He met me at the gate with a smile.
‘I.K.,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘Onitsha seems to be good to you. I knew you would like it.’ The glare of the afternoon sun made him blink many times.
‘But I can’t keep away from home, Joe,’ I said, making a face.
‘I know,’ he said. He closed the gate. Its rusty hinges tore the market-day-like silence that enveloped the village. ‘I always forget to put oil on these hinges!’
We walked towards the brightly painted cement house twenty yards away. It had zinc roofing. The broad path to it was bordered by a well-kept farm that covered any area not taken up by a building. The yam mounds in the farm were huge. Above them a cool sea of green leaves waved as the wind passed through. It was a big compound, quiet and neat like its owner.
‘I wish I were you, Joe,’ I said, remembering the riotous noise that was Onitsha, the stinking gutters and filthy side streets. It was to escape all that that I spent my weekends at home. I often hated to go back on Monday mornings. But a man had to eat.
‘Did you go to church today?’ I asked.
He ran his hand over the bald patch on the crown of his head. ‘You know me,’ he said.
It was a statement as well as a rebuke. I knew Joe, I thought, and I didn’t know him. The quiet church-going man of the village; the silent force whose aid you could enlist in a pinch and be sure your secret would be kept. That was not all. Joe and I were cousins. We were brought up together; he lost his parents at an early age. When Joe was eighteen and we were in the north, he was apprenticed to a tailor. On Joe’s graduation my father equipped him and set him up at our market place at home. And he had made good, combining tailoring and farming with an ease that surprised most people.
Yes, I knew Joe. But there were occasions I felt there was something more to him, and that his quietness was that of the forest to a town dweller. At such times I remembered what my mother told me about Joe’s early childhood when I asked her why the little finger of Joe’s right hand looked as if it had been cut. Joe, I said, had refused to tell me.
‘That’s the sign of the ogbanje,’ Mother said curtly. She was annoyed but felt I should get an answer to my question. ‘Joe came two times and went away. So when he came and went the third time, his little finger was cut to make him stay if he came the fourth time.’ Although I did not understand this answer till many years later, I could not ask for an explanation then, for Mother, suddenly looking up from the yam she was peeling, glared at me. ‘Don’t ever ask Joe or anybody such a question again!’
‘Hello, where are the owners of this house?’ I asked as I stepped into the sparsely furnished, medium-sized sitting room. There were two new armchairs with beautifully covered cushions and in between, an elongated coffee table. The doors that opened into or out of the room were lined up so that anyone coming in from outside could see right through to the backyard.
Mercy soon appeared from the kitchen, rubbing her eyes with one end of her lappa. I could smell the wood smoke that clung to her clothing.
‘I can see you’re making a great effort to prepare something eatable,’ I teased.
‘If I had my way,’ she retorted in a voice that sounded like a split bamboo musical instrument, ‘you’d cook your own food. You’re not a stranger in this house.’
‘So that’s how it is,’ I said. ‘I’d better leave. I don’t like being indebted to people. They always make sure I never forget.’
‘Well, you’d better stay and eat the food since it’s on the fire.’
‘Oh God,’ I said in mock horror. ‘I thought everything would have been ready by the time I got here. I didn’t know I had to wait till the next world to have a simple lunch.’
‘You!’ she said laughing and going back to the kitchen.
I threw myself into one of the armchairs and laughed till my sides hurt. ‘You’re lucky, Joe,’ I said as he came out of the bedroom with some bottles of beer. ‘You know, if you hadn’t married Mercy this house would have been as quiet as a farm at noon.’
Joe gave me his brief smile and busied himself with opening and pouring out the beer. He left his glass half-full. He liked to mix his beer with palm wine, a jarful of which was by his side. Whilst we drank, I wondered how Joe and Mercy had kept their marriage going with no apparent friction. They had now been married for two years without any issue! In the village, people speculated who was at fault, but the general belief was that it must be Joe. Being an only child, they argued, he would have put Mercy away as soon as he was sure she was barren. Besides, he was rich enough to marry as many wives as he wanted and he wasn’t a fanatical Christian, nor had he any very close relative to inherit all the money he was making should he die childless.
