SOME WEEKS AFTER I MAKE MY WISH KNOWN TO OKIKE, my cousin Beatrice returns from Lagos. I don’t believe my mother when she breaks the news until my whole family goes to see her in her fine cement house with brown paint, a black corrugated roof, and a black gate, and I wonder about the mystery of my reincarnation, truly awed.
“I think I know someone who needs a houseboy,” she says. “Dimkpa, I want you to amount to something. I hear that all you do here in the village is go to Ote Nkwo wrestling and Oriokpa masking festivals.” She laughs. “Maybe you will put that small muscle of yours to good use in Lagos.”
I smile at her. She is fair-skinned and thick, with bulging hips caged in linen trousers. She didn’t used to be fair-skinned. But Lagos has turned her into an agaracha who bleaches her skin and dresses in men’s clothes. An agaracha who refuses to get married.
Beatrice is Uncle Alumona’s daughter, that is, one of his daughters. She used to run a sewing parlour in Ogige market before she abandoned it and took off to Lagos without entombing her father, leaving without her little son, born without a father, because the man who made her pregnant rejected her. Her mother’s relative took in the little boy and has been his guardian since. No one knows exactly what Beatrice does for a living in Lagos or how she earned the money to demolish her father’s old mud-brick dwelling and replace it with a big, modern house. People in the village hold different opinions of her. While the younger ladies envy her for her smooth skin and bold clothes, the older women frown at her agaracha lifestyle. As for the men, the bachelors won’t approach her for marriage, and the old men look at her with pity in their eyes.
The night before my departure, I have my last supper with my family. Afterwards, we drink palm wine and chat into the night. I can’t help wondering if it was palm wine Jesus Christ drank with his disciples or something softer. I promise to buy a ball for Ebube, and a ribbon for Ihebube, to cut short their rivalry before it degenerates to an argument.
“You are going to a place that’s illuminated from heights; there’s a lot to see, a lot to enjoy.” My father laughs his water-running-through-stones laugh, and I sense that he is getting high on the wine, which is a gift from Beatrice. “But don’t be carried away by the pleasures of the city.”
I had gone to see Aunt Ogbom earlier that day, to tell her that I was leaving for Lagos. Ogbom lives in the hut my father built her after her failed marriage, the hut that smells of fresh clay polish. It looks clean as usual, daubed to a slippery shine. As a child, I would sit outside and smell fresh clay after a meal. I could not resist Ogbom’s traditional foods, especially her uwuna or itipe or her cornmeal garnished with ilolo. Ogbom is the only woman I know who cooks her cornmeal with those winged termites. But it is not yet the season of ilolo; they are forerunners of the dry season, coming at a time when the mist coats everywhere in a translucent haze. They come in swarms that darken the linden tree at the hillside, but not now when spring is already edging out the dry season and ushering in the heavy rains. “May Ezenwanyi protect you wherever you go,” Ogbom prayed for me, her ashen face breaking into an affectionate smile as she pinched sand into my palm to consummate her prayer.
Machebe and I have a private moment on the old flattened mattress in the room we share. I realize that he has prepared for this talk.
“Lagos is a distant city.” His voice is small and unusually soft, untigerish.
I agree with him, wondering where the conversation is headed. We are seated, our legs stretched in front of us, our backs against the wall, talking like two long-lost friends.
“You are going to be so far away from us,” he says in a slightly husky voice.
“Yes,” I reply.
A sound makes me look to see the money he rustles out of his pocket.
“Keep it.” He pushes the crisp notes at me. “It’s the money I have saved. You never know what might happen. Use it if you have need for it.”
I have tears in my eyes when I say “Thank you.”
Machebe can sometimes act like a decent brother when he is not behaving like the king of the jungle.
“I was saving for the future.” His voice falters with emotion. “I might learn a trade. Our parents may not be able to afford the tools I will need, but you will need the money more. It’s dangerous to go to a place so far away from home empty-handed.”
