“Eh? Abulu the madman?” Mother cried, springing to her feet in terror.
Obembe, it seemed, had not expected this reaction. Perhaps frightened, Obembe cast his eyes on the bare mattress spread out in front of him and said nothing. For this was a metal-lidded secret, one that Boja had warned us never to reveal to anyone after Ikenna first started drawing a line between us and him. “You have both seen what it has done to Ikenna,” he’d said, “so keep your mouths shut.” We had agreed, and promised to wipe it out of our memory by committing a lobotomy on our minds.
“I asked you a question,” Mother said. “Which Abulu did they meet? The madman?”
“Yes,” Obembe affirmed in a whisper, and quickly glanced at the wall that partitioned our room from our elder brothers’ room, suspecting that they might have heard he’d revealed the secret.
“Chi-neke!” Mother cried. Then she sat back on the bed slowly, her hands on her head. She remained in that strange silence for a moment, grinding her teeth and tsking. “Now,” she said suddenly, “tell me at once, what happened when you met him? Did you hear me, Obembe? I said, and I’m saying for the last time, tell me what happened at that river.”
Obembe hesitated for a while longer, too afraid to begin the story he’d partly told in that one revealing sentence. But it was too late, for Mother had already started to wait anxiously, her feet suddenly set on the hill as if she’d seen a raptor advancing towards her fold, and she, the falconer, was ready for a confrontation. Hence, it was now impossible for Obembe, even if he’d wanted to, to resist her.
A little more than a week before the neighbour caught us, my brothers and I were returning from the Omi-Ala River with the other boys when we met Abulu along the sandy pathway. We had just completed a fishing session at the river and were walking home, discussing the two big tilapias we’d caught that day (one of which Ikenna had fiercely argued was a Symphysodon) when, upon reaching the clearing where the mango tree and the Celestial Church were located, Kayode cried: “Look, there’s a dead man under the tree! A dead man! A dead man!”
We all turned at once to the spot and saw a man lying on a mat of fallen leaves at the foot of the mango tree, his head pillowed on a small broken branch still foliated with leaves. Mangoes of different sizes, colours—yellow, green, red—and ones in different stages of decomposition lay about everywhere. Some were squashed, some rotten from bird bites. The soles of the man’s feet, which laid plain before our eyes, were so ugly that it seemed that athlete’s foot had carved sinewy lines all over them, giving them the resemblance of a complex map, coloured with dead leaves that clung to every line.
“That’s not a dead man; he is the one humming this tune,” Ikenna said calmly. “He must be a madman; this is how mad people behave.”
Although I’d not heard the tune before, I did now that Ikenna called our attention to it.
“Ikenna is right,” Solomon said. “This is Abulu, the vision-seeing madman.” Then snapping his fingers, he said, “I detest this man.”
“Ah!” Ikenna cried. “Is it him?”
“It is him—Abulu,” Solomon said.
“I didn’t even recognize him,” said Ikenna.
I looked at the madman, whom Ikenna and Solomon had revealed they knew, but I could not remember having ever seen him before. A great number of mad people, derelicts and beggars roamed the streets of Akure, and there was nothing noteworthy or distinct about any of them. It was thus strange to me that this one not only had a distinct identity, but also a name—a name people seemed to know. As we looked on, the madman raised his hands and held them strangely in the air, still, with a sublimity that struck me with awe.
“Look at that!” Boja said.
Abulu sat up now, as if glued to the spot, peering straight into the distance.
“Let’s leave him alone and go on our way,” Solomon said at that point. “Let’s not talk to him, let’s just go; leave him alone—”
“No, no, we should rattle him a bit,” Boja, who’d moved towards the man, suggested. “We shouldn’t just leave like that, this could be fun. Listen, we could frighten him, and—”
“No!” Solomon said forcefully. “Are you mad? Don’t you know this man is evil? Don’t you know him?”
While Solomon was still speaking, the madman burst into a sudden roar of laughter. In fear, Boja swiftly skipped backwards and re-joined the rest of us. Just then, Abulu sprang acrobatically to his feet with one prodigious leap. He put both hands together to his side, clasped his legs, and without a part of his body moving, fell back into his former position. Thrilled by this callisthenic display, we clapped and cheered in admiration.