‘Where did you get these armchairs?’ I asked Joe. I loved to hear and watch him talk. You had to stare intently at the small mouth hemmed in by the flowing black beard and moustache to realize that the words came from it. And he spoke so quietly. Nobody had ever heard him raise his voice in anger. Not even I.
‘From a carpenter in Umueke village,’ he answered. ‘He was trained at Onitsha but couldn’t make a living there, so he came home. I got them cheap. I believe I was his first customer.’
‘You know how to find good things.’
‘I like to get things before people discover how good they are and force prices up, or spoil their quality. Very few things people praise are really as good as they are made out to be.’
The sitting room, as I looked round once more, bore testimony to Joe’s good taste. The whitewashed walls forced everyone to be careful. The filthy fingerprints and body marks that dirtied the painted walls of many houses in the village were nonexistent. And Joe himself, diminutive in size and looking every inch an ebony-black, extremely restrained, miniature Fidel Castro, was another good thing people had not yet discovered.
‘How’s the tailoring these days?’
He said nothing. His small brown eyes, black from the surrounding forest of hair, twinkled in amusement.
Then I remembered a complaint he had made to me some years ago, a complaint that was made the only way he ever made one, quietly and without fuss: ‘You always make me talk too much, I.K.’
‘You haven’t changed, I.K.,’ he said finally. His eyes still twinkled, and the amusement had also passed on to his lips and lifted them in a smile. ‘I’m glad,’ he added as an afterthought.
I sipped my beer silently, letting the peace of the village do all our talking. That was what he wanted.
Outside there was the hard glare of the sun and the living, cool green of the yam tendrils and maize stalks and the reverberation of the mortar full of pathos. Inside there was the coolness and the cleanness and the pleasantly stale odour of bottled beer mixed inextricably with the fresh one of undiluted palm wine and the sharp smell of frying onions and palm oil.
I smiled unconsciously and Joe smiled back. It was like a dream. Perhaps, I thought, Joe’s quietness had to do with the fear of his parents in his infancy that he might die any moment and its attendant watchfulness.
‘Joe!’ Mercy suddenly shouted from the kitchen. ‘Please help me set the table? I’m almost ready.’
The sound of her voice brought me back to earth and even in my annoyance I glanced quickly at Joe to see how he had taken the jar. Not a muscle twitched in his face. Quietly he drained his cup, put it on the cemented floor, got up and went into the bedroom.
And another aspect of their marriage was explained to me. The sound of her voice had come and gone like a roll of thunder and already its remembered sound had blended with the quiet and even deepened it.
But I was curious to know how Mercy had adjusted to the marriage.
Joe laid the table. A fitful breeze kept flapping the legs of the white trousers of the pyjama-style dress he had taken to wearing while at home. It gave him the ascetic look of a prophet.
The table was soon laden with plates of rice and stew. After Mercy had washed her face and hands we began to eat.
She was a good cook. I told her so. It set her off.
‘Joe won’t allow me to get anyone to help me in the house,’ she complained. ‘Yet he expects his meals to be well-cooked. Look at how long it has taken me to prepare this. If I had someone to help me, we would have finished eating by now. Joe won’t even allow me to bring any of my relations here and he does not want any of his to live with us. Sometimes this place gets so dull and silent I wonder if I’m alive at all. But Joe will never understand. He thinks only of himself. He has his tailoring and his farming to keep him busy …’
‘And you have the house and me,’ Joe interjected.
Mercy said no more but concentrated on her eating with fury. I stole glances at her from time to time. Somehow, I got the impression that had I not been present she would have quarrelled with Joe. By the time the meal was halfway, however, she had recovered her composure. Her long, narrow face and large eyes assumed their usual expression. It was one that always seemed to say, ‘Hm, who do you think you’re kidding?’
After she had cleared the table, Joe and I went back to our drinking.
‘You know,’ Joe said slowly, ‘I’m beginning to enjoy farming more than tailoring. My boys now do most of the work in the shop and I go there only to make sure I’m not being cheated.’
‘I’ve always wondered how you manage both jobs,’ I said, noticing that the wine was making him talk.
‘I buy the labour for my farms with the money I make from tailoring. I think I’ll stop tailoring altogether when I’ve bought some more land.’
