“Sunday, dere are children here,” she replied.
He looked at her and raised his hand to strike her. It hung in the air between them as if he couldn’t remember what he meant to do with it. With a sigh he wiped his face.
“Beatrice, see de kind of man I am becoming? Shit!”
And then he was gone, clumping loudly down the steps. The silence on the veranda followed him down the path until he disappeared from sight.
Edith Piaf groaned from the record player, settling like deep night over the veranda. In the flicker of storm lanterns, Oye and Beatrice sat sipping hot tea. Elvis sat on the mat on the floor next to his mother, while Oye sat in the wicker chair.
“Why is my father always so angry?” Elvis asked.
Beatrice smiled and ruffled his hair.
“He didn’t used to be dat way. Not when I met him. He was full of life, and we would dance all night and he made me laugh all de time.”
“Tha’ was just in the beginning, when you were too blind to see him for what he was,” Oye said.
“Mama! You never liked him.”
“Uhum.”
“It’s dis sickness. It has infected him too.”
“Does that mean his body is angry with him too? Will it start fighting him?”
“No, Elvis,” Beatrice said. “It’s your father’s spirit dat is fighting him.”
“And he’s losing,” Oye said, spitting into the darkness.
“Mama! Elvis, read your book. I have to write some things.”
Beatrice had her journal open on her lap, pen poised to write. Elvis nodded and silently returned to the book he was reading.
It was about nine p.m. and Efua had been sent home. From the veranda they could see a line of farmers returning from the fields, which were located on communal land several miles from town and worked from before dawn to well after dusk with hoes and other manual tools. Elvis closed his book and watched as Beatrice wrote down a recipe for an herbal treatment that Oye was dictating to her. He watched her spidery handwriting spread across the page as though laying claim to an ancient kingdom.
“This is what the plant looks like,” Oye said, handing her a plant. “Draw it next to the recipe. So you won’t forget.”
“What are you doing?” Elvis asked.
“Your mother is getting ready for her next life.”
“By writing?”
“Yes, laddie, she is writing down tha things she wants to remember in her next life.”
“Dead people don’t come back, except as ghosts,” he said.
“Yes they do, laddie.”
“But Father Patrick says—”
“Oh, tha bloody church!” Oye exclaimed.
“Mama!” Beatrice said. Turning to Elvis, she said: “Don’t argue with your grandmother.”
“Yes, Ma,” he said, his face wearing a sulky expression.
“Come closer,” Beatrice said, pulling him close and handing him a pencil. “Here, draw next to me.”
As he bent over the page next to his mother, his crude picture emerged next to her sophisticated one.
ACHYRANTHES ASPER L.
(Igbo: Odudu Ngwere)
This is a weed common to abandoned farmlands, with a varied appearance and many branches, and can be a woody shrub or a climber, morphing shape, some healers say, depending on its mood. Its leaves are thin, smooth and ovoid in shape, covered sparely with coarse hair. Small green or pink flowers are borne on common stalks that droop when full These stalks look and feel like the tails of small lizards, which is what their Igbo name means.
The root, macerated in water, can be applied to relieve scorpion stings. It can also be used to help stunted or crippled limbs grow back straight because it contains the regenerative power of lizard tails. Some witches claim the flowers can help you forget the sting of a broken heart when dried and drunk like tea. The dosage must be carefully monitored, however, as too much can prove harmful.
FIVE
We do not define kola, or life. It defines us.
The kola nut is used in divination by dibias to discern the path of the petitioner. The dibia always asks the petitioner to bring an unbroken pod of kola nuts. The dibia then mutters an incantation and smashes the pod against the floor or a facing wall. The kola nut that lands at the dibia’s feet is the one used for the divination.
Lagos, 1983
Elvis was dressed for work in an old T-shirt and pants. He stood by his desk, checking through his backpack to make sure he had everything he wanted. He took out Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, replacing it with the paperback of the Koran he’d bought off a street vendor. He wasn’t a Muslim, but with the constant violence between Christians and Muslims, he wanted to see for himself if the Koran called for the death of infidels. He walked over to his bed and pulled his mother’s journal from under his pillow. He had taken to sleeping with it there after Jagua Rigogo had suggested that it was the perfect way to contact her spirit in his dreams. It hadn’t worked so far, but it brought him comfort to have it within reach. He often fell asleep rubbing his left fingertips against the worn leather.
There was a low knock on his door.
“Come in,” he called out.
Comfort’s son Tunji stood in the doorway. He was holding a red shirt.
“Brother Elvis,” he began, employing the moniker of respect. “I iron your shirt for work.”
Elvis opened his mouth to say that he hadn’t asked for an ironed shirt and that it was impractical to wear a freshly ironed shirt to a job as a laborer on a building site. But Tunji seemed so sincere he just mumbled his thanks and took the shirt. As Tunji turned to leave, Elvis stopped him. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a one-naira note and handed it to him. Tunji accepted it gratefully.
On his way to work, Elvis stopped at Madam Caro’s to get some breakfast. Seeing his already drunk father seated at a table pontificating, he moved on. Sunday’s public drunkenness was hard for Elvis to watch. Although Sunday had always turned to alcohol when life became hard, back in their hometown there had been some dignity to his drinking. Perhaps it was because for the most part it had been conducted in the privacy of their house.
As he approached another buka, Elvis saw a man standing outside, begging the owner for food. The owner’s heated response was attracting a small crowd. The man grabbed hold of the plate of food the owner was about to serve and desperately tried to wrench it from her, but she held on tightly. As they struggled for it, the plate gave way and fell to the floor, spilling food everywhere. The man pounced on it, triumphantly scraping rice and dirt into his mouth.
Elvis smiled, mentally celebrating the man’s victory, small as it was. He entered the buka and sat down at one of the tables. Watching the man shoveling rice and dirt into his mouth tugged at him, and he counted the money in his pocket, doing some quick arithmetic. Satisfied that he could spare some, he called the man inside and ordered a steaming bowl of soup and fufu for him.
The man bolted the food, eating so fast his hand was a blur as he shoveled balls of fufu into his mouth. Apparently unaffected by the heat of the food, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a piston. Finishing, the man drank deeply from a jug of water on the table, belched and let out a long-drawn-out sigh. He sat back and smiled at Elvis.
“If you need something, any time, just ask for me, Okon,” he announced.
Elvis nodded distractedly. It seemed like every mendicant in Lagos was able to help him, first the King of the Beggars and now this man.