“I like it,” Bibi says.
“Ma, that’s a very good title,” Paul says, and Ajie turns around to look at him, but Paul is not there. Paul is dead, and what is left of him is in a casket at a funeral home near St. John’s.
Apart from Dotun, who is sitting in the armchair, everything else in the parlor looks exactly the same as when they were children. Ma has returned the family photographs to the wall. She took them all down years ago, after Paul disappeared and Bendic passed away. Now she has replaced the family portrait. Her wedding photo is right below the wall clock. They are standing in front of the St. Luke’s Cathedral in Ede. Ma is dressed in an ivory satin dress and Bendic is wearing a gray suit. A white flower is pinned to the lapel of his suit.
Paul, Bibi, and Ajie are in a photograph hanging in the dining area. Bibi has a small frown on her face. There was something phenomenal about her rage when she was about eight or nine years old. It whipped about for what seemed just over a moment until she snapped and double-slapped you in the face, but here she is now, a recently qualified doctor, collected, her cornrows neat and sheeny.
In the picture, Paul is smiling and ready for the camera. He is looking at Bendic, who is standing outside the frame, telling Ajie to adjust his collar. Ajie looks away from the photo and back at the newspaper before him. He suddenly realizes he is gasping for breath and silently whooping. He puts his head down, and his tears free-fall into the pages and smudge the black print. He stands up, walks into the kitchen, and turns the tap on.
When he returns to the living room, he says, “I think I will go to Ogibah tomorrow, Ma. So I get there a day before you all to get things ready. You haven’t been to the house for a while now. Besides, I want to check out what they’ve done about the grave.”
“I wanted you to be in the car that’s taking your brother.”
“I know, but someone needs to be there to make sure everything is in place.”
“It’s true,” Ma says. Then she warns Ajie to be careful in Ogibah. “Things aren’t the way they used to be.” Disputes are no longer settled with raised voices in a meeting. People no longer write strongly worded petitions to voice their dissent. If you disagree with someone these days, you simply go over to the person’s house with your face unmasked and shoot him. OYF has split into warring factions, and the body count is on a steep rise.
—
The bike speeds past the church and comes to a halt as it reaches the house. Ajie gets off and hands the okada man some cash and waits for his change.
“The people wey get here no dey come home again,” the man says to him as he rifles through his pockets for change.
Ajie wants to say something in Ogba so the bike man stops taking him for a stranger. He wants to tell the man to mind his own business, but he doesn’t. He just smiles and waits for his change. He imagines the man’s reaction if he speaks in Ogba. First surprise that he speaks the language at all, and then that he speaks it well. He would want to know who Ajie is, and Ajie is in no mood to be fawned over. He collects his change from the bike man and turns to leave.
“I am Ofuma by name.” The man is relentless. Ajie accepts the challenge but plays it his own way — he won’t be forced to introduce himself. The paint of the house is peeling and the roofing sheets are rotten and exposed in parts. It is midday, and a kit of pigeons squawk and fly out of a gap on the roof.
“Oga Ofuma, safe journey,” Ajie says to the bike man and walks toward the house, his bag heavy and swaying from his shoulders. He walks beneath the eaves of the house and then looks back at the motorcycle as it makes its way past the church, past the fruit tree by the road, lost in the distance.
Bendic’s grave is to the right side of the quadrangle, and beside it, on the left, is the one made for Paul.
Once Ajie has put his things away, he goes over to Nne Nta’s house to greet her and stays only long enough to tell her everyone is well and that Ma and the others will arrive the next morning, before giving an excuse to leave to attend to an urgent matter.
Ossai’s mother is not at home when Ajie gets there. He meets a little boy who tells him she has gone to the farm and that Ossai is attending a polytechnic in Warri. Company, the boy tells him, awarded twenty scholarships to Ogibah people, and Ossai was one of the lucky ones to get picked.
Ajie doesn’t meet anyone on the road as he makes his way back home. Most people are on their farms by this time of day. The walk seems shorter than he remembers it.
He leaves the house behind, ambles toward the churchyard. He greets the warden at the church, and the man hesitates to ask him who he is. Ajie continues on his way. “Don’t be offended,” the man calls behind him. “Are you not Benedict’s son?”
“I am,” Ajie replies, “the second one.”
“God Almighty!” The man cups his hand over his mouth. “Carbon copy! Exactly like your father.”
He asks Ajie about the burial, and Ajie tells him it’s tomorrow. His mother wants it as quiet as possible. A small service and interment. They’ve prepared only light refreshments for the guests, unlike normal funerals.
“We will be there,” the man says firmly. “Me and my family. I don’t think you will remember me. You were so small when you people came home last.”
“Of course I remember you.” Ajie smiles and says the man’s name.
“That is good!” The man beams. “Wonderful. So where are you going now? You can come to my house when you are free.”
“I will,” Ajie says. “I am just going to the swamp. The weather is too hot. I would like to get in the water.”
“The swamp behind the school?”
“Yes,” Ajie replies.
“It’s gone. All the ponds are dried up,” the man says. “You know they have built a dam across the river at Idu?”
“Who?”
“Nearly ten years now,” with a slight shrug of the shoulder, like it was an event from long ago and he has forgotten how to feel about it.
“Who built the dam?” Ajie asks in a surprising surge of rage.
“My son, it wasn’t even today Company built that dam; they offered to pay for the land, and the families who owned the land fought and fought among each other, but finally, the dam is there now.”
But you can’t buy up a stream, Ajie wants to say before he leaves the man to go on his way. You can’t just buy up a stream or a swamp, a river, or any communal water body. Nobody has a right to do that. It surprises him — this spark of rage in his chest. Right now he would like to snap away something from someone, something dear to him or her, and destroy it completely. He would like to strike down whoever has made this happen, make them totally powerless to protect the thing they love, humiliate them, reduce them to trivial and useless things. What if he walks across the road now and stops any of these trucks passing with Company workers in them; if he is in luck, there might be someone in it senior enough to have been part of the decision to dam the river. He would order them out of the van and make like he has a gun in his pocket. Oh, the rush of actually having a gun to hold to a person’s head. He would make them lie on the ground and step on their heads with his shoes to make sure their faces were rubbing in the dirt, and they would shiver with fear and maybe piss their pants, begging. How do you make someone feel useless and powerless, how do you make someone feel like a stupid worthless thing that has never mattered and never will? With this he marches across the road, beyond the school, which has been moved to a new site.
The swamp is not there. The ponds are dried up, all the trees felled. No slowworms, no bamboo or bracken, no blackbirds pecking on a rotting palm trunk. He walks on in what is now a rough stretch of land that he can see from here to there, and farther away new buildings being erected.