IT’S A LONG, PAINFUL WEEKEND. I CAN’T GO TO THE stream. I can’t go anywhere. Okike’s tomb and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man are my only companions. The novel is a gift from the ever-smiling, coat-wearing English and literature teacher, who knows my fondness for novels from my performance in his classes. He probably noticed I was craning to catch the title of the book in his grip.
I pour myself into the book now, relaxing on the tomb. The story is set in a Negro college. The narrator’s experience when he arrives at the hotel ballroom where he is to give his speech, where he is informed by the white leaders of the town who are smoking and drinking together about a boxing match—a “battle royal” fought between black classmates of his in which he is invited to take part—reminds me of my time at the mansion, and how much people are willing to exploit other people’s bodies for their entertainment. Buried in the novel, wondering how much more of me is still to be discovered hidden in a book, I only notice her presence on the novel’s page, in the umbra of her shadow.
The tall, slender form of Grace is not what I expect to see when I look up, outside our poor mud house of all places. Her sudden appearance leaves me speechless. I have never seen her in a dress other than the school uniform. She looks prettier than usual in this pink round-neck dress that flares at the hips. She has long, graceful arms, and her skin is the soft brown of cowpea in the dull Saturday afternoon sun now passing over the tomb.
I don’t want to take her inside. It is bad enough her coming here and seeing the outside of our rat hole. I don’t know her family, although she strikes me as someone who lives in a good house, as someone whose father trades at Ogige market, sells jewelry or Echolac bags. She hesitates when I ask her to sit on the tomb with me.
“Whose grave is it?” she whispers.
“It is my aunt’s.”
She is silent, fear shadowing her thin face and mounting a flush to her cheeks as she sits down with one buttock.
“Ime aga?” I can smell her soap’s pear taste as I ask after her well-being.
“I am good.” She brightens. “What are you reading?”
Showing her the title of the book, I say, “I got it from the English and literature teacher.”
Eyeing me, she replies, “I didn’t know you read novels as a hobby.”
I quickly list the novels I have read, to impress her.
“I am sorry about your aunt,” she says after we talk a little about novels and poetry, and how Chris Okigbo’s “Elegy for Alto” is her favourite, a poem about the onset of the Nigerian civil war, in which the poet bemoaned the disintegration of the country and the bloodletting to come. I could see the English and literature teacher performing the poem in class, feet firmly planted and hands at his sides. Of a particular poignancy to me is the poet prophesying his own death in the war, his dying as he fought on the side of Biafra, that we may live and have honour.
“My mother says I came to Okike to suck her breasts and cried when I didn’t find milk in them.” I bring the conversation back to my aunt.
She giggles, looking shy, then intrigued. I can see she is endeared by my closeness to Okike, but the part about sucking her breasts makes her fidget nervously.
“It was naughty of you sucking your aunt’s breasts.”
I don’t know how she might react if I tell her that I am Okike’s reincarnation. “My mother says I was a big sucker.”
She giggles again. “Boys are big suckers. My brother sucked his teeth milk yellow.”
“My brother sucked his rust red.”
She laughs.
I laugh.
“Is he home, your brother? Do you look alike?” A flush of curiosity warms through her.
“He looks finer. He has the muscle of a man and the skill of a spider. He used to weave baskets he sold at Ogige market. Now he is a motor mechanic apprentice.”
“How nice!” She smiles, nervously, her eyes leading me to Bingo sitting on the doorway, fighting off flies from her sores. The dog is doing it in rather a repulsive manner, catching the flies in her mouth and grinding them. Ugh!
I think she is going to retch. I stone the dog away.
“My mother is not home, either,” I say, sensing her anxiety, her discomfort. “I have a sister like you, but she has gone to see my other sister at her husband’s place. The younger ones are playing somewhere in the neighbourhood. I am home alone.”
“Oh!” she says lightly, but I can feel her relax beside me. “Where has she gone to, your mother?”
“Church. My mother is a Protestant.”
“Oh.” She relaxes on the tomb. “You. What are you?”
Her question startles me. “Catholic.” I couldn’t possibly tell her that I visit Ezenwanyi’s cave. She would see me as a pagan.
“I am Catholic, too.”
Silence.
“They cry a lot, too, boys.” She returns to the original conversation. “They sap their energies crying, and then they suck like there is no tomorrow.”
“I was a big crier, my mother says, a snot-nose.” I pick up a stone and throw it at a goat that has wandered out of the goat pen behind the house; the animal doubles back.
“You must have been such a horrible child.” She laughs. “Oh, what a shame! I came to know how your leg is healing, and here we are talking about other things.”
I stretch out my leg, which looks ripe after the massaging and oiling, for her to see.
“It must be very painful. Can’t you stop playing football?”
“If I didn’t play football, would you be here talking with me?” I say this softly, because I can never be angry with her. “Would you have even noticed me?”
She looks at me with a somewhat guilty expression.
“I was a good-for-nothing student who couldn’t answer a question in class. Papa. Have you forgotten all the giggles, the gossips, and the name-calling?”
Silence reigns again. I feel like telling her I almost quit, but I don’t dare. She is my guest. I wouldn’t dare even if the circumstances were different. She looks so pretty, delicate, and fragile.
“My mother caught me crying.” The feather in her voice alights. “I told her about the lashing. She insisted I apologize, but I . . . I . . .” A back-and-forth flight of the feather in that irregular rhythm. “And then you hurt yourself. I had to take the chance when you were alone. I came to know if I have been forgiven.”
There’s nothing to forgive, I tell her.
“You surprised me with your football skills.” She is relieved and glowing again. “You look really good in a football jersey, and you play elegantly. I was proud of you when you scored the goal that won our school the cup. But then you became too big a star in school to notice someone like me.”
“That’s not true.” I grin, amused by her mischief. “I am not a big star. And I doubt I’ll ever become one, because of you.”
“Me? How?”
“Don’t you want me to stop playing?”
She hesitates. “I don’t know. You get hurt. Look at your leg, so swollen.”
“It’s nothing.” I want to say more. I want to tell her that everyone gets hurt sometimes, one way or another. But they get better and play again, that’s the only way they can become a star. I want to tell her that my father is a failure because he refused to confront the people who stole his crown. That more than nurturing the conspiracy against him to success, his silence stripped him bare and left him a penniless weakling.
We sit in silence, falling back into our thoughts.
“Have you lost an aunt or anyone close to you?” I say, to fill the emptiness.
“I lost my grandmother.”
“I am sorry. Did your father build a tomb for her?”
She shakes her head.
What a shame! I could tell her that I built this tomb for Okike, but I don’t want her to know how Okike drowned. The shame of it. I begin to drum on the tomb. And then I stop, scratch my hair, and throw stones to fill up the silence.
“I miss her.” She purses her lips. “I took after her. I was named Egoyibo after her, but Grace drowned my native name.”
“Egoyibo.” I gasp for the love of the name.
She giggled. “She kept poultry and insisted that I alone eat their eggs.”
“What happened to her poultry?”
“They went feral after her death. She came in a dream and scolded my father, and then he replaced them.”
I draw silent parallels between her grandmother and my aunt.
“Tell me about your ear.”
Suddenly I feel her hand on my bad ear like electric shock. No one except my mother has ever touched my bad ear in that tender way.
“I am sorry you had to go through all that,” she says after hearing the story of the madman, which made her giggle, frown, grimace, and then shed a tear.
The silence becomes awkward.
“I shall leave.” She rises, the setting sun falling on her, glowing on the cowpea brown of her skin. “You don’t have to see me off if you can’t.”
I insist.
We talk about school and the exam on her way out. About Lioness, and Cat, and Nza. I manage to walk her to the village road and watch her bound ahead, as light and free as a butterfly. Suddenly she turns and looks back, and then she waves at my silhouette before vanishing at the village intersection.
I may have told Grace that I am Catholic, but the truth is, I can’t remember the last time I went to church. “No son of mine living under the same roof with me will end up a pagan,” my mother would swear at the top of her voice each time I failed to go to church. “It’s bad enough that your father worships idols and those other worthless gods.”
I turn around and begin to hop towards home with a big smile, my mind rewinding the name over and over again like a beautiful song, lyrical and poetic.
“Egoyibo.”