Suddenly, angry voices sounded down the road that ran by the side of one of the walls of the compound. The voices belonged to two women and their anger seemed to be directed at a third but absent person. Once in a while one of them wailed, calling on God to witness a crime that had been committed and punish the guilty. They were soon joined by a third voice that sounded like Mercy’s and the wailing and cursing became more frequent. Then the voices drifted away and Mercy ran into the house breathless with excitement.
‘They caught Nwanma with a man!’ she announced.
‘Where?’ I asked with dismay. Nwanma was one of those married, beautiful women that one felt, without talking to them, one could get to know better if one had the courage to try. Another had beaten me to it.
‘At the forest of Ngele-Ojii. They were caught by a woman who had gone to collect some cocoyam from the village cocoyam barn.’
‘I wonder what her husband will do to her.’
‘He’ll take her back,’ Joe said. ‘Beautiful women always marry men they can play football with. Their being chased or seduced increases their worth in their husband’s eyes.’
Mercy, who had been staring at him whilst he spoke, now burst out, her long neck bobbing and weaving. ‘So that’s what you think of it, Joe? I bet you must have had your eyes on her and been waiting for the opportunity to go in! What a pity Nwankwo beat you to it! Or perhaps now you know it’s possible you will redouble your efforts. Well, let me tell you that the day I hear any scandal about you, I’ll pack my bags, leave your house and I won’t return. I.K., you heard me say it.’ She stormed back to her kitchen, her tall lean body shaking with anger.
‘It is good to make women jealous once in a while,’ Joe said when later I got up to go. ‘Otherwise they’ll forget what they have.’
I said goodbye to Mercy but she was still in a bad mood. Perhaps the thought that Joe had rescued her from probable spinsterhood and that it would be virtually impossible for her to remarry should she leave him had made her feel worse. ‘Poor girl,’ I thought. A baby would make a world of difference to her.
Joe saw me to the only main road the village had. It ran from the next village to the marketplace. Most of our houses were built on both sides of it.
‘E-he, I have a message for you,’ I said as we were about to part. ‘One middle-aged woman who sells cloth at Onitsha market asked me to greet you. She refused to tell me her name. She said if I just told you she sells cloth you’d remember.’
‘Thank you,’ Joe said flatly and that was all. It seemed the effects of the wine had worn off.
It was a little over a year before Joe’s tongue was again loosened by wine in my presence. We had just had dinner with my parents and at Joe’s suggestion retired to his house for beer and palm wine. A hurricane lantern stood on the coffee table, attracting insects to their death. The moon, not visible yet, lightened the dark night with suffused light. I could sense a certain excitement, fitting for a Saturday night, in the air as the young ones got ready for moonlight games. Although this had ceased to be the great event it was in my youth, it was still something to look forward to – some of the grown-up girls at the games still wore nothing else but a few strings of beads round their slim waists.
Joe hadn’t changed; a year couldn’t change a man already set in an iron, middle-aged mould. But his household had. Mercy had run away with Nwankwo. Nobody knew where but rumour had it they had gone North. Since Nwankwo was regarded as a foreigner – he had come from Okigwe as a child – none bothered to find out his exact whereabouts.
Mercy herself was from a town six miles away. Her impoverished family had sighed with relief when Joe married her.
I still remembered the last time I had seen Mercy. It was on a beautiful Sunday morning. I was standing in front of my house with my back to the main road and savouring the brilliancy of the natural colours when I heard a mocking voice behind me call me by my praise name:
‘Oke Osisi.’
I turned round. Mercy stood on the main road, a large pot of water balanced on her small head.
‘Mercy,’ I said, surprised. ‘When did you go to the stream to be returning already?’
‘I’m not a white woman that sleeps late.’ She laughed happily.
‘You went alone?’ I asked.
‘Only children fear the dark.’ Again her laughter was happy. Suspicious, I looked at her closely. Her face, which often reminded me of a hairless, beautiful monkey, glowed. I was sure she hadn’t rubbed any pomade for I would have seen the container in the plate covering the mouth of the water pot. Besides, her eyes twinkled with an inner excitement, and her bare dark arms and neck had a sheen that I had not seen there before. Even her tall thin body seemed to be filling out.
‘This is the first time you’re looking at me with the eyes of a husband,’ she said, feeling uncomfortable under my scrutiny.
