‘I am here.’
‘I said what did I tell you about carving the image of gods? Perhaps you did not hear my first question; perhaps I spoke with water in my mouth.’
‘You told me to avoid it.’
‘I told you that, did I? What is this story I hear then – that you are carving an
alusi
for a man of Umuagu?’
‘Who told you?’
‘Who told me? Is it true or not is what I want to know, not who told me.’
‘I want to know who told you because I don’t think he can tell the difference between the face of a deity and the face of a Mask.’
‘I see. You may go, my son. And if you like you may carve all the gods in Umuaro. If you hear me asking you about it again take my name and give it to a dog.’
‘What I am carving for the man of Umuagu is not…’
‘It is not me you are talking to. I have finished with you.’
Nwafo tried in vain to make sense out of these words. When his father’s temper cooled he would ask. Then his sister, Obiageli, came in from the inner compound, saluted Ezeulu and made to sit on the mud-bed.
‘Have you finished preparing the bitter-leaf?’ asked Nwafo.
‘Don’t you know how to prepare bitter-leaf? Or are your fingers broken?’
‘Keep quiet there, you two.’ Ezeulu rolled the yam out of the fire with the stick and quickly felt it between his thumb and first finger, and was satisfied. He brought down a two-edged knife from the rafters and began to scrape off the coat of black on the roast yam. His hands were covered in soot when he had finished, and he clapped them together a few times to get them clean again. His wooden bowl was near at hand and he cut the yam into it and waited for it to cool.
When he began eating Obiageli started to sing quietly to herself. She should have known by now that her father never gave out even the smallest crumbs of the yam he ate without palm oil at every new moon. But she never ceased hoping.
He ate in silence. He had moved away from the fire and now sat with his back against the wall, looking outwards. As was usual with him on these occasions his mind seemed to be fixed on distant thoughts. Now and again he drank from a calabash of cold water which Nwafo had brought for him. As he took the last piece Obiageli returned to her mother’s hut. Nwafo put away the wooden bowl and the calabash and stuck the knife again between two rafters.
Ezeulu rose from his goatskin and moved to the household shrine on a flat board behind the central dwarf wall at the entrance. His
ikenga
, about as tall as a man’s forearm, its animal horn as long as the rest of its human body, jostled with faceless
okposi
of the ancestors black with the blood of sacrifice, and his short personal staff of
ofo
. Nwafo’s eyes picked out the special
okposi
which belonged to him. It had been carved for him because of the convulsions he used to have at night. They told him to call it Namesake, and he did. Gradually the convulsions had left him.
Ezeulu took the
ofo
staff from the others and sat in front of the shrine, not astride in a man’s fashion but with his legs stretched in front of him to one side of the shrine, like a woman. He held one end of the short staff in his right hand and with the other end hit the earth to punctuate his prayer:
Ulu, I thank you for making me see another new moon. May I see it again and again. This household may it be healthy and prosperous. As this is the moon of planting may the six villages plant with profit. May we escape danger in the farm – the bite of a snake or the sting of the scorpion, the mighty one of the scrubland. May we not cut our shinbone with the matchet or the hoe. And let our wives bear male children. May we increase in numbers at the next counting of the villages so that we shall sacrifice to you a cow, not a chicken as we did after the last New Yam feast. May children put their fathers into the earth and not fathers their children. May good meet the face of every man and every woman. Let it come to the land of the riverain folk and to the land of the forest peoples.
He put the
ofo
back among the
ikenga
and the
okposi
, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and returned to his place. Every time he prayed for Umuaro bitterness rose into his mouth, a great smouldering anger for the division which had come to the six villages and which his enemies sought to lay on his head. And for what reason? Because he had spoken the truth before the white man. But how could a man who held the holy staff of Ulu know that a thing was a lie and speak it? How could he fail to tell the story as he had heard it from his own father? Even the white man, Wintabota, understood, though he came from a land no one knew. He had called Ezeulu the only witness of truth. That was what riled his enemies – that the white man whose father or mother no one knew should come to tell them the truth they knew but hated to hear. It was an augury of the world’s ruin.
The voices of women returning from the stream broke into Ezeulu’s thoughts. He could not see them because of the darkness outside. The new moon having shown itself had retired again. But the night bore marks of its visit. The darkness was not impenetrable as it had been lately, but open and airy like a forest from which the under-growth had been cut. As the women called out ‘Ezeulu’ one after another he saw their vague forms and returned their greeting. They left the
obi
to their right and went into the inner compound through the only other entrance – a high, carved door in the red, earth walls.
‘Are these not the people I saw going to the stream before the sun went down?’
‘Yes,’ said Nwafo. ‘They went to Nwangene.’
‘I see.’ Ezeulu had forgotten temporarily that the nearer stream, Ota, had been abandoned since the oracle announced yesterday that the enormous boulder resting on two other rocks at its source was about to fall and would take a softer pillow for its head. Until the
alusi
who owned the stream and whose name it bore had been placated no one would go near it.
Still, Ezeulu thought, he would speak his mind to whoever brought him a late supper tonight. If they knew they had to go to Nwangene they should have set out earlier. He was tired of having his meal sent to him when other men had eaten and forgotten.
Obika’s great, manly voice rose louder and louder into the night air as he approached home. Even his whistling carried farther than some men’s voices. He sang and whistled alternately.
‘Obika is returning,’ said Nwafo.
‘The night bird is early coming home today,’ said Ezeulu, at the same time.
‘One day soon he will see Eru again,’ said Nwafo, referring to the apparition Obika had once seen at night. The story had been told so often that Nwafo imagined he was there.
‘This time it will be Idemili or Ogwugwu,’ said Ezeulu with a smile, and Nwafo was full