The men were dressed in cheap long-sleeved shirts tucked into soft-fabric trousers—one wore black trousers and the other one green. They held hardback books that we immediately knew were bibles; they had just left some church.
“Perhaps, we could pray for him,” one of the men—swarthy, with a balding that had stopped in the middle of his head—suggested.
“We have been fasting and praying for three weeks now,” the other said, “asking God for power. Isn’t it time to use it?”
The first man nodded sheepishly. And before he could respond, someone else said, “It surely isn’t.”
It was my brother; the two men turned to him.
“This man, here,” my brother continued with a countenance masked with fear, “is a fake. This is all pretence. He is a sane man. He is a well-known trickster who pretends to be like this to beg for alms, dancing on the roadsides, storefronts, or marketplaces, but he is sane. He has children.” My brother looked at me, although he was addressing the men. “He is our father.”
“What?” the balding man exclaimed.
“Yes,” my brother continued to my complete shock, “Paul, here”—he pointed at me—“and I have been sent by our mother to bring him back home, that it is enough for today, but he has refused to return home with us.”
He made a gesture of entreaty to the madman who was looking around the stool and the ground as though searching for a missing object, and did not seem to notice my brother.
“This is unbelievable,” the swarthy man said. “There’s nothing we won’t hear or see in this world—a man pretending to be insane just to earn a living? Unbelievable.”
Shaking their heads repeatedly, the men took their leave, bidding us to pray for God to touch him, and convict him of his greed. “God can do anything,” the swarthy one said, “if you ask in faith.”
My brother agreed and thanked them. When the men were gone out of earshot, I asked my brother what that was all about.
“Shh,” he said, grinning. “Listen, I was scared those men had some power. You never know: they have fasted for three weeks? Phew! What if they had power like Reinhard Bonnke, Kumuyi or Benny Hinn, and they could pray and get him healed? I don’t want that to happen. If he is well, he won’t roam about anymore, maybe he would even leave this town—who knows? You know what that means don’t you? That this man will escape, go scot-free after what he did? No, no, I won’t let that happen—over my dead bo—” My brother was forced to truncate his speech by what we now saw: a man, his wife and son about my age had stopped to watch the madman, who was chuckling. Obembe was saddened by this, as these people would again delay us till the madman left the spot. Discouraged, he concluded it was too open a place to use the poison, so we went home.
Abulu was not in his truck when we went to search for him the following day, but we found him near the small primary school with a high fence. From inside the compound, we could hear the uniform voices of children reciting poems and of their teacher breaking in, and sporadically asking them to give themselves a round of applause. The madman soon rose, and began walking majestically, his hands curved around him like the CEO of an oil company. Lying open, just a close distance from him was an umbrella with its skeletal ribs unclipped from its cleated battered tarpaulin. With his eyes fixed on a ring on one of his fingers, Abulu stamped about, chanting a string of words: “Wife,” “Now wed,” “Love,” “Marry,” “Beautiful ring,” “Now wed,” “You,” “Father,” “Marry”…
Obembe would tell me—after the madman and his gibberish had petered out of sight—that he was mimicking a Christian wedding procession. We followed him from a distance, slowly. We passed the place where Ikenna had pulled a dead man from a car in 1993. As we went, I thought of the potency of the rat poison we carried and my fear soared and again I began to feel pity for the madman, who seemed to be living just like a stray dog feeding everywhere. He often stopped, turned back, and posed like a model on a runway, stretching the hand that had the ring on it. We’d never been to this street before. Abulu made towards three women at a balcony, in front of a bungalow, plaiting the hair of one seated on a stool. Two of them gave him a chase, picking up stones and throwing them in his direction to scare him away.
Long after the women had retreated—they’d barely moved, and had only screamed at him to get his filthy self away—the madman was still running, looking back intermittently, the lascivious smile still on his face. The dirt track, as we would find out just shortly afterwards, was hardly used by cars because it ended with a wooden bridge about two hundred metres long over one part of the Omi-Ala. This made it easy for some street children to convert the track, only a few metres long, into a playground. The children lined four big rocks on both ends of the road, with spaces between them; the stones were the goal posts. They played football here, shouting and raising dust. Abulu watched them, his face filled with smiles. Then, positioning himself this and that way—with an invisible ball in his hand—he kicked wildly into the air, almost falling in the act. He shouted, thrusting his hands in the air with flourish, “Goaaaal! It. Is. A goalllll!”
When we caught up with him, we saw that Igbafe and his brother were among the boys. The moment we stepped on the bridge, I remembered the dream of the footbridge I’d seen around the time Ikenna was undergoing his metamorphosis. The familiar smell of the river, the sight of multi-coloured fish similar to the ones we used to catch, swimming at the edges of the waters, the sound of invisible croaking toads and chirping crickets and even the smell of dead river matter, all reminded me of our fishing days. I watched the fish closely because I’d not seen them swimming in a long time. I used to wish I was a fish, and that all my brothers were fish too. And that all we did, all day, every day, was swim forever and ever and ever.
