THE MONSTER TAKES OWNERSHIP OF CHIKELUE ON our way home in violent jerks and spasms. It knocks him down. He kicks out, throwing wild punches in retaliation. He chews his tongue and lips until blood and saliva dribble down the corner of his mouth. His body is like steel when I try to help him. The monster holds him captive for about ten minutes. And then it frees him as he gulps air into his lungs and succumbs to a quiet stupor.
“I am sorry,” I say, overcome with guilt as he regains consciousness.
He answers with a nod, too tired to utter words.
We walk slowly home against the encroaching darkness, taking a different route back, a longer route, because we want to get into the village after dark to hide Chikelue’s stained white gabardine shirt and hair covered with dirt. This illness demystifies him, taking away the timber in his voice, and the pride that stands in his eyes and squares his shoulders.
My mother has lit her ochanja when we arrive home. “The moon will not be rising,” she says.
Outside, the night sky is set with stars, but the cold is piercingly hostile, and we sit over dinner in the mildewed warmth of the room. The seats are set closely around the table in a square illuminated by the dancing yellow flame of my mother’s ochanja. My father shares a seat with my mother. His body is shielded in his thick, dirty awuru, and his face is dark against the mushroom of his hair. My mother’s wrappa is thrown around her shoulders to keep the cold at bay. Machebe is sitting next to Usonwa, his broad chest bare. His arms are short, thick, and bunched with veins from lifting car engines. He is eating quietly, stretching his rough and callused workman’s hand to pluck food from the large dish on the table. Ihebube and Ebube are protected from the cold in layers of dirty clothing. They are scoffing greedily as if competing with each other. The dinner is unusually rich.
“It is a special meal to celebrate your homecoming.” My mother glances at Chikelue with a rueful look.
Chikelue once again refuses her cooking and instead eats the hamburgers he brought from the mansion in a slow and disconsolate way. He has changed from his stained white gabardine into a thick ash turtleneck sweater. It is a long, long night ahead, and he will have to take his bath in our bathroom with its palm-frond walls and a wet floor covered in sickly green moss. He will have to scoop water from an iron bucket with cupped hands and throw it over his body. In his father’s mansion, he sits in a tub and indulges himself in a warm, luxurious bath flowing from the hot-water tap. In my father’s chicken coop, he will sleep on a naked mattress after the ordeal of the iron bucket, and dream of the duvets and Armani coverlets of the mansion.
“My friend is very sick.” I open up to my father about Chikelue’s illness and our experience in the cave after my mother and siblings have gone to bed.
“Ndo,” he says to Chikelue, his mood suddenly pensive.
My father explains that what we saw in Ezenwanyi’s cave might not happen again for another generation to come. According to him, we only needed to splash ourselves in the great waterfall, soaking ourselves in it long enough to benefit from its ritual ablutions. Its deep spiritual nourishments.
“You will take him to the attama in the morning to see if there is something he can do to help him,” my father says. “I shall provide you with a cock to offer him.”
I stir and open my eyes. Chikelue’s form is outlined against the wall in the blue light of his mobile phone. He is sitting up, his knees raised and his arms wrapped around them. He has his back against the wall. A mosquito is caught in the blue light in a slow and heavy flight. Another one drones in my ear and my clap is rewarded with a thick red sludge in my palms. I don’t know why Chikelue would want to blame me for his being caught up sleepless in the cold, dark night of my small village. The dinner my mother made was the best she could have offered an important visitor, but Chikelue had preferred to eat hamburgers from the mansion. I sit for a long time trying to figure it out. Chikelue is full of life and yet so sick? But why come to the mythical cave in my village backwoods to seek healing? I think I understand. This is not Chikelue; this form looking small and vulnerable is the dignified hypocrisy of the “new world.” But I am much indebted to Chikelue, so deeply I cannot hold his rudeness against him.
We spend the rest of the night sitting up, nodding, and slapping at mosquitoes. I resolve not to rest or close an eye again in sleep until this sickness is chased out of him, this sickness that has defied medical knowledge. We rise at the crow of the first cock and leave for the shrine to see the attama.
“He is the custodian of Ezenwanyi’s cave,” I explain to Chikelue on our way.
