by Jowhor Ile
The distant drumming had stopped. Paul turned over and mumbled something in his sleep, and Ajie was sure he could hear Bibi softly breathing from the room next door.
—
There is a house on the left corner of the square. If you are walking from Mercury Super Store, it’s the first thing you will see. It’s built of red brick and has wooden windows that open outward. There is a high veranda and there are five steps you have to climb to get to it. Beside this house, there is a path wide enough for a car to drive along.
Paul and Ajie turned left onto this road, and the sun was high, but the cotton trees that lined the path shielded them. They walked past Nwube’s house, which had a stick barring the entrance to the narrow walkway. There was pounding coming from Nkaa’s house, and the voices of women were loud and indistinct. Nkaa was a hunter, famed for killing three buffaloes in his lifetime, before buffaloes became extinct in Ogba land. People said that the buffaloes got offended and left due to the inhospitality shown them. Nkaa paid the price for hunting down these great beasts with his lack of children. Buffaloes, it was said, had strong spirits.
Here is the house Charlie built. The house his son now lives in since Charlie died. Ajie never met Charlie, but there was a popular ballad about him and his wife, Opi, that had endured. Opi had refused to let Charlie have the chicken gizzard, which was a part reserved for the man of the house. The chicken thighs were the man’s portion; the chicken bottom was his, too; so were the kidneys and the breasts. Opi, as it turned out, had developed a ruinous taste for gizzards and simply dished them out for herself all the time. These were the facts of this notorious domestic dispute. “What?” the final line of the ballad inquired. “Opi, what wrong did Charlie do to have married you?”
“Wait!” Someone was shouting and running toward them. “Wait.” It was Ossai, Ajie’s friend. “I went to your house to look for you, but you were not there. Someone said they saw you near Mercury. Where are you going?”
“We are going to see Boy in Obigwe,” Ajie said.
“Do you want to come with us?” Paul asked. “We’ll drive to Omoku. Boy’s cousin has a party.”
“I’ll come,” Ossai said, and fell in line with them as they walked along. “There is going to be trouble in town today,” he continued, still breathless from his running.
Company had decided to give all of Ogibah a gift of twenty cows for the New Yam Festival. This morning two trucks drove into Ogibah with the cows and parked on the road beside Nwokwe’s house. There was already fighting among the OYF. Some of the members thought the gift should be returned right away, that Company had ignored what Ogibah was talking about and instead had brought gifts to win them over. Other members thought it was stupid to return the gifts, it was a fine gesture, there was no point in being so extreme. Other people were wondering why the truck was parked in front of Nwokwe’s house instead of in the square. Who apart from Nwokwe was consulted about the gift? Fighting had broken out that morning. Nwokwe’s son, Ogbuku, had a third of the OYF with him. If these old men wanted to talk forever, they could go ahead, but before sunset, there would be the smell of burning meat in the air.
Ossai had given them a detailed account of the morning skirmish when they finally hit Uhwo. “Morgan sent a message to Ogbuku saying that if any of the cows’ blood dropped on Ogibah soil tonight, human blood would drop, too.”
Uhwo was a vast spread of wiry grassland that stretched from Ogibah to Obigwe. Ma said Uhwo was an anomaly: a Sahel-like grassland that had no business being in a rain forest. Bendic said it was possible Uhwo was a desiccated river from hundreds of years ago. It still flooded often, and the soil was an ashy clay that didn’t support much farming; it was a hot shrub steppe teeming with rodents and small lives. Animals came there to graze. It was there, by that tree, that Nkaa crouched in wait all night for a herd of buffaloes he had been tracking for weeks.
Each time Nkaa cut down a buffalo, the whole village came out to celebrate his kill. A medicine man would be sent for from an Ekpeye village, because Ekpeye people, it was believed, had strange and powerful medicines. As the buffalo was being flayed, torn apart, and disemboweled, the medicine man would take Nkaa to a hut to prepare his body against the attack of the buffaloes. That same night Nkaa would be escorted straight to his mother’s people.
Late in the deep dark, buffalo cries would be heard. A herd of them would gather at Nkaa’s door and weep all night. Why had he taken their brother? Why had he taken their mother? And if Nkaa had a pregnant wife at the time, the very next morning, she would see blood. After he killed his third buffalo in ’82, his mother begged him to leave the creatures alone. She wanted to have a grandchild from him before going to her grave.
They reached Boy’s house and went in through the back door. Paul looked at his watch and said it was one-thirty and that they were just in time. Boy was already dressed. “Look at my Port Harcourt boys!” he shouted when he saw his visitors. “Look at my boys from Port Harcourt!” He shook hands with Paul and asked how he was doing. Some children sitting on the ground stopped their play to watch the new arrivals. Boy was about eighteen but always treated Paul like his mate. He liked to take them places whenever they came to the village. He would brag about them to friends. His first and only time in Port Harcourt, he had come with his mother to spend the weekend with the Utus at 11 Yakubu. Boy’s mother had brought them a bunch of plantains, groundnuts, and palm kernels as gifts, and Bendic and Ma had said to her, “Oh why do you worry yourself so much.” Boy had spent the weekend learning to play Nintendo games with Paul. When Bendic took them to Chanrai’s and asked them to pick whatever they wanted, Boy didn’t know what to pick; he didn’t know if he wanted anything. Later he told Paul and Ajie that Chanrai’s was like abroad, and was it the American man at the counter who owned the shop? Paul told him Jaysil wasn’t the owner of Chanrai’s, although someone in his family was, and that they were from India, not America.
