MY FATHER’S COMPOUND IS A TAINTED GREEN CARPET, covered with moss. It drizzles all night, as if the skies are mourning Eke, the air thickening into a solid frozen lump. I think of Eke sleeplessly: the years we spent together, the friendship and laughter we shared. I replay the horrible memory of Eke’s mother banishing me from his funeral and my mother blaming me for it. “You acted like a child,” my mother said. “You should have come home to break the news ahead of the body arriving as his closest kith and kin in that foreign land.” The village is still in shock. Eke’s mother is heartbroken. The Anukwu community that escorted the body home left after the burial, but I have resolved not to return to Anukwu. I am done with migrant work. My mother took one look at my wrecked body, my mangled ear, and broke down in tears.
The ground is soaked this morning, blending the smell of wet loam with the stomach-churning odour of decayed wild mangoes and goat dung. My gaze wanders to the garden by the side of the house, the grave catching my eyes, flourishing green with cassava, pumpkins, and spinach in the genial morning sunlight. Eating breakfast with my family, sober, feels unfamiliar. My youngest siblings are excited to see me, and they bug me with questions about my ear, but Machebe’s jaws are clamped tight. He knows there is nothing to celebrate about my empty-handed homecoming. Once more I have failed to help my family out of the poverty we are mired in. But I have resolved to build Okike a tomb as a token of my gratitude to her for saving me from imminent death, even if I have to spend my savings down to the last kobo. It’s not much, the bulk of it coming from the work that took Eke’s life, but it is enough.
Eke’s mother is out of her mind with grief. I don’t really blame her for reacting the way she did, for charging at me like a wounded beast. Beyond blaming me for bringing her son’s body home unannounced, I sense a resurgence of the old hatred, some sneaking suspicion that Eke died because he had stubbornly refused to dissociate himself from me. But I forgive her. It is easy to do that when I think that it could easily be me lying six feet below, putting my mother in his mother’s position.
“It’s not a bad idea,” my father says when I mention my plan to start work on the tomb. He also believes it is Okike, my ancestral benefactress, who saved me. But my mother is sure it is Chukwu Abiama, the Christian God-of-the-Selected, who tucked me in his giant lemon wings and whisked me out of the way of the massive earthfall.
“For taking care of her grave, your aunt will continue to protect your interests from the world beyond,” my father says.
“It’s a heathen belief,” my mother says, shaking her head.
“Okike has been giving,” my father insists. “It has not been a good season for plants, with greenflies all over the place, but the plants in the garden where the grave is remain untouched by the aphids. The spinach grows from nowhere. Harvest it today, tomorrow it sprouts again.”
“Did you ever kill a tortoise?” I hear myself saying.
My father snorts as he often does when asked a dumb question.
I rephrase the question. “Is it a sacrilege to kill a tortoise?”
“Well, it depends.” He begins to explain as my mother walks away from what he is about to utter, from sin. “While it is not a sacrilege in this community to kill a tortoise, it might be elsewhere, in places where gods incarnate themselves in certain animals. Ezenwanyi is one such goddess. But she takes the form of a serpent.”
I tell him the story of the woman we buried in Anukwu, but in the third person, as if it happened to someone else.
“I feel for this woman, assuming she actually killed the tortoise accidentally,” he says, with more cool than I had hoped. “But she should have gone ahead to perform the expiatory rites. It—”
“That’s blasphemy.” My mother flying out of the house again interrupts him.
“Well then,” my father says. “Would you have preferred to die?”
“For doing what pleases my father, yes,” my mother says with hands fisting her hips, fight in her posture. “And to take my place in his house in heaven.”
I leave them to their argument.
As I approach Okike’s grave and see the plants blossoming green on this clear and calm morning with its bank of grey clouds, anger rises in me like hot Saharan dust. I shouldn’t allow rage to defile my mourning, I tell myself, even if my family has thoughtlessly ploughed my benefactress’s grave. I have decided I will not start work on the tomb until after twenty-eight days of mourning Eke, the traditional period for close kin. I go to bed every night hoping Eke will come to me in my dreams, but instead I have nightmares, violent and stark, depicting his end. I realize that I don’t have a single photograph of him, and my feelings of despair deepen. It’s only days since his death and his features are already receding in my memory, kindling the fear that his image might continue to fade until it becomes a pale blur, and then only just an idea.
I sneak out to his gravesite one night. The grave is in his father’s compound, next to the tree where we used to sit and peel oranges, and where Eke would call me a coward and laugh in his crackling bushfire voice. I must cut a lonely figure standing in the cold darkness, whipped by the rain, lit by streaks of lightning. I choose a stormy night because his mother is more likely to be indoors. Lying six feet below the ground, Eke must be cold, too, and wrapped in thick layers of darkness. I do not leave the graveside until I’m thoroughly damp and shivering. As I walk home on the orange path paved by lightning, the feeling that Eke and I are on equal terms again fills me with relief, but then I am ashamed of the self-centredness of my thoughts.
After twenty-eight days, I send Eke’s things to his mother through my father and set to work.
It is easy for me to harvest the cassava. The ground is soft and wet after weeks of rain, and the thin, immature roots of cassava follow each effortless pull without any grudge. My mother watches me with a pout. “I don’t understand why you have to destroy those plants in these hard times all because of a tomb. Can you not wait until they are harvested?”
