WE HAVE A FEW TOMBS IN MY VILLAGE. BUT THEY ARE nothing like what I want for Okike. They are the usual blocks of ugly dull masonry. I want the best tomb for her, a big, shiny tomb, so I go in search of something similar. The villages that make up our region of Ishiayanashi are all set up the same way. They are connected by a twisted matrix of paths that loop around farmlands and compounds. I know of many people who’ve died: of old age, a fall from a palm tree, complications from childbirth, convulsions, measles, malaria, or road accidents. But I find no more than a few graves as I walk through the cluster of villages. Most of them have been ploughed over and planted with crops.
I remember a grave in the village where people go to Mass in a stone-walled building named Holy Trinity Catholic Church, where catechism classes are held outside under a mango tree. On weekdays, the building is used as a primary school. Ticks used to live in the broken floor back in my school days. My mother would open up my big toes with a thorn to free them of the large egg-white parasites imprisoned inside. On Sundays, the classrooms disappear and an altar is set up. The wooden benches are rearranged to create an aisle for the bony parish priest to pace up and down. Sometimes, when angry for reasons known to only him, the erratic priest will hoof around in a fit of bad temper. “Like a hyena that smells blood,” I overheard someone say. The priest mandates the parishioners to shun Ezenwanyi’s shrine. “It is a heathen practice, and you must not allow yourself to be yoked with unbelievers,” Father Matthew directs his congregation.
The damp morning is airless with the stench of rotten mangoes as I cross the church, which faces the cream-and-brown parish residence the congregation laboured to build for Father Matthew. My mother is saving for a general congregation levy to replace the priest’s old, smoking 504 Salon car.
I finally locate the tomb I am thinking of on the roadside at the entrance to a long pathway up to a house painted in browns and dark reds. It is a plain, flat slab of cement whose occupant is depicted by a statue sitting at the head of the grave: a pretty young woman, showing a bit of flesh. Her skin is glistening with mist—a wet, plain-of-Bournvita brown. Her hair is plaited in a series of loops like the slender coils of akidi, the black bean pods planted in farms.
“Why are you touching that statue?” a harsh voice bawls behind me.
I had moved closer and stretched a hand to feel the statue’s wet clay skin before the voice pinned me to the spot. I turn around to find a boy my age standing right behind me in a frayed black shirt and combat shorts. He is glaring at me. He looks troublesome, that I see at once.
“I am just admiring the tomb,” I say in as polite a tone as possible, my eyes settling on his intimidating pectorals.
“Don’t you know it’s my mother’s tomb,” he says, bunching his fists and coming closer.
I take a step back. Anyone passing could stretch out a hand and touch the statue, that’s how close the tomb is to the road, but for the sake of my teeth I do not want to argue with this boy in combat shorts with a strong chest and a bunched fist. He quickly steps up to close the gap between us. We look at each other, his eyes flashing with anger and violence. I don’t know what to say to him or do, if I should apologize or turn and take a sprint for it. He doesn’t look like he cares about apologies.
Finally, I drop my eyes, my feet shifting uneasily. Maybe he sees my fear. He steps up and shoves me backwards, so hard I almost trip over. He waits to see how I will react, but my hands hang limply by my side. The insult rankles, but I know I don’t stand a chance against him. If I want to do anything, it is to turn and tear off like a grasscutter doubling back from a predator, and then to show him my five fingers from a safe distance or even throw the whole ten at him in contempt. As if reading my thoughts he closes the gap between us again, so that I can feel his breath on my face like flame, his hands still tightened into fists.
“Hei, Ehamehule!” A man emerges from the house, his voice deep and rumbling.
The boy stops, loosens up, but his eyes are still on me, regretting the beating I may have been spared. It must be his father. I can see their resemblance. The boy has the man’s healthy brown face and springy gait. In grey shorts and bare torso, the man looks well built, with good muscle tone, a clean-shaven face, and thick calves.
“Why are you fighting him?” the man says.
He approaches with brisk, springy steps.
“I caught him trying to dirty the statue,” the boy says. His lie comes off so glib, like a clean breath.
“I didn’t,” I protest, my voice suddenly very loud and defiant. “I was only looking at the statue.”
The man considers me briefly. The brown imperious eyes move back to his son. “I have told you, if you keep fighting anyone who touches the statue, you will end up fighting everyone,” he says in a voice full of reverence for his late wife or the artwork or both.
