“I said, who?” But as he asked, he’d begun to run out of the house. I followed, Obembe behind me.
The well, with its slightly torn metal lid, was filled with water to a level above eight feet. The neighbour’s plastic bucket lay at the foot of the silt around the mouth of the well. Boja’s body was floating atop the water, his clothing formed a parachute behind him, bloated like a full balloon. One of his eyes was open and could be seen beneath the surface of the clear water. The other was closed and swollen. His head was held half above the water, resting against the fading bricks of the well, while his light-skinned hands lingered on top of the water as though he was locked in an embrace with another who no one else but he could see.
This well in which he had hidden and then revealed himself had always been a part of his history, though. Two years earlier, a mother hawk—probably blind or deformed in some way—fell into the open well and drowned. The bird, like Boja, was not discovered until after many days, and so it simply lay beneath the water at first, quietly, like venom in a bloodstream. Then when its time was due, it spawned and swam upstream, but by that time, it had started to decompose. That incident happened around the time Boja was converted at the Great Gospel Crusade organized by the international German preacher, Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, in 1991. After the bird was removed from the well, persuaded that if he prayed over it, it could not harm him, Boja announced he would pray over the water and drink it. He put his faith in the scripture passage “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.” While we were waiting for the Ministry of Water Affairs officers Father had summoned to come purify the water, Boja drank a cup of it. Fearing he would die, Ikenna let the cat out of the bag, throwing our parents into a panic. Swearing he would whip Boja thoroughly afterwards, Father took him to the hospital. It was a great relief when test results showed that he was safe. So at the time, Boja conquered the well, but years later, the well conquered him. It killed him.
His form was inconceivably altered when he was pulled out. Obembe stood staring at me in horror as a mob gathered from every part of our district. In small communities in West Africa in those days, a tragic occurrence such as this travelled like a forest fire in the Harmattan. Once the woman cried out, people—both familiar and unfamiliar—started pouring into our compound until they crowded it. Unlike at the scene of Ikenna’s death, neither Obembe nor I tried to stop Boja from being taken away. Obembe did not act the same way he did when, after recovering from his enchanted intoning of “river of red, river of red, river of red,” he held Ikenna’s head and frantically tried to pump oxygen into his mouth, beckoning, “Ike wake up, please wake up, Ike” until Mr Bode pulled him off Ikenna. This time around, with our parents present, we watched from our balcony.
There were so many people that we could barely see the unfolding scene, for the people of Akure and most small towns in West Africa were pigeons: passive creatures that grazed lazily about in marketplaces or in playgrounds waddling as if waiting for a piece of rumour or news, congregating wherever a handful of grain is poured on the ground. Everyone knew you; you knew everyone. Everyone was your brother; you were everyone’s brother. It was hard to be somewhere and not see someone who knew your mother or brother. This was true of all our neighbours. Mr Agbati came wearing just a white singlet and brown shorts. Igbafe’s father and mother came in same-coloured traditional attire, having just arrived from some event and not having had the chance to change clothes. There were other people, including Mr Bode. It was he who entered the well and brought Boja out. I would gather from the commentaries of the people there that he’d first climbed in with a ladder passed down and tried to pull Boja out with one hand, but Boja’s dead weight refused to come forth. Mr Bode put his hand on the side of the well and pulled Boja up again. This time, Boja’s shirt snapped under the arm, and the ladder sank lower into the well. At the sight of that, the men at the lip of the well pulled tightly at him to prevent him from sliding in. Three men held on to the last man’s legs and waist. But when Mr Bode tried again, descending down the rungs of the ladder a bit lower, he pulled him out from the watery tomb in which he’d been dead for days. And like the scene when Lazarus was raised, the mob roared in approval.
But his appearance was not like that of a resurrected body, it was the unforgettable frightening image of a bloated dead. To prevent this image from imprinting on our minds, Father forced Obembe and me into the house.