“I don’t want to spend the money budgeted for the tomb on something else,” I explain.
She walks away with a hiss.
I weed the grave neat after harvesting the cassava. The avocado tree my father planted to mark the head of the grave has matured. I rush off to Ogige market to buy cement at Commercial Avenue, near a smelly abattoir where the butchers wield curved carving knives with glancing blades. I can’t help but feel for the cattle as I imagine all sorts of grim possibilities. I have worked out the cost of building the tomb. The money I returned with covers the cost of cement and tiles. Some of my father’s bricks are lying around in the compound, so I won’t need to buy blocks. I will fetch sand from deposits along the village road for the construction. I know it won’t be anything close to the Folashade gold-rimmed tomb, but it’s all I can afford, and I hope Okike understands.
I form the tomb with the bricks and raise a wall at the head of the grave to the height of my waist, and then I fill up the rectangular brickwork with sand and cover it with the white tiles. It takes a long time to construct it, maybe two hours, maybe three, because I do a clean job. Finally I wash the tiles clean and stand back to admire the shining white tomb, filled with a sense of achievement, imagining Okike’s statue seated on the short wall at the head of the tomb in lace, beads, and a purse, her ichafu rising on her head in poetic folds.
Satisfied, I wash, eat lunch, and stroll down to the cave, thinking of the woman we buried in Anukwu. My father has talked about the healing powers of the cave’s spring, its waterfall provoked by euphoria at moments when Ezenwanyi is in a benevolent mood. He has talked about Ezenwanyi’s protectiveness, and how the goddess blesses her favoured. I ponder the mystery of my survival at the excavation site, realizing that my mother should not have forbidden us from Ezenwanyi’s cave or waved away my father when he said our destinies were tied to a reptile goddess, a crowing crested cobra.
Two groves lean away from each other on the broad sweep of hills. The cave is buried in the womb of one of the groves, the thicker of the two. At this time of the season when the rains are relentless, water ambles out of the caves and strolls down the valley into the second grove with ululations that beguile, with the devotion of a mother feeding a child. The view is breathtaking, but the scene is nothing in the dry season after the hills have been licked by tongues of orange flame, leaving a charred, soulless ridge. And then the caves dry up completely, with cakes of dirt collecting at their bottoms. The entrance to the grove is a dark corridor pierced by shafts of sunlight. Everything seems quiet, not a bird chirping, so quiet the ululation of the water is unusually audible, pure melody, reminding me of okanga, a dance of drumming and fluting performed by the old men of my village when they celebrated Ezenwanyi with music before the arrival of Holy Trinity Church and Father Matthew, according to my father.
Everything seems to have gone quiet in this part of the grove, where Okike’s body was found, as I was told. I wade across to the spot where they found her body wedged on a tree. It seems no one comes this way to fetch water or do laundry or wash breadfruit any longer for fear of being cast out by Father Matthew. Years of water washing over the base of the tree has bared its thick root. The grove is full of spots and beautiful patterns of sunlight. I sit on a looped branch, one of several spiraling down all the way from the treetops, and begin to swing forth and back with eyes closed as I try to reconnect with a feeling, the energy building up. The story is that Okike drowned in the cave at a time when it was full and flowing. She was there alone in this lonely grove for three days before they saw her body. She may have let herself into the bowel of the cave, her body floating down the broader side of the channel to this place where the creek is narrower, becoming wedged on the tree.
The branch suddenly snaps, perhaps with the weight of my thoughts and feelings, and I see myself easing down into the water. I step away and hug the tree in gratitude, my arms ending halfway around the huge, leathery trunk. But for the tree my father might never have found Okike’s body. She could have been swept away where my father would never have found her. I kiss the tree, the smell of its bark filling my nose like the caffeine I always smelt in Mummy’s coffee in Lagos. But I am startled by a sharp pain that needles my chest as a black ant, which has smuggled itself into my shirt, unleashes its fury at being crushed: a tendril of pain that spirals through my body, ending in a bubble of liquid at the tip of my penis. I let go, moving away from the tree, pondering its name. It has the leathery grey bark of an oak, but it is not an oak. It is not a banyan, either. It is the Tree of Life and Death—the phrase appears suddenly and fully formed in my mind.
I glow at the new name, Tree of Life and Death, at this flash of inspiration, as I undress for a bath, stooping and scooping water with cupped hands, throwing each scoop over my shoulder and shuddering as it falls on me with a chill. I dress after the bath and walk out of the creek as the sun sinks below treetops, low and red in the sky, and the day slowly fades like a scene in a boring film as I walk home.
At home I stand afar and admire the tomb again in the blue-grey light of a dusk skimming with bats and swifts. I have a feeling that Okike is very pleased with me. Dinner is yam and salted palm oil. The room is illuminated by the big round flame of my mother’s ochanja, but we eat outdoors in the moonlight. The tomb is chalky under a cool lunar glow. After the meal, while my family enjoys a post-dinner conversation, I lie on the tomb beside Okike, face up and looking into the big liquid eye of a moon. I imagine myself in her arms, my little teary face pressed into her breasts, and my small mouth tightened around her milkless nipple as she pats my small shoulder and croons me a soft song: Onyemurunwanebeakwa, egbemurunwanebeakwa, wetuzizawetose, wetamaraneluofe, kumunnunurachaka, egbeoo egbeoo.