The Son of the House

by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe

  ‘You love your brother,’ my mother stated. It was a fact, neither good nor bad. ‘But he is not a little boy any more. He is a man. You …’ Here, she paused and studied me with piercing, knowing eyes. ‘You,’ she repeated, ‘you are a woman.’ She stopped and searched my face to see if this piece of information had made its way home. ‘A woman must love herself. You must love yourself too. You must take care of yourself now.’ She stopped – waiting, it seemed, for this vital truth to sink in.

  Then she went on to illustrate: ‘This brother of yours is a drunk.’ Her lips curled in scorn as I startled, hypocritically, at her description. At that moment, fragments of our childhood came to me. Us, playing outside the house in Umuleri when Papa taught there, building small huts of sand and then trampling them. Reading for entrance examinations by the dull light of the hurricane lamp. The small party the night before he went off to school at CKC, when we lived near St James. Afam kneeling before my father, while I suppressed envious and thus devilish and unworthy thoughts that no such party had been thrown for me or even contemplated when I got into Aba Girls on scholarship, the only child around Umuleri who had done so in the year 1951. All our neighbours cheered, with stomachs full of nicely pounded yam and egwusi soup, for the young man who had secured a place at the prestigious CKC, the school where smart Catholic boys went. After my father’s hands had rested on my brother’s head in prayer and pride, Afam stood and faced the small crowd of people who had gathered in our compound that evening: tall, vital, energetic, happy, looking forward to tomorrow.

  That tomorrow had now become yesterday, and today my mother called her son – the bright hope of yesterday – a drunk.

  ‘He will marry one day,’ Mama Afam, as everyone called my mother, continued. ‘Yes, a woman will marry this drunken brother of yours. For love; for money, though God knows how he will ever make any; for his tall foolishness; or for children. Why? Because he is a man. With a penis between his legs. But you are a woman. With a womb which comes with an expiry date.’

  Did penises have no expiry dates? a stray demon asked me.

  ‘Coming here to hit him, to shout at him, to pour anger on him will do neither you nor him any good. It will solve nothing. Go and live your own life. Find a man, any man, get married, and have children. Have children. That is what is most important. So that you can be happy and fulfil your life’s purpose.’

  I wanted to ask if she felt that, having given birth to a drunk, she had fulfilled her life’s purpose. But I lacked the power to be insolent to my mother. She had made sure of that long ago.

  ‘You see this drunk you call your brother?’ I still winced inwardly at her words and tone. ‘One day he will get a young thing, who will come in here on two sticks that she will call legs and tell you not to pluck an orange, an orange that I, your mother, planted. Or a pear that you planted. And what would you be able to do about it? Nothing. It will be her home after all. You will be allowed in, but only just. If you have your own home, however, you can come visit but you will go back home, where you can pluck your own oranges and pears and manage them as you please. And, most important, raise your own children.

  ‘Children are the joy of a woman’s life. Not men. Not marriage. Not money. Children,’ she emphasised with that extended index finger. Had my father been that awful to her? that demon asked me again.

  ‘Even if you have one that is as hopeless as your brother – and I pray that you do not, for it is a painful experience – you will have another like you have been to me, who will love you, who will take care of you in your old age, of whom you can be proud. That is the joy of a woman’s life.’ Here, she stopped and we sat in silence for a little. Her words were forcing themselves into my head, making sure that they would be there to reverberate when I least wanted to entertain them.

  ‘I pray you do not miss it. For you have been God’s gift to me. I pray that you will find someone soon. And that God will open your womb immediately as He did mine when I married your father, and as He has done for your younger sisters.’