The party in Omoku wasn’t really happening, at least not yet. It was only three in the afternoon, and there was music coming from the room Boy led them to. It was dark inside, and Ajie had to squint to see the two people who were sitting on the bed. The stereo speakers were set on the floor, and Ajie could feel the vibration coming from the thumping of the music. Boy shook hands with the two boys sitting on the bed and told them these were his cousins. One boy stood up lazily and said welcome to them. He left the room and returned with four drinks, which he dropped on the floor beside them and nodded at Paul. He left the room again for a long time. He ushered in two girls when he came back in. “Have a seat,” he said to them, and they sat down awkwardly on the bed beside Paul.
Later, Ajie heard Boy saying to the girls that Paul had come from Port Harcourt. One of the girls wore a blue cotton blouse with a red rose drawn over her bosom. She had a print wrapper around her waist and wore rubber slippers. Her face was white with talcum powder, and she looked like she would rather not be in the room. Her friend was chatting with Boy’s friend. Chaka Demus & Pliers came through the speakers, chanting “Water Bam Bam”; the girls spoke quietly among themselves and then stood up and began to dance. They held each other’s hands and moved to the beat. Boy went to the door and beckoned to Ajie. When Ajie stood up, Boy beckoned to Ossai, too, and they both followed him out of the room.
—
It was already dark when they got back to Ogibah. The air was thick and muggy and filled with the smell of roasted meat. While approaching from Uhwo, Ogibah was drenched in a shifting half-light that gave it the feel of an abandoned village. A place ruined, sacked, and set ablaze by an army from far away, carting away treasures, leaving behind the dead and the dying, and some livestock to roam the empty streets. Ajie heard the sound of pounding as they neared Nwube’s house. There were a few bright stars and a quarter moon in the sky. Palm trees in the far distance stood away from each other, and beyond, beside Base Camp, the rushing red flames of flaring gas licked the sky.
Bibi was downstairs by the ta
nk with her friends. “Ma and Bendic have been looking for the two of you. Where did you go?” she asked, sounding ominous. “They are upstairs, you better go and see them now.” Her friends had stopped talking, waiting for Bibi to finish, and she fully occupied this space they had given her. The girls seemed impressed both by her command of English and by the authority in her voice. Paul and Ajie walked past without much of a response.
Upstairs, Ma looked at them and said, “Ah, you are back. Where have you been?” Then she looked away from them and continued talking to Bendic. When she glanced back and saw they were still standing there, she said, “Your food is on the kitchen table,” and as they left the parlor, her eyes followed them. “Ajie, have you had a bath today?”
“Yes,” Ajie replied, angry that Ma had singled him out to ask that question. They went to the kitchen, brought their food down, and sat on the dwarf kitchen stools to eat. They had not thought much of the smell of burned meat in the air when they first neared the village. They had not remembered or thought of the ten cows Ossai had talked about in the morning. Twenty cows that were brought in two trucks, a gift from Company to all of Ogibah as a gesture of goodwill for the festival. This gesture that had caused such ruction that morning. “We do not want their disgusting gift! They can’t buy us from ourselves.” “But why should we reject a gift during our festival?”
Morgan threw Nwokwe on the ground, and Nwokwe’s son ran in for a machete and had to be restrained, and the warning cry, “Otchu! Otchu! Murder! Murder!” ripped the air.
Paul and Ajie did not know the details of how and why the uproar was calmed, how it came to be that the cows were killed and shared among all the families in the village. If any portion was set aside for Bendic, it did not get into his house; it did not boil in Ma’s pot.
Paul and Ajie finished their food and went to their room and then fell asleep almost immediately, until Ossai came to wake them up when it was time for Ntitroegberi.
—
The path to Nkaa’s house was narrow and crowded by trees. Paul carried a flashlight so they could see where they were stepping. They walked in single file—Paul in front with the flashlight, Ajie in the middle, and Ossai behind. Nkaa was now the oldest man from their Onubobdo, so it was his duty to do the narration that night. For Paul and Ajie, this would be their first time to hear him tell the stories. They had always enjoyed how Okposi told the story of their ancestors’ arrival at Ogba land—although the story was the same, each time it sounded different from Okposi’s mouth—but he had recently died under the knife of a surgeon while having his appendix removed at the General Hospital in Omoku.
By the time Paul, Ajie, and Ossai arrived in Nkaa’s front room, there was hardly any space left for them to sit. There was some shuffling about before Ajie and Ossai found a place on the floor to crouch, and Paul stood leaning on the wall beside them. The boy sitting in front of Ajie smelled of palm-kernel oil. He soon fell asleep and his head began to tilt slowly backward, and each time, just when Ajie thought to slap him awake, the boy caught himself with a quick jerk of his lolling head and then looked around, ready to refute anyone who accused him of dozing off.
