I NEVER IMAGINED SPENDING CHRISTMAS AT A gravesite. I never imagined that while others were eating rice and meat in their homes and drinking palm wine with their families on Christmas Day, I would be digging a grave in her little garden behind her house in which to bury her, the woman who killed a god.
I begin the day with a smoke as usual. I smoke first thing every morning. I enjoy it, lying in a relaxed posture, hissing smoke deep down in my lungs while thinking of the day ahead. When I am not in the mood for work, and I have some money for food and beer, I often lie on my mat all morning, smoking and listening to music on Joe’s radio. I go to Mama Obodo’s bar to spend the afternoon and return late and drunk. But if I don’t have money, I am the first to show up at Ogbo-Mmanu, and I will carry buckets of sludge to empty a pit latrine as long as someone will hire me.
Lying quietly on my mat, I ponder a lonely Christmas without beer and cigarettes. An oil lamp turned low, daylight stealing in through the door, and a bird singing at my window have become familiar sights. Finally I get out of bed. Emptiness echoes through the house. Almost everyone has gone home for Christmas, including Eke, and the house seems colossal, frightening. I may as well be at work.
I step outside and hug a draft, a white morning dyed a partial blue. The bird at my window is yellow-chested, a weaver bird. I ignore it and walk into the pit latrine. I like to smoke in the toilet, squatting over the round concrete hole with eyes closed and enjoying my cigarette as much as the latrine fumes that warm my anus. I pull my grey shorts down to my knees as I lower myself. I have constipation, so I have to push with a lot of strength and groaning to get anything out. I wonder what I ate that has tightened my stomach as things I could have stoned somebody with finally hurtle out. My anus feels like it has been rubbed with pepper.
I wash my face, dress in my work rags, and hit the road with my spade. The scent of Christmas combs the street, intertwining with the Harmattan haze coating Anukwu. The road is busy with adults and children heading to church in their Christmas attire. I pause for a moment to ponder my religion. I haven’t been to church since I came here, and long before that even. But I have been to a Christmas church before, and listened to the choir sing Alleluia Chorus. I am tempted to walk in, but my desire to make money pushes me along.
Mama Obodo’s bar is open. I stop to ask for a stick of cigarette. Two men in dirty shorts and singlets, Okute and Nwude, are nursing a shot each of nkwu-oku, the locally distilled hot drink that has already jaundiced their features. They are sitting on a short bench at the mouth of the barroom, all pale and red-rimmed with hangover. One is a mason, the other a carpenter. We live on the same street, and they both are regulars at Mama Obodo’s.
“Happy Christmas,” I say to them.
“Happy Christmas,” they grouse a chorus, lifting sagged faces to peer at me, their voices husky.
Mama Obodo is leaning on the counter, chin cupped in hand, with a face like mud.
“Happy Christmas, Mama Obodo,” I say, grinning at her. “Give me a stick of cigarette.”
“I am not going to begin the morning of a Christmas Day with debt,” she snaps, sensing that I am broke.
“I will pay when I come back from work,” I say in the softest of voices, knowing I won’t get the cigarette if I return her insult.
She looks away. “I wonder who hires a labourer on Christmas Day.”
I stare at the bottle of nkwu-oku and a squat porcelain shot lining the counter with packets of Benson & Hedges, Gold Leaf, St. Moritz, and Marlboro, and I swallow hard. A radio is playing Christmas carols.
“Give the poor fellow a shot and a stick of cigarette, and add it to my bill,” Okute, the carpenter, says, scratching his fat yellowed nose, and posing as if he is doing me a great favour. I swallow the drink, light the cigarette, and thank Okute even though he is only paying back a debt. I buy him a drink sometimes, and I take exception to being referred to as “poor fellow” on Christmas Day.
I walk away with my spade while humming along to “The First Noel” playing from Mama Obodo’s radio. It reminds me of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which I read back at the mansion, and Mama Obodo reminds me of the book’s miserly protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge. How can anyone hate Christmas? I miss my routine of reading at the mansion. I don’t have anything to read here, and even if I could get my hands on a book, I’d be too exhausted to read it after a hard day’s labour.