  I had heard this sermon, or some variation of it, since Papa died. But it did not diminish the urgency with which it was delivered, nor the fear within me that she spoke truth, that it was a joy that I might never encounter. I did not say what I would have said even two years before – that one could have a child without the benefit or burden of marriage – to which she would tell me to spit out the foolish words and that it would not happen, not in that manner. I was beginning to be afraid. Afraid that I was an okpokwu, nna ja-anu, the one whose father would marry, the leftover. Afraid that I was useless as a woman, no good to anyone including myself. And now, after my mother’s speech, afraid that I would not have what she thought was the best thing that a woman could hope to possess: motherhood.

  She stood up and went into the kitchen at the back of the house. She returned with some okpa, one of my favourite things to eat.

  While she watched, I cut it carefully with the knife she’d handed me and put a small, moist, red piece into my mouth, more out of obligation than hunger. But it was soft and delicious, and before long I was not eating out of courtesy. I sometimes would buy okpa in Enugu, just outside my office. But my mother had made this herself as always, and it tasted not only of the right ingredients mixed in at the right time, but of home and love.

  As I ate, the tension began to dissipate, to leave the room and find other homes to trouble. We began to talk about ordinary things. Afam stayed in my mind and in my mother’s, but we did not speak of him again. There was nothing more to be said, really. Instead, we spoke about Grace, Mama Mike’s last child, who was going into secondary school. Her mother had come to my mother, she said, to ask for advice about whether they should betroth her to someone before she went. My mother told her that those days when little girls were betrothed so young were long gone. She would find a husband when she finished secondary school. Educated women were more marriageable these days than in years past, Mama Afam assured Mama Mike. I let that sink in, to ponder in solitude, reconciling the seemingly conflicting views my mother espoused.

  Then we spoke of Ebenezer, a distant cousin, whose son had died and would be buried in the coming week. A house was being constructed quickly in his father’s compound by his younger brother so that he could be buried properly. His father had been an efulefu, a prodigal, who had married his wife, given her three children, and moved to Lagos, refusing to come home or send what was more important than his presence: money. A Calabar woman had him enthralled, and it would require the intervention of God Himself to separate them. Now his son had died and the prodigal father had still not come home.

  After some time, Ekweozo, my mother’s brother, arrived and joined the conversation. I got up to fetch the firewood outside. I took it to the back, and split it with the axe, then stacked it neatly in a corner of my mother’s small kitchen. I poured some water from the clay water-pot with the aluminium cup that was always left on top of it. It tasted cool and pleasant to my tongue, like nothing I drank in the township. My mother came into the kitchen and, murmuring thanks, took a piece of fish from the uko above her fire in which she grilled fish and meat. It was her gesture from childhood of thanks, of comfort, of kindness. I bit into the fish and found it as tasty as always.

  Later, my mother saw me out. She was not one for gratuitous affection, so I kept my hug brief and climbed into the car. Afam had slept all the while and did not come out until I started the engine. One hand on his head – nursing a headache, I was sure – he waved goodbye lackadaisically from the veranda, our fight seemingly forgotten.

  ‘Drive carefully,’ my mother said, like she says each time I visit. She still worried about my driving, worried that men would be put off, that the car would be too intimidating. I won’t waste money on taxis when I can buy a car, I had told her. She had shaken her head at my stubbornness, asking the Virgin Mary to help me see sense. Virgin Mary did not agree with her, obviously, because I had bought myself a new red Volkswagen. I was guilty of
too much pride over it, but my only regret was that my father had not lived to see it.

  ‘Remember what I said,’ she added now after a pause. ‘It will be well, do you hear?’

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ I said with a smile that stayed on my face for a little while. I set her lecture on the important things a woman must accomplish aside for dissection during quiet, lonely nights in Enugu.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  My heart beat fast, pounding like the drums of Achukwu in my chest each time I visited. The smell that came into my nostrils, an unwelcome stranger, reminded me that I wanted to be anywhere but here. It was the same smell from the time when Papa died. At this thought, panic suffused my being – hospital meant death.