“He is a giant—Superman!” Kayode cried and the others laughed.
We’d forgotten that we had been going home, darkness was slowly covering the surface of the horizon and our mother might soon begin looking for us. I was thrilled and fascinated by this strange man. I cupped my hand around my mouth and said: “He is like a lion!”
“You compare everything to animals, Ben,” Ikenna said, shaking his head as if the comparison had annoyed him. “He is not like anything, you hear? He is just a madman—a madman.”
Lost in the moment, I watched this awesome creature with all the concentration I could gather until details of him filled my mind. He was robed from head to foot in filth. As he rose spryly to stand, some of the filth rose with him, while some was left in patches on the ground. He had a fresh scar on his face just below his chin, and his back was caked with a dripping mess from some dead mango in a state of putrefaction. His lips were dried and cracked. His hair was unkempt; it stretched like tendrils, giving him the appearance of a Rastafarian. His teeth, most of which were blackened as if singed, reminded me of fire-blowing gypsies and circus players who blew fire from their mouths and probably, I thought, burned their teeth. The man lay bare before our eyes, stark naked except for a shred of rag which hung loosely from his shoulder down to his waist; his pubic region was covered with a dense foliage of hair in the midst of which his veiny penis hung limply like trouser rope. His legs were bursting with taut varicose veins.
Kayode picked a mango and threw it in the direction of Abulu, and at once, as if expecting it, the madman caught the mango in the air. Holding out the fruit as if it was an acrid substance he could not bring close to himself, he slowly rose to his feet. With a loud, piercing cry, he hauled the mango so high it might have landed at the town centre, some twenty miles away. This swept the ground from beneath our feet.
In silence, we stood there, frozen, watching this man until Solomon moved forward and said: “You see? Do you see what I tell you? Can an ordinary human being do this?” he pointed in the direction of the projectile that was the mango. “This man is evil. Let us go home and leave him. Haven’t you heard how he killed his brother, eh? What can be worse than a man who killed his own brother?” He put his hand to hold the lobe of his ear in the manner of an older person giving instruction to a child. “We must all go home, now!”
“He is right,” Ikenna said after a moment’s thought. “We should all go home. See, it is getting late.”
We started on our way, but once we began, Abulu burst out in laughter. “Ignore him,” Solomon urged, waving us on. The rest marched on, but I couldn’t. I’d become suddenly afraid, on account of Solomon’s description of him, that this man was so dangerous he could jump on us and kill us. I turned, and when I saw that he was coming after us, my fear was inflamed.
“Let us run,” I cried, “he will kill us!”
“No, he can’t kill us,” Ikenna said and turned rapidly to face the madman. “He can see we are armed.”
“With what?” asked Boja.
“Our fishing hooks,” Ikenna replied curtly. “If he comes any closer, we will tear his flesh with the hooks, just like we kill fish, and throw his body in the river.”
As if deterred by this threat, the madman stopped and stood still, his hands masking his face, making strange sounds. We continued and had walked a f
air distance away when we heard a loud cry of Ikenna’s name. We pulled to an immediate halt in shock.
“Ikena,” the voice called again with a Yoruba accent that lengthened the e sound of the first letter and obliterated the second n so that it sounded as Ikena.
We glanced around in bewilderment to see who’d said the name, but Abulu was the only person within sight. He now stood a few metres from us, his arms folded across his chest.
“Ikena,” Abulu repeated aloud, inching closer towards us.
“Let’s not listen to Abulu’s prophecies. O le wu—it is dangerous,” Solomon shouted at us, his Yoruba thickening with a twang of his Oyo dialect. “Let’s go home now, let’s go.” He pushed Ikenna forward. “It’s not good to listen to Abulu’s prophecies, Ike. Let us go!”
“Yes, Ike,” Kayode said, “he is of the devil, but we are Christians.”
For a moment, we all waited for Ikenna, whose eyes now stayed on the madman. Without turning to the rest of us, he shook his head and cried, “No!”
