THE DAYS FOLLOWING EKE’S TRAGIC DEATH, AS I ARRANGE to bring his body home, are melancholy days, and they fill me with a deep sense of loss. I have never before lost someone so close to me, watching them die. Realizing that Eke was buried in that graveyard of laterite forged the lethal tool, but hearing his deep groan speared my heart. I lie exhausted on my mat, limp as a leaf lamed by heat, less from passing out at the scene of the accident than from what lies ahead as I contemplate a life without my friend. I can’t stop the tears from flowing. I try to shake off the fear that stalks my paths. Eke’s memory is everywhere in the half-finished house, his ghost looming in the large, empty corridor.
The bodies of Eke, Jerome, and Nduka lie cooling in a mortuary. The Wawa community makes donations to take care of this and the ambulances that will take their bodies to their hometowns. The tragedy seems to unite the migrant workers from Wawaland even more and fill them with a sense of duty to the dead. I am going to ride all the way home with Eke’s body. I had thought of going home to announce his death beforehand, to warn his family, but I cannot leave Eke’s body alone in a foreign land. The community here needs me in their plans, too, as his closest kin.
Home is a sour grape I have to eat. There is not much to pack. Two shirts, a pair of trousers, a comb and a mirror, a packet of Tiger razor blades, my new Kchibo radio, and a pair of slippers—they make up my household property. But I also have to take Eke’s things. I am going to give them to his mother, plus his share of the money from the contract. The full impact of Eke’s tragic end hits me as I take one more look around the room. I let out a sob as I lock the door and slip the key under a doormat where I always kept it for Eke, as if expecting him to come back from work and find it as usual.
I follow the shortcut, the side of the fence where the low brick wall has crumbled, instead of the old gate whose rusty hinges groan like a sick man when it is swung open. The track runs through a grove to the wide road that connects Ogbo-Mmanu. I turn to look at the large, unpainted house for the last time. Some crows are up on the roof scratching and clamouring in their harsh, annoying voices. I consider stoning the evil birds away, but then I turn and begin to stride down the road, leaving them in their uproar. Ogbo-Mmanu is quiet, still trying to come to terms with the tragedy. The whole Wawa community gathers as the ambulances arrive with a convoy of three chartered buses to escort the bodies of their fellow labourers home. Eke’s memory fills the space in my mind on the drive to Agulu through the same road that brought us to Anukwu. Death is all I think of as we depart Anukwu, rolling in between a depressing mesh of greenery.
We arrive at Ogige market around sunset. Nothing has changed in the hilly town of Nsukka under the dull chrome of a sunset. Ogige market still exudes that familiar unidentifiable damp smell, but the smell of fresh leaves and barks banish the Ogige market–flavoured stench as we head towards Oregwu. The roads are muddy, the houses old; the ones that are close to the roads are streaked with red mud. Everything unwinds like a bad dream. Sad and scary. The sound of the ambulance as it approaches the village brings people to their housefronts, panic on their faces. Hell is let loose as it noses its way to Eke’s family house, and as Eke’s body is lifted out and taken to his mother without warning, a mistake I will live to regret.
The arrival of Obochi is the most exciting thing to happen to Onoyima since he was forced to relocate to the shrine of Ezenwanyi.
Obochi had first fled to escape her fate. “I would rather die than become the bride of any goddess,” she had vowed. But she hadn’t got far. Her parents passed on before sunset, as forewarned by the seer. A few days after their deaths, her older brother fell from a tree and broke his neck, forcing her out of hiding. She walked straight home and surrendered herself to prevent the deaths of her remaining siblings. She was escorted to the shrine of Ezenwanyi by relatives. They walked miles and miles into the forbidden forest, finally arrived at Ishiayanashi, and were received by attama Ezenwanyi, a haggard old man sitting in his large polygamous household filled with humans and livestock, overseeing a community of outcasts.
Onoyima works all day at the farm. He leaves his hut at dawn and returns at dusk. Surprisingly, he likes it. It means less time to brood over his misfortune. It would have been less hurtful if he had been captured by the slave raiders from Aro and Nike terrorizing the villages and sold to the white people who came to their land through the seas. Knowing that he fell to the powers of the famous Ibinikpuabi and his own weakness as a man would have appeased his anger and self-reproach. But he realizes how important it is to accept his fate with calm and bravery, and not dwell too much on the good home life he used to have when he was still living with his parents and six siblings, though he misses them greatly. “I am forever estranged from them,” he laments, and there and then he vows to dump the name Onoyima and henceforth go by Gbaghalu, imploring their forgiveness and severing the last link with his family.
Obochi is frightened in the early days of her arrival. Gbaghalu had felt the same way in his first few weeks, like a lonely little bird in the wild. He keeps her company and makes conversation to reassure her. Sometimes they sit in tense, guilt-laden silence. She senses in him a man struggling to overcome his past. He notices how heavily the guilt of her parents’ deaths and that of her brother weighs down on her. Now the bride of a goddess, a few weeks ago she had been a beautiful and happy maiden, obviously desired by all the eligible young men in her community. It was killing him, too, his guilt over the deaths of his parents by his own hands.