At the end of the road, St. Emmanuel Anglican Church resounds with more Christmas hymns. The church is festooned with decorations: tree, lights, balloons, and flowers. The congregation straggles to the premises. The spire is standing proud and tall with the birth of Jesus Christ. I know my mother will be in the local Protestant church in my hometown, singing hymns and speaking in tongues, asking God to bless me, Dimkpa, her first son. I heard she left the Catholic Church because the God there had refused to prosper me when I went to Lagos. Now she wears a lemon vest and wanders off for days with a Bible, just as my mind wanders back through the months. Still I have not saved anything to help my family out of poverty. Still I wake up with a hangover every morning. Still I have a piece of my left ear missing, and a small round bald spot on my scalp I got from lifting concrete up a flight of stairs.
Ogbo-Mmanu is quiet, deserted. No labourers jostling for work. No tipper trucks and no contractors. A boy my age is leaning on a spade beside a locked provision store. He looks hungry and broke, too. I wonder if he has a hangover. Maybe they hesitate to sell things to him, too, if he can’t pay for them. I am tempted to cross over and ask him for a stick of cigarette, but instead I sit on the paving of a locked grocery shop and rest my chin on my spade. I know I am just wasting my time sitting here waiting for work on Christmas Day, but I can’t stand the loneliness of my cold, cheerless room. At last, overcome by my hunger for a cigarette, I walk over to where the boy is seated. He looks Nwaba, a scurfy, timid individual.
“We seem to be the only two around here.” I keep my voice low and casual, the way we do when we address them, the classless, dirty, razor-blade-selling, dialect-speaking Nwaba boys. I hate it when people like Mama Obodo yoke us together just because we both are from northern Igboland.
“Yeah.” He looks like a rabbit ambushed in its hole. They always look wary, and intimidated.
“You have a cigarette there, eeh?” I look away into the distance for effect. The road is dusty, coated with Harmattan haze. The market and its lock-up shops are looking very strange, lonely. Much of the world beyond can’t be seen.
He fumbles in his shabby trousers pocket and comes out with a squeezed packet of Three Rings. “Here,” he says.
“I don’t smoke this.” I make a face but grab the packet still. “But the shops are closed for Christmas, so I have no choice.”
I pluck two out of the four sticks left in the pack. I light one and take a long, famished draw. “Everyone has gone home for Christmas.” I toss the other stick into my pocket. “You didn’t go home. Why?”
“No money,” he says.
“Money is not my problem.” I have to let him know we are not on equal terms. It is called packaging, an exaggerated way of life we try to learn from the Agbenu townspeople. “I didn’t feel like going home. I would be bored out of my mind sitting back in the house. That’s why I am here.”
He says nothing, and I wonder if he knows.
The road gets busy again towards midmorning, with people driving or walking home from church, and noon is thickly perfumed with spices that wake hunger pangs in me. Now the streets are full of boys with fried hair and perforated ears, cruising around in SUVs. The haze is gone. A car stops. A fat hand beckons me over. The hairs on my body raise themselves to their full height with hope as I hurry across the road to the big man on the wheels. There is no competition with everyone gone home, so no need to sprint. Nwaba drags himself behind me at a respectful distance.
“We need a grave, and some people to help us bury a body,” says a man with a crew cut and a plain black T-shirt from behind the wheels. His companion is a smaller man wearing a starched green shirt.
A ripple of excitement spreads inside me. This is not a regular job like casting concrete or loading a tipper truck or serving as a building hand. It sounds intriguing, even more adventurous than catching an escaped madman fisting a machete.
“How much will it cost us?” Starched Green Shirt says.
I glance at Nwaba. “Pay us five thousand.”
I should have asked for more. Crew Cut waves us into the car without bargaining. We are whisked away with our diggers and spades. The drive to the place is a quiet one. I am sitting at the back with Nwaba, in quiet contemplation. Crew Cut’s voice keeps repeating itself in my head: We need a grave, and some people to help us bury a body. In my village a dead person is buried by his relatives. This man must have a lot of money to be hiring people to bury his dead for a whole five thousand naira. But he doesn’t really look rich. He doesn’t have a large stomach, his hands are not beefy or hairy, and he is not bald. He doesn’t even have a full beard. I can usually identify a rich man by his voice and his laugh. I haven’t heard this man laugh, though.
