There were lists of activities for the seven days of the week, under columns of ‘Morning session, ‘Afternoon session’ and ‘Evening session’. Fridays and Wednesdays had ‘Night session’. The list alone took three quarters of the whole signpost.
Zach was hooked instantly and he followed, without a lingering thought, the arrow on the signpost. It led him down one of the streets branching off the boulevard, down another, round a bend and into a close. He needn’t even search for it for a low but very audible voice coming from a stuttering horn speaker guided his way.
The hall that formed the main part of what was the Holiness Church of Nānti was housed in a large compound. A very old and low shopping-mall-looking-like building of about eight stalls that had been clumsily converted into a one-room home for eight-children family. Another room for a five-children family belonging to a carpenter who hardly made lasting stuffs, and his clumsy and craggy carpenter shop. A small beer house. A room homing two prostitutes that woke up each morning with quarrels. These lined the short road that led up to the cul-de-sac that opened into the church compound.
As Zach walked on, a boy riding a motorcycle tyre being chased by his friends zoomed past and his friends following him with same speed. A woman cursed at her kid from inside her room with a very loud voice and dark words. The road itself was bad, broken and very dirty already—the ‘tenants’ were having a hard time coming to a consensus as to the rotation of the road cleaning rooster. To make it worse, a woman was pouring dirty water onto the road right from her door. Zach was close to it. Realizing that she almost poured water on a stranger, the woman made eye contact and snorted carelessly before returning to her cooking in what was her ‘kitchen’. Zach caught a sight of the ‘box kitchen’. It was a convertible one. The stove was placed inside a rough box made of roofing sheets. The box was then placed just by the door. He looked up and saw the same box at two or three of the doors he passed on his way up.
The church was no better. Its walls were half cement blocks and half rusty roofing sheets. The roofing was held by metal poles that lined the hall dividing it into ‘women’s section’ on the right and ‘men’s section’ on the left. The hall had an extension that formed the ‘children’s section’ of the church.
Zach walked in after being greeted by a roughed-faced sixty-year old looking man who was usher. He was not at all late from what he judged. By the look of things, the sermon had not even started. A scrawny woman, who had aged too soon, was facing the audience, giving a ‘testimony’. A bell was ringing from behind her loudly, and oddly too, calling her to stop. She was taking the whole time. However, she seemed to have a really long story that she considered worthy of all the time and the telling for the bell instead of chasing her off, turned her to tears, in a bid to gain herself more time by appealing to their pity. It worked.
Zach was not interested in the woman’s story. He was taking in the sights that greeted him. The usher had led him up to the third row from the last. Sitting with his leg wide apart on his right was Truth Is Life. But he did not notice the big bellied man who had an odour. Truth Is Life hadn’t noticed his neighbour as well. Not until way into the sermon.
The audience was arranged according to age in an ascending order. The young adults took the frontmost rows, followed by the youths, then the men, and the women on their own side.
The pulpit section had three men seated on an elevated platform facing the audience. All of them were dressed in old coats sagging at the shoulders, multi-coloured ties with very large knots, and they all looked on with mean faces. Among them was Reverend Iňaō Ūnarö. His face was far meaner than those of the other two.
The women all had their head covered to the very last hair from the first to the last. The younger women wore either long gowns or long skirts. The older women wore traditional dresses and wrappers. All things were kept long. The men wore neck-high shirts and trousers. Jean trousers were a first-class ticket to hell. The men had their faces rid of all the beards. It was the work of the devil.
There were smells from all corners oozing from the sweaty bodies, unkempt hair and unbrushed mouths and clothes. There no fans, and being a damp day, there were no winds to dispel them.
It was ten o’clock when Zach arrived the barn that housed the Holiness Church of Nānti. It was not until eleven that the sermon started. By then Truth Is Life was fast asleep dangling his neck back and forth and occasionally hitting it on Zach’s shoulder. He even managed a low snore. A large chunk of the church were asleep halfway through the dangerously long sermon. The sermon was interrupted in places by the crying of children. The interpreter who interpreted the sermon into the vernacular, was a grubbier man who took more time than his leader. More noise even filtered in from the extension that formed the ‘children’s section’. By the time the grubby man was done, Zach was greatly disappointed—as well as entertained.
Not only the sermon, there was a ‘first timers’ wait-after time after the main service that took forty-five more minutes of his time. By the time he got home, it almost was three o’clock. And they were indeed looking forward to seeing him another day—that evening actually for the evening service.
# # #
When he finally reached the shack, Zach was exhausted, hungry, and with a slight headache.
After a while, he had taken time to recollect all that he’d heard and seen, the ones that made him bury his head in his hands and stifle what would’ve been a very loud and ‘going to hell’ laugh. And the ones that made him want to wring off someone’s head off his neck in the same manner with which bottles are uncorked.
The sermon was titled ‘Heaven At Last’. It could have been titled: Ready or Not? Or ‘Run the Heavenly Race With Your Tail Between Your Legs’. Or ‘The Dress Sense of Holiness Church of Nānti’. It could have been all those for the man kept bumping off from how ‘beautiful’ heaven was—as if he had seen it—to how not wearing miniskirts, denim trousers, not owning television sets, etc. was the way to get into it.
Rev Iňaō’s strong tone would rise and drop to the severity of the theme of his sermon and spit would flutter out of his thick-tongued mouth. And when he was finally taken by the stuffiness of the hall to remove his coat, Zach saw two large patches of brown under his arm pit. He could have vomited.
‘Heaven is real and we must get into it.’ The a
udience watched on as he tuned off into a heaven-dreaming hymn with a dreamy voice. They joined him. Thy returned to looking on when he stopped, read Matthew 7:14 and switched gears.
‘Narrow is the way. ‘Brethren do not be fooled. Only a few will make it to heaven. The others will burn in hell. Where do you want to spend eternity? Heaven with streets of gold or hell where the fire burns? It is better to suffer on earth for a short while than in hell for all eternity.’
The audience followed his words with blank faces. They were used to it. In no time, he would come to his best topic—dressing and Madam Békhtèn’s hall.
‘The Spirit of Jezebel shall not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. All those who wear miniskirts, those who scrape their eyebrows and replace them with paints, all those that weave their natural hair and those that use perms, all those that wear strapless gowns, use perfumes, and all those who watch television…Look, the bible says the road is narrow. My brothers and sisters, I warn you to beware of these things and of the people who do it. And more than that, judge them as evil. Refuse to look upon them. Refuse to have anything to do with them. They are from the pit of hell! And they lead to the pit of hell. But follow godliness and contentment for in them is great gain.’
Zach thought he was finally going to have a fit when the man switched to HIV. ‘The judgement of God has already started. Yes, that new disease they have been talking about, it is the judgement of God against fornicators! Just imagine what hell would be! My brethren in Christ, let us flee youthful lusts, let us submit to the Word of God. For in so doing, we would make heaven.’
His idea of fleeing ‘youthful lusts’ was really troubling. It involved not seating next to the opposite sex ‘because the devil is indeed a master craftsman who can use anything against us. Do not give him anything to use against you. So Flee! Flee! Do not visit them! Do not have any relations with them! Do no business with them. Most of you here are market women; do not sell your goods to these evil people. If you do so, you will participate in their evil.