by Okezie Nwoka
The sun gave her thin lines of heat. The welts gave her more. So she stayed on the ground, fearing those heats would swell and grow if she moved; turning her head to the earth beside her and seeing specks of blood sinking into its orange, as the sight of them made the welts feel larger, feel deeper, than the river channels feeding the village farms. And she dared not move, not with the many sounds preserved in her head, preserved in the way salt preserves raw meat; and those sounds were not the sounds of the cane against her back, but the sounds of Ọfọdile’s beating litany: bush animal and fool! Ichulu’s destroyer! root of this family’s shame! thief! title killer! they no longer call me Ekwueme because of you, thief of the titles I would have earned, cause of Nnamdị’s impairment, near-assassin to my only son! prostitute for the osu! Anị’s poison, you think I do not know you fed Jekwu! deceiver, jeopardizer of the promise I made my brother, did I protect Ụzọdị, animal! flying animal! flying animal that does not talk!
She lay atop Ọfọdile’s compound exposed—back bleeding, with no rappa to cover herself; feeling the ants crawling along her legs, along the line of her buttocks and her back; and she did not move, letting the ants stay and take what they wanted, hearing Nnenna’s footsteps, and asking her not to come beside her, not to cover her and ask how she was doing, not to do for her trite things adults proclaimed children needed, not to take from her any more secrets that she owned.
“What have you done to our child!” Nnenna said, breaking into Ọfọdile’s obi as he snorted snuff atop his raffia mat.
“Are you now deaf! What have you done to our Ada!”
Ọfọdile remained silent, shaking more snuff out of his container as Nnenna rushed to him—slapping his face over and again, then falling on him—secretly praying to crush him dead.
“Lift, yourself from me!” Ọfọdile said, pushing Nnenna’s body away.
“If you are a man, you will tell me, the mother of your children—what our Ada did to be beaten close to death!”
“You bush animal. You come into my home, with foulness, and shit on your mouth. You knew that your Ada, was with the osu!”
“Hear how you speak. You cannot even talk like a man! Yes! Yes, I knew it! I knew it! And what of it? Is she not becoming a woman? Is Chukwu not protecting her?”
“So you support it? You support your disgusting child, running about this village, spoiling my name, and the name of my father?”
“May Chukwu burn your name and the name of all of your fathers! You abomination! You foolish man who wants the love of the world before the love of his own child! Our home is burning. Our home is burning and you do not even see it! You do not even see. Does Ichulu not call me mother of the mute? Do they not call me that? But have I let it kill me! You weak, titleless man! She is my daughter, and my daughter will be free! My daughter will be free, AYY! If you could only speak with her! If you could only speak to her, as you speak to our other children—but if you touch her again, it will be me who will take your life from you …”
“You stupid woman! Ijeọma will remain, where I say she will remain.”
“You are more foolish than I believed,” said Nnenna, unknotting her rappa and tossing it on the floor. “Come and touch our daughter again. Come and try it! But on these, these breasts of mine, on these breasts that nursed your children I swear it! Touch any of our children again, and death will fall on your head!”
Nnenna quickly walked out of Ọfọdile’s obi—and with her rappa in her hand, she approached the mouth of her red-clay home, hearing Nnamdị’s voice beside Ijeọma’s body.
“He will love you one day,” she heard Nnamdị saying. “I know that you despise him now. But one day he will love you, and our mother, and Ụzọdị, and everybody again. When I wanted to join you in the sky, and fell hard on the ground and broke my leg, I saw nothing at all. But then someone told me to open my eyes, and I did, and I saw our father doing something which I have never seen. He was crying, Ijeọma. Our father was crying, because he thought he had lost his child … Ijeọma, he loves us.”
Nnenna watched Nnamdị stand from Ijeọma’s side and limp toward her red-clay home. And as he stood beside her, she saw him looking within her eyes—knowing he was seeing them be tired and dim.
“I love you, my father,” Nnenna said—as Nnamdị enclosed her within his arms—both unable to say even the smallest word, as Nnenna began weeping terribly.
