Stay With Me

by AYÒ. BÁMI ADÉBÁYÒ.

  I didn’t attend her funeral; Moomi believed it would enrage her family to see me. Akin attended and apart from a moody evening he spent downing bottles of beer when he returned from the funeral, he did not seem to mourn Funmi’s death at all. There was no staring into space, no angry outbursts at the newscasters on TV or a stool that stood in his way, no long nights away from the house which ended with him staggering home and vomiting in the hallway.

  He spent his evenings singing made-up songs to Olamide and reading newspaper articles aloud to her. My daughter knew all about the proceedings of the constitution review committee and the constituent assembly before she was three months old. It was the most beautiful thing, watching my husband tell my daughter things she could not understand. It was so perfect, so surreal that I wanted to press the pause button on life in those moments.

  Funmi faded from my mind, slowly, like a bad dream.

  Soon Akin’s hands were groping me in the early hours of the morning. He reached across Olamide’s sleeping form to squeeze my breast and whispered about us making another baby. And though, by this time, Moomi had poked three fingers into my vagina and assured me that it was tight enough before terminating the alum-water treatment, I was not ready for sex. I told Akin this, but he ignored my words, seducing me with words of his own about how beautiful our lives would be with another child.

  I caved in like I always did under the weight of his husky voice.

  Olamide would darken beyond Akin’s brownness to my shade, my mother’s shade, a midnight black that would glow ethereally in the fierce sun. She would get all the prizes and I would stand up throughout the prize-giving ceremonies at her school, clapping loudly so that everyone would recognise her as my child. She would go on to university, of course, become a doctor or an engineer, an inventor, a Nobel prize-winner in medicine, chemistry or physics.

  I could see all of this in her eyes when she suckled my breast, and I was already proud.

  16

  About a month after Olamide was born, I went to church for the first time since I had married Yejide. Stopped bothering with the Sunday services when I was at university, but I still showed up for Easter and Christmas celebrations before I got married. Hadn’t been back in church on a Sunday morning since then, because I didn’t think I had an extra hour in my week to spend sitting in a pew. But two weeks after my daughter was born, I started having nightmares again, dreaming up the same images from the protest march I joined in Ife in ’81. Kept seeing the jeans-clad girl lying in the rain – only difference was that this time I knew that each girl on the floor was Funmi. So I went back to church.

  I didn’t sit in the back pew where many men, dragged to the Sunday service by nagging wives, dozed with their mouths open or read newspapers. I went as close to the front row as I could get. Sat in a pew where I had a clear view of the stained-glass windows behind the altar. The glassy scene showed Christ and the twelve at the Last Supper: eleven disciples at the table; the twelfth, presumably Judas already on his way out, his back to Christ.

  When the vicar mounted the pulpit, the old woman to my right hung her head as though about to pray. Soon, she started to snore softly. The vicar began his sermon by reading out the Lord’s Prayer from the massive Bible that resided permanently on the marble pulpit. He stopped at Deliver us from evil and breathed heavily into the microphone. He whispered the words, repeating the line over and over, pausing after each word, his voice rising with each repetition until he was shouting into the microphone: BUT. DELIVER. US. FROM. EVIL.

  Beside me, the old woman was startled out of her sleep. She looked around the church, then rested her chin on her chest again.

  ‘We often ask the Lord to deliver us from evil,’ the vicar said. ‘And we should. However we must also consider the unspeakable evils that we seek out by ourselves. What are we doing about the terrible evils that we can deliver ourselves from? Why must we always wait for the Lord when we are perpetrating so much evil with our own hands? Have we stopped to think about the evil we deliver into the world? The list is endless, but let me try to remind you: adultery, sloth, envy, jealousy, bitterness, anger, drunkenness . . .’

  The vicar’s eyes roamed the rows as he spoke. Our eyes met when he mentioned drunkenness, as if he knew something about me, something hidden, secret. His gaze lingered on me; maybe he wanted my heart to quiver. I shook my head from side to side, slowly, as I imagined saints did when they heard all about the sins of the worldly.

  Fact is, I’m not a drunkard. I don’t drink a lot. There are months when I don’t take any alcohol, not even a glass of wine. If I had to count the number of times I have been drunk during my whole life, you could count them all on one hand. First time I got drunk, I was a teenager. At the time, my father would send me to buy him a gourd of fresh palm wine every evening. Dotun often went with me. On our way back home, we’d drink a bit of the wine and chew raw ewedu leaves to get rid of the smell before we got into the house. One day, we decided to drink everything in the gourd. The plan was to tell Baba that we’d been attacked by rogues who had snatched the gourd from us. That was the last time Baba sent us to get palm wine.

  According to Moomi, Dotun and I arrived on our street drunk, beating the gourd, singing church hymns. We went past our home, marched into our neighbour’s compound, calling for lost souls to repent. Moomi blamed Baba for sending her young children to buy alcohol. He blamed her for raising boys who couldn’t keep their drink down. The argument lasted the whole year, dying down to rise again at unexpected moments in Moomi’s shrill voice and Baba’s studied silence.