“You both—sit here,” he said, panting, his countenance like I had never seen it before. Sudden wrinkles had appeared on his face, and his eyes were bloodshot. He knelt down when we sat, and placing his hands on both of our thighs, said: “From this moment on, both of you will be strong men. You will be men who will look into the eyes of the world and order your ways and paths through it… with… with the sort of courage your brothers had. Do you understand?”
We nodded.
“Good,” he said, nodding repeatedly and absent-mindedly.
He bowed his head and put his face between his palms. I could hear his teeth gritting in his mouth as he sustained a mechanical muttering, the only word of which we could hear being “Jesus.” When he lowered his head, I saw the middle of his scalp where his baldness, unlike Grandfather’s, had stopped its spurn as a mere arc of hairless portion hidden away in the midst of a ring of hair.
“Remember what you said some years ago, Obembe?” Father said, facing up again.
Obembe shook his head.
“You have forgotten,”—a wounded smile flashed across his face and wilted away—“what you said when your brother, Ike, drove the car to my office during the M.K.O. riots? Right there at the dining table,” he pointed to the table which had been left in a raucous state of unfinished meals on which flies were now perching, half-drained glasses of water and a jug of warm water from which, unaware of the absence of its drinkers, vapour had continued to rise. “You asked what you would do should they die.”
Obembe nodded now—like me, he’d remembered that night of June 12, 1993, when, after Father drove us home in his own car, we’d all begun in turns to tell stories of the riot at dinner. Mother told of how she and her friends ran into the nearby military barracks as the Pro-M.K.O. rioters razed the market, killing anyone they thought was a northerner. When all finished, Obembe said: “What will happen to Ben and me when Ikenna and Boja grow old and die?”
Everyone burst into laughter except the little ones, Obembe and me. Although I had not thought of the possibilities till then, I considered the question a valid inquiry.
“Obembe, you will have grown old, too, by then; they are not much older than you,” Father replied, squeaking with laughter.
“Okay.” Obembe wavered, albeit for a moment. He kept his eyes on them, questions crowding his mind like an unbearable urge. “But what if they died?”
“Will you shut up?” Mother yelled at him. “Dear God! How can you ever allow such a thought into your head? Your brothers will not die, you hear me?” She held the lobe of her ear, and Obembe—pumped with fear—nodded affirmatively.
“Good, now eat your food!” Mother thundered.
Dejected, Obembe would drop his head and continue his meal in silence.
“Yes, now that this has happened,” Father continued after our nods. “Obembe, you have to drive yourself and your younger brothers, Ben, here, and David. They will be looking up to you as their elder brother.”
Obembe nodded.
“I’m not saying you should drive them in a car, no.” Father shook his head. “I mean, you just lead them.”
Obembe seconded his initial nod.
“Lead them,” Father mumbled.
“Okay, Daddy,” Obembe replied.
Father stood up and wiped his nose with his hand. The mess slid down the back of his hand, its colour like Vaseline. As I watched him, I remembered that I’d once read in the Animal Atlas that most eagles lay only two eggs. And that the e
aglets, once hatched from the eggs, are often killed by the older chicks—especially during times of food shortages in what the book termed “the Cain and Abel syndrome.” Despite their might and strength, I’d read, eagles do nothing to stop these fratricides. Perhaps these killings happen when the eagles are away from the eyrie, or when they travel camel distances to get food for the household. Then when they pick the squirrel or mouse and mount the clouds in hasty flight to their eyrie, they return only to find the eaglets—perhaps two eaglets—dead: one bloodied inside the eyrie, its dark red blood leaking through the nest, and the other swollen double, bloated and floating on a nearby pool.
“You both stay here,” Father said, cutting into my thoughts. “Don’t come out of here until I tell you to. Okay?”
“Yes, Daddy,” we chorused.
He rose to leave, but turned slowly. I believe he started a sentence, perhaps a plea: “Please I beg you—” but that was it. He went out and left us there, both of us startled.
