I LEAN AGAINST THE UMBRELLA TREE IN OUR COMPOUND and watch the trees, the houses, and the livestock moving about. I have had a long sleep. I feel better waking up and eating the breakfast prepared by my mother. Just eating my mother’s food and looking around my father’s compound is a comfort. My eyes wander to Okike’s grave.
“Mother, how can you allow weeds to grow on the grave?” In my absence, it has become completely overrun again.
My mother and siblings have been working all morning, hulling boiled okpeye seeds and preparing them for fermentation. In a few days, my mother will grind the fermented cotyledons into paste and mold the paste into fingers of raw umber seasoning, a fetid smell thickening in the air.
“You and graves,” she hisses. “I have more important things to do than weed graves.”
The avocado tree my father planted to mark the head of the grave has grown taller than I am; that is how long Okike has been gone, and that’s how much the distance between us has grown. I stroll over and stand near the tree, determining to weed the grave, to pull out the tufts that wedge between us.
I wonder how they could have allowed such ruin to befall Okike’s resting place as I reach down. I picture her, pinned on all sides with spikes and nettles, suddenly regaining her space, her freedom, and breathing freely again. I imagine her smiling at me with gratitude. I regret not coming back with money for a tomb. I have failed myself, and my family. I couldn’t even buy the toys I promised to the twins, and I wasted Machebe’s money on my ticket home. Ejiro called me a coward, a weakling. Maybe I shouldn’t have fled Mummy’s house that easily. I know I will soon get tired of eating cocoyam and cowage soup in place of the mansion’s pantry full of butter, corned beef, Geisha, sardines, juice, and confectioneries.
I spend my days indoors to hide my shame. The village is boring without Eke. I’m told he left shortly after I travelled to Lagos. No one seems to know why he made the decision to abandon school and take off to an unknown place. Patty Onah and Oluoha are also gone—both in police detention for mobilizing protesters who went around town carrying placards after the MASSOB leader was arrested. The police stormed the village, traced them to the chemist shop, and arrested the two of them. The place is deserted now, the whole village silent and apprehensive.
For a few days I enjoy the lull in my life: eating, sleeping, and waking up late in the morning. I no longer eat with my younger siblings on the tray with peeling paint on which my mother dishes a large quantity of food for the children to share. Since I have returned, she has been serving my food separately on metal plates, and speaking to me only in her sweet tangerine voice. My father is down and hasn’t bothered me about fetching fodder for the goats. The pain of his dislocated hip bone worsens after my return. My siblings help him out to a mat under the umbrella tree in the middle of our compound and back in when he gets tired of lying outdoors. Machebe thinks I am a failure. He is the most critical of me, taking over the role of my father while he is bedridden. He resents that I am being treated “like a king,” scowling when my mother serves my food on a separate plate.
“Why is everyone licking his buttocks?” he flares up when he can no longer bear it. “He came back with nothing. He won’t go to the farm, he won’t fetch fodder for the goats, he won’t do anything. He just sits around and eats from the effort of other people. Are we celebrating his failure?”
I swallow a retort. I am trying to avoid a fight. He has the right to be angry with me for wasting his life savings. My father sides with Machebe as usual, his voice sharp, and when my mother rebukes my father for not sparing himself even in his sickbed he says, “I dislocated my hip bone, not my voice.”
My mother says nothing. Usonwa is silent, but I sense I no longer have even her sympathy. I know when I am defeated. And Machebe won’t stop. He is all bunched up for a fight. I may be older, but he is bigger. He inherited his impressive stature and muscle from my father’s side. I look more like my mother’s people. If I had won any fights with him in the past, it was not because I was stronger, but because my sense of being older prevailed. Because it made me more resilient.
Suddenly we are exchanging blows. I hit him first for his spittle that touches me, for the memories of my brawls with Ejiro that flash in my mind and prod me to rise up. I hit him on the jaw. Square. It is unexpected, and I feel his bone shift as he cries out with pain. He staggers back and falls, although he doesn’t go down completely, landing on one hand like a swimmer taking a backstroke dive, using the same hand to lever himself up and spring back to his feet almost at once. He charges at me. I step back, neatly dodging him. He must realize how much my skills have improved. But then I trip on a nearby bench, sending my plate of food crashing to the ground. I struggle to rise to my feet, my left leg getting hooked to a short curved framework on the side of the bench, frustrating my efforts. The rest is easy, and Machebe is all over me like a famished tiger. My mother and siblings scream for help. My father watches silently.
I feel small and ashamed after the fight. Things are how they used to be before I went away, when I woke up every morning to the same tepid view of the hills, feeling trapped inside the village; when my life revolved around helping my father with bricklaying and breaking the soil with a hoe; a life of eating cocoyam and cowage soup, and millipedes crawling over everything. Ugh!
Machebe carries himself around like a peacock. His life seems to have more purpose since I left. More rhythm. He will be apprenticed to a good mechanic when the family finds one. I know I am never going to have the patience to learn a trade under a master for so many years. I cannot go back to load carrying after returning from a large city like Lagos. I consider it demeaning. My family cannot afford the capital to start me off with a business at Ogige market. My dream of erecting a tomb on Okike’s grave is fast fading. I am a butterfly on a purposeless flight.
But the fight with Machebe shakes me out of my trance and renews the impulse to dream big once again. I remind myself of the task ahead—to pull my family out of poverty and stigma—and know that until I have completed Okike’s reburial, my soul will know no rest. I have to leave this village again somehow. I know I cannot make the kind of money my family needs here. Before going to Lagos, I made a wish to Okike, and it came to pass. In Lagos the idea of pretending to have epilepsy was obviously planted by Okike. So once again I raise my hands skywards to make another wish.
Eke shows up in the village two days later.