We have with us the cock my father has given us. The village is still silent and full of darkness. At this time of the winter solstice, the nights draw out and it doesn’t get light until later in the mornings. We make our way to the shrine, the same clearing in the grove, the same grim thatch shelter curtained with ribbons of appliqué cloth of different colours. We enter without our footwear, as is customary. It is still the same inside the shrine. There is still a half-buried clay pot on the earth floor near a small hollow in the ground, but it is no longer the same attama, the same old man sitting with his face in deep shadow. The old attama has passed on, and a new attama has assumed his position and is already sitting by the light of an oil lamp as if he were expecting us.
“He will take a bath in the water,” the new attama says after we have explained the symptoms of Chikelue’s illness.
He is a lanky, soft-spoken, somnambulant-eyed seventeen-year-old boy who treats us impassively and touches things distractedly in the shrine. He inherited the priesthood of the deity at the age of sixteen. “That boy has left too much in ruin,” my father had said of him.
“That’s all?” I ask the boy.
He raises his sleepy eyes to look at me. “He will return to the shrine for a final ritual. He was destined to be favoured. Eziyi was in a benevolent mood. You were at the cave yesterday.”
I don’t know if it is a statement or a question from the offhand way he says it, but I reply, “Yes.”
“What you saw in the cave, many men have lived and died craving to see.”
We wait to hear more, but the priest resigns himself again to silence and that enigmatic habit of touching things around the shrine.
We set off to the cave with him leading the way. He is dressed in khaki shorts and a sober brown shirt. His walk is evocative of a moth’s. At the cave he asks that I wait around the mouth while he leads Chikelue in. I sit in the grass to wait. I think of Chikelue’s sickness and the attama’s erratic ways. The scenery is full of earth-coloured anthills and trees with foliage looking like the thick afro hair of a man. And then I pace about to release the tension cocked into me like beer, ready to spill over if shaken and uncorked.
They spend a long time in the cave. The splashing of water tells me Chikelue is having the bath. The chill of each scoop that falls on him stings my body. At last Chikelue climbs out of the cave fully dressed and we walk back to the shrine where the ada of Ezenwanyi, a wizened old woman, is summoned by the priest for the final ritual. My father had said that before so many women like my mother abandoned Ezenwanyi for their so-called Christianity, whoever had held the position of ada had headed the governing council of women who oversaw the caretaking of Ezenwanyi. They kept the shrine clean and fined members who broke their rules. Most of these women eventually left to join the Catholic community, leaving an inactive group with a few skeptics, but the ada has been as consistent in her duties as she is unwavering in her faith.
It is daylight by the time the ada of Ezenwanyi arrives. Chikelue is asked to remove his shirt. We watch the attama slay the cock into the hollow in the ground. He performs a libation, muttering incoherent words, immediately after which comes a loud rustling sound in the bush behind the shrine.
“Eziyi is about to make his appearance,” he says to warn us ahead of the appearance of Ezenwanyi’s serpent. My father has told me about it.
Eziyi approaches with a sound like a boiling sea wave. Every eye in the shrine is fixed on the thick undergrowth now shaking with vigour. Fear seizes us as the fabulous serpent with an enormous head, complete with combs and wattles like a full-grown cock, looms into view. We cringe from the chilly stare of the serpent as it swings its massive greyish body into the shrine, raises its head, and hisses loudly. I have never witnessed a scene so terrifying. Now I can see the serpent closely, scarlet about the face, with an artistic arrangement of cowries running along its serrated cockscomb down to the back of its head. The shrine resonates with the voice of the ada rising and falling in a well-rehearsed cantillation. At the sight of the serpent, she leaps up then glides back and forth in a fluid sequence of movements, her face radiant and yellow, and the tempo of her voice rising correspondingly with the fluidity of her footwork. A startled silence rules the shrine in that brief moment while she pauses and anoints the serpent’s great head with a powdery substance crushed from yellow chalk in her hand. Suddenly, the serpent begins a long, slow withdrawal, sliding out of the shrine into the bush to complete the process.
“You may now go. You are healed,” the attama says, then adds as an afterthought, “If in three days you do not suffer a relapse.”
Chikelue is shaking with trauma. He drops some money, an entire bundle of it, on the earth floor, and we hurry out of the shrine and head home. Once he has calmed down, he looks like a new creature, pride back again in his eyes and in his walk. The success of his healing ignites a smile, his round cheeks dimpling and making his pert lips more feminine.