I LIE LOW. I HAVE THIS FEELING OF BEING NAKED, AND the only way I can hide my nakedness is to keep indoors and curtail from parading my shame around the village; that is the only way to stop myself from being mocked and laughed at, from being held in a cold and silent contempt by the neighbours for humiliating myself with a married woman. I spend the days brooding and running down a review of my failed life. I think of hunger, which now only seems to get worse with my father’s physical and emotional health plunging, leaving my mother toiling endlessly to provide food; I think of my reputation, which I have succeeded in tearing to shreds; and I think of my dream of pulling my family out of poverty, which is fast slipping away from me.
My mother picks up bad news on her way back from church on Sunday. Ehamehule, the boy who fought me over his mother’s tomb, is dead.
I had forgotten about Ehamehule.
“He left school to become a highway bus driver. And then he got into an accident.” My mother weeps until her eyes are reddened, swollen.
I remember Ehamehule’s father with his deep, rumbling voice and the body of an athlete. I imagine him seated with sympathizers in a cushioned room, his face tight, and his muscles pulsing with sorrow. Will he build a tomb or even raise a statue for Ehamehule like he did for the boy’s mother? Everyone is talking about Ehamehule’s death, how heartbroken his father is, ought to be.
“He will have no one to carry on his name,” my father says.
“He could remarry,” my mother says. “He should have done that long ago after his wife passed on.”
“He is old and may not withstand the demands of a much younger wife,” my father laments. “He might not even have the strength to get a woman pregnant anymore.”
Everyone is talking about it, saying what they think. I ponder this man’s tragedy, but from a different angle. He lost a wife, erected a tomb and a statue for her, something his son had guarded jealously, even fought over, and now the son, his only child, is dead. Should he die in a few months himself, this man who has lived a foolish life in the eyes of the villagers, but who happens to be my idol for his devotion to his wife after her death, should he die of a broken heart, of loneliness, that would be the real tragedy of his little, censured, self-sacrificing life, because there would be no one to entomb him.
In the meantime, paled by the tragic death of Ehamehule, my encounter with Enujioke slowly fades, greying like a dying day. There is little to do to fill the emptiness of the days. I get tired of sitting at home listening to the neighbours as they pound their fufu or a woman as she calls out in a strident voice to her child who has wandered off to play. Obodike, our neighbour, is always hitting his wife. Machebe and Usonwa are always fighting. The rivalry between us, Machebe and me, has shifted somehow, dislodged by my self-alienation and Usonwa’s ascension to maidenhood. Their voices clash like a pair of cymbals whenever they happen to be home together. They fight over little things. They drag the clothesline, Machebe kicking her bucket down, and Usonwa screaming abuses and lunging at him in retaliation.
I get bored and walk down to the creek and spend the afternoon there. I stroll along the far countryside, hungry and angry and in dire need of a little excitement, a little money for snacks and my favourite chilled drinks. The trees are also looking bare and bored, the ground parched and thirsty after weeks of wild Harmattan. The whole place is aflame with the tang. The sun is up and staring wearily down at me, like a weak infected eye, as I walk from tree to tree checking for pods I might be able to steal. Most of the trees have nothing on them. After a long search I find one, an oil bean tree heavy with pods. I can’t believe my luck, but then I notice ants with big red heads and small black bodies crawling all over the tree. I look up again at the long black pods, determining to get them even if there are snakes on the tree. Some of the pods are broken, a sign that the seeds are very ripe. The broken pods look like a pair of brown palms coming together for a clap. These red-headed ants are vicious and may have been the reason the owner of the tree has ignored the pods until now.
I begin to climb the tree. Sensing an intruder, more ants pour out of a black nest gummed to a branch of the tree. They look scary with their big red heads and grim little bodies. I have to be fast to avoid the ants, but then I have to pluck the pods with my bare hands since I do not have a machete to cut them down. It really slows down the process. I do not bring a machete when I am coming to rob trees, to avoid attracting attention; someone might get suspicious. I pluck the pods and hide them in the bush, then come back with a bag to collect them under the cover of darkness. The next day, I take them to the local market in a neighbouring community to sell. I usually leave for the market before daylight to beat nosy eyes.These pods are fully ripe and easy to pluck, but the ants are vicious. I keep rubbing my feet together to crush them, to stop them from climbing beyond the knee into my private area.
“Come down quietly.” A harsh voice, similar to a goat’s bleat when it chokes on its tether, startles me, nearly pushing me off the tree.
Ogbareka, the owner of the farm, a bull of a man, is standing at the foot of the tree when I look down. I stare at him with startled eyes. I didn’t hear him sneak up on me. He has a machete. Bare to the waist, broad and callused like a chimpanzee, he is glaring up at me, his beefy nose flaring with anger and his great fist tightened around the machete. Every time I see his wide nostrils, I imagine a game in which I jump into his head through his nostrils and out again.
“Come down right away.”
I get a big ant bite at the tip of my penis and let out a wince, almost falling off the tree with the pain. The man tries to hide a chuckle. But still I refuse to climb down and have myself sliced like vegetable.
“If you must get me, then come get me up here, old man.”
The ants are all over me with their ferocious, conspiratorial bites. I know I won’t last much longer up the tree. He probably knows it, too, which is why he is patiently waiting for me to give myself up. Around him are the scattered pods I have plucked and thrown down, a sight that infuriates him all the more. I think of jumping. But people are in their farms working. I can see them bent over in the distance. The man is still yelling at me to come down. They will hear his voice and come rushing over with their machetes; they are bound by a keen sense of communal living. If I jump now and he catches me and takes me to the village head, I will deny stealing his pods since there is no witness, but if someone else comes along, not only will he have a witness but my chance of escaping a chase by two people will be very slim. The machete in his hand catches the sun and glances wickedly, dulling the pain of the ant bites.
“All right,” he says suddenly, throwing the machete down. “Come down. I am not going to hurt you since you haven’t made away with any of the pods. Your punishment is going to be a simple one. You will come down, gather these pods into a bundle, and take the bundle to my house.”
His sudden change of mind seems suspicious. Is this a bait to lure me down? I could take the chance; after all, I cannot last much longer up here with these ants all over me. But then I think of the humiliation of being dragged into the village with pods tied around my neck and waist the way they do to thieves.
The man suddenly squints up at me, his left palm shading his eyes. “Wait. Are you not the son of Agala?”
I curse him under my breath for recognizing me.
He grabs the machete again, his fury suddenly taking a monstrous leap, making a wild beast of him, like a famished lion with a caged prey in sight about to be released to it for a meal. I recoil from the violence escaping from the holes under his nose in hot steam. “Yes. I am the son of Agala,” I yell at him. “I am the son of Agala, his first son who will soon go to the university to study. Do you have a problem with that, you lousy fat-nose?”
“Me! A fat-nose!” He fumes.
“You are not only a fat-nose, you are an ugly chimpanzee.” I suddenly do not care anymore.
“Chaii!” he laments.
“What are you going to do about that—rob my father of another title?” I rail at him. “Do you know that you are not qualified to mention my father’s name because he is a better man than you despite your oppression? I am sure you don’t have a son who is going to the university soon, or do you?”
“I am going to kill you today.” He makes wild gestures that scare me. He is trembling with fury.
I reach out, pluck a pod, and fling it down at him. He ducks as the pod hurtles down towards him. I reach out for another pod, and another, and another. The man keeps dancing this and that way to avoid the pods, but I determine to stone him with the pods until he flees, and then I will have a chance to jump down and run. A man in a work hat and farm clothes emerges. He begins to race towards us. The noise of our skirmish must have attracted him. The man has a machete, too. The sight of him activates my clogged brain. Again I survey the distance that I will need to jump. The tree is a very tall one and I might as well be jumping from the top floor of a two-storied house. I look again at Ogbareka, howling like a mad dog at the foot of the tree, hate and anger making a pathetic wretch of him. Suddenly I let myself drop, landing on my feet and then rolling a few times to cushion the effect of the fall.
Ogbareka lunges at me with the machete.
The baby startles awake. Finding an empty house, he lets go a loud wail. The baby yells until his voice fades to a whimper. Exhausted, he sits in sobbing spasms, in his urine and excreta.
Obochi finds him in this state when she storms in. The child stares at her, apparently too weak to be startled by her sudden arrival. His stuttering breath tells her he has been awake a long time and has sobbed for all of it. They look at each other fixedly, fear and mistrust in the baby’s eyes, hers still dilating with the horror of watching as its father was named the sacrifice. As they bound him, tightening the rope until spasms of resistance wearied out. And then they gagged his voice and blindfolded away the fire and spirit in his eyes. The first hoeful of red soil took a downward flight into the grave, landing on his broad chest with a thud. It paved the way for many hoefuls whipping his recumbent body and smothering out the small, muffled voice of history. She clutched her chest, heart ripped through with pain, face raked and twisted, and let out a wail. She tore herself away from the gruesome scene that replays itself now with the same cruelty, the same savageness.
Suddenly she dives across the room for her son. She holds him to her chest, crushes him to her bosom and smothers him with kisses, snot, sweat, tears, excreta, urine, and all. He gasps, and his body rebels against hers, asking questions: will a lifetime of cuddling be enough to make up for the injustices of denying him his right to motherly affection, the lunacy of referring to him as a thing in place of giving him a name? As she presses him tighter and whispers his new name, Gbaghalu, she imagines the cadaver expanding in time, and the blindfold ripping apart. She pictures the bulging eyes as they summon termites that make a meal of their terror, and then the seed decaying in the soil, bringing forth a new tendril.