I looked away with a laugh. ‘You don’t behave towards me as to a husband,’ I retorted and, before she could protest, went on, ‘For instance you’ve never fetched me bathwater from the stream.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it when you come home next time. I’d better be going or I’ll be late for church.’
She hadn’t been gone more than twenty minutes when I saw Nwankwo, magnificent in underpants, striding back from the stream, a huge water pot sitting on his head …
‘Will you escort me to Umuoko village tomorrow?’ Joe had to repeat the question before I became aware he was speaking.
‘Only immediately after the church service. I have somewhere to go after lunch.’
‘That will be all right. Where shall I wait for you?’
‘Will your tailoring shop do?’
‘Yes.’
We continued drinking. Sounds of laughter and snatches of song came from the playground. They took me back to the old days.
‘I’m thinking of getting married again,’ Joe said.
‘But your wife is still alive and your church doesn’t allow divorce.’
‘I’ll soon leave the church.’
‘You’ll lose their custom.’
Joe made most of the vestments for the Roman Catholic churches around, and subsequently most of the congregation became his customers.
‘I’m selling the tailoring business too. I want to do only farming. I need a wife.’
‘Have you seen a girl you like?’
‘Yes. You’ll see her tomorrow.’
And I began to think it was high time I got married myself. But it was not that easy. I had to consider too many things, age, education, background, love, parental approval, where we would live … Joe didn’t have to think of any of these. All he wanted was a woman.
‘That cloth seller asked about you again, Joe. In fact, she has been constantly asking about you since I told her we were related.’
‘Hm.’
‘I told her your wife ran away and she said she wasn’t surprised. She said both of you knew of only one woman who could make you happy.’
‘What did she, the cloth seller, look like?’ Joe asked after a while.
‘Tall, dark with a small face, a long chin, and thick shampooed hair. I think it’s her hair and not a wig. She’s pretty in a way but not young.’
‘Hm, you should have seen her when she was young.’ He sipped his drink and stared into space.
‘I can see she must have been beautiful,’ I said, trying to make him go on.
‘She was my mistress.’
I didn’t know what to say to that so I kept quiet. That woman, his mistress? He must be out of his mind. Even I found it difficult to talk to her. She was so sophisticated, experienced and rich …
‘I buy all my cloth from her and have been doing so since I started my tailoring business,’ Joe said. ‘It seems such a long time ago, and I must have been another person then. I don’t know what she saw in me. It started with her making me buy from her all the cloth I needed. She sold everything cheap to me. Then she began to prepare meals so I wouldn’t go hungry any time I visited Onitsha. Her excuse at the time was that I was her best customer. We came to know each other very well and I began to visit Onitsha more times than was required by my business. When she told me she was unhappily married, I advised her to leave her husband. She did, and I stayed in the house I got for her each time I visited.
‘I would have married her. But I knew your father would object and besides, she didn’t want to live here with me. Born and bred at Onitsha she said she couldn’t live in a village. She had a child for me. When she saw she couldn’t make me do what she wanted, she married my rival. However, I believe she still loves me.’
‘Why don’t you visit her, Joe, if only to see your child? I’m sure she would love it.’
‘But I wouldn’t like it. I’m not good at sharing things. Comes from being an only child.’
And looking at Joe as his beard glistened in the lamp light, I wondered if it were possible to really know a man, to know his thoughts or feelings except those he gave away through talking or action. Of course, minds did achieve a certain rapport but even that was infrequent, and if human intercourse depended on it then life would be hellishly slow. Who would have thought, seeing Joe as he sat calmly drinking beer mixed with palm wine, the very image of discretion, provincialism and naïveté, that he had once had a torrid affair with an extremely sophisticated city woman?
Perhaps, I thought, that was why he had taken his wife’s desertion so calmly and quietly. But I was not sure. I could only be sure if he told me so himself.
The next day Joe and I rode to Umuoko where we visited the Uko family. The compound was a large one and there were many young girls around to keep it clean. We were well entertained and on our way home Joe told me he was going to marry one of the girls.
‘Not the tall quiet one?’ I asked.
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘She had eyes for you alone.’
Joe married her soon afterwards. Elenye was a docile creature, who soon fell in love with her husband. She also gave him three children in quick succession, and from my infrequent visits at their house I felt they were happy.
