“How come you don’t talk to the turtles when people are about?” he had asked.
“Because I know tha difference between a gift and insanity.”
Finally Elvis finished grinding the chilies into a grade-A paste. Oye usually had a treat for him, a bottle of soda or, even better, a malt drink. This time was no different and, drinking straight from the bottle, he finished it in a few gulps. He looked at her hopefully, but before he could speak, she said, “No, laddie. No more, it’ll give you piles. You dinna want to be penny wise, do you?”
Elvis smiled. Oye had a talent for using clichés wrongly. Only the other day she had complained about not having green fingers. Sitting on the floor at her feet, he read through his mother’s journal while he waited for the long line of petitioners to be attended to. When the last of them had left and she looked down at him, she saw he was lost in thought, stroking the cracked binding of the journal.
“Thinking about your mother?”
He started.
“Yes. Tell me about her, Granny.”
“Have I taught you nothing, lad?”
“Please?”
“Tha’s better. I’ve told you about her so many times.”
“Once more. Please?”
“You are going to be here for a while, so you might as well make yourself useful,” she said, passing him a handful of dried melon seeds and a sheet of newspaper.
He grimaced but knew there was no getting out of it, so he began to shell.
“Beatrice was a stubborn one, like you. She always had to have her way. Ach! But she was beautiful, even more so than a mermaid, and dark. Probably as dark as tha antimony women use to draw patterns on themselves. She never could wear makeup, your mother. She was so dark it never showed. I always said she was like a photo negative!” Oye broke into a laugh that soon became a hacking cough.
He felt a pang of worry go through him, even though he knew she only had a cold. Oye was getting older each day, and he always worried when she showed the slightest sign of illness. Torn between concern and his impatience for her to continue, he asked:
“Are you okay?”
“Ach,” she continued. “Where was I? Oh yes, Beatrice. She loved to dance, your mother. She danced all tha time, and I would watch her spin like a leaf caught in tha wind. I was so afraid for her, she seemed to have no substance, you know? Like she was made out of air, or a dream.”
He tried to imagine his mother as made out of air. All of his memories of her were sketchy and had been supplemented by the fantasies he built around the things he read in her journal. Oye had once told him that he had been old enough when Beatrice died to remember her clearly and that it was just his pain that was keeping him from fully remembering. He didn’t know if she was right or wrong. He concentrated really hard to try and call up an image of his mother. The only one that came up was of her standing over him in her garden, the sun behind her, a tall, dark, smiling presence. Not wanting to miss anything, he returned his attention to Oye and her story.
“She loved music. She sang for hours while she did all tha chores — and what a voice, ach! She could not have goat it from me, I dinna sing, lad. No. But her father, he could hold a tune. Tha’ was your grandfather. He died when I was still a young lass.”
“How old were you when you were married, then?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven?”
Oye laughed through her cough. When she caught her breath she said, “Aren’t you precious, wee one! If you could see your face — ach! Things were different in those days, you know. By fifteen, most of us had already had three or four children. It was tha way.”
“But that doesn’t seem right. You were only a child.”
“I dinna say it was right, lad. But I dinna say it was wrong, either. I said it was tha way then.
“Anyway, your mother loved music, and when your grandfather died, she inherited his gramophone. It was a beastie of a thing, and you had to keep winding it up or tha people singing sounded like they were drowning. Ach! I never cared much for it myself. She stopped using it though and bought tha’ new record player. Your mother loved Elvis Presley …”
“So that is how I got my name,” Elvis said.
Oye gave him a stern look.
“You know tha’. Act yer age, lad, not yer shoe size. Enough of tha’ story, time you went inside and ate your supper. You must have your homework ready before your father comes home or else it will be another night of carrying on. Now go.”
Elvis got up reluctantly and left, but not before he poured the shelled seeds carefully into Oye’s bowl. He wrapped the newspaper around the shells and took them to throw in the compost heap out back.
EMILIA SONCHIFOLIA DC
(Asteraceae) (Igbo: Nti-Ele)
This is a straggling herb common to open places in the forest or farmland, and frequently at roadsides. Its leaves are irregularly lobed and triangular in shape, resembling the ears of an antelope, which accounts for its Igbo name. These leaves are arranged alternately along the stem, with small pink flowers.
Medicinally, the leaves are eaten cooked in soup or added fresh to a salad to ease fevers. When the fresh leaves are rubbed and squeezed, they produce a green liquid which, when dropped into the eyes, eases soreness, cataracts and generally improves vision and clarity of sight.
ELEVEN
Four lines on the King’s head mark the destination; the moment of royalty, the full crown. This star, spread like a child’s smile or the reaching of four fingers, is rare.
The four-lobed kola nut is the King nut. Rare, it is always a good omen. Four, in Igbo cosmology, is the number of completion, of dominion over the physical universe. It is also the number of energy pockets that true sorcerers and sorceresses need to perform their sacred duty.
Lagos, 1983
Elvis stared at the mound of grey powder. It wasn’t white — at least not in the way he had expected cocaine to be. He rubbed a little between his fingers. It felt coarse, not smooth like icing sugar, the way he had imagined it.
“Careful,” Redemption warned. “Dat is big money.”
“Sorry,” Elvis mumbled, brushing the grainy stuff from his fingers back onto the pile. “Redemption, this is serious business. It is—”
“I know what it is. Are you in or out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your trouble too much. Every time I see you, you say ‘Hook me up with some money deal.’ Den when I do, you say you don’t know.”
“But—”
“Anyway, it is not you I blame, you see?” Redemption interrupted. “I blame myself for involving a boy in a man’s work.”
Elvis heaved a sigh and took a swig from his beer.
“This is dangerous, we could go to prison for this.”
“In dis country you can go to prison if some soldier does not like you. At least with dis you can make some money.”
Elvis drank some more. He seemed to be sweating inordinately, and his throat felt unusually dry. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and then ran his wet hand over his trouser leg.