We hug. I wish I had half his intuition, his willpower.
I lie awake thinking of his act of kindness. Machebe is already asleep. He doesn’t snore, he roars. I think about the inexplicable stigma hanging over our family. Did it come about after my aunt’s drowning, or because of my father’s insistence on and subservience to Ezenwanyi in a village where almost everyone manages to appear in church on Sunday, wherever they have been the night before? Is ohu ma something to do with those stigmas, or is there a deeper mystery waiting to be unraveled like a parcel full of scorpions and snakes? I think of how to resolve these conflicts to better advantage my family as a rich young man who will have gained the exposure of the city. At the moment, everything looks hazy, but maybe time and success will see these thoughts settle like dregs at the bottom of a clear mug of palm wine. I lie awake, thinking of the journey to Lagos, small anxieties gnawing at me like a mischief of sharp-toothed rats.
My mother knocks on Beatrice’s door at the first crow of the cock to deliver me to my cousin. Beatrice looks me over with disapproval. Hands on her hips and sleep in her eyes, she says I cannot follow her to a big city like Lagos with my things in the large tin box sitting on my head. Hearing her speak, you would think I have millipedes and worms in the box, not bar soap and a sponge made from wood fibre for bathing, and other personal things my mother has arranged for me. Beatrice prefers I take a few clothes in a plastic bag. My mother has given me a rosary, too, for protection.
Eke turns up, to my surprise. We had said our goodbyes the previous day. I know from his eyes he will miss me as much as I will miss him, and his expression also confirms my suspicion that he wants me to go to Lagos because he is doubtful of the prospects of my succeeding here, in a place that holds me in contempt.
Machebe’s hug is not so tigerish, my father’s is unexpectedly warm, but my mother’s hug is the longest, the warmest. Her tears open the floodgates of emotions from Usonwa and the twins. The morning is cold, damp, and grey. Beatrice has arranged for an okada to take us to Ogige market, where we shall board a long bus to Lagos. My heart glows at the sound of the commercial motorcycle outside, driven by Arua, a townsman swaddled in a jacket. My mother and siblings wave goodbye with tears in their eyes in anticipation of a long separation, our first ever. I don’t get a chance for a last glimpse of my family, because I am made to sit in the middle of the motorcycle, sandwiched in between Arua and Beatrice. Arua bathes me with his spittle, which he sprays generously whenever he opens his mouth to talk. I can smell his hangover through the dirt hanging thick on his jacket as he navigates a potholed road full of mud and water. A slight fear creeps up the small of my back, detached from a grain of nostalgia the picture of my family standing and waving at us has planted in my mind. Beatrice scolds Arua for his filth in her high-pitched voice, which sends my fear receding into the darkness. She spits into the emptiness. The man laughs, wryly. I can’t see his face, but I imagine him blushing, looking like a stunned sheep.
“Between you and me, who is the filth?” He suddenly flays up, spraying more spittle, almost losing our luggage sitting on the tank of his motorcycle as we swim through the puddles.
I expect their quarrel to escalate, her mouth cracking open like a pod and words flying out and stoning Arua. But Beatrice allows Arua to rail, allows him to spout rivers of spittle and drown me in it. Eventually he stops, probably realizing he is getting no rejoinders from her, but he continues to drive like a madman. The market is not too long a drive from my village. In Ogige market, beautiful things are displayed in shops in the glitter of their newness, and big women from the university come to shop for groceries—women who dress as if they don’t poop—defying bad smells and flies that rise from the abattoir as they make their purchases. They wave braceleted hands at the load carriers and give them a few coins to carry their salad greens and bloody meat to their cars. The market is wearing a damp look this morning after days of rain. A musty smell clings to the air. A few people and cars are moving through the half-lit dawn. We stop at Ifesinachi Bus Station nestling on the shoulder of the market. Lying on the same arc with Aku Road, it sets off a fine sweep of valley—the Bishop Shanahan Valley—with a wilderness of rust-coloured roofs leveling out to the right-hand side and the Bishop Shanahan Hospital and Mortuary to the left. In the blue-grey light the trees that screen off the cathedral beyond look fake and ghostlike. Ghosts, moons, and dreams occupy my mind all through the wait, and even as the long bus finally noses out of the garage and swings into the road to begin the adventurous journey to Lagos.
