Temper: A Novel

by Nicky Drayden

  Slowly, he slides the yam pieces back together. I’m filled with an odd sort of tension as the pieces move closer and closer, then a strange calm overwhelms me as I watch their orange flesh touch. I suck in a small, involuntary gasp of air.

  His eyes drill into mine, and he nods. “You felt that, didn’t you?”

  The calmness soon fades, and a proximity ache hits me right in the gut. Sharp and precise, like I’ve been stabbed with a knife. Uncle Pabio puts his hand on my shoulder, and with the other, he smudges a tear from the corner of his eye. Judging from the pain Uncle Pabio and I are trying to hide from each other, maybe the bonds in his blood run as strongly as the ones in mine. The way he and Uncle Yeboah fight, I would never have guessed.

  “I’m starving,” Uncle Pabio says with a pat to his belly. “Aren’t you?”

  I nod, knowing exactly what he means. Starving for proximity.

  When we arrive in the dining room, I gag on the scent of cinnamon, two tea candles in each window, twenty windows opened to the ocean vista. This room could swallow our meager apartment up whole, but somehow it seems cramped with all these egos stuffed into it. Aunt Cisse orchestrates Mother and the servants as they set the table and bring steaming dishes of lamb stew and pig trotters, pumpkin fritters, and loaves upon loaves of beer bread. Uncle Yeboah’s aged mother and her twin have arrived as well, both of them dressed in lofty felted wigs and their finest netted shawls, both last fashionable around the time they’d witnessed Uncle Yeboah and Uncle Pabio take Discernment some forty years ago. They give Chimwe and Chiso slobbery kisses and handfuls of gold coins, gushing over how they’ve never seen a firmer finemister or a prissier laddie, kigen slurs common back in their day. Chimwe and Chiso flush as Aunt Cisse corrects the bigoted old hags with more socially acceptable terms, but her efforts, as usual, go ignored.

  Uncle Yeboah always says that it’s impossible to change what’s ground into someone’s moral fiber, probably the one thing he and I see eye to eye on. People can’t help the vices they’re dealt. We play the hand as best we can, is all. That said, both Great-aunts Anenih and Mensah seem to enjoy getting a pass for lack of tact. It’s one of the perks of living as long as they have. They’re a mess, the both of them, but they’re the nicest bigots you’ll ever meet. I press my shoulder against Kasim’s, feeling whole again, as the great-aunts shower us with handfuls of gold coins, too, calling us handsome little bastards.

  Aunt Anenih pinches my cheeks. “Look at you, little Kassir. Oh, this dark chocolate skin, I could lick it off you right now. And Arwin,” she says, turning to Kasim. “You’re a nice hunk of warm caramel. You must drive all those comfy girls crazy, leaving a trail of little bastards behind you, no?”

  “No,” Kasim says. He scowls and discards his fistful of newfound wealth onto the table.

  I scoop up his coins. They clatter and jangle against the ones already in my pocket as I try my damnedest not to feel like a charity case. I turn and catch snickers from Chimwe and Chiso, wearing different cikis of course, with bold diamond-print skirts down to their calves—untouched by the taint of the comfy. “Cousins,” I greet them with a childish stick of my tongue. “Good to see you, as always.” I can’t believe I’m even related to these jerks.

  “Glad you’ve made it up here for a taste of the good life,” Chimwe says.

  “Don’t boast,” Chiso says. “Comfy life is perfectly fine. Sure they might not have the freshest foods, or the servants at their beck, or the best schools, or the spending money. But they’ve got their pride.” Chiso scrunches eir nose. “And sewer rats the size of a small dog.”

  “Children!” booms Uncle Yeboah’s voice. The room goes quiet as he makes his grand entrance through the high arches leading from the living quarters. Even the servants stop dead in their tracks. Uncle Yeboah looks something fierce in his turtleneck ciki jacket—the elasticized python skin dyed indigo, cobalt blue, and gold. I’d been drawn to something similar at Liddie Ameache’s, and had barely turned the price tag over when the sales attendant shooed me away. Sixteen hundred djang. Uncle Yeboah steeples his fingers and brings them to his chin, looking pleased with himself as he approaches the table. His rigid brow eases. “We’re here to celebrate the narrow season, not pick each other apart. Butts in chairs, now.”

