I FINALLY SUMMON MY FAMILY AFTER WEEKS OF SLEEPLESS nights pondering how to broach the matter. I try to control my trembling voice. My heart is beating so loudly I can hear it. My eyes are watchful, noting every nuance of expression. My father’s face is a cold, blank mask, but I can sense his disinterest, his lack of confidence in me. My mother looks at me as if I were about to climb Ugwokanyi Mountain and jump off the summit. Machebe thinks the dream, the whole idea of returning to school, is laughable, senseless. We have done nothing but exchange red eyes and expand the vocabulary of curses we throw at each other in the last few weeks.
“I am not in school because there is no money to train me, and I will be spending many years as a motor mechanic apprentice,” Machebe spits in protest. “But now after wandering all over the place he comes back with half an ear and says he wants to go to school.”
My father brings out his snuff box, a large tin that could take enough snuff to go round his estranged kinsmen, those tobacco-smelling greybeards who call him Agala—a nickname that came from his masking prowess—instead of Egwu, the name his parents had given him, and who turned around to stab him in the back when providence smiled at him.
He snorts. “From where do you expect your mother and me to raise money for fees?”
“I will not let any of my children kill me before my time,” my mother says painfully. Her crow’s feet are so long and so close they could pierce her eyes. “You should be talking about learning a skill: motor mechanics or carpentry or bricklaying, but instead you choose to hang your laundry at impossible heights.”
I wasn’t expecting my family to succumb easily to my wish. But I will not give up without a fight. My dream was so vivid that I know it’s a revelation, but I figure I should cover all bases. I go to the tomb to petition my ancestral benefactress, feeling guilty and ashamed to face Okike. For as many times as I have failed and betrayed every wish she has granted me, she must feel disappointed. I have grown to understand the ways in which she passes an idea across to me, mostly through dreams. So I know what message she is passing when she walks away only to turn around again and smile at me with my sister Oyimaja’s face. I know then that Oyimaja is the key with which to unlock my father’s closed heart. She’s the oldest in the family, and her opinions are respected. She lives with her husband, Joseph, and their six children in Igugu, a neighbouring town. They live in a crowded house: two small rooms built by Joseph. He has a carpentry workshop where he makes stools, but he is also an assistant catechist in the local church. I resolve to involve them.
I set off to Oyimaja’s house early one morning, travelling on foot because I don’t have the money to transport myself. It’s quite a long trek, and I arrive around midmorning. They are both home, but their children have gone to school. The youngest is a sleeping baby.
“Ala, welcome,” Joseph says for the eleventh time within just a few minutes of my arrival.
He is a small man. I have always wondered if his size has anything to do with why he makes stools and small pieces of furniture instead of big chairs and cushions.
“I hope you did not lie to me when you said that Father and Mother and everyone is fine at home,” Oyimaja says with somewhat of a note of anxiety over my sudden, unannounced visit.
I had rehearsed my lines, but now that I am sitting across from them, the words grow thick and heavy in my mouth. I stare at their wedding photograph hanging from a nail on the wall.
I finally spill it. “I want to go back to school. I know that Father and Mother will not give their consent. So I came to ask you to talk to them.”
I have passed the burden, and I can feel my older sister groaning with the weight of it. A large dried palm-frond crucifix from the previous Palm Sunday is tucked in the corner of the room where she sits.
“They will not consent to it because you have let them down,” she says, an edge to her voice. “And they are not the only ones you let down, wasting so many years and returning a failure each time.”
Her words hurt. They force things out of me before I can stop myself. I would have been killed in a fight if I hadn’t fled Lagos, I burst out. And I didn’t want to come back from Anukwu in a coffin like Eke.
“Why did you keep what happened in Lagos to yourself?” Her voice drops, flailing like a dead leaf and settling with a softness at my feet. “Why didn’t you tell our parents about it?”
“It’s better kept from them,” Joseph says, his voice a tiny spurtle. “Telling them wouldn’t have changed anything, and it is best to spare the old folks the psychological trauma.”
At least for once I have someone’s support in the family, even if he is a poor and diminutive brother-in-law. I wonder why they did not consider their smallness, their sameness before getting married, to avoid having an elf out of story-land for a child.