  Today, Afam was lying on his side when I came into the room. My mother was curled in a chair in the corner, sleeping. She had slept in that position every day for the past seven days since Afam had been brought in – that is, when her body overcame her will and its protests overwhelmed her desire to keep her eyes on her son. She had not showered in days, and refused to entertain my pleas to come to my flat to rest.

  The doctors had said the same thing every day for the past seven days. He was in a coma. There was nothing to do but wait and pray.

  I sat and stared at Afam, willing him to wake up. I thought about his tears when Papa died. ‘I disappointed him,’ he had said to me then.

  I was silent – it was true.

  ‘You know,’ he’d said, his deep baritone booming in our small sitting room, ‘when Chima died, I knew the war was over.’

  Chima had been Afam’s best friend. A slight young man, with a deep voice like my brother’s. But Chima’s voice and his bravery outsized him. He served under Colonel Achuzie, and his exploits, his ability to inspire men, made many say that Ojukwu would make him a general before the war was over. But he had died at the Umuahia front.

  ‘Julie, I wish I had died in battle like Chima,’ Afam had once confided in me.

  Unlike so many that we knew, my brother had come back from the war. Thinner, yes – his collarbones and his Adam’s apple jutted out – but without much injury that was visible to the eye. His smile, however, was gone. Something indefinable, indescribable, seemed broken within. The joy and the passion with which he had sung war songs when he’d set out as a vibrant twenty-four-year-old to join the army in 1968 had gone, a log that had burned brightly and then out, leaving dying embers slowly falling apart.

  ‘No, don’t say that,’ I had protested immediately. Because that was what was required: when people wished for suicide, you told them no. When they had nightmares like he did every night, you waved their fears away and told them that all was well. When I thought back on that conversation, I knew I should have let Afam speak. It was the first time my brother had spoken to me from his heart, the way we always did before the war. But I shut him down. And he kept his thoughts inside.

  After the war, Afam wandered aimlessly, as if he had lost his eyes in the war. Had Afam gone back to school, Papa would have been content, retaining hope for the family line, for the future of his bright son. But he did not. He had brushed off Papa’s talk about a wife. How could he marry without work? How would he feed a family, he asked when Papa brought it up.

  He went to Lagos, but did not stay long; none of his friends could help him, he said. Why must friends help you? I asked. He came to Enugu, where I had returned to work as a teacher in the secondary school. He slept all morning and kept me up late talking about our childhood, anything but the war or what he planned to do with his life. I reminded him that he had talked about going to the United States, to Stanford for postgraduate studies after finishing at the University of Lagos. Papa had thought that was a wonderful idea. But that was before the war, he replied, as if that explained everything. The war was over, I argued with him. He had no answer to that; Stanford was simply another dream the war had killed. He left my house and moved around, staying with an acquaintance and then a friend. He was like a boat set adrift on the Ngene River with no one to row it.

  But he was not the only one who had disappointed Papa. I had too. Even on his deathbed, Papa gave me the injunction, ‘Look after your brother. Make sure he becomes someone.’

  I prayed that Afam would wake up, that he would be all right. I could not bear Papa’s disappointment hanging over me for the rest of my life.

  When we were young, I hated Afam’s nickname for me. He called me ‘Akpa Akpu’, a heavy sack of cassava, because of my chubbiness. He teased me without mercy. We fought each other, but we stood united once we were in company. I loved this and I loved him. My brother had been smarter than me, but many people outside the family did not know this because I was the one who, through sheer discipline and determination, came first in my classes. He would get into trouble with his friends – go to the stream and play when he should be cutting grass to bring home to my mother’s goats; sneak out from school to go steal fruit from other people’s mango and udala trees; join the boys who followed the masquerades, those spirit beings that my father, a staunch Catholic, said were of the devil. My father’s frequent thrashings with his cane, my mother’s lectures and ear-pulling did nothing to curb Afam’s enthusiasm for trouble or his appetite for adventure. For all our parents’ strictness, he was a free spirit who kept a smile on his face and ran around with the brashness of youth.