DIARY ENTRY #964 DATE UNKNOWN
ofodile you put me in this prison how? how? fathers don’t send their children away fathers don’t abandon what chukwu has given them even when you beat me down until my back tore open i managed to find a way to understand you i gave you everything that a child can give. i gave you my heart. was there more i could do?
the day my mother told you I could fly you didn’t sit with me and talk with me or ask me what the gods were doing when I gave you your dinner that day you brushed me away. you told me i did not matter to you without having to say it. maybe you thought i wasn’t worthy of being spoken to. all i wanted to hear you say was “My Ada I love you.”
but you are evil. cold-hearted and evil. evil like the pastor who wants me dead. evil like the gods who condemned me evil like the god who has abandoned me every time I pray on my knees and offer up my blood and tears i want to damn all of you. i want to curse all of you, like uzodi willed himself to curse the dibia i will not do it. but I will not lie and say that hatred has not taken my heart, to you, to the pastor and his workers, to chukwu, even to you chukwu.
AH! I wish you dead Ofodile! I wish you dead! Every pastor and every attendant! I pray you burn in the everlasting fire of which you preach! Chukwu you, Chukwu you are hurting me, you are hurting me so badly that my wounds, my blood, my pain, my broken heart. They are too much. I gave you my entire being and you’ve only ignored me Hatred is taking my heart Chukwu and your name is close to it
Remove me from this cell today! If you are Most Supreme, do it, I want to be freed today! Today! Today! Free me today! Today! Or else how do you dare call yourself a god!
7.
ỌFỌDILE’S COMPOUND HAD FALLEN ASLEEP to a ruptured home and had awoken to a dark and silent morning. Nnenna had left the compound very early to bathe herself in Idemili, and the ones called her children lay quietly on their raffia mats, waiting for the cocks to crow. The chickens tended only to their chicks, and the goats ate their grass wearily; and the silence was then crudely broken by the presence of a rumbling noise.
Nnamdị stood from his mat and hurried toward the noise—boldly, curiously—seeing a man on a vehicle at the mouth of Ọfọdile’s compound and knowing that he had not seen the man or his vehicle before—one which looked to him like a metal ram. And as Nnamdị began limping toward the unfamiliar, he thought of how he would greet this man—agreeing within himself to smile.
“How is it that you are doing?” Nnamdị said.
“Good morning,” the man responded, his Igbo sounding bizarre to Nnamdị; stiff and inflexible, like his metal ram.
“I am looking for a man named Ọfọdile. Does he live here?”
“Yes! He is my father.”
“That is fine … My name is John. What is your name?”
“My name is Nnamdị.”
“Is your father here,” John said.
“Yes. He is there in his obi. Follow me, and I will show you where he is.”
Nnamdị took John through Ọfọdile’s compound, grabbing his right hand and pulling him to the mouth of Ọfọdile’s obi.
“Father of mine, a man from another place has come to see you!”
“What is it!” Ọfọdile said, coming out of his obi, thinking of how early in the morning it was.
“How are you, Ọfọdile? My name is—”
“Where are you from?” Ọfọdile said.
“I come from another place,” said John, “a place that we call a house of prayer.”
“And where is this house of prayer?”
“It is in
Amalike.”
Ọfọdile widened his eyes—leaving his visitor, then quickly returning with a machete.
“If you do not remove yourself from my compound and my village, I will cut off your head!”
“Please, please … listen to me,” John said, waving his hands fearfully.
“Do you think I am a man of idle words? Get out, or I will kill you!”
“It concerns Ijeọma! The man who leads the house of prayer knows of Ijeọma and he wants to cure her! He wants to cure her!”
“What!”
“He can cure her!”
“What?”
Ọfọdile dropped his machete and looked deeply into the man’s eyes, searching for any sincerity—but by the promise of a cure he believed John’s word to be good, and he invited him into his obi, watching him enter it with slight hesitation, sitting down timidly and refusing all his offerings, even that of kola.
“What did you, say … was your name,” Ọfọdile said.
“My name is John … and I am a servant to a very powerful man in Amalike.”