“What no? Don’t you know Abulu?” Solomon asked. He caught Ikenna by the shirt, but Ikenna pulled away from him, leaving a piece of his old Bahamas resort T-shirt in Solomon’s hand.
“Leave me,” Ikenna said. “I’m not going away. He is calling my name. He is calling my name. How did he know my name? How—how is he calling my name?”
“Maybe he heard it from one of us,” Solomon said, matching Ikenna’s forceful tone.
“No, he didn’t,” Ikenna shouted. “He didn’t hear it from anyone.”
He had just said that when—in a softer, subtler voice—Abulu called again, “Ikena.” Then raising his hands, the madman burst into a song I’d heard people sing in our neighbourhood without knowing where it came from or what it meant, and the song was titled: “The Sower of Green Things.”
We all listened to his rapturous singing for a while, even Solomon. Then, shaking his head, Solomon picked up his fishing hook, tossed the piece of Ikenna’s shirt to the ground and said: “You and your brothers may stay, but I won’t stay.”
Solomon turned and Kayode followed him. Igbafe, conspicuously indeterminate, threw glances back and forth between us and the vanishing duo. Then slowly, he began walking away until, after about a hundred metres, he began to run.
Abulu had stopped singing by the time I had lost sight of those who had left us, and he had resumed calling Ikenna’s name. When it seemed he’d called it for the thousandth time, he cast his eyes above, lifted his hands and shouted: “Ikena, you will be bound like a bird on the day you shall die,” he cried, covering his eyes with his hands to demonstrate blindness.
“Ikena, you will be mute,” he said, and closed his ears with both hands.
“Ikena, you will be crippled,” he said, and moved his legs apart, folding his palms together in the way of spiritual supplications. Then he knocked his knees together and fell backwards into the dirt as though the bones of his knees had suddenly been broken.
When he said: “Your tongue will stick out of your mouth like a hungry beast, and will not return back into your mouth,” he thrust out his tongue, and curled it to one side of his mouth.
“Ikena, you shall lift your hands to grasp air, but you will not be able to. Ikena, you shall open your mouth to speak on that day”—the madman opened his mouth and made a loud gasping sound of ah, ah—“but words will freeze in your mouth.”
As he spoke, the din of an aircraft flying overhead mopped his voice into a desperate whimper at first, and then—when the plane had drawn much closer—it swallowed the rest of his words like a boa. The last statement we heard him make, “Ikena, you will swim in a river of red but shall never rise from it again. Your life—” was barely audible. The din and the voices of children cheering at the plane from around the neighbourhood threw the evening into a cacophonous haze. Abulu cast a frenzied gaze upwards in confusion. Then, as if in a fury, he continued in a louder voice that was whipped into faint whispers by the sound of the aircraft. As the noise tapered off, we all heard him say “Ikena, you shall die like a cock dies.”
Abulu fell silent and his face lit up with relief. Then he moved one of his hands in the air as if scribbling something on an invisible hanging paper or book with a pen no one else but he could see. When it seemed he was done, he started to go, singing and clapping along.
We watched the forward-and-backwards swing of his backbone as he sang and danced, the song’s charged lyrics falling back on us like wind-borne dust.
A fe f ko le fe ko
ma kan igi oko As the wind cannot blow
without touching the trees
Osupa ko le hon ki
enikan fi aso di As no one can block the light of the moon with a sheet
of the moon with a sheet
Oh, Olu Orun,
eni ti mo je Ojise fun Oh, father of the host for
whom I’m an oracle
E fa orun ya,
e je ki ojo ro I implore you to tear the
firmaments and give rain
Ki oro ti mo to
gbin ba le gbo That the green things
I have sown will live
E ba igba orun je,
ki oro mi bale mi Mutilate the seasons so my
words can breathe,
Ki won ba le gbo. That they yield fruit.
The madman sang on as he went away from us until his voice petered out, along with all of his corporeal convoy—his presence, his smell, his shadow that clung to the tree and the ground, his body. And once he was out of sight, I noticed that the night had descended heavily around us, covering the roof of the world with a crepuscular awning, and—in what seemed like the blink of an eye—had turned the birds nesting in the mango tree and the sprawling esan bush around it into black objects that were imperceptible to the eyes as they flew past us. Even the Nigerian flag that hovered over the police station two hundred metres away had darkened and the distant hills had merged with the dark sky as if there was no partition between the sky and the earth.