“I will think about it,” Oyimaja says. “I will be home this weekend to discuss it. By then I will have made my decision.”
In the wedding photo, she is cradling a bundle of lantanas the same way you would cradle a sheaf of fodder collected from the bush for goats. The wedding gown looks as if it was passed to her by a much larger woman who had worn it, someone of a matronly size, but despite being the smallest in the family, Oyimaja’s voice is the strongest.
A few days after my visit, Oyimaja arrives with her last baby strapped to her back. She looks haggard, dry, and thin. The baby’s nose is filled with thick yellow snot as if it is suffering from a cold. She unstraps it, puts her mouth to its nose, and sucks the snot noisily. I watch her as she spits it out, sick to my bone marrow. Ugh!
“I am in support of Dimkpa going back to school.” She wipes her mouth with her dirty wrappa.
The silence that greets her speech is intense. I glance at my mother. She reacts to Oyimaja’s suggestion as if someone has pinched her hard. For supporting me, I at once forgive Oyimaja for her grossness.
“How shall we raise money for his school fees?” my father says in a heavy voice.
My mother takes the baby from Oyimaja and rocks him on her lap.
“Sell our land if we have to,” Oyimaja says.
The room whirls. Her voice sounds like my mother’s, soft but powerful in effect. Among us siblings, she looks the most like my mother. I’d sometimes mistake her voice for my mother’s when she was living with us, quickly straightening myself out, thinking my mother was back, if I was up to any kind of mischief.
My father gives a low snort. “Are you saying we should put up for sale the family’s only piece of land? Our only inheritance?” he says.
“You lose one thing to gain another,” Oyimaja maintains. “The family needs to take a bold step; otherwise, we will remain sunken in poverty.”
The tiger in Machebe growls, my father tips snuff into his left palm with a darkening brow, my mother rocks the baby in her arms with a vigour that hurts the baby and provokes a whine. There is silence that is as sticky as earwax. My father clears his voice, says the silence is a chance for the spirits to contribute their views to the discussion, a statement that seems hollow, but it helps to relieve the tension. Ihebube enters and insists on taking the baby from my mother. I watch her as she struggles to shoulder him with the help of my mother, a shudder of revulsion passing over me as I remember the snot-sucking. It grows into a retch when Oyimaja dunks the drinking-water cup into the large water receptacle in a corner of the room. I watch her as she lifts the cup to her lips and gulps down the water. Ugh! I am never going to drink from that side of the cup where her repulsive snot-sucking lips have touched it.
The piece of land Oyimaja has suggested we put up for sale is the only one my father inherited from his father, the same land where his father was buried. My father snorts and sighs again. He shifts in his seat as Oyimaja recounts my dream when my father lost the crown.
“His dreams have a way of manifesting themselves in reality.” Her voice is soft, and beguiling.
My mother gives a wavering smile, probably not because she believes in dreams, but because she lacks the willpower to oppose her first daughter, her double.
In my father’s eyes is a look accusing the women of conspiracy, the look of a cornered prey, a look blaming my mother for betraying his hiding place.
“I cannot object to the decision of the family, as hard as it is for me to lose my only heritage,” he says in a vanquished voice. “I would send all my children to school if I had the means. Education is good.” He scowls at me. “I will put up the land for sale, but I hope you realize that to whom much is given, much is expected. It is your responsibility, as the first and privileged son, to strive to be successful and ensure that your younger ones also get their share.”
Excitement riles inside me like liquor in a drunken man’s head. I can feel Machebe’s eyes singeing my back. I don’t blame him. He goes to his master’s workshop every morning dressed in mechanic’s rags. I will soon leave the house every morning looking like a swan in the whites of St. Teresa’s College.
“Don’t fool yourself.” He lashes out at me when I mention St. Teresa’s College as my first choice. “I know you can’t pass their entrance exam, ever.”
Machebe is right about St. Teresa’s College. The community school is less elite, more like okrika, the used clothes that I can bend down and select from a heap at Ogige market for little money, but it’s still school. Every night I lie awake, invoking a buyer for the land. And then I wake up the next morning feeling a step closer to my dream.