As expected, Abulu began walking towards the bridge, his eyes fixed on the horizon, until he reached its foot. When he climbed, we felt his weight bear down on the wooden slab from the other end of the bridge where we were standing.
“We’ll run away, fast, once we feed it to him,” my brother said as the madman drew nigh. “He could fall into the water and die there; no one will see him die.”
Although I was afraid of this plan, I merely nodded in agreement. When Abulu climbed the bridge, he immediately went close to the railing and holding on to it, began urinating into the river. We watched until he finished, and his penis reclined like an elastic string relapsing to the centre of his waist, spitting a few last drops on the footbridge. My brother looked around to be sure no one was watching and brought out the poisoned bread and made for the madman as he went.
Now up close and certain he would soon die, I let my eyes take an inventory of the madman. He appeared like a mighty man of old when men shredded everything they grasped with bare hands. His face was fecund with a beard that stretched from the side of his face down to his jaw. His moustache stood over his mouth as though it had been applied there by fine brush strokes of charcoal paint. His hair was dirty, long, and tangled. Thick foliations of hair also covered a large part of his chest, his wrinkled and swarthy face, the centre of his pelvis, and encircled his penis. The matrixes of his fingernails were long and taut, and in the bed beneath each plate were masses of grime and dirt.
I observed that he carried on his body a variety of odours, the most noticeable of which was a faecal smell that wafted at me like a drone of flies when I drew closer to him. This smell, I thought, might have been a result of his going for long without cleaning his anus after excretion. He reeked of sweat accumulated inside the dense growth of hair around his pubic regions and armpits. He smelt of rotten food, and unhealed wounds and pus, and of bodily fluids and wastes. He was redolent of rusting metals, putrefying matter, old clothes, ditched underwear he sometimes wore. He smelt, too, of leaves, creepers, decaying mangoes by the Omi-Ala, the sand of the riverbank, and even of the water itself. He had the smell of banana trees and guava trees, of the Harmattan dust, of trashed clothes in the large bin behind the tailor’s shop
, of leftover meat at the open abattoir in the town, of leftover things devoured by vultures, of used condoms from the La Room motel, of sewage water and filth, of semen from the ejaculations he’d spilled on himself every time he’d masturbated, of vaginal fluids, of dried mucus. But these were not all; he smelt of immaterial things. He smelt of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of unknown things, of strange elements, and of fearsome and forgotten things. He smelt of death.
Obembe held out some bread for the madman, and he took it when he reached us. He seemed not to recognize us at all, as though we were not the same people he’d prophesied about.
“Food!” he said, sticking out his tongue. He then broke out into a monotonous chorus of words: “Eat, rice, beans, eat, bread, eat, that, manna, maize, eba, yam, egg, eat.” He bumped his knuckle into the palm of his other hand, and continued his rhythmic chant, which had been ignited by the word “food.”
“Food, food, ajankro ba, f-f-f-f-food! Eat this.” He bulked a space between his palms, imitating the shape of a pot. “Eat, food, eat, eat—”
“This is good food,” Obembe stuttered. “Bread, eat, eat, Abulu.”
Abulu rolled his eyes, now, with such dexterity that would have put the best eye-rollers to shame. He took a piece of the bread from Obembe, chuckled, and yawned as though it was a punctuation of some sort, and therefore part of the language he had just spoken. Once he took the bread, Obembe glared at me, drew back until, reaching a safe distance, we picked up speed. We’d run down another street before we thought to stop. In the distance, a wild motoring road undulated on a swathe of dirt road.
“Let’s not go too far away from him,” my brother said, panting, holding my shoulder for support.
“Yes,” I mumbled, trying to catch my breath.
“He will soon fall,” my brother purred, his eyes a horizon accommodating a single, radiant star of joy, but my eyes were filled with the rapid waters of ripping pity. The story Mother told of how Abulu sucked a cow’s teats had come to my mind just then, and so did the feeling that it was privation and destitution that had driven him to such desperation. In our fridge were cans of milk, Cowbell, Peak, all with pictures of cows. Perhaps, I’d thought, he could not afford any of these. He had no money, no clothes, no parents, no house. He was like the pigeons in the Sunday-school song we sang: “Look at the Pigeons, They Have No Clothes.” They have no gardens, yet God watches them. I thought that Abulu was like the pigeons, and for this I pitied the madman, as I sometimes found myself doing.
“He will soon die,” my brother said, cutting off my thoughts.
We’d stopped in front of a shed where a woman sold petty things. The shed was covered on the grille by netting under which a cashier-like space opened for interaction with customers. Hanging from the top of the grille were various sachets of beverage, powdered milk, biscuits, sweets, and other food. As we waited here, I imagined Abulu falling and dying away on the bridge. We’d seen him put the poisoned bread in his mouth, his moustached mouth shaking as he chewed. We saw him now, still holding the nylon, peering into the river. A few men passed him, one of them turning back to look at him. My heart skipped.
