Some spirit poured cold water on my heart and I heard the sound of defeat in my head. Someone had asked for my hand. I was to be the wife of an old man. Which old man, I wondered.
‘You remember Mama Nathan,’ she said. I nodded, not sure what this had to do with anything.
‘Eh,’ she began, uncharacteristically picking her words. ‘She wants you to be part of her family.’
I was puzzled. Was there an old man in that family? I did not know.
Mama Nkemdilim looked past me when she said, ‘She wants to marry you for her son, Nathan.’
I could feel my forehead furrowing the way it did when I was confused. Like when I saw Mummy make salad in the first week of my stay with them. Were they going to eat that, I wondered. Green, red, and orange leaves, and other things? Without first boiling them? I smiled as I remembered that now; I had really been a ‘bush girl’.
‘I knew you would see the good sense in this proposition,’ Mama Nkemdilim said, seeing the smile spread on my face. ‘I told her that you were an intelligent girl despite this terrible mistake you made. You should really thank me for opening the door for this opportunity to come to you.’
I was in a bad dream. What was she saying? That she thought I had agreed to marry a dead man? Marry Nathan or marry his mother? None of this made sense to me. ‘I cannot marry a dead man, Ma,’ I managed to say at last. ‘Nobody marries someone who is dead.’
‘Listen,’ she said patiently, a trait that was alien to the woman I had come to know, ‘you are a child. You do not know our customs. You do not know that, by custom, a mother or father can get a wife for a deceased son, especially when that son died prematurely, like Nathan, and therefore did not plant a seed in his family. It is particularly the case when it is an only son. The family name, the family line, needs to continue, you see. There are some who do it too when there is no son at all in the family. They can persuade a daughter to remain within the family and thus not marry, in order to bear children that would bear the father’s name. Or a good daughter might opt to do so to save the family line and win the eternal gratitude of her father. Or the family can marry a wife who would then produce a son to continue the family name.’
That was all good and well, this lesson in customs and those to whom it applied, I thought, but it had nothing to do with me.
‘I will mention this to the umunna and I know they will be agreeable. Indeed, they will be happy. Your child will have a name, lands even; if he is a boy, he will be a full member of Nwokenta.’ She smiled at me. ‘Even if it is not a boy this time, you can have a boy later on.’
Have another child? By whom? I looked into her face and wondered what I had done to this woman to deserve all the hatred she had shown me – and now this. Her cunning smile could not hide the truth – that she wanted me out of this house, which had been built by my father and mother.
‘I will not marry Nathan or his mother or his family,’ I said firmly. There must be no room for doubt. I had been docile, doing her bidding like an onukwu, but this was going too far.
She stared at me. Then, with a sudden movement, she grabbed my book of fairy tales and threw it into the mud, as far from where we stood as she could.
‘Do not think that because you acquired some polish in Enugu, do not think that because you can read, you have ceased to be as foolish as a goat,’ she shouted. ‘If you think that I will feed you and feed the bastard you are pushing around like a wheelbarrow, then you are even more stupid than a goat.’
‘I will not marry Nathan or his mother,’ I repeated.
Mama Nkemdilim stepped back, as if to avoid the foolish disease that now inhabited my head in case it was catching. ‘We will see about that,’ she spat as she walked away.
Strangely, I was not afraid. The proposal was completely outside the bounds of reason. I would not marry a dead man.
CHAPTER SEVEN
For a while, it seemed that all was forgotten. I was not getting much bigger, but I felt heavier and slower. As Nwobodo and Onoh vied for the governorship of our state in 1978, I thought how nice it would have been to serve drinks in Daddy’s sitting room and overhear his friends discuss the merits of each candidate over whisky and wine. They would talk, at the tops of their voices, about which candidate would best serve the Igbo cause, and who had hidden during the Biafran War and was now coming to reap votes they did not sow. I could see Daddy occasionally requesting a new glass when he felt, as I often thought then, that his friend’s saliva had somehow escaped from his mouth into Daddy’s glass.