“What … is, the man’s name?”
“His name is Innocent Nwosu.”
“What? Nwosu? How can, an osu’s child … be a powerful man … in Amalike?”
“Nwosu is a slave to a powerful god, the most powerful god, that cures any illness and answers any prayer. The god’s name is Jesus, and he is a god that does whatever Nwosu asks.”
How is this possible, Ọfọdile asked himself, trying to find meaning in the words of John—trying to understand why this most powerful god had favored an outcast named Nwosu instead of a freeborn?
“He knows about your daughter flying,” John said. “He has sent me here to tell you that he can cure her through the power of his god.”
“How, will he do … it?” asked Ọfọdile. “How will, he cure her?”
“He wants your daughter to come with me, back to the house of prayer … and there he will cure her.”
Ọfọdile remained silent—thinking of the daily consultations he had been having for more than one year; recalling that Igbokwe himself stated that he did not have the power to stop the flights. Now the gods had presented him with a man whose master guaranteed that he could heal Ijeọma.
“You have spoken, good words Jọn,” Ọfọdile said to John. “My people say … ‘Hot soup, must be eaten slowly.’ Return tomorrow … and I will answer you.”
“That is good, sah!”
“Sah?”
“I wanted to say elder of mine.”
The two men stood together, then slapped their hands in rhythms to exchange their farewells. Kola was not broken, but each felt at ease with the other; and when Ọfọdile heard the bold sounds of John’s vehicle driving away from his four-home compound, he could not help but wonder at the promise of this foreign god.
On the day that followed, there was no consultation. Ọfọdile left Ijeọma in Nnenna’s home and journeyed with his chi to the compound of Igbokwe. He walked through the thin orange paths connecting the compounds of Ichulu, and he arrived at the compound of Igbokwe before the roosters had broken their cry. Ọfọdile could hear the dịbịa singing in his obi, chanting prayers to their holy pantheon; and as he stood at the mouth of his obi, waiting for the singing to end, he could hear the words, from an ancient song, more clearly than he had heard them before:
Let the man who calls the woman ‘fool’
Forget the name of his Mother.
Let the woman who calls the man ‘fool’
Forget the name of her Father.
And let the one who forgets the name of their chi
Never see the coming Home;
For if one forgets that they are as the Other
They have begun to perish.
A rooster crowed, and the singing ended; and when the dịbịa saw his visitor, he bellowed from within his obi, “Ọfọdile! Come and greet me!”
“How are you, Igbokwe?”
“I am well, child of mine … Where is Ijeọma?”
“She … is not coming.”
“What? Who has made that so?”
“Igbokwe, a man came and visited me … yesterday. He told me that he knows a man, who will cure Ijeọma.”
“Ọfọdile … this man who said he can cure Ijeọma, did he tell you the name of her sickness?”
“Igbokwe, what kind of question is that! The girl is flying! That is her sickness!”
“That is what you have called it … I have told you each day that Chukwu has favored your daughter. You came to me, not because you thought I could stop her flying. On many days I told you I could not stop it. But you brought your daughter to my compound, month to month to month … because of your fear—to prevent your hope from dying. Ọfọdile, my child … why are you afraid to love this child?”
“Igbokwe, I do not want to hear your nonsense! You have not, been able to heal my child—so I must send her, to this man who promises he will.”
“My child … I have heard you. Before you remove my daughter from the land of her ancestors, and the outer realms of her chi … let me tell you of the dream that has visited me for three weeks. I was in a land with no trees, no grass, only the pale eroded earth like that which came after the flood. And in this land I saw yam, soft and white, falling from the sky. Yam was falling from the sky, feeding me in this barren land! Ọfọdile, I have told you of the war between the gods. I have told you of the mighty power wielded by Chukwu. And I have seen the power of your daughter. Do you not know that before Ngọzi announced her pregnancy in the market square, she came to me and told me of the origins of her pregnancy? She told me that one morning, the morning after lying with her husband, she saw you and Ijeọma on the path to my compound. She said that she was carrying groundnut, and when she shared some with Ijeọma, she felt something like fire enter her body and settle in her stomach. Ngọzi told me that she felt the fire move the seed of her husband … but did not want to tell the village of any of it, even when her bleeding stopped … because of the possibility of there being a miscarriage. She did not want any evil befalling your name. Do you not see? Your daughter is saving this village. Without Ijeọma, the flood that came would have destroyed Ichulu; my divinations have told me so. Do you not see? Your daughter has done these things because Chukwu has made it so. Keep her where she is. Allow Chukwu to finish what Chukwu has begun. Let those who curse you and speak against you drown in their foolishness … because if they do not accept Ijeọma, they can never be free.”