“The attama is Ezenwanyi’s physical agent,” he says to her. “He guides her worshippers and looks after her belongings: her outcasts, her livestock, her farmlands, her forests. Her universe.”
Obochi listens to him with her chin cupped in her hands, lines of anxiety etched on her forehead.
“But it is safe in the shrine,” he assures her. “We are sacred and untouchable beings.” He inclines his head and says in a thick voice, “I killed a man from this shrine. I wouldn’t have touched him, no matter the level of provocation, if I had known he belonged to Ezenwanyi.”
“What happened?”
He told her the full story of the fight and murder at the farm.
How different their stories are. He killed a man, but she only picked snails.
“You are only a victim,” he says, concern and sympathy in his voice. “Would you like to hear the story of how Ezenwanyi came to this community?”
“Yes, please,” she whispers.
He begins to narrate the story of how the community fell to intervillage warring a long time ago, losing many of its citizens to death and enslavement, while others fled to distant places for safety. The few survivors, in order to protect themselves from the slaving and warring activities of enemy neighbours, installed a powerful, protective deity. Ezenwanyi, a female warrior goddess, has the responsibility of nurturing and protecting the citizens in order to repopulate the community. She enslaves people who trespass into her territory and claims their belongings as part of her rebuilding mission.
Obochi’s eyes light up with a new understanding of the structure of Ezenwanyi.
Gbaghalu takes Obochi around the shrine, showing her the other outcast huts. He points out one with a pillar of smoke rising from a fire just outside. A man and a woman can be seen in front of the hut. The man, shrunken and old, is sitting a short distance from the smouldering fire. He is warming himself in the cold of the forest in his loincloth. The woman is tending a clay pot. She is thin, her shriveled breasts stretched like fibres on her bare chest, but it is easy to see from her height and her litheness that she was once a woman of great beauty.
Gbaghalu stammers an explanation. “The man I—I accidentally killed was their son. He was their only son. He had been running an errand for his father on the day of our bloody encounter, but he was attracted to the shimmering green plume of the young palm in my father’s farm on his way home.”
Obochi listens in calm, horrified silence.
“The old woman, his mother, is a promise made to Ezenwanyi a long time ago,” he continues. “There was a deadly famine in her place of birth. Her father had to come all the way to this shrine on pilgrimage. He made a deal with Ezenwanyi to dedicate his fairest daughter to the goddess in exchange for prosperity, to save the rest of the family from starvation. His prayer was answered. He gave her up in fulfillment of his promise. Her husband, then a charming young bachelor, saw her and fell in love, but his family was not in support of him marrying an Ezenwanyi ‘dedicate.’ He insisted on marrying her, took her bride price to the shrine, dropped it on the altar, and made his intentions known to the goddess. By doing that, he secured the permission of Ezenwanyi to marry her. But for getting involved with an outcast, his family disowned him, because he had become a contaminated man himself. He relocated to the shrine, and they have lived together here ever since.”
A fresh wave of sadness envelops Obochi.
Obochi steps out of her hut and into the rain. Standing under the shaggy eaves, she lets the water stream down on her. She shuts her eyes as it seeps into her soul, finds her guilt, and begins to cleanse it—the guilt of causing the deaths of her parents and brother, and mortgaging the future of her siblings in the hands of others. Every time it rains, she strips, walks outside, and gets a good drenching. And after, she enters into a long revitalizing sleep, and feels better when she wakes up. This is, for her, an act of penance. It is, more importantly, therapy.
One day, while she is in the middle of her outdoor bath, she becomes aware of someone watching her. The forest seems to have grown a pair of ogling eyes. Though her own eyes are closed, she can feel the intensity of the stare, like a rig drilling a hole in her nakedness.
“Who is there?” Her voice is tentative, wavering between uncertainty and a tepid confrontation.
The forest replies with silence punctuated by birdsong.
Later on, as she searches around for clues, she finds footprints, and they are familiar. She sits in front of her hut wondering, mourning her lost maidenhood: the fancies, the pretenses, and the daydreams of growing up, and of falling in and out of love.
Gbaghalu emerges from his hut. He walks towards her, his male whiff and brawny features stirring desirous feelings in her. But she is incensed nonetheless. She had before that afternoon in the rain seen him as a responsible young man, a leopard killer, but now as he strolls over for the ritual of a chat, she watches his slow shuffling gait, debating whether or not to confront him. She does. He squirms, brushing an imaginary speck off his arm, his reaction betraying his guilt.
“You have no excuse,” she snaps, incensed that he tries to excuse his mischief, his act of indignity as male weakness, a shameless peeper like him.
“I am sorry.” His feelings of remorse tighten on his face.
Somehow she likes it that a reason to hate him has presented itself. He has been making things too comfortable for her in the shrine.
“I want to be left alone,” she declares.
“Your idea of penance,” he says.
He is right. She shouldn’t be heard laughing at his jokes. By laughing, she desecrates the memory of her parents and brother. She should be mourning instead of spending time in the company of a man whose every action betrays a deep adoration for her.
“I have done something terrible and shameful,” he says. “Something inexcusable. I will take whatever comes to me as a matter of atonement, but to sit here and wallow in self-pity, I will not let you.”
She stares icily at him.