Then three men from our umunna, our family clan, arrived at the house one morning. Two of them had the anklets and red caps that indicated they were titled men, ndi ozo. The last time I recalled such a visit was soon after my uncle Nnabuzo died, and after my return from Lagos, when they had come to persuade Mama Nkemdilim to pick a husband – a protector, they had said – from a man in the umunna. When she told them she intended to raise her son to take his father’s place, they had left her to her fate, to raising us by herself, since she needed no man. In private, she had called them vultures – they found the taste of human flesh more delicious than beef, she had said. They could not wait to grab lands that did not belong to them. They went to church, she sneered, some of them at least, but continued to engage in cruel pagan practices.
They summoned Mama Nkemdilim, who received them and served them kola nuts. From the spot where I sat washing my clothes at the back, I heard only the rhythmic rise and fall of their voices.
It was not long before Mama Nkemdilim came out and said that I was wanted in the sitting room. I wiped my hands, heaved myself up, and went with her, wondering what this was about. I could read nothing in Mama Nkemdilim’s face, and I knew better than to ask. But she did not seem as unhappy with the delegation as she had been the last time.
‘Ndewo nu,’ I greeted them and sat facing them on one side of the room.
I knew these man from the umunna were the custodians of the family honour by custom. They were the ones receiving prospective suitors and their families, providing lists of items that must be presented to the family in exchange for giving out its daughters in marriage. They settled disputes and provided, or at least ought to provide, support to a family member who found himself or herself in trouble, even outside the village. But the coming of Christianity had diluted many things, I remembered my father saying when I was a child, and the concept of family and community unity, the idea of one for all and all for one, more than anything else. I was not sure at the time what he meant, but since the death of my father and uncle I had witnessed how little help the men from the umunna had given us. When they did show up, it was to eat, to issue commands about which choice parts of the goats that were killed at the burial were to be given to the umunna. Now they had arrived this morning, but for what?
Mama Nkemdilim stood on their side of the room. I was facing judgement, it seemed. But for what? By now my pregnancy had been common knowledge. They had no business with me unless I was getting married. My mind paused at the thought. Marriage?
Ichie Okeke spoke first. A tall, spare, fair-skinned man, he was known for his love of women. At last count, he had four wives and many children, some old enough to have their own children, others young enough to suck milk from their mothers’ breasts. He went to church but did not take the Communion. He was of the firm view that one religion should not come in where another existed and say that it would not share living space. So he worshipped his ancestors and the gods that he said had provided for our village from the era before time, and he also went to church and made sure each of his many children was baptised.
‘Ehen, nne,’ he said, responding to my greeting, ‘Kedu?’
‘O di nma,’ I said. I was not really well, but the answer to ‘how are you’ everywhere is ‘fine’.
He cleared his throat. ‘We, my brothers and I, have heard about your condition.’
And you show up after three months, I wondered silently.
He contin
ued. ‘Hmm. We have been at a loss, yes, we have wondered how a properly raised daughter of ours would put herself in a condition of this sort.’
‘Eziokwu, ikwulu ife mele eme, it is just as you have said, you have spoken well,’ one of the men, Ichie Anyabuzo, said.
‘Your mother,’ Ichie Okeke continued, ‘has done well.’ Mama Nkemdilim beamed. ‘But she has younger children; she cannot continue to suffer. We have all wondered what we could do. But our chi does not sleep. No indeed.’ He paused. I waited. ‘As we wondered what to do, a solution arrived. Ezechitoke himself brought the solution. Someone wants to marry you.’
My heart began to beat fast at his words, the implications of the message driven home by his measured tone and unhurried pace. He glared at me as he spoke, gesticulating with his arms on which the spare flesh was beginning to sag. His fingernails were black, I saw, and I wondered when he had last washed his hands.
