Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  When I was seven my father said, “Does it frighten you, this story?”

  I nodded.

  “It should. It put our family out of business for a few years. Lean years. But we survived, we endured. People like us always do.”

  “Anacleto was scary.”

  He placed a hand on the left side of my chest. The power in that hand could crush me. Black curly hairs grew from the backs of his fingers. “Everything is scary to you, my son. Your heart skips like a cheetah after prey, even when you sleep. I know this; I’ve been to check. This is what worries me: that you won’t endure like we need you to, like your family needs you to.”

  I took his hand off my chest. “I am not a coward,” I said.

  My father smiled. “I know.”

  Later in my life, when my father was dead from Yellow Fever, a new problem faced the clan.

  “We have to kill them all. Of necessity,” said the witch doctor in his raspy whisper. He fed strips of tilapia to his caged mongoose. It wasn’t really a pet. It was there for the snakes, just like the dried tobacco leaves we all had hanging from our roofs. Snakes hated the smell of tobacco leaves.

  “When?” asked Bode. He had the wide forehead of an east African, but with darker skin. There was talk about his mother and a travelling merchant, but I never got the details.

  “Tomorrow, at noon,” said the witch doctor.

  “What about the Christians?” asked Ogini.

  “Fuck the Christians,” said the witch doctor. “They can go to the village square when the sun is overhead or die like animals in their homes.”

  I kept quiet, even though I had the urge to say something, to justify my presence, to sound tough and intelligent. I could wield a machete, but barely so. I was the youngest in the hut, much older than seven.

  The witch doctor licked his fingers. The mongoose paced in the cage, climbing, leaning its pointed snout toward its master who had no tilapia left. “I don’t really know what it is. I think it’s a spirit that comes over people and turns them into … beasts. We call them parasites. It’s unlucky to call the true name.”

  “The priest, the Christos priest, he said they are demons,” said Bode. “He said they can’t stand before his god.”

  “You mean his invisible, imaginary god who doesn’t grant prayers? Or does he mean the naked one they tortured?” I could hear the bitterness in the witch doctor’s voice. Stupid of Bode to mention Christos or his servants.

  “How does it start? How did it get here?”

  “From the Leper’s forest,” said the witch doctor, but this was a lie. Anything he did not understand he attributed to the Leper’s forest, a patch of wood where we left those afflicted with small pox or tuberculosis or unclean spirits to die. People said there were evil spirits in there but Ogini once spent a night there and said there was nothing supernatural about it. Even so not one of us present could upbraid the witch doctor.

  In point of fact it started with death. The death of infants and children. They were found dead in the mornings, gashes bitten out of their flesh as if from wild animals, yet mothers unaware. These children didn’t cry out in the night; their mothers never stirred. Within a week no woman breast-fed in the village, no children played in the dust, no synchronized voices counting from the school yard. Next, Iyam, the lunatic who spent his time hovering around the slaughterhouse, disappeared. His rotting body turned up bloated one morning, multiple bite marks. Other people went missing. At first the infirm and simple, but then healthy people. Much like when my family sold slaves to the Portuguese.

  After ten days, the witch doctor called a meeting in which he said we had to kill them all, the parasites.

  The gong sounded every five minutes and everyone in the village met at the square. Even the arthritic woman to whom my mother made me deliver maize every week. The two rival bicycle sellers came glaring at each other, though only one of them had the commercial sense to ride a bike to the square. Even the priest, the Christos representative who wished for us to call him father and dressed in women’s clothing, even he came out.

  It was noon. Of necessity.

  Not everyone was at the village square.

  The constable was missing. Since he was the fattest person in the village it was easy to note his absence. Kemi was also absent, but she was an albino and they were not fond of the sun. She might have been waiting for the last minute. I didn’t want to kill Kemi; she was nice. Burma was a friend of mine, and he wasn’t there. Others that I knew only by face were absent. I could feel them like a void, like the undertow of a river.

  We the young men of the village waited.

  The crier did one last sweep through the village screaming, “He who has ears, let him hear!” but there were no stragglers. The Witch Doctor nodded in our direction and we armed ourselves with spears and knives and machetes. Guns were not helpful in situations like this. We walked side by side in a single rank starting from the south end of the village. Bode was to my left, Ogini to my right. In all there were ten of us. We were naked because any wound had to be immediately visible to everyone present. Any wound would be fatal. One way or the other.

  Three of us moved toward the first hut as we had worked out the night before. Two of us entered, one stayed blocking the entrance. The rest surrounded the hut, waiting. I held up the machete in front of me, like a candle. The hut was freshly swept—I could see the imprint of the raffia broom on the floor. The sleeping mats were rolled up and leaning against the wall. A hen hurried out, frightened by the activity. This hut had two rooms opening on opposite ends of the living area. I took the one on the left, pulling aside the beads, blinking so that my eyes could adjust to the darkness within. It was empty. We marked the house with quicklime and moved on.

  In the next house we rotated and I was the one stationed at the door way. It was empty as well as the next, and the next.

  The twenty-first was not empty. It was Kemi’s house.

