First he offered to collect Oye’s letters from the post office on his way home from school. She hesitated initially, because waiting for the postman brought a special feeling to the day. But both Elvis and his father managed to convince her of the danger of waiting near that bend around which the lorries came barreling. It also made sense since he took her replies to the post office.
When she got used to the new system and began to let him open the envelopes for her, he moved on to the next stage of his plan. He stopped mailing her replies, using the postage money instead to pay for his movie adventures. He never failed to feel the pang of guilt, but the candy and Fanta assuaged that and he was soon lost in the movie, hardly aware of Efua breathing gently beside him. He was no longer strictly seeing movies that helped his dancing, although he did learn a few moves from the Bollywood flicks. But he was hooked, and the cheap, jerky silent movies of the motor park had lost their appeal.
The one hitch to his plan was that Oye would be expecting detailed replies from her pen pals from all over the world, a problem compounded by the fact that she received between one and five letters a week. To cover up, he would have to write the replies she so looked forward to. It proved harder than he had thought, and the need to keep varying the voices and contents soon exhausted him. Desperate, he began using scenes from the films he watched to make up the letters.
Oye’s Argentinean pen pal moved from the city to the pampas and began to ranch cattle as a pampas cowboy. He was a tough customer who kept the rustlers at bay with mild threats.
“‘Don’t make me shoot you, pilgrim’?” Oye asked, alarmed. “What does tha’ mean? When did José buy a gun and become a cowboy?” she continued. “He was a priest a few weeks ago.”
Elvis swallowed hard and kept his head down. And so the lies rolled off his pen. Scenes from Casablanca, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Gone With the Wind were rewritten to fit his letters. Oye’s suspicions seemed to him to have been allayed too easily and quickly, though, and he couldn’t shake his unease, convinced that she was setting him up. It niggled at him all the time.
And the stories he could cook up from the movies were finite, and with the constant reruns, Elvis was fast running out of material. When he started his scam, the plan was to still mail off a few letters so that Oye would receive some genuine replies and wouldn’t grow suspicious at the change in tone of the forged ones. He then meant to build up slowly until he wasn’t posting any of the letters from her. Things got out of control too quickly, and he stopped posting all her letters too soon. He would still go to the post office, stand in line so that he would be seen by any neighbors or relatives that might just happen to be around on their own business; then he ducked around the corner and out the back door. Hidden by the rampant bush that grew almost up to the back door, he shoved the letters into his schoolbag. Then, in the shade of a leafy tree branch right there behind the post office, he would begin forging the replies. He needed more input. Television was out of the question, as Oye might catch him out. There were all the books he read, like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and the Hardy Boys adventures, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to plagiarize an actual book.
He finally turned to his own imagination. And what a colorful place that turned out to be! A dog that spoke to its owners and saved them from every mishap resigned and bought shares in a beachfront bar called Sharky’s, run by a dolphin. A Sri Lankan pen pal was abducted by aliens in the middle of some secret ceremony performed by Arthur C. Clarke. A Catholic priest performed an exorcism on a home in Poland overrun by goose-stepping, machine-gun-toting goblins. A Cuban Santería priestess regularly turned into an invincible tiger to rout Castro’s secret police. An American pen pal, tiring of her job in the Department of Motor Vehicles, retrained as an astronaut and took a rocket to Mars, where she found out that the locals were blacks with a penchant for playing jazz on moon-rock saxophones.
The more elaborate the story, the more Oye enjoyed it and the more his conscience nibbled at him endlessly. At first he tried to deny the prods, masking them as a stomach ulcer. But then he began to have sudden and inexplicable vomiting attacks. Owning up to the truth, he decided to turn himself in. The next time Oye settled down with her tankard of sweet tea to listen to him read, he decided to test the waters.
“Gran, you don’t believe the stories these people have been writing to you, do you?” he asked.
“Why? Are you changing what is written there?” she demanded suspiciously.
“No, no,” he protested quickly. “But I mean surely you did not believe the story about the priest exorcising the goblins.”
“Why not? I have seen goblins.”
“Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath. “What about the woman who met black people on Mars?”
“What about it? We are everywhere. Why all tha questions, eh? For so long my pen pals held out on tha good stories. Instead they wrote boring letters about how well their flowers were blooming and tha’ their local supermarket now had shark and crocodile steaks. What do I care about all tha’, eh? Stop wasting my time, boy, and read,” she said.
With a sigh he unfolded a letter from Russia and began.
Afikpo, 1978
“Not every hoose is a hame,” Oye said. “And since your mother died, this hoose is no hame. Not with him here, tha way he is.”
She balanced her considerable bulk on the tired sway of a wicker chair and began shelling pumpkin seeds into a silver bowl. Occasionally, she would nibble on some of the sweet soft flesh, but for the most part, she saved it. The seeds would be ground into a soft paste on the flat grindstone later and were the main ingredient of egusi soup. In between shelling, Oye sipped on endless cups of too milky, too sweet tea and doled out snippets of wisdom to passersby, who invariably stopped to talk to her.
“Here, lad, go and grind these on tha’ stone in the corner,” she said, passing Elvis the bowl. Then, just as quickly, she snatched the bowl back from his very reluctant hands. He was pleased at the reprieve. The grinding stone was the worst chore. But it turned out to be only a temporary reprieve. “Better start with those peppers over there,” she said instead.
Elvis ground the dry chilies, trying to make all the seeds vanish, mixing in water to thicken it into a paste for the soup.
“I’ve finished,” he called over.
“Already, laddie?” she asked, hauling herself creaking to her feet. “Here, let me see.”
And she spread the paste around on the stone with a wet knife, like jam on toast. Then, with an exasperated sigh, she scraped it into a pile.
“More, more. Like egusi, tha chilies have to be a smooth paste.”
“But I am a boy,” Elvis argued.
“Nobody said boys had to be stupid, did they?”
With a sigh Elvis went back to the grindstone, muttering under his breath.
“What’s tha’, laddie?”
“Nothing.”
“Doesn’t sound like nothing to me. Spit it oot.”
It was just his luck to be born into the only home in the small town with a psychotic father, a dead mother and a Scottish-sounding witch for a grandmother, he said, and he wished his life were different. She nodded sympathetically.
“Ach, lad, but yer canna paint a canary yellow,” she said.
Elvis looked up at her. On the table next to her was a tray that held several pots, jam jars and bottles of herbs and infusions. All day, people came up to Oye complaining of some ailment or the other. She would reach into one of the jars or containers and pass out some dried herbs or a combination of such. Other times, she would nod and just listen, still as a statue except for when, every few minutes, she would bend down and feed some carrots or lettuce to the turtles in an earthenware bowl of water at her feet. When she was alone, she laughed and talked to the turtles sotto voce, as though they shared some joke.