It was after Father left that it struck me that Boja was also a self-destructive fungus: one who inhabited the body of an organism and gradually effected its destruction. This was what he did to Ikenna. First, he sank Ikenna’s spirit and then he banished his soul by making a deadly perforation through which Ikenna’s blood emptied from his body and formed a red river below him. After this, like his kind, he turned against himself and killed himself.
It was Obembe who first told me that Boja killed himself. Obembe gathered from the people who’d congregated in the compound that this must have been the case, and had waited to tell me about it. And once Father left the room, he turned to me and said, “Do you know what Boja did?”
This stung me deep.
“Do you know that we drank the blood from his wound?” Obembe continued. I shook my head.
“Listen, you don’t know anything. Do you not know that there was a big hole in his head? I—saw—it! And we made tea with this well water this morning, and we all drank from it.”
I could not understand this, I could not understand how he might have been there all along. “If he was there, there all the time, there—” I began to say but stopped.
“Go on,” Obembe said.
“If he was there all this while, there—there,” I stammered.
“Go on?” he said.
“Okay, if he was there how didn’t we see him in the well when we fetched water this morning?”
“Because when something drowns, they don’t come up immediately. Listen, remember the lizard that fell into Kayode’s water drum?”
I nodded.
“And the bird that fell into the well two years ago?”
I nodded again.
“Yes, like these; it happens that way.” He gestured wearily towards the window and repeated, “Like that—it happens that way.”
He stood from the chair and lay on the bed and covered himself with the wrappa Mother had given us, the one with the portraits of a tiger etched all over it. I watched the movement of his head as the sound of suppressed sobs came from under the covering. I sat still, glued to where I was but conscious of a gradual eruption in my bowel, where something that felt like a miniature hare was gnawing inside it. The gnawing continued until, suddenly feeling a vinegary taste in my mouth, I vomited a lump of moist food in soupy pastry on the floor. The outburst was followed by bouts of coughing. I bent to the floor and coughed out more.
Obembe jumped out of his bed towards me. “What? What happened to you?”
I tried to answer, but could not; the hare had continued scratching deeper into my bones. I gasped for breath.
“Eh, water,” he said. “Let me get you some water.”
I nodded.
He brought water, and sprinkled it on my face, but it felt as if I was immersed in water, as if I were drowning. I gasped as the beads trickled down my face, and frantically wiped them off.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded and mumbled: “Yes.”
“You should drink some water.”
He left and returned with water in a cup.
“Take, drink,” he said. “And don’t be afraid anymore.”
When he said that, I remembered how, once, before we began fishing, while we were coming back from the football pitch, a dog leapt out of one of the skeletal rooms of an uncompleted building, and started barking at us. This dog was a lean thing, so thin its ribs could easily be numbered. Spots and fresh wounds covered its body like freckles on a pineapple. The poor beast came towards us in intermittent steps, belligerently, as though it wanted to attack. Although I loved animals, I was scared of dogs, lions, tigers and all those in the cat family, for I had read so much about how they tore people and other animals to pieces. I screamed at the sight of the dog and clasped to Boja. To quench my fear, Boja picked a stone and aimed at the dog. The stone missed the dog, but scared it so much that the dog woofed on, jutting mechanically, wagging its thin tail as it went away, marking its footprints in the dirt. Then, turning to me, he said: “The dog is gone, Ben; don’t be afraid anymore.” And that instant, my fear was gone.
As I drank the water Obembe had brought, I became conscious of the sudden surge in the pandemonium outside. A siren was blaring at a close distance. As the peal grew louder, voices shouted orders for people to allow “them” to come in. An ambulance had apparently arrived. A tumult overwhelmed our compound as men bore Boja’s swollen body to the ambulance. Obembe rushed to watch them load Boja’s corpse into the ambulance from the window of our sitting room, making sure Father did not see him and trying to keep an eye on me at the same time. He returned to me when the sirens began blaring again, this time deafeningly. I’d drunk the water and had stopped vomiting, but my mind could not stop spinning.