‘I know your mother has spoken to you. So this will not surprise you.’ He peered into my face and, seeing the dismay there, continued. ‘Perhaps,’ he said after a little pause, his brows furrowing, ‘this was not a proposal you would have considered in other circumstances. But, as the Igbo people would say, afuro ka-eme, eme ka afu. It is the best offer, indeed the only offer, you are likely to get in your condition. It is necessary that your child have a name. This would spare him or her much embarrassment in the future.
‘You are a child, and probably did not know these things,’ he said. The two other men nodded vigorously at this. He paused again. ‘Your mother,’ he said, ‘has done her best. You cannot expect her to carry even more on her already-worn shoulders.’
The three men and Mama Nkemdilim looked at me intently, trying to determine if I was a fool who would reject the wisdom of the people who had gone before, or whether I would right my steps from now onward. When I said nothing, Ichie Okeke continued.
‘In your best interests, ehn so that it will be well with you, we have accepted the proposal,’ he said. ‘We have told Okoye’s family to come and commence the marriage rites during the coming weekend. I am sure, yes, I know it, Mama Nathan will see that you want for nothing. They will treat you well. We are here; we will make sure of that. We have no fears. We know you will be well taken care of and your baby will have a name.’
By this time, Mama Nkemdilim’s smile was as wide as the River Niger.
‘I will not marry Nathan or his mother or his family,’ I said quietly when I found my voice. I knew it was a foolish thing to insult the men of the umunna, but they had to know that what they proposed was impossible.
‘You will,’ said Ichie Anyabuzo. He was a palm-wine tapper, known to be strict but fair-minded. ‘You have no choice. This child needs a home and if someone has come forward to provide that home, you shall marry into that family.’
‘Yes,’ said Ichie Okeke. All four of them were nodding their heads like lizards: up, down, up, down.
At this, I broke into tears. Quicksand was threatening to swallow me. Where was my uncle when I needed him? Where was my father? A bulldozer had shoved me to the ground even before I stood up to fight, and rolled right over me.
The three men looked away at the sight of my tears. Ichie Anyabuzo looked down; Ichie Okeke swatted an imaginary fly off his legs. I looked at each of them. I waited. The third man, who had not spoken yet, cleared his throat.
His name was Papa Ugonna, the one who had stuck by his childless wife for years while the whole village marvelled at his stoic acceptance and eventually began to gossip about the possibility that his manhood was useless. Ugonna, their child, was born many years after the marriage. Perhaps he had something to say that would change the minds of the others, I hoped.
‘Do not cry,’ he said kindly, his eyes sincere. ‘It is for the best.’
It was said that if you did not want Mama Ugonna to hear a thing, you did not say it to Papa Ugonna. I wondered if he had told his wife that his mission that morning was to compel me to marry a dead man.
After they left, Mama Nkemdilim walked around the house singing, joyous, like a prisoner about to be made free. Made free by my own captivity, I thought bitterly. That night, I resolved to run away. I was unsure where I would go, especially with a baby about to be born. But I was certain that I could not, and would not, marry a dead man.
In the end, I had nowhere to run to. This was no fairy tale; there was no rescue at the end of the story. In the morning, I went to the church, the only place I thought might offer some reprieve. I met the catechist, a man from our village, and he said that Father had gone on holiday abroad to England and would not be back for a month. That would be too late, I explained to him. It was a barbaric custom, he said, but he could do nothing. He could not take me in, nor could he order Mama Nkemdilim, a member of the congregation, to cease the joyous preparations she was making for handing me over to the dead man’s family that weekend.
As I left the catechist that day, I left behind my faith in the Church, in the Virgin, in God. I went back to the house emptied of all hope in the goodness of humans and God, and resigned myself to fate.