The boy walks away, still scowling at me.
On my way home, I run into Eke in the company of a dark-skinned, angular boy. Eke is my closest friend, and we are from the same village. We used to walk to school together, barefoot, eating unripe mangoes we stoned down and African olives we plucked from their trees like madmen. Eke is in his second year in the secondary school now.
The boy in his company looks like a snake, with small, loose limbs. He probably said something funny, because Eke is laughing in his dry, crackling way that reminds me of a quick bushfire. We shake hands like young men, the three of us, and then Eke and I watch the boy twist and dance down the road, his thin back arced like that of Bingo, our malnourished dog.
“Who is he?”
“My cousin. I was seeing him off. He came all the way from Lejja to visit us.”
I glance back again at the boy’s elongated form as we begin to stroll the other way, to Eke’s family house.
I tell Eke about my run-in with the boy over his mother’s statue.
“I know him. His name is Ehamehule, and he is the only child of the woman who died,” Eke says.
Eke seems to know everyone. He lives with his mother and siblings in a house his father left them. His father made huge profits from groundnut storage and built their aluminum-roofed house before he died in a motorcycle accident. His mother is a warden at Holy Trinity Catholic Church. She doesn’t like me all that much.
“I was so afraid, and then his father appeared, to my greatest relief.”
Eke lights his crackling bushfire laughter. And then we arrive at the treed compound and settle down on a bench in the shadow of an orange tree in front of the large house. The tree is heavy with ripe oranges. At the back of the house are a goat pen and a chicken coop with low mud walls and grass roofs. A towering coconut tree carrying many seeds stands guard over the house.
Eke’s mother is not home, and I feel relieved. She once called me “ohu ma”—a term I did not understand but knew was some kind of insult—even after the parish priest had said not to, especially to his wardens and the front-pew sitters. And then she swept away my footprints from her compound. I was in primary school at the time, barely nine years old. Eke and I were playing when his mother returned from the farm. I hurried off as soon as I saw her. As I made for the path that led home, I heard the quick, angry swish of a broom. And when I looked back, I saw Eke’s mother sweeping the ground I had trod over on my way out.
Growing up, I had always sensed that something was wrong with my family. I knew that people whispered about us. I supposed that even my friends talked more freely amongst themselves than they did when I was around; sometimes I could not help but sense an air of reservation when we were together. When I visited my friends, I’d often have the feeling that I was being watched by their families. I walked into conversations that ended abruptly, suspiciously. I heard cryptic hisses and felt hard glares stabbing my back. I tried to talk to my mother about this, but eventually I gave up, because each time I raised it her mood changed. It brought sadness to her face. Words grew too thick for speech, sometimes ending in a flash of anger, so I learned to let go. I suspected it was because my father still openly went to that shrine.
“That makes you a coward, fleeing from a boy your age.” Eke brings me back to the present, laughing long at my confession, his laughter crackling wildly and quickly, and then dying down in faint claps and pops.
“He looked like he was cast in iron.”
“And you, what are you cast in? Apiti, a paste of loam?”
I chuckle at his joke. We pluck some oranges, peel them with a penknife, and eat.
“My mother says she was very beautiful, the boy’s mother,” Eke says. “She says the woman died the same day she made the pretty hair she wears in that statue, when Ehamehule was still a baby. Years after she was buried at the churchyard, they accidentally dug up her head when they were digging the foundation for the priest’s residence. Her plaits were still as fresh as the day she had made them, untouched by dead-flesh mites. It was a big mystery, my mother says.”
I vaguely remember. The story had broken one afternoon on our way home from school: a fresh human head exhumed at the churchyard.
I suddenly glimpse Eke’s mother returning along the footpath that leads into the compound from the main road in small curves and half loops. Sometimes the path makes me think of a necklace tossed carelessly on a table, curved here, twisted there. She is carrying a large basket on her head, a dark, robust, irritable woman.
I greet her as she crosses, a loudly whispered “Deje.”
Stamping as if she bears a grudge against the ground upon which she is walking, she answers with a long sizzling hiss, stamps to a corner of the house, and tips the contents of her raffia basket violently. Something heavy hits the ground with a great thud and gives me a start. It is only a head of palm nut, but it sounds like an explosion. Some bush mangoes roll out of the basket with a familiar whiff.
“Eke!” she calls in a harsh voice that instantly sends me up on my feet and fleeing as Eke snaps a reply and rushes off to meet her.