“He is dying,” my brother whispered, “Look, he is probably trembling now, and that is why the men are looking at him. They say when the effect begins, the body first starts to tremble.”
As if to confirm our suspicion, Abulu bent downwards to the bridge and appeared to be spitting onto it. My brother was right, I thought. We’d seen so many movies in which people coughed and foamed at the mouth after consuming poison, and then fell and died.
“We did it, we did it,” he cried. “We avenged Ike and Boja. I told you we will. I said it.”
Elated, my brother began talking about how we would now have peace, and how the madman would no longer bother people. He stopped talking when he saw Abulu starting to walk towards us, dancing and clapping as he went. This miracle came towards us dancing and singing rhapsodies of a saviour on whose palms nine-inch nails were driven and who would someday return to the earth. His psalmody whooped the darkening evening into an esoteric realm as we followed, shocked that he was still alive. We trudged along past the long road, past shops closing until Obembe, short of words, stopped, and turned back towards home. I knew that he, like me, had come to spot the difference between an unhurt thumb blood-covered from being dipped into a pool of blood, and a thumb robed in blood from a gash. He’d understood that the poison would not kill Abulu.
While the leech that infested my brother and me pasteurized our grief and kept our wound fresh, our parents healed. Mother cast away her mourning clothes towards the end of December and returned to normal life. She no longer burst out in sudden rage nor plunged into sudden declivities of grief, and it seemed the spiders had gone extinct. Because of her recovery, the valedictory service for Ikenna and Boja, which had been postponed for many weeks due to Mother’s illness, was held the following Saturday—five days after our first failed attempt on Abulu’s life. That morning, all of us in black dress, including David and Nkem, packed into Father’s car, which had had to be repaired the previous day by Mr Bode. His role in that tragedy had brought him closer to our family, and he’d visited many times, once with his betrothed, a girl whose set of protruding dentition made it hard for her to firmly close her mouth. Father had now called him “my brother.”
The service was composed of songs of valediction, a brief history of “the boys” rendered by Father, and a short sermon by Pastor Collins, who wore a gauze on his head that day. He’d had an accident a few days before on a motorcycle taxi. The auditorium was full of familiar faces from our neighbourhood, most of whom were members of other churches. In his speech, Father said Ikenna was a great man—Obembe cast a lingering stare at me when he said that—a man who would have led men if he’d lived.
“I will not say much about him, but Ikenna was a fine child,” he said. “A child who knew a lot of hardships. I mean, the devil tried to steal him, many times, but God was faithful. A scorpion stung him at age six—” Father was interrupted by a muted gasp of horror that ran through the congregation upon this revelation.
“Yes, at Yola,” he continued. “And just a few years later, one of his testicles was kicked into his body. I will spare you the rest of the details about that incident, but please know that God was with him. His brother, Boja—” and then the kind of silence I’d never experienced before in my life descended on the congregation. For, still at the podium, in front of the church, Father—our father, the man who knew all things, the brave man, the strong man, the Generalissimo, the commander of the forces of corporal discipline, the intellectual, the eagle—had begun to sob. A feeling of shame seized me at the sight of my Father openly weeping, I bent my head and fixed my eyes on my shoe while Father continued; albeit, this time, his word—like an overloaded lumber truck caught in Lagos traffic—slalomed through the pockmarked dirt of his moving speech, halting and jerking and slumping.
“He would, have been great, too. He… he was a gifted, child. He, if you knew him, he… was a good child. Thank you all for coming.”
After the long applause when Father’s hurried speech ended, the hymns began. Mother cried softly through it, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. A small knife of grief sliced slowly through my heart as I wept for my brothers.
The congregation was singing “It Is Well with My Soul,” when I noticed unusual movements. In a moment, heads began turning and eyes diverting towards the back. I did not want to turn because Father was seated beside us, next to Obembe. But just as I was wondering, Obembe tilted his head towards me, and whispered: “Abulu is here.”
I turned at once and saw Abulu, dressed in a muddied brown shirt with a large circle of sweat and grime, standing somewhere among the congregation. Father cast a glance at me, his eyes ordering me to focus. Abulu had attended the church many times before. The first time, he came in the middle of a sermon, walked past the ushers at the door, and sat down on a
bench in the women’s row. Although the congregants instantly became aware that something unusual was happening, the Pastor preached on while the ushers, young men who kept watch at the doors, kept a close watch on him. But he maintained an unusual composure throughout the sermon, and when it was time for the closing prayer and hymn, he indulged in both as if he was not who everyone knew him to be. When the assembly was dismissed, he went out quietly leaving a stir in his wake. He attended a couple more times afterwards, mostly sitting in the women’s row, triggering a hot debate between those who felt his nudity was unwelcome because of the women and the children, and those who felt the house of God was meant for anyone who wished to come in, naked/clothed, poor/rich, sane/insane and to whom identity was of no importance. Finally, the church decided to stop him from attending services, and the ushers chased him with sticks whenever he came near the premises.
The Fishermen Page 21