“Igbokwe, I have heard you. And you, have said nothing … You cannot cure Ijeọma.”
Igbokwe watched as Ọfọdile turned and left him, knowing that he might never see Ijeọma again, heaving a groan to release his sorrow. He had not understood Ọfọdile’s fear. The gods had given the village enough signs, he thought, to make Ijeọma’s flight a blessed thing; the infant Jekwu had been saved from the Evil Forest; a woman who could not give birth was now many months pregnant; Ichulu was changing, and Igbokwe believed that nobody should be afraid. Chukwu was protecting the village. The war between the gods had ended—how else could he explain the peace in the village; how could there be a war when the sun, and the rain, and the earth, and the wind all worked with the rest of creation to sustain Ichulu; when the cowrie shells predicted no more floods, or wars, or calamities, but showed the death of a goddess, and the peace of this village? The world was indeed well, and the dịbịa sang his ancient song, hoping it would reach the heart of Ọfọdile.
And as Igbokwe sang into the day—watching Anyanwụ, traveling from east to west toward the undulating god, Idemili—the people of Ichulu continued with their affairs. Nnenna had finished fetching water from Idemili and began returning to Ọfọdile’s compound; until she saw the bearded Okoye approaching her, then sliding around her front and back.
“Nne! How is the mother of my future children?”
“Okoye, you are a foolish person!”
“Ahhh, Nne! You know that w
e were once betrothed when Ichulu sang of our love. Return to me, so that we can enjoy ourselves like in those times.”
“Okoye, move from my way; Ọfọdile and I are doing well.”
“So he has not told you,” Okoye said, looking at Nnenna perplexedly.
“What? What has my husband not told me?”
“Ijeọma …” Okoye said, falling silent, reading Nnenna’s eyes—and having them reveal that she did not know of what he was speaking. He held her hand, then felt her quickly remove herself from his grip, feeling then his own moroseness in preparing to tell her of that afternoon.
“Nnenna … some of us saw Ijeọma on a vehicle with a man who is not from Ichulu. He was traveling east. We tried to hold him; but he said that he was sent by Ọfọdile. You know that Ọfọdile and I do not speak, so I gathered the other men, and we went to Igbokwe to consult with him. He told us that Ọfọdile sent Ijeọma to a man who would stop her flying.”
Nnenna pushed through Okoye—and began running home—the water pot on her head shattering to pieces as she went—the orange dust behind her heels—rising to Igwe in the heavens; she rushed through the mouth of the compound—and cried, “Ijeọma! Ijeọma!” She cried, “Ada of mine! Ada of mine!” but heard nothing. The compound remained silent, and remained dark—then more silent, until the sun was hidden beneath Idemili—and the children were told their stories beneath the moon.
8.
ONCE THE VEHICLE’S ENGINE CEASED rumbling and John’s feet touched the dusty ground, Ijeọma knew it was time to dismount his motorbike. She memorized his paths—believing that if she wanted, she could run from him—and head westward—returning to where she came—leaving this new town to itself; but remembering then—that she could no longer return to Ọfọdile’s compound—not wanting to accept that word, nor call it good—shuddering: still despondent and weak—thinking no more of Ọfọdile. She was looking around and about her—searching for the familial, searching all about—believing—she is coming … she is coming … but there was no face resembling Nnenna’s, and she did not want to believe it—continuing her search—waiting for Nnenna’s face to appear from within the busy streets of Amalike.