I have a history with dreams. I always think of ghosts when I am alone in a dark room, so I sleep with the light on, but when I see a moon, even if it is shaped like my sickle, the first thing I remember is my old, sprightly grandmother, my mother’s mother, a memory tied to moons and folktales.
I see Enugu, its urban periphery, in fleeting glances caught from the window at intervals when the bus enjoys the luxury of speed on the heavily potholed road. The driver mouths curses at the government for allowing dilapidation to overtake the road like a leg with festering sores. “What happened to the taxes they take from us?” he wonders.
The driver may have thrown out the question to provoke debate on corruption in the country, but some of the passengers are dozing already; others are awake but show no interest in the hackneyed old theme. Beatrice shoots me a glance. I must have been grinning, in conversation with my memory.
As we wade through Onitsha and the thick human and vehicular traffic, I am amazed by my first contact with a large city. There seems to be a set look in the face of every young man and woman pushing through the crowd. As we cross the Niger Bridge, the enchantment of water in receding expanses feeds my famished imagination, boats and canoes sailing far off in the brilliance of a midmorning sun. My village of Oregwu already belongs to a place I see now as the old world. I am more interested in moving into a new world, a large and dreamlike city. I remember Arua and his outburst—Between you and me, who is the filth?—but he only brushes across my mind and recedes with the endless stretch of deck and superstructure.
Onoyima walks up the bush track with a machete in his grip to find a man standing in his father’s farm near a young palm tree, a man smaller than himself, with a machete raised over his head. Onoyima stops and observes the intruder, who is about his own age. At twenty, Onoyima looks powerful. He is brawny, with hair covering his broad chest. But this other man, he is a slight fellow. Onoyima takes a moment to size him up. The man is not familiar, and he looks ordinary, a no-match. Onoyima still holds the record as the youngest man to have killed a leopard in the whole of the community. Suddenly, the intruder brings the machete down, slashing through the soft stem of a palm frond, the grey of the steel shining in the midmorning sun, the frond falling, a slow, feathery, downward flight, covering the man. Onoyima bites his lip, flinching as if the machete had cut into his own heart.
“Who is this madman slashing things on another man’s farm with impunity?” Onoyima’s voice rumbles with the fury of a late-season thunder.
“I am not a madman,” the young man says in a polite tone of voice, the hand holding the machete going slack, the other hand gently pushing the frond away to pave way for a better view of the man accosting him. “I am only a man looking for fodder for his goats.”
Onoyima rushes forward instinctively, his own machete raised, barely holding himself back from cutting the small man down the way the man had cut down his palm frond. “That’s not enough reason to kill a young palm tree,” he thunders again, his anger threatening to rip his heart out.
“I do not intend to kill the palm tree,” the young man explains, his voice soft but strong in denial. “I am only here to collect one or two palm fronds. It has been an unusually long season, my good friend. The sun has been strong and most unfriendly to the pastures.” He waves around. “Look at how scorched and parched everything is looking. One can barely grab fodder for the goats.”
“That is nonsense,” barks Onoyima. “A man of your age should know that cutting the fronds of such a young palm tree could lead to its premature death. When you eat food, do you feed yourself through the nose instead of the mouth?”
“Do not make this issue bigger than it is, my friend,” the man says. “You and I know that a palm tree no matter how young cannot die simply because you cut off a few fronds.”
“You have no right to raise your voice in argument with me, little man,” Onoyima says, growing even more furious, his machete going up again, threatening.
The young man backs away, raising his own machete in self-defense. The two machetes kiss each other with a grim resonance.