  Moomi ripped our buttocks with a stick every day for a week, extracting a promise not to touch alcohol until we died with each stroke. She gave me double the number of strokes Dotun got, reminded me that she expected more from me because I was her first-born son, the beginning of her strength. I discovered beer during the next week. Best thing about it was that Moomi couldn’t recognise the smell on our breath because Baba didn’t drink it at the time. Dotun and I would pour beer into plastic cups, then drink under Moomi’s nose and tell her that we were sharing a bottle of malt.

  As the vicar continued his sermon that Sunday, I made a note in my jotter to get a crate of beer ready for Dotun’s next visit; he planned to stop over in Ilesa for a few days on his way to Abuja at some point in the next couple of weeks. When I glanced up, I didn’t look at the vicar, stared instead at the stained-glass windows. Struck for the first time by Judas’s downturned lips, I wondered if he already regretted what he was about to do. I had regrets that Sunday morning, about getting drunk during Olamide’s naming ceremony. I had had my first beer after Dotun arrived from Lagos with his family around ten in the morning, just before the ceremony began. I’d stood in the storeroom beside the kitchen, the place where nobody would have looked for me. Swallowed gulp after gulp of warm beer until I’d emptied three brown bottles back-to-back. It was easier to smile when I rejoined the crowd that had gathered in our home to celebrate with Yejide and me. Even then, my words were not slurred when I read out the twenty-one names that Olamide would bear.

  Each name was a contribution from a key member of the family. Even Yejide’s stepmothers contributed names. Olamide was Yejide’s choice, but everyone thought it was my choice since it was the first name I called out. But I did not give that child any name, not one. The beer made the names roll off my tongue as if they were names whose layers of meaning I, father of the child, had pondered upon before agreeing to include them on the handwritten list that I read from. It was so much easier to be a father after three bottles of beer.

  Everyone was congratulating me. They called me Baba Aburo, Baba Ikoko, Baba Baby, then after the names had been given, Baba Olamide. Colleagues slapped me on the back, told me that the next baby had to be a boy. Friends said I had allowed Yejide to start with an easy hand by having a girl; next it was time for a boy – better still, boys. Two, three, four boys, as many as I could knock into her at once. Then somebody remembered Funmi, reme
mbered that I was now pulling double duty.

  My colleagues and friends decided that I needed reinforcement. The kind any man would need if faced with the task of getting two beautiful women pregnant with boys. It was time to start getting ready, one of my friends said. We were all seated around a metal table beneath the large tarpaulin tent that was used for the naming ceremony. We were drinking beer and eating fried meat as the conversation took place. I was not as drunk as most people at the table when Dotun suggested that I should drink several bottles of odeku in preparation for the task ahead.

  It was Dotun who then brought the crate of stout to our table. He handed me the first brown bottle, while the other men at the table chanted: odeku odeku odeku. The men stood up to hand me the subsequent bottles, as though each one was a gift – their own contribution to solidifying my virility and populating my family with enough children to make up for the years when quite a number of them had asked me to do something about the barren woman in my house. They gave me bottle after bottle, cheered me on each time I slammed an empty brown bottle on the table like a warlord returning from battle holding an opponent’s head.

  I don’t remember how Funmi came to join us at that table, how she too became involved in the drunken preparation for the task of filling our house with a dozen children. But soon enough, Funmi and I were swapping beer bottles, laughing like fools. That day was the first time I saw Funmi drink stout. No, drunkenness has never been a problem for me or the women in my life. And as the vicar began to wrap up his sermon that Sunday about a month after Funmi died, I decided that drunkenness was not something I needed to be delivered from.

  ‘Perhaps when we ask the Lord to deliver us from evil, we are really asking him to deliver us from ourselves.’ The vicar wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief. ‘I admonish you today, to deliver yourself from every evil that you have brought into your life with your own hands. Let us now bow our heads for prayers.’

  I tried to shut my eyes and pray, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Funmi. I could see her clearly as I studied the stained glass. I could hear her final yelp, see the way her hands tried to grab the banister after I pushed her down the stairs.

  17

  When I was a child, my stepmothers would usher their children into bed to tell them stories. But always behind closed and bolted doors. I was never invited in to listen, so I lurked around in the corridor, moving from doors to windows as I tried to determine which woman’s voice was loudest each night.

  I consoled myself by saying that being motherless meant that I got to pick and choose my stories. If I did not like the story one wife was telling her children, I could simply move to the next doorway. I was not trapped behind the bolted doors like my half-siblings. I told myself that I was free. Sometimes, I did not check the floor very well before sitting down and I would sit in chicken or goat shit. Some of the women were just dirty; they did not bother to clean up their part of the corridor before settling in for the night.

  I loved the riddles best because I knew them so well. The thin rod that touches both heaven and earth? Rain. The one who eats with the king, but does not pick up the plate? The housefly. I mouthed the answers from my spot in the corridor, usually before a half-sibling screamed it inside the room. And when the other children were asked to clap for the one who had got the answer right, I would smile and my face would feel warm, as if they were actually clapping for me.