  I was fearful. I walked through life afraid, with my heart pounding, my belly knotted with nausea, my skin glistening with a sweat that had nothing to do with the sun, with the taste of bile in my mouth. I had always been nervous. The few times I remember not being afraid had been with Kemi.

  For this reason it bothered me that she ignored the gong and was in her own house, her own room during the hunt. It bothered me that she was crouched over the corpse of her consumptive aunt with blood smeared over her lower lip, jaw, and neck. We looked at each other. Her blue irises darted from side to side involuntarily, normal in albinism, but always disconcerting.

  “Kemi?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  What to say? “Why aren’t you in the village square?”

  She seemed to consider this. Her tongue broke out and swept along her lower lip, cleaning the blood. “The sun. You know how it burns my skin. Because I’m pale.”

  I nodded. She started to rise. “Don’t,” I said.

  In the room to my right Bode raised a ruckus searching the place. I heard his footfalls behind me.

  “You have blood on your dress,” I said.

  “It’s not mine,” said Kemi.

  I was going to kill her. The inevitability of it fell on me like a sudden rainstorm. I could see the future and it was her lying on the floor with hundreds of machete cuts and her blood mixing with that of her tuberculous aunt. And with the same blood dripping from my right arm, my aching right arm. Bode would be next to me, and he would have helped. This was her future, and she knew it. It was in her eyes.

  “Will you … will you kiss me?” Kemi said.

  There are many kinds of kisses. There are kisses that give life, and kisses that do not.

  I bled, an aftereffect of Kemi’s kiss. I bled on the run, even though I was not a coward. I ran from Bode and Ogini and the rest of the youths charged with the cleansing. I ran because I had let Kemi contaminate me, and even though I had struck her down we had clear instructions to kill anyone who mixed blood with … them, the parasites.

&
nbsp; I wasn’t going to be like them, though. I headed for the river. I could not swim, but I preferred drowning to death by a thousand cuts.

  The current snatched me away from my pursuers. Soon, I would be dead.

  The river filled my lungs and combined with the undertow to drag me down. It gurgled, and pressed against my eardrums and pulled me. I didn’t die. I couldn’t expel the water because I would need air for that. And I would have just drowned again in any case, so I allowed the current to yank me away. I should have learned how to swim. Once, two rains ago, Bode pushed me in this same river when he found out I couldn’t swim. I had flailed about for a while then sank quickly. Kemi had jumped in and pulled me back up. Before we broke surface she had kissed me briefly, on the lips. Or at least I thought she did. I was too rattled and tired to mention it on that day, and afterwards … the moment had passed. She had gone back to being nice again.

  There are many kinds of kisses. The proprietary kiss a wife gives her husband when she feels threatened by a younger woman. The kiss a mother gives her child at night, which is as much a prayer to the gods as a sign of affection. There is the traitor’s kiss. The stolen kiss of youngsters. The lusty kiss in the midst of passion where the tongues penetrate. Kemi’s kiss was none of these and all of them.

  Or perhaps, because I was drowning, I could not remember accurately, and it was just imagination.

  I didn’t really think of anything as the current swept me along. Hours, it took. I’d get caught on a root or outcropping, but the river would soon dislodge me, and the journey would continue. Sometimes I would break surface, but for less than a minute. The water changed from clear to turbid to opaque brown.

  It’s strange: I wasn’t dead but I wasn’t curious about it.

  The river split and split again. I followed the branch that emptied into a lake. I sank to the bottom and sat in the silt.

  There is another world at the bottoms of lakes and ponds. It is dark and wet and full of the items you and I throw away.

  There is a proverb: white ants cannot eat brass. My people say that. Sometimes they say white ants can’t eat iron. Or termites can’t eat iron.

  White ants do not eat brass, worms do not eat lead, neither can rust. Water cannot kill me.

  That was my first lesson in the silence of the lake.

  You get used to silence.

  Four

  When I crawled out of the lake it was with great difficulty. The banks were muddy and I kept falling. There were women washing clothes with children slung on their backs. They made the sign of the Christos to ward me off, and I knew that I was east of my village where the Catholics had taken deep root like the iroko tree. They wore their crosses and threw protective gestures as if it added yam seeds to their barns.

  My clothes were torn and bloody, but my wounds had knitted. I was tingling from the sun but I didn’t know at that time what it meant.

  I started back toward my own village, not quite sure of what I would do when I got there. I know some essential part of me had changed and that Kemi was somehow responsible for this. I saw her face, her lip-smacking, the way her eyes narrowed when she found something amusing.

  Which is why the men who set upon me caught me by surprise.

  This is what bloodlust is: it is when you break the skin of another and get your tongue on the red flow of his life force and will not let go until the life is drained. All other thoughts and considerations become irrelevant. This is literally seeing red. This is how the lion hunts and kills prey. Go for the neck, puncture, clamp down with powerful jaws, hold on till the prey weakens. Then feed.

  Repeat as necessary.

  I walked along a footpath lined by palm trees, all angled slightly, leaning, colluding with each other, knowing what was coming but not telling me. Gourds were fastened at the tops of most of them to drain the sap for palm wine.