My brothers and I went home afterwards, bruised as if we’d been beaten in an easy fight, while the world around us continued to run with the machinery of things unaltered, with nothing suggesting that something of portentous significance had happened to us. For the street was alive, bustling with the night-time cacophony of roadside sellers with lanterns and candles on tables and people walking around whose shadows were scattered on the ground, walls, against trees, on buildings like life-sized murals. A Hausa man in northern garment stood behind a wooden shed covered with tarpaulins, turning a pile of skewered meat on a charcoal hearth set in a metal bowl from which thick black smoke was rising. Separated from this man by a running sewer were two women who sat on a bench, bent over an actual hearth, roasting corn.
We were only a stone’s throw from our house when Ikenna stopped walking, forcing the rest of us to a halt, so that he stood in front of the three of us, now a mere silhouette. “Did any of you hear what he said when the plane was flying past?” he said in a voice that was unsteady yet measured. “Abulu kept speaking, but I did not hear.”
I had not heard the madman; the plane had caught my attention so much that, for the time it was visible, I had watched it closely, my hand shaded over my eyes to try to catch a glimpse of its most likely foreign passengers heading, perhaps, somewhere in the Western world. But it seemed neither Boja nor Obembe had heard him, for neither said a word. Ikenna had turned and was about to start walking when Obembe said: “I did.”
“What then are you waiting for?” Ikenna thundered loudly. All three of us stepped back a few metres.
Obembe steeled himself, afraid that Ikenna would hit him.
“Were you deaf?” Ikenna shouted.
The rage in Ikenna’s voice frightened me. I dropped my head to avoid looking straight at him and focused, instead, on his shadow that was sprawled on the dirt. As I watched the actions of his actual body by the movement of his shadow on the dirt, I saw it throw what it held in its hand to the ground. Then
his shadow flowed towards Obembe, its head elongating at first and then retracting back into shape. When it steadied, its arms flailed briefly and then I heard the sound of Obembe’s tin fall and felt a splash of its content on my leg. Two small fish—one of which Ikenna had argued was a Symphysodon—shot out of the tin, and began writhing and thrashing about in the dirt, muddied by the spilled water as the tin swung from side to side, spurting out more water and tadpoles until it stilled. For a moment, the shadows did not move. Then a hand that elongated and stretched across the other side of the street was followed by a cry from Ikenna’s voice: “Tell me!”
“Didn’t you hear him?” Boja asked menacingly even though Obembe—frozen in a posture of his hand shielding himself from an expected assault from Ikenna—had begun to speak.
“He said,” Obembe stammered, but stopped when Boja spoke. Now he began afresh again: “He said—he said that a fisherman will kill you, Ike.”
“What, a fisherman?” Boja said aloud.
“A fisherman?” Ikenna repeated.
“Yes, a fisher—” Obembe did not complete this, he was trembling.
“Are you sure?” Boja said. When Obembe nodded, Boja said: “How did he say it?”
“He said ‘Ikena, you shall—’ ” He stopped, his lips shaking as he gazed from face to face and then to the ground. It was with his eyes cast down to the ground that he continued: “He said Ikenna, you shall die by the hands of a fisherman.”
It is hard to forget the black cloud that covered Ikenna’s face after Obembe said those words. He glanced up as if in search of something, then he turned in the direction where the madman had gone, but there was nothing to be seen but a sky turned to orange.
We were almost at our gate when Ikenna faced us, but with his eyes cast on no one in particular. “He saw a vision that one of you will kill me,” he said.
More words dangled feverishly on his lips, but didn’t spill out. They seemed to retract inside as if they were fastened to a rope that was pulled back from within him by an unseen hand. Then, as if unsure of what to say or do, and without waiting for any of us to speak—for Boja was starting to say something now—he turned and walked on into our gate, and we followed him.
The Fishermen Page 8