“You yellow monkey,” Onoyima snarls. He makes to strike, misconceiving the intruder’s instinct of self-defense for a challenge. “You dare to raise your machete at me, little man? I will make you regret being born a monkey. I will make you eat your own excrement.”
“Body mass is not an assurance of strength.” The young man squares up for a fight, angered by Onoyima’s insult.
Onoyima drops the machete. He goes for him with bare hands. “It’d be unfair for me to fight you with a machete,” he spits. “I am a man who detests inequity.”
The young man strikes, the blade of his machete gleaming viciously. Onoyima parries the blow, but the razor-sharp blade grazes his left shoulder. His thick, wide, grim face turns ashen at the sight of blood running down his shoulder. Onoyima strikes with his big, right fist, knocking the machete out of the intruder’s hand. Fear and shock competing on his face, the young man turns to flee. Onoyima gives him a hot chase. He is fast for a man his size. They stumble over crusted farm ridges, tripping and falling, with Onoyima spitting threats, hot in pursuit. When he finally gets his huge hands on the man, Onoyima grabs his opponent by the nape of the neck, lifts and hangs him up in the air, his massive hands tightening around his throat. The small man kicks out in agony, his strangled voice rising in a great outburst of alarm and dying again as his body suddenly goes limp. Onoyima flicks the lifeless body down. He glances at his shoulder that is still dripping blood. Suddenly realizing he has murdered a man, he begins to flee the scene. He stops again at the edge of the farm, walks back to the body, drags it towards the far tree line, and dumps it there. He returns to get the two machetes from the farm. He looks around as though to be sure no one has seen him. He wipes the blade of the other man’s machete, stained with his own blood, on scorched grass and steps quickly onto the path leading home.
Onoyima arrives home to a large compound with three wattle-and-daub huts, a few trees scattered among them. He tries not to look ruffled so as not to give himself away to his mother, a large-boned woman sitting alone on the parched ground, legs stretched out in front of her around a thatch kitchen. Bare to her massive waist, she is cutting into wild mango balls to get to ogbono seeds, heavy breasts swinging with her motions like cow udders.
“Nnoo, nna.” She doesn’t look away from her chore as she welcomes him.
The air is fusty with the smell of the round, light green fruits.
“Deje, nne.” Onoyima returns her greeting in a surprisingly calm voice.
He leans his machete against the wall and walks into his own hut. The walls inside are covered with animal skins from his kills; from the deep tree-branch yellow of buffalo hides to striped hyenas, from the charcoal and white of pythons to the thick scales and bony plates of the alligator. The big one covering his mud bed is the striking hide of a leopard, with its dappling of solid black spots and golden patterns. Everything in the room speaks of a man of achievements. He settles on the bed to rest and feed snuff to his nose. A healthy black cat emerges from an inner room and rubs its long body against his legs before settling around his feet. After inhaling a few fierce pinches of snuff, Onoyima pokes his head through the door and blows his nose with a rasping noise, spraying the air umber. He wipes his nose clean with the back of his hand and rubs his palms together. He then picks up a hoe and, using the back door, walks all the way back to the farm, to the scene of the murder.
The place is still quiet and lonely the way he had left it. He marks a portion on the forest floor and starts to break the soil. It is hard on the surface, but soft and loamy beneath. His hoe rises above his head, sinks into the ground, and comes up with warm mounds of red soil. He works in silence, his strong biceps swollen and shiny with sweat, the hoe tearing the ground with a sound that travels through the quiet forest with a chilly echo. He stops and climbs out, bathed in his sweat. He walks to the body and starts to drag it towards the shallow grave. He rolls the body into the grave, wipes his sweaty face with his forearms, and begins shoveling the red clay back into the rectangular hole. He works until the pile of earth disappears. He then stamps the ground level again. He steps back to watch the grave that forms a sharp, startling red contrast to the rest of the forest floor covered with fallen leaves. Bending, he rakes then spreads dead leaves over the grave to make it one with the forest floor. He then cleans his hoe, wipes the sweat on his brow, heaves a deep sigh, and walks hurriedly away.