  I saw a brief bright flash and some pain at the back of my head. I dropped to one knee from surprise. My shout was in another voice, not mine.

  Sticks and stones.

  There were four of them, holding cudgels and cutlasses. One of them was an old white man with painful red hair and a long black robe. Priest. The three black men swung at me in turns. They missed, or I was fast, I’m not sure which. I was not myself. They shouted things in English, which I did not understand at that time. I took a cut on my forearm and leapt at the one who had inflicted it. I punched his chest right in the centre and heard cracks as the rib cage gave way. I latched on to his throat and bit, tore skin and cartilage, and tasted blood.

  I cannot tell you what happened next except that when I came to my senses I was stronger than when I started out, and four dead men surrounded me. The bone of my second knuckle on my right hand poked out from torn flaps of skin, white like a he-goat’s member. And I was sated.

  On blood: when you feed on blood your shit comes out black and sticky. Like tar.

  You can also see this if you bleed into your gut from a knife wound or an ulcer.

  Feeding on blood is disgusting.

  These creatures feed on blood: lice, ticks, mosquitoes, vampire bats, gnats, leeches.

  There are others, but the mosquito is interesting—only the female sucks blood.

  I thought the men might have been out to protect their women. I didn’t really care. I didn’t threaten the women. I just wanted to get home.

  Which was a stupid thing to do.

  Five

  The priest started when he saw me.

  He was just about to close the door to his house and it was still ajar.

  “Close the door and lock it,” I said. “I can reach you before you swing it open.”

  He remained motionless.

  “I am not lying,” I said. “I have killed one of your kind today. Come in, lock the door and sit down.”

  He did.

  At first I thought he was afraid, but it was only surprise. He sat down opposite me in one of his living room chairs. His house was better and stronger and cleaner than any in the village.

  “Do you want to know what my worst nightmare is?” I asked. When he didn’t answer I said, “My worst nightmare is living without my family. My mother, father, uncles and aunts. Bode. Ogini. My friends. You wouldn’t understand this. You left your people to teach the Christos to strangers. I came back here to be with my kinsmen. But it is all different. They have a bonfire and Kemi is in it. Kemi’s body. Is in the fire. Is burning. This is what they will do to me if ….”

  The priest steepled his fingers. The veins stood out on them like the gnarled roots of an old tree. He wore spectacles.

  “What am I?” I asked the priest of Christos.

  “A murderer,” he said, simply.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “‘Thou shalt not kill.” That is the command of God.”

  “Your god. In this land when someone tries to kill you, you are allowed to kill them. The gods will thank you for sending the spirit of the evil one to them for punishment.”

  “The bible says—”

  “Who is this bible?”

  “It is the most holy book, words breathed from the very lips of God.”

  “Your god. I have no use for one who won’t let me defend myself.”

  “But you are here because your pagan witch doctor will almost certainly reject you.”

  I wanted to read this bible, but I couldn’t read. The priest could read. With those eyes of his that became black when he got worked up into a holy rage.

  “You are an unclean spirit,” he said, “a gap in the natural order of things. Your soul should have gone down to hell this afternoon with the rest of your kind.”

  My skin itched from the sun. I had not yet become aware of the need to stay in the shadows. The reason for hunting Kemi and the other parasites at noon did not occur to me. I was young, stupid, confused, and angry.

  From a pocket he produced a small black book with a red placemarker ribbon. It had a golden cross embossed on it.

  “You cann
ot look my God in the eye.”

  I stood, picked up the book and flung it at the wall.

  “Yes, I can.”

  He laughed. “You think my Lord is in the pages of a book? On the last day, after the wrath of God is poured out unto the kingdoms of this world then you will fear the Lion of Judah. Then you—”

  “Teach me to read,” I said.

  The priest’s name was Father Philips.

  I was wrong when I thought his house was the best in the village. The house belonged to his “Lord”; it was for worship on some days of the week. Father Philips lived in what he called the presbytery, which consisted of two rooms attached to the church. The church and presbytery were the only buildings made of concrete in the village. Father Philips was under the erroneous impression that his Lord’s house was a sanctuary into which evil could not enter.

  He wouldn’t even have lived to build the church if Baba Aluko hadn’t boiled tree bark for him to drink, sweating out the fever and relieving the delirium he stumbled into our village with.

  The first words he said when his eyes cleared were, “I bring good tidings.”

  Father Philips was a good man.

  “You didn’t go to your father’s house. You came to God’s house,” Father Philips was saying. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Because you are a white man and hence know nothing about removing uncleanliness from the village,” I said. “Will you teach me to read or not?”

  “I have no reason to teach you.”

  “If you teach me I will not kill you.”

  Father Philips was not, as it were, afraid to die. If I wasn’t dumber than a decapitated chicken I would have known that from his being a missionary alone. When he capitulated I thought it had to do with my death threat.

  Still, he taught me to read and I went on to finish the bible a few times. Four times, actually.

  I liked Ecclesiastes.