That Saturday, I was numb throughout the proceedings. I barely knew what was happening. When it was time for the groom to speak, a man from their family rose and said that he was only there as a representative of Nathan. He knew that Nathan would have wanted to be there himself, to bring home his beautiful bride himself. At this he glanced at my swollen self, dressed in clothes that Mama Nkemdilim had made hurriedly that week. They all sounded mad to me, but when the time came, I went with them, my numb legs moving stiffly forwards as if they had a mind of their own.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I went to live with Mama Nathan in her house, a two-bedroom place surrounded by orange and mango trees and fenced with dried palm fronds. Nathan had roofed the house with aluminium sheets just before he died. The windows had been newly put in, in preparation, Mama Nathan said, to receive ‘our new wife’. I had no emotion left to hate her, to curse at my fate. I sought refuge in numbness as I often did when faced with an overpowering challenge.
She did all she could to make me comfortable. I did not need to lift a finger, except to swallow the smooth balls of pounded yam she made. She cooked a fresh soup every day – spicy ora with snails one day, steamy and pungent onugbu with goat meat the next. I did not sweep, cook, fetch water from the stream or feed her goats. My only job, she said, was to eat, take short walks around the house and bring down this baby in my belly safely. I was relieved not to have to do all the chores that Mama Nkemdilim had made me do, but eating was hard these days. I got full quickly and heartburn followed immediately after every meal. Mama Nathan said this meant that the baby was a boy. She was confident that it was a boy, but also said that she would accept even a girl. Whatever God chose to give her, she would accept.
If I could have summoned the physical strength, the emotional energy to do so, I would have laughed at her continued belief in this God who had taken her son at so young an age; this God who could not soften the heart of his servant the catechist to take me in when I desperately needed help; this God who would now gift her with a child that only the most wicked of customs had made possible.
I could not wait for the baby to arrive. There was no excitement in this waiting, the kind of eagerness that I sensed in Mama Nathan. I had no name picked out for it. I was not curious about its sex, though I thought that it might be nice for Mama Nathan if it turned out to be a boy. Yet, towards the end, I longed for its arrival; the discomfort was interminable. Even sleep was now almost impossible, from finding a less painful way to lower myself onto the soft bed Mama Nathan had made for me, to turning from one side to the next, to getting up many times to relieve myself in the small potty Mama Nathan put in the corridor at night so that we would not have to use the latrine outside.
One day, when I had lived with Mama Nathan for three weeks, the baby decided to relieve me of the agony of my existence and make its entrance into the world. But it chose the most painful
way possible to do this. The pains began as soon as we woke up that morning. Mama Nathan was a midwife; she had delivered many babies in the village, using the old ways. When I first came to live with her, she told me often not to worry, not to be afraid; the pain I would experience was only the body trying to push the baby out. This made me smile; I was not worried about the pain, I gave no thought to it at all. That would have meant thinking about the baby and all that lay afterwards.
But that morning the pain grabbed hold of my thoughts and held them captive. There was no numbness; all my nerves were alive as they had never been before, and they tormented me. Mama Nathan made me walk round and round the compound. Two other women came to assist her. They chatted amiably while I endured the sort of pain that surely no other human had borne on earth. They listened to my moans and complimented me. I was doing well, they said. To each other they would admit that first babies often took their time. They asked Mama Nathan if she had given me nchi meat, to which she responded a vehement no. She knew better than that – how could she want me in labour for hours unending, she asked. They told me not to scream, otherwise I would scream each time I had a baby. I would never do this again, I cried emphatically. They laughed, but not in mockery. All women think that, Mama Nathan said, until they saw the reward of their pain, and then the joy was boundless and they forgot the pain; it was like the pain had never been. I ignored them: I knew in my heart that this was the last time I would do this.
When it was time, they took me into the room, where they proceeded by turns to cajole and persuade, to plead and command me to push out the baby. When I thought that pain was all that existed in the world, something plopped out from between my legs. The pain let go of my body. The next instant, I heard the cry of a baby, and despite my exhaustion, I stretched out my hands for it. They put the baby boy on top of my chest. I touched him carefully, and tried to sit up to see him better.
The Son of the House Page 9