The next morning, Onoyima’s father, Egwu, sets out with Onoyima to the farm with a raffia climbing rope around his left shoulder. A man of average build, he wears his loincloth firm around his small waist. He looks sprightly and moves with quick, nimble steps through the sunbathed midmorning along the lonely bush track, on his way to his farm to harvest his palm nuts. Egwu does not know of the murder his son has committed. As he winds the raffia rope around a palm tree and knots it where the two ends meet, he is unaware that he is standing a few yards away from the shallow grave his son dug only yesterday. Onoyima calmly watches as his father slips the rope over his head and around his bare scrawny back and begins to climb the tree, using his feet and the rope as propellers, his machete tucked tightly in between his left shoulder and jaw, his small buttocks clenching and unclenching in his thin loincloth. When he gets to the top of the tree, he takes the machete from between his jaw and shoulder and starts to cut the palm fronds, slashing them at the base to create space around the head of palm nuts. Each frond slashed waves its long green many-fingered arm at Onoyima as it crashes to the ground.
As he raises his machete again to cut the palm-nut head itself, Egwu stiffens as his quick eyes meet the cold, lifeless eyes of a long black cobra, a spitting cobra. In his over twenty years of climbing palm trees he has encountered different kinds of snakes, from cobra to mamba to adder to boa constrictor, but the spitting cobra is the most deadly. His reaction is mechanical and swift as the snake, hissing fiercely, pink tongue streaking like lightning, lunges at him. He attacks with his machete, aiming at the snake’s head. Many of the snakes he has stumbled on before he would behead with one precise stroke of his sharp machete, though a few escaped, either dropping to the ground and slithering away to safety or disappearing into the thick plume of fronds, but now as he strikes at this cobra and misses it, the sharp edge of his machete slashes through the raffia rope. Plunging with a long, piercing cry, he lands, to Onoyima’s horror, neck-first on the hard, dry ground with a sickening thud.
Like a wild Harmattan wind, Egwu’s accident blows through Ejuona and is greeted with shock and an outburst of weeping and mourning. He is given a quick burial, and then a few days later, Igolo, Onoyima’s robust mother, succumbs to a swelling illness. Her illness worsens, the swollen body breaking and maggots shimmering within the rot, emitting a horrible smell. And then she dies on the fourth day, and is buried, too.
“It is a bad omen for a widow to die in her blacks,” says an elder in the family.
This run of tragedies cannot be ordinary: a man dying from a palm-tree fall and his widow following even while his body is still fresh and has not sweated in the grave. The elders are confused, and they ponder what to do. Finally, they agree to see a seer and set out at once to the seer’s shrine, a clearing in a grove somewhere at the edge of Ejuona, where a little man sitting on a goatskin mat with horrid kaolin patterns sketched around his eyes receives them in a hut.
“Someone took what belongs to a goddess,” says the seer after casting and studying his divination motifs, a pair of round husks strung together. “Murder!” the seer cries. “Look at it here. It is very clear.” He points to the motifs in front of him. “A man killed another man for nothing. The man who was killed happens to be the property of Ezenwanyi, a very powerful goddess in a distant, far-flung community from ours.”
The elders crane their necks, but they see nothing.
“For this sacrilege,” says the seer, “the young man, the murderer, must take the place of the man he murdered at the shrine. The bodies of his late parents must be exhumed and taken to the shrine, too. They are also possessions of Ezenwanyi, including all that the murderer has. You must do this at once to forestall further deaths in that family.”
The elders are stung by the news. They walk back home and swing into action, prodded by a note of urgency in the seer’s message. That same day, four young men are sent to the graves of Onoyima’s parents to exhume their bodies. Working in utter silence, palm fronds clenched in between their teeth, they exhume the bodies of Egwu and Igolo, his widow, and travel all the way to Ishiayanashi to rebury the corpses in Ezenwanyi’s grove.