  Papa would call me into our sitting room, his chaplet in his hands, rubbing the beads. He would sit on one of the two stools that a reverend father had given him and I would sit on the brown floor before him. He would look at me and say, ‘You will have to take care of your brother. He is smart, but he is foolish also. He has many things to learn yet, but you came almost fully prepared for this world.’

  I liked the way my father confided in me and entrusted responsibility to me. It made me feel close to him. And so, although I had a deep love for my brother, taking care of him was special because it was something I could do for my father. And I knew this was something important to Papa because, after my brother, my mother had three more girls before her womb seemed to shut up shop, thus leaving my brother an only son for several years. Only sons could carry the family name, could make sure that the name of the family did not get lost.

  ‘See, your name is Afamefuna,’ Papa would say to my brother. ‘Your other name, Ugonna, the one who will bring honour to his father, carries a similar weight. I have not failed my parents. I know that you will likewise not fail me, not fail the honourable name of our family. And when the time comes, you, and your brothers, should it be God’s will to send us more, will carry on the great legacy of our family and pass it on to your own children.’

  Afam, diminutive for Afamefuna – ‘may my name not be lost’ – that was my brother’s name. When more boys did not come along immediately, the name became even more significant. His academic strengths and his growing height boded well for the responsibilities that rested on his shoulders. His penchant for fun and frivolity did not.

  My father would call him for special sessions on our family history. Whenever possible, when I had no work to do for Mama in the kitchen, I would slip outside to listen. We would sit on a mat in front of the kitchen, Papa cleaning his ear with the tip of a cock’s feather and our mother peeling egwusi, the darkness lit by the glow of the hurricane lamp and the moonlight. The bright light of electricity would have disturbed the intimacy of the evening; over time, in Umuma, hurricane lamps gave way to kerosene lamps and only occasional electric lights, and then to rechargeable lamps, and then to noisy generators.

  My father had a lot of stories, and his deep voice was filled with spellbinding emotion – by turns joyful, sad, angry, but never passionless. Sometimes, it was about adventures in foreign lands, like the war in Burma. Other times, it was about our family. How our ancestors had worshipped the old gods, and how our father, one of his father’s two sons, had run away from the ichi ceremony. Igbu ichi was that painful branding and scarification of the face, which formed lines that crisscrossed on the foreh
ead. In those days, it was done to sons of noble families, starting with the eldest, to distinguish them as members of the prestigious society of Nze na Ozo, a society of men who upheld truth.The hot iron seared into the forehead while the young man, in a show of the strength given him by his chi, bore the pain with only occasional short grunts.

  Papa had joined the Catholic Church, risking my grandfather’s grave displeasure. As an adult, it occurred to me that he might have considered priesthood had it not been for the family traditions and the need to ensure that the lineage went on. Papa’s own father must have done much etching and imprinting of custom, of family pride and history. For Papa was a staunch Catholic, but also a firm believer that family lineages must be continued. As we grew up, he often said, as frequently as he could find a child to listen, that we should know where we came from. He would often say, ‘I am a Christian. But one has to protect one’s legacies. That is one’s heritage. Otherwise life becomes meaningless and vain, as the wise author of Ecclesiastes says.’ He would pause and look intently at Afam, who always looked past him. My own eyes always stayed on Papa’s face, drinking in his words and stories of who we were.

  ‘By joining the church and getting an education,’ he continued, ‘I brought light to my family. It is the duty of each new person in the line to bring something good to the family, to keep the family going.’

  I was proud of my father’s contribution to the family line. When farming and old titles were becoming things of the past, our family stood in the new world as respected people – catechists, teachers, headmasters, civil servants, politicians.

  ‘Do you understand what I am saying to you?’ my father often asked Afam when he ended one of his stories, peering at him through the dim light of the hurricane lamps.

  My brother would say yes, although he had been pinching me in the dark, playing, not taking my father too seriously, trying to get me to do the same.