Christmas masquerades are now out on the road, drawing spectators out of their homes. Growing up, I had a Christmas Igariga mask back home. We arrive in a sleepy little village and stop outside a small cement house with a rusty tin roof. The house is enveloped in a sad silence. A small group of mourners sits outside. A fetid smell seeps through the tight Harmattan air as we come down with our tools and are led into the house past the mourners dressed like a church congregation. A wrecked wooden door leads into a small dingy passage. I feel the smell swell and seep into my pores as we turn right into a bare room where the body is lying. They have let it slide into a terrible state of decay. I glimpse a face bruised and drawn taut in the agony of death. I can’t discern the sex of the bloated body lying on a soiled mattress in the unpainted room. My stomach turns. On the cement floor by the bed is a roughly made coffin. I suppose I wasn’t expecting to see a body swaddled in clean, laundered sheets or lying in a varnished pitch-pine coffin.
Crew Cut leads us to the back of the house and points to a small garden where the grave will be dug. He returns to join the mourners. I wonder who he is to the dead person. There is a small backyard and a kitchen. A low shrub fence separates the compound from another compound with a bungalow. I notice people living in the next compound peeping at us through the fence as we dig the grave. They are looking at us as if we might bury ourselves in the grave right after digging it. We work without cigarettes, in silence, after we share Nwaba’s last stick. He is a human excavator. I watch him dig, his body dark and shiny, pure wire-hard muscle. My mind wanders to Mummy in Lagos, but my wandering eyes catch the gaze of a gawky teenager standing in the neighbouring compound as I straighten to stretch myself.
“I will be back,” I say to Nwaba. I walk to the shrub fence to meet the boy, who takes a few steps back as I approach. “We were hired to dig this grave and bury a body. Who is he?” I say to him.
“She killed a tortoise. She’s an osu,” he says and glides out of sight.
I stiffen to attention. Osu is the Agbenu word for “outcast.” I have a creeping feeling I am about to unravel a mystery, but the boy is gone like a flash of lightning. I walk back, sit on a heap of red clay thrown out of the grave as Nwaba shovels, and watch a white-chested bird perching on a shrub at the head of the garden as it suckles at a flower, beaking some grey insects to death.
“Check if it’s okay,” says Nwaba, wanting to know if he should stop digging.
He actually says it a few times before I hear him. My mind is busy trying to work out what has happened here. I consider asking the men who hired us as I walk around the grave with hands tucked into my pockets like a supervisor in some important ministry.
“Okay,” I say, after asking him to mend this angle and dress that corner.
When it is time to box up the body, we move towards the room where it is lying. I ease behind to allow Nwaba to go first. After the experience with the madman, I have learned not to go first. I sense Nwaba’s fright. We both hesitate at the door, but I win. He suddenly enters, startling flies. A fat fly stones the upper side of my mouth on its way to escaping. The smell in the room has gone from dry to a sticky, sickening wet. Nwaba throws a soiled blanket over the body and jerks his head at me. Together we haul it into the coffin and slam the lid closed.
The slow nasal hymn of the small congregation singing with wrinkled noses escorts her to the grave:
Not a burden we bear
Not a sorrow we share
But our toil he doth richly repay
Not a grief or a loss
Not a frown or a cross
But is blest if we trust and obey
Elizabeth-Marie, the woman we buried, founded Jehovah Kingdom Mission in Anukwu in 1981 and died childless, Crew Cut tells me later.
My face must tell him that I want to hear more.
“Everyone in this village believes she was killed by some deity because she accidentally killed a tortoise. Can you imagine that?”
“It’s unimaginable,” I say. My father once told me that Ezenwanyi took the form of a snake. People had seen the snake sunning itself on a rock surface in the cave. The snake would not harm them. It simply withdrew for them to fetch water, prompting villagers to announce their presence before entering the cave to avoid stumbling on the goddess’s serpent incarnation.
“Of course the people in this village foolishly believe this tortoise is their god incarnate . . . You and I know that tortoises are tortoises, and so did she, but these people wanted her to perform expiatory rites, and when she refused . . .” At this point, his companion strolls up and interrupts our conversation.
My eyes scan the small, impersonal crowd, the choir singing Psalms, her congregation according her a full funeral liturgy even after the villagers refused to get involved.
Laying Elizabeth-Marie in her coffin was an ordeal that left my hands oily. They are still sodden with her fluids even after washing them with hot water and detergent. My memory holds nothing and my eyes see nothing but her bloated figure—even after smoking countless sticks of cigarette and drowning myself in alcohol at Mama Obodo’s bar.