I got married myself eventually and had to move to Onitsha. Joe wrote once in a while, his letters as empty of personal things as his silences. He rarely filled a page with his laborious writing. Then one day he wrote to say he was ill. I got the letter in midweek and waited till the weekend before going home.
Joe was very ill from pneumonia and his poor wife didn’t know what to do. She was at her wits’ end when I arrived. Five years of marriage had not changed her much. A little plump with the sensuous, soft looks of a well-fed married woman, she was still the tractable girl Joe had married. But the touching, childish innocence had now gone from her eyes.
I was very angry with Joe for not having gone to the hospital. He said he would rather die than entrust himself to callous nurses. He preferred to take drugs prescribed by the owner of the village drug store.
‘I’ll never forget what I saw at Adazi hospital,’ he told me jerkily. The illness seemed to have made him garrulous at a time when he found it painful to talk. ‘The nurses had no patience with the sick. If you’d heard them make fun of pregnant women and the seriously sick! They even made fun of the dead.’
By evening of the next day it was obvious Joe was going to die, and yet he refused to be moved. He wanted to die in his bed and in his house, he said. I couldn’t go against his wishes for even though we had had some understanding in the past, now I felt that I had never known him. He looked so emaciated and his eyes were those of a fanatic, burning with a fierce light that underscored anything he said. He was almost a complete stranger.
‘I.K.,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You’re going back to Onitsha tomorrow morning?’ The night was very far advanced.
‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. It was a question I hadn’t answered in my mind. My parents had already assured me they would take care of Joe in my absence but I was still reluctant to go. I felt that if I went, I might never see him again.
‘It’s better you go.’
‘There’s still time to decide that,’ I said evasively.
‘Not much though,’ he countered.
He fell silent and for a while I thought he had gone. Suddenly a cock flapped its wings on the igberiri-covered wall of the compound and announced the early morning hours. Joe opened his eyes again. It took him some time to recognize me. I made as if to go and call his wife. I had allowed the poor girl to snatch a few hours of sleep whilst I kept watch, but Joe stopped me.
‘I don’t know why I always find it easy to tell you things,’ he said slowly.
‘We’re brothers.’
‘I.K., I’ve done some terrible things.’
I would have laughed had he been well. Joe, do terrible things? I supposed such things would include refusing to loan money to a lazy person or not wanting any of his distant relations to sponge on him.
‘I.K., Mercy did not run away.’
‘What then did she do?’
‘I killed her!’
‘Don’t say such things, Joe,’ I said sharply. ‘You’re sick. You’re suffering from hallucinations. You …’
‘It’s true, I.K. It’s true.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘I buried her in the forest of Ngele-Ojii, in one of those unfilled saw pits.’
‘I suppose you’ll soon be telling me you killed Nwankwo too,’ I said sarcastically.
‘That coward! He ran away when I threatened him.’
‘Oh Joe, you don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘I caught them at it one evening at the outer edges of the forest.’ He was speaking very fast now, as if racing against time. ‘I didn’t know Mercy could be so passionate. She would have seen me if she hadn’t had her eyes tightly shut. I parted them. I told Nwankwo to leave the village immediately. He slunk away without a fight. Mercy started screaming curses at me. She said I wasn’t a man, not even a person … that she was pregnant and it was Nwankwo’s … that they had been doing it for months … that I could do nothing to stop them. I had to keep her quiet. I had to …’ He paused, his breathing shallow and fast.
And I remembered years ago in the North when Joe had nearly killed a huge man who had insulted my father. One moment the man was towering over Joe and the next he was rolling on the ground in acute agony. I never found out where Joe hit him.
‘I.K., I had to hide her body. She wasn’t worth dying for. I swore never to marry again. But I found it very difficult to stay alone in the house after that and …’ He gasped for breath and when he recovered I knew I had to call his wife. Joe might have something to say to her before …
‘I.K. … I.K. … I.K. Look … look after …’
I dashed across the sitting room to the other bedroom where Elenye was sleeping with the children. By the time we came back he was dead …
Elenye screamed. The children, startled out of their sleep, cried aloud with fear. The noise rose in waves and washed over me and each moment I expected Joe to restore that quiet he prized so much. Only a glance would have done it. Or even a twitch. But his quietness was now absolute.