There was a stir when Nkaa walked into the room. There was hardly enough passage for him to get to his seat, and the movement of people making space for him upset the sitting arrangement on the floor. This worked in some people’s favor; Ajie tapped Paul on the leg and motioned for him to sit on the floor beside him. Nkaa cleared his throat and immediately began a call-and-response song. Ajie saw Bibi come in with two of her friends. She looked around, her eyes searching, and then she walked toward the left of the room, where some of her friends who’d arrived earlier had kept a place for her on a bench.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The school gate was made of wrought iron, freshly painted green. New block work was in progress to replace the barbed wired fencing. Students in checked red uniforms dotted the side roads and parking lot. Ma sat alone in the back of the car as it approached the barrier. Marcus wound down the window to talk to the security man at the gate; he was dressed in a navy blue polyester uniform and held a stick in his hand. The man looked into the car, nodded at Ma, and then waved them on.
Visiting-day regulations required that students remain in their dorms, carrying on as normal, until their parents arrived, at which point a staff member on duty at the gate would send for them. But it was nearly noon, and prefects ignored their duty, rules slackened, and loitering became the order of the day. Those who were hopeful their parents would visit sneaked about, scanning the gate for cars that looked like their parents’. Some attached themselves to friends whose parents had already arrived, heading down together to be introduced—as seatmates, bunk mates, dorm mates, new best friends—eager for a taste of some home cooking.
Paul sat with his friends on a windowsill in the senior classroom block, with a clear view of the gate. When he saw the Peugeot 504 come through the gate, he didn’t check to confirm the plate number: He knew too well that blue metallic sheen of the chassis, the particular glint of the windshield, and on which corners of it the insurance stickers were stamped. He snapped his fingers at a passing junior boy whom he ordered to go fetch Ajie at once. “If you divert, you are dead.”
“Yes, Senior.” The junior boy scampered off.
Paul and Ajie soon joined Ma where the car was parked beneath a whistling pine tree by the science laboratories.
“Look at the two of you!” Ma gasped in horror. “You are all necks.” She drew Paul close, feeling his body to see how much weight he had lost.
“Ma, stop.” Paul laughed, trying to pull away.
“You are all bones,” she declared. “Ajie, are you skipping meals? Or is it that they are not serving proper food in that dining hall?” She turned around. “Marcus, come and look at my children o!” Paul and Ajie greeted Marcus.
“Madam, it’s growth,” Marcus said playfully. “They are stretching out, that’s why they are thin.”
“This stretching is too much,” Ma said, searching her children’s faces and bodies with her eyes. “Let this school not kill my children for me, please.”
They threw open all four doors of the car to allow for a good supply of breeze. It was the second week in February, and here in the hilly lands of the east, the receding harmattan season had left the air dry and balmy. The soil was a stony red. The generator house stood at a remove from them, and behind it was a stretch of field that was stopped by the barbed wire fence. From where they sat, they could see the Enugu–Port Harcourt Expressway and the vast cashew plantation that stretched far and wide on the other side of the road.
Ma served and passed the food to them, leaning into the car from where she stood by the trunk. Spicy fried rice with diced carrot, green peas, chopped liver fried to a crisp, and stewed chicken. Marcus insisted Ma serve him only a small portion so he didn’t doze off at the wheel from a heavy stomach.
They all dug in.
“Why did Bendic not come?” Paul asked.
“He probably has a court case in Lagos or something,” Ajie informed Paul, teeth clenched, eyes squinting as he chewed a piece of chicken thigh.
“Your father is resting,” Ma said. “The doctor asked him to take some days off and relax at home.”
“Some days off? Is Bendic sick?” Paul asked, looking at Ma.
“He just needs rest; you know how your father carries on with work,” Ma said. “Dr. Idoniboye said he must slow down a bit, reduce his movement a little.”
“I can’t imagine Bendic obeying any instruction like that,” Paul said.
Ajie thought of Bendic lying in bed compulsorily. Faceup, hands by his sides, not moving or turning, just lying there inert for a whole week and then getting up to go about his business when the time had been served fully.
“At home or in the hospital?” Paul asked.
“At home now,” Ma replied, a little reluctant. “He stayed in the hospital for three days first. He’s fine, don’t worry your heads.”
She didn’t tell them that Bendic had slumped in his office one afternoon and been rushed to the hospital, that he had remained unconscious for two days before he came to. She didn’t tell them about the series of tests they had to run; about carrying him back and forth between their home and Braithwaite Memorial because that was the only hospital in Port Harcourt that was equipped to carry out the tests. Then there was the weeklong wait for the results. She didn’t tell them how she had prayed, really prayed, for the first time in a long time; how she had felt she was standing on a precipice, a raging wind at her back, the dark bottomless unknown before her. They would never know of the promise she made to God at that moment, and then to herself, to nature, to the universe, to whatever was good and great out there, that if only things could turn out right, please let this thing turn out right.
She looked up at her children and said, “Your father wrote you letters, but finish your food first.”
Marcus looked back and said, “Look at all the food still on your plates. Paul, Ajie, what’s happening? Quick quick, there’s still more food in the cooler.”