  I would sing along to the choruses that came in the middle of the tale, but always under my breath. If my voice was heard on the other side, if one of the mothers came out to check, I would have been in hot soup. My ear would have been twisted and pulled until it was hot enough to boil water on. In our polygamous home, eavesdropping was not just rude, it was criminal. Everyone had secrets, secrets that they were ready to guard with their lives. I learned to be light-footed, to listen for the footfalls of anyone coming to the door during the tale. I learned to listen and run to my room without making noise.

  My favourite story was the one about Oluronbi and the Iroko tree. Initially, it was difficult for me to believe the version my stepmothers told. Their Oluronbi was a market woman who promised to give her daughter to the Iroko tree if it could help her to sell more goods than other traders in the market. At the end of the story, she lost her child to the Iroko. I hated this version because I did not believe that anyone would trade a child for anything else. The story as my stepmothers told it did not make sense to me, so I decided to create my own version. I added new bits and pieces each time one of my stepmothers told the tale. After a while, I would tune out whenever they told Oluronbi’s story and concentrate on building my own version of it.

  That was the version I told my Olamide. I started telling her stories after Moomi left. She would have thought it was strange that I was telling stories to an infant who could not comprehend what I was saying. But I had been waiting all my life for a child, my own child, a child I could tell stories to. I was not ready to wait one more minute. I told the stories in the afternoon, when Olamide and I were alone in the house. I made up new stories in addition to those I remembered from my childhood. But I told my version of Oluronbi’s story most often. And I think Olamide liked it as much as I did.

  In my version, Oluronbi was born a very long time ago, at a time when human beings still understood the language of trees and animals. Oluronbi’s family loved her and she was everyone’s favourite. She was like water; she had no enemies in her family. Oluronbi’s mother loved her so much that she took Oluronbi along to the market every day. This was how Oluronbi learned to trade very well, so that even as a young girl she knew how to manage a stall. Oluronbi was an obedient child, very beautiful. She never told a lie, never stole; she never snuck out at night to talk to boys behind a wall.

  Oluronbi was living happily until one fateful day. On that day, Oluronbi’s father was harvesting a lot of yams on his farm. This farm was next to a forest. He asked Oluronbi’s mother and all the children to follow him to the farm to help out. But Oluronbi was asked to stay behind to manage the stall. When she got back from the market in the evening, she prepared a big meal for the people who had gone to the farm. Then she waited and waited for them to get back. The sun disappeared from the sky and they didn’t return from the farm. When the sun came up the next morning, Oluronbi went to the market. She assumed that her family had decided to sleep at the farm the previous night. But when she got back from the market, there was still no one in the house. There was some light in the sky, so she hurried into the forest and went to her father’s farm. There was nobody there. She walked the length and breadth of the farm, calling out the names of each member of her family. There was no response.

  By the time Oluronbi got back to the village, it was dark. She went home, and when she discovered there was no one there, she began going from house to house, asking if anyone had seen her family. While the sun slept that night, Oluronbi went to every house in the village to ask if anyone had seen her family members. No one knew where they were.

  The moment the sun woke up and started its work in the skies, Oluronbi went to the king’s palace to report the strange occurrence. The king sent out a search party into the forest to look for the missing people. Oluronbi didn’t leave the king’s palace until the search party returned two days later. The search had been fruitless.

  ‘Maybe your family decided to leave this our village,’ the king said to Oluronbi.

  Oluronbi pleaded with the king to send the bravest hunters in the village into the depths of the forest. The king agreed, but after five days, the hunters returned empty-handed. They too had been unable to find Oluronbi’s family. The king advised Oluronbi to get on with her life because there was nothing left to be done. ‘Maybe your family decided to leave the village,’ he said again.

  Oluronbi did not believe the king; she knew that her family would never abandon her. So she decided to search for them again in the forest. Every day of the week she went deep into the forest, asking all the trees if
they had seen her family. But the trees refused to tell her anything.

  Then one day she asked the king of trees, the Iroko tree.

  ‘I know where your family is,’ the Iroko said.

  ‘Are they alive? Tell me – are they still alive?’ Oluronbi asked.

  ‘Yes, they are still alive,’ the Iroko said. ‘But I don’t know how long they will last.’

  Oluronbi screamed. ‘Iroko, tell me where they are so I can rescue them quickly!’

  ‘No,’ the Iroko said.

  ‘Please, Iroko, tell me where they are. I will do anything – anything you ask me to do, I will do.’

  ‘No way,’ said the Iroko.

  ‘Please, Iroko, I will give you anything you want, anything you ask, just tell me where they are.’

  ‘Anything I want?’ the Iroko asked.

  ‘Anything.’ Oluronbi was on her knees before the Iroko tree.

  ‘I want your first child,’ the Iroko said.

  ‘Iroko, but I don’t have a child,’ Oluronbi said. ‘Ask me for anything else, and I will give it to you. Do you want a cow?’

  ‘No,’ the Iroko said. ‘I want your first child.’

  ‘Do you want a goat? I can get a very big goat.’

  ‘No,’ the Iroko said. ‘I want your first child.’

  ‘But I don’t have a child to give you,’ Oluronbi said. ‘I am not even married.’

  ‘You can fulfil your vow when you have a child,’ the Iroko said.