Ike stepped out into a breezeless, sweltering afternoon. The sun was overhead. Its rays singed, its heat sizzled on his skin.
He’d intended to walk home and tell his mother all about his spat with Pastor Uka but decided to call on his uncle right away.
Ike’s shadow was a squat, disfigured thing on the ground. He walked briskly through the heat. His legs seemed powered by some strange energy. Having blitzed Pastor Uka, he was in a buoyant mood, free of resentment. Drums of victory beat in his head, but he cautioned himself against over-celebrating. From the outset, he’d known that the pastor would be the weaker of the foes he would have to engage and dominate. His uncle, Osuakwu, was bound to be far tougher.
In planning the operation in the comfort of his apartment in New York, Ike had not foreseen any obstacles. But now, his two feet planted in Utonki, his mother’s home within shouting distance of the shrine, he found himself increasingly powerless against the fear-tinged breeze that lashed him when he least expected.
Ike knew this much: that until he entered the shrine and sat among other men and looked his uncle in the face and spoke words that would shake off the nervousness in his voice and dislodge the doubt in his heart, until he peered at the statue itself and remained steely, he could afford no sense of victory.
The twin emotions of elation and terror tussled within him as he walked. He was aware of the irony of hastening to see an uncle he would betray in a matter of days.
Betray! The word stung. But Ngene was no longer what it used to be, a war deity. The warriors of Utonki had not fought a war in more than a hundred years. In fact, there were no warriors to speak of.
Years ago, before he traveled to America, Ike had listened, captivated, as a frail old man recounted the story of Utonki’s last war—a short-lived campaign to punish the people of Amanuke whose fishermen had encroached on the Utonki River.
“The fight lasted only a day,” the bent warrior recalled through fits of coughing. “Our warriors were so fierce that we wasted the enemy’s blood.” He exposed yellowed teeth in a sly nostalgic smile. “The next day, we gathered at the glade of Ngene to gird ourselves for another battle. We found ourselves suddenly surrounded by soldiers in peak hats, their guns trained on us. Then a white man stepped forward and asked for our leader. Ataa, our greatest warrior, stood up. In battle, pellets bounced off his body. Machetes grazed him, but they could never scathe him. A warrior of his stature had not been seen in Utonki for many, many moons. The white man took him away, and he never returned, alive or dead, to Utonki. The white man also gathered and hauled away our guns and machetes. He said the queen who ruled his country was now also our ruler. This woman we’d never seen—and who had never seen us—had declared that the river no longer belonged to us. She’d ruled that any stranger who wished could come and fish in it.” He bared his teeth again. This time, the smile was baleful, a thing born by pain.
As Ike recalled that story, he felt that Ngene was now no more than a retired god, a slumberous deity, in limbo. Its decline began on that day when the white man burst upon Utonki’s warriors and showed his superior hand.
Or perhaps Ngene was always a shirker, a dozer at his duty post, except that the warriors of Utonki did not know it. Else, how could it have failed to sniff out the white man’s ambush? On its watch, how could the white man’s army have crept upon the spears and guns of Utonki and crippled them?
He calculated the uncertain cost of spiriting off Ngene against the certain advantage of an assured windfall. True, the deity’s disappearance would propel Osuakwu into a state of shattering grief, but what of it? He thought about the once-upon-a-time when every living soul in Utonki, man, woman, and child, paid obeisance to Ngene. That time was now a vanished memory. Today, most of the people had become Christians. They had traded in their war deity for the one whose love was so overpowering that He assented to being impaled. Ike pictured Ngene as a deity staring with dejection at the backs of its former followers flocking to churches—and to charlatans like Uka.
Mark Gruels had argued that, in a postmodern world, a god that didn’t travel was dead. There was a ring of truth to it, perhaps a chic kind of ring, but he found it comforting enough. In an age when gods must travel or die, he, Ike, would become the instrument to refuel Ngene. It had fallen to him to show the world to Ngene, stuck too long in Utonki, and Ngene to the world. He pictured a party that would be thrown on the marvelous lawns of some swanky home to celebrate the acquisition of Ngene. It would be an extraordinary affair, the biggest debut party, graced by all the big collectors. They’d cast killing eyes of envy at the lucky new owner of Ngene, an African god of war.
A film of sweat spread over Ike’s face. He searched in the pockets of his pants for a handkerchief. Finding none, he ran a palm across his slick forehead and then rubbed the sweat between his hands.
He looked at the lump of his shadow, then remembered a game he used to play as a child, trying to outwit his shadow. He would stand stock-still until he was certain his shadow had been lulled to inattentiveness. Then he’d suddenly sprint, feint, or bob. Like the game with the mirror, it amazed him that, whatever his gambit, he never was able to shake off his shadow. It clung to him with tenacity, impossible to elude.
“Who do I greet?” asked a woman in a high-pitched voice.
Squinting against the glare, Ike made out a woman with a woven basket delicately balanced on her head. He acknowledged her greeting with a smile.
“I bet you don’t remember me,” said the woman.
He didn’t remember her name, but he knew her story. She was the widow of a truck driver who’d died years ago in an accident the week before she gave birth to their first child, a son. The baby had been born a spitting image of his father, complete with a scar above his left eyebrow, an exact copy of a scar on his father’s face. People marveled at the resemblance. It meant, they said, that the man’s death was premature, it had not been cleared in the spirit world; the accident that claimed his life was the work of some spiteful, malevolent dibia. His son’s uncanny resemblance meant that the man had reincarnated.
As the story played out in Ike’s mind, he suddenly remembered her son’s name. “You’re Obiajulu’s mother,” he said.
“You know me,” she said exultantly, smiling. Then the smile disappeared. “You must have heard,” the woman said, as if the words themselves bore light. “Obiajulu left me.”
“Ah-ah!” was all he could say, as if a ballast of heat had hit him. It was then that he noticed the funereal blackness of the woman’s wrapper.
“Obiajulu became a truck driver, just like his father. They’ve taken him away from me. The truck he was driving ran into a ditch. He was thrown out, and the truck fell on him. I saw my son’s body, crushed like pulp. It’s less than two months ago that we put him in the earth.”
Sorrow swelled his head. “Ndo,” he said, hurrying away.
“Ooh.” She sighed in acknowledgment.
Death seized his thoughts. Dead, dreary things flickered into his eyes. The caked, clayey earth bespoke death. A hardy slab, untouched by rain, the earth seemed baked in some radial oven. Death presented its awful face in the charred bark of trees. It loomed in the scalding rage of the very air. Its scent laced the air, giving it the reek of turned earth and dead, rotted leaves.