I thought of what Obembe had told me on the day Ikenna pushed Boja against the metal box. He’d sat quietly in a corner of our room, hugging himself as if he’d caught a cold. Then he asked if I saw what was in the pocket of Ikenna’s shorts when he came into the room earlier.
“No, what was it?” I had asked him, but he merely gazed, dazed, his mouth hardly closing, so that his large incisors appeared bigger than they actually were. He went to the window, his face still filled with that look. He set his eyes outside where a long cavalcade of soldier ants was making a procession along the fence, which was still wet from the long days of rain. A piece of rag was stuck to it, dripping water in a long line that slowly slid down to the foot of the wall. A cumulus cloud hung in the horizon above the walls.
I had waited patiently for Obembe’s answer, but when it became a long time coming, I asked him again.
“Ikenna had a knife—in his pocket,” he answered, without turning to look at me.
I sat up and raced to him as though a beast had rammed through the wall into the room to devour me. “A knife?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I saw it, it was Mama’s cooking knife, the one with which Boja killed the cock.” He shook his head again. “I saw it,” he repeated, gazing first at the ceiling—as if something there had nodded in the affirmative to confirm that he was right. “He had a knife.” With his face contorting now and his voice falling, he said: “Perhaps, he wanted to kill Boja.”
The ambulance’s siren began to wail again, and the noise of the mob rose to a deafening pitch. Obembe withdrew from the window and came towards me.
“They have taken him,” Obembe said presently in a husky voice. He repeated it as he took my hand and gently laid me down. My legs had, by that time, weakened from squatting to retch on the floor.
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded.
“I’ll clean this and come lie with you, just lie there,” he said and made towards the door but, as if on second thought, stopped and smiled, two blinking pearls stuck to the pupil of both eyes.
“Ben,” he called.
“Eh.”
“Ike and Boja are dead.” His jaw wobbled, his lower lip pouted as the two pearls slid down, marking their t
rails with twin liquid lines.
Because I did not know what to make of what he said, I nodded. He turned and left the room.
I closed my eyes while he packed the mess with the dustpan, my mind filled with the imagination of how Boja had died, of how—according to what they said—he’d killed himself. I imagined him standing over Ikenna’s corpse after the stabbing, wailing, having suddenly realized that by that singular action, he had plundered his own life in one single haul like a cave of ancient riches. He must have seen it, must have thought about what the future held in stock for him and dreaded it. It must have been these thoughts that birthed the heinous courage that administered the suicidal idea like morphine into his mind’s vein, starting off its slow death. With his mind dead, it must have been easy to move his legs, carry his body, fear and uncertainty sewing his mind thread-by-thread, the bulge thickening, the loom pilling until he made the plunge—head first, like a diver, the way he always dived into the river, the Omi-Ala. At once, he must have felt a rush of air flood his eyes as he dipped, quietly, without a slight moan or a word spoken. There must have been no increased throbbing and no increased pulse in his heart as he dipped; rather, he must have maintained a curious calm and tranquillity. In that state of mind, he must have glimpsed an illusory epiphany, a montage of images of his past that must have consisted of still images of a five-year-old Boja mounted on the high branch of the tangerine tree in our compound, singing Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy”; five-year-old Boja with a bowl of excreta in his pants when he was asked to stand before the entire school morning assembly and lead the school in the Lord’s Prayer; ten-year-old Boja who acted as Joseph the Carpenter, husband of Mary the mother of Jesus in our church’s Christmas play of 1992 and said: “Mary, I will not marry you because you’re an ashewo!” to the astonishment of all; Boja, who was told by M.K.O. never to fight, don’t ever!; and Boja who, earlier in the year, was a zealous Fisherman. These images may have assembled in his mind like a swarm of bees in a hive as he dipped lower until he hit the bottom of the well. The contact dashed the hive and scattered the images.
The Fishermen Page 16