  Chiso and Chimwe straighten up and snap to, finding their seats at one end of the sprawling mahogany table. The great-aunts have already seated themselves at the opposite end. Kasim raises a brow, silently asking if we should seat ourselves next to the bigots or the assholes.

  “Bigots, definitely,” I say, louder than I should. I get a stern look from Uncle Yeboah. He seems like he’s bent on taking a reed to my rear, but grits his teeth at me instead. He’s so full of himself, and unabashedly so. Mind as narrow as this damned season. He almost makes me thankful that we’d grown up fatherless.

  Almost.

  “The narrow season is upon us,” Uncle Yeboah says, taking his seat at the head of the table. “Ol’ Icy Blue’s eyes are keen this time of year, so it is important that family stays close and twins stay closer, tempering each other’s vices and virtues alike, lest that great frigid devil set whispers of evil into your mind.”

  “Hush, Yeboah,” Aunt Cisse says, finally settling into her seat across the table from her husband. Mother takes her seat as well, and the servants buzz away. “Speaking that old devil’s name is as good as inviting him into our home! Why don’t you do something useful with your mouth, and say the bless—” Aunt Cisse’s eyes go wide and watery. “Good Grace, what is that smell?” Her eyes track to Uncle Pabio, and her lips purse. “Pabio. I could have sworn I threw that filthy jacket out.”

  Uncle Pabio looks up from doodling upon one of Aunt Cisse’s cloth napkins and gives her an innocent shrug. Aunt Cisse scowls at Uncle Pabio, like he’s taken a shit in one of her immaculate flowerbeds, then she turns to Chiso sitting to her right. “Chisomo! Don’t cross your legs. You’ll crease your ciki,” Aunt Cisse says, flicking Chiso in the forehead. “And Chimwemwe, you little mongrel,” she growls, with a vise grip on Chimwe’s earlobe. “If you slouch like this at the sanctuary next Tiodoti, I swear I’ll disown you!”

  A caterwaul of whining ensues from my cousins. These two are so coddled, they couldn’t punch their way through a wet paper bag without complaining to their mother about it first. Aunt Cisse tunes them out as she checks that her turban is perfectly balanced upon her head, then tucks the edges just so. She looks the picture of a patron donor, until she rises from her seat, leans forward, and slams her hands down onto the table with all the grace of a mouthy fishwife slinging cod at the docks. “For the love of Grace, Yeboah, can you say the blessing so we can eat already?”

  Uncle Pabio whispers into my ear. “I know this is a nice holiday from school for you, but me, I’m counting the days until they ship those whiny brats back to Gabadamosi Prep.” He pats the flask tucked into his breast pocket, then eyes my glass. “I’m not sure there’s enough spirits in the world to make this dinner go by any faster, but we can try, right?”

  I smirk, sneaking my glass to Uncle Pabio as Uncle Yeboah closes his eyes and leads us in prayer. His voice is full of the charisma and charm that landed him his cushy job. “And let vainglory be tempered by humility. Let the outwardly wants of envy be tempered by the inward introspection of conscience. Let the duplicitous tongue be moved to truth and absolute sincerity, and the lecherous heart be guided into chastity. Replace doubt with due diligence, and let greed beget charity. And above all, let Grace shine down upon us all, banishing temper into the icy depths of the shadowlands. Can I get a ‘Hallowed Hands’?”

  “Hallowed Hands!” the great-aunts shout, their hands thrust high in the air. Chimwe and Chiso follow along, albeit with significantly less enthusiasm. Aunt Cisse nods appropriately.

  “And what are we going to do with these Hallowed Hands?” Uncle Yeboah asks.

  “Praise Grace! Praise Grace! Praise Grace!” the great-aunts sing, fingers a-wiggle.

&nbs
p; Uncle Pabio slips me his napkin, strewn with illustrations in a soupy purple ink depicting Uncle Yeboah holding a huge flaming sanjo cig hand-wrapped with paper from the Holy Scrolls. A plume of smoke drifts over into Chimwe’s and Chiso’s open skulls. Uncle Pabio is as talented at weaving conspiracies as he is at drawing indecent picture books. He thinks Grace and Icy Blue are just clever inventions for branding morality, and that all schools, especially religious schools, and especially Gabadamosi, were designed to separate us from nature, from our tribal communities and cultures, and from critical thinking so that we could wholly tolerate this unjust and unnatural system instituted by a bunch of wealthy Nri immigrants fearful of growing Nationalism and the Mzansi elite who pulled their strings.

  His words, not mine.

  Sometimes I want to believe him, to think he knows something that the rest of us don’t, but then he’ll start ranting about “death traders” skimming around the ocean in their sailing ships, and their “skin the color of sun-bleached bone” and how centuries ago, they “almost nearly could have brought an end to the Nri empire spread out along the west coast of the continent and the Ottoman empire on the east, and all the lands like ours caught in between” and it all just gets to be a bit much to swallow.

  The praises continue, then start to peter out. Just when I think we’re through the thick of it, just when I think I can’t stand staring at all this food going cold in front of my eyes for a second longer, Uncle Yeboah says, “And you, Kasim. What are you going to do with those Hallowed Hands?”

  Mother’s posture goes stiff. “Yeboah, you know my stance on religioning,” she warns. “We will respect your observances, as long as you don’t infringe on our right to respectfully decline involvement.”

  “You said it. It’s your stance. The boys are old enough to decide for themselves now.” Yeboah clasps his large and intimidating hands. “Well, boy?”

  “I . . .” Kasim glances at Mother.

  “Look here, boy,” Uncle Yeboah demands, pointing at his own eyes. “Your mother doesn’t know whether or not Grace dwells within your heart. What say you?”

  “Hallowed Hands do not move me,” Kasim says. “My virtues and vices are my own to act upon.”

  Oh, the humility on this one. Kasim could have said “vice” in the singular. But all the humility in the world couldn’t stop his words from causing the great-aunts to go into one of their conniptions. They pray loudly and inappropriately for his “little bastard soul.”

  “And you, Auben. Tell us all how Grace touches you.” You could hear a pin drop as all eyes drill into me. It is not often I have the chance to be seen as the greater twin. I could easily spin a deft lie, say how Grace guides me in my every step, is above me while I sleep, beside me as I sup, to school and from school, always there, always watching. Our narrow season dinner would go on to be its normal absolute disaster. I could lie, but right now, all I can think about is how family obligation is a huge pain in the ass, and a huge waste of time, and I’m done pretending. So for once, I tell the truth.

  “There’s no such thing as Grace,” I say. My heart goes rigid, worried that I’ve gone too far, and at the same time, that I haven’t yet gone far enough. I turn to Uncle Pabio for strength and reassurance, but he’s already lost in another napkin drawing. Still, he nods, almost imperceptibly, and it’s enough to fuel me. “Or Icy Blue. They’re figments to stop people from treating each other like crap, but apparently no one in this family has gotten that memo.”

  “Daia!” Uncle Yeboah booms. “You’d better control that boy of yours before he says something he’ll regret!”

  Mother smiles, and I nearly melt from the pride I see stretched across her lips. “You asked him a question,” she says. “He answered.”

  “You’ve raised these boys and denied them Grace. I should never have—”

  “They’re my boys and I’ve raised them as I’ve seen fit. You’ll have no hand in their upbringing, hallowed or not.”

  “My corset!” Great-aunt Mensah says with a wheeze. “Help me out of my corset!” Usually the great-aunts do not begin to disrobe until after the rum desserts have been served, but Great-aunt Mensah seems overly anxious to free herself from the miracle of a contraption that keeps her body from wiggling like the jellied currants waiting so deliciously for me to take a taste. “Please! I can’t breathe.”

  Yes, she’s all kinds of awful, but the woman needs help, so I take Aunt Mensah’s arm as her breathing becomes strained, guiding her to a comfortable position on the floor.

  “Hail an ambulance!” I order into the brimming chaos. I keep my wits about me, willing myself to remember what we’d learned about this in the homeomedics class I’d just had a test over. Check the airway, I say to myself. No obstructions in her throat. Her pulse has gone thin. I tune out the screaming behind me and place my ear to her mouth, listening for signs of breath. There is none. I focus on her pale pruned lips, ready to press mine against them.

  She doesn’t deserve your help, the whisper tells me. I ignore it.

  She tastes of hard liquor and hard candies. I blow once, twice, her chest rising beneath me. I go to blow once more, but something other than my breath slips coolly over my lips, falls into Aunt Mensah’s mouth. Her skin ashens, her lips go blue and cold as ice.

  Uncle Yeboah tries to restrain his hysterical mother, but she claws her way to her fallen twin and begins beating me with her coin-filled purse. “You filthy, filthy devilish bastard! You’ve killed her!”

  “I’m trying to save her!” I say, but then I take a jawful of designer leather, and I back off. She’s gone now, anyhow, lying there, eyes staring off into nothingness. I’ve never seen death before. So serene, so surreal, so detached from everything. The body once full of life, now an empty husk, and already the world has started to move past it.

  Kasim catches my hand out of nowhere. “You tried,” he says, then bends down to close her eyes. Upon his touch, they flick wide open. Her cheeks flush, and she takes a loud, ragged breath. Kasim stumbles backward, looks at me. I’ve never seen so much disquiet in his eyes.

  “I hear they do that sometimes,” I say to him, later that night, after the ambulance has come and gone, hauling dear Aunt Mensah’s body to the morgue. “The recently deceased. One last involuntary spasm before they kick it permanently.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably what happened,” Kasim says with a grimace, and I can tell he doesn’t believe his words any more than I do.

  Great-aunt Anenih goes three weeks later, and after the funerals are all said and done, we are in the peak of the narrow season. The chill seeps through the windows of our bedroom, beneath our covers, into our bones. Even Mother’s resorted to putting tea candles on the sills at night, though she claims it is purely for decoration, and in no way tied to diverting Icy Blue’s breath from our home.

  It pains me to admit it, but I envy Chimwe and Chiso. I envy their privilege. They already have their entire lives written out for them. They’re a year younger than us, and look how much they’ve accomplished—going to Gabadamosi Preparatory, the premier boarding school in the Cape, and probably the country. Pedigree drives admissions there, and I’ve heard even the offspring of royal families from Nri have been turned down. Our cousins will spend their last year and a half there, then will have Primways University knocking at their doors to bring them on, then six or eight years later, Chimwe and Chiso will be co–vice presidents at their father’s firm, hauling in more djang per day than Mother makes in a year.

  It’s not fair. Mother works damned hard. It hurts to never see her, and when we do see her, it hurts to watch her struggle to raise us all on her own. Two jobs every day so that we can afford to pay tuition at our crappy secular school. There are a dozen religious city schools that we could attend for cheap or free, but she’ll have none of that.

  Still, it eats at me. I’d heard Mother mumbling a couple months back, when we brought home letters about next quarter’s tuition increase. “Grace will provide,” Aunt Ci
sse had said, when Mother had made the mistake of complaining about it over our weekly family dinner. Mom had gritted her teeth so hard, she’d cracked one of her incisors, but what if Aunt Cisse was right? She and her family were certainly well provided for.

  Mother had done her best to keep religion out of our home, but Uncle Yeboah had spoken the truth. I’m old enough to decide for myself now. Besides, if I open my heart to Grace, what’s the worst that could happen? If I feel His Hallowed Hands moving me, I can convince Mother to let me do my religioning in one of the free public schools where I can learn to silence the voices bidding me toward vice. And if I go out into the world and find that Grace doesn’t exist, well . . . there are other ways for a vice-ridden teen to scrape up a few djang. Either way, this is something I have to figure out on my own.

  Only thing is, I’ve never done anything on my own.

  I slip out of bed, the cold driving deeper into me, so deep, I worry I’ll never be able to rid myself of it. I dig in the closet until I find the wu dolls I’d stolen for Ruda. My heart twists, but I try to ignore that failed stage of my life and concentrate on bringing upon a newer, better one.

  The little black-faced dolls stare at me with their heavy-lidded eyes and their lips puckered in a kiss. The wood is rough, and much of the artist’s knifework can be seen and appreciated. Dangling from each of their necks is a strand of white beads with a tiny crystal virtue token attached—a plus sign to signify the greater twin, and a minus sign to signify the lesser.

  “Earth, water, air, and spirit,” I mumble under my breath, careful not to disturb Kasim’s sleep. Body essences, the wu mystic had mentioned. I pluck a piece of my hair for Earth and twine it around the lesser doll’s head. I spit upon the doll’s face for water, breathe into its chest, and then wave it around, hoping that will satisfy my spirit.