I WISH I HADN’T SPOKEN ABOUT EZENWANYI’S CAVE IN such glowing terms. I don’t know about its healing powers any more than I know a fairy tale, even though my father has told me about them many times. But I feel indebted to Chikelue, and hope that he will be healed of his epilepsy in my village, where we are now headed together.
“I have had it since childhood,” he confessed to me after we became fast friends. “I have been everywhere from medical doctors to palmists to prophets to herbalists in search of a cure.”
Chikelue’s story is heartbreaking. Sitting next to him as he drives, I steal glances at him, wondering about this monster that comes into him and leaves him hollow after it departs. After we parted ways at the end of his National Youth Service—Chikelue returning to Lagos while I continued my studies and writing—our correspondence became less frequent, and eventually I lost his contact information. I didn’t hear from him until he called me five years later. By then I had finished at school, and his husky voice on the phone scraped my ears of the ants running around in my head. My father had invited this colony of ants when he said, “If you are not a failure, why can’t you find work after leaving the university instead of sitting here roasting your buttocks in the ash heap writing trash?”
“Leave this boy be and stop pecking at him like he is birdseed,” my mother scolded him.
“Boy.” My father sniggered. “Do you still call him a boy?”
Machebe sided with my father. “The rest of us couldn’t go to school because you people wasted the family savings and even sold our only land to send him.”
My heart would sink each time I heard their lamentations. Machebe had rounded off his mechanic apprenticeship. Usonwa had learned hair braiding at Ogige market. Ihebube and Ebube were finishing at primary school. If I had a job, I could support them all the way to the university. With nothing to do, life in the village became more boring than ever. I had no one to visit, with Eke long dead and the boys I grew up with all gone in pursuit of careers, leaving snuff-nosed old men and women in the village behind. It was so boring, I felt like running away. I’d sit on the tomb all day lost in daydreams. I realized how much I missed Grace, remembering how we sat together on Okike’s tomb during an evening of orange sunset, an evening when nature was profound with its paintbrush. I wondered about her family, her wealthy husband and round babies. Good for her. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere with a man like me.
What my father had called “writing trash” was my attempt to write our history. I had been working on the plot outline for the book when Chikelue and I parted ways. He had been very encouraging, even reading some pages and praising them at length. I had resumed work on the book to fill up the empty days after my Youth Service Scheme, determining to leave the village even if it meant sleeping under a bridge like the touts in Lagos. And then the phone rang and Chikelue’s deep voice was saying, “My father wants his biography written. I recommended you.” I had given up the hope of ever hearing from Chikelue again. My breath quickened with the expectation of seeing him after such a long time, and the thrilling knowledge that he’d not have recommended me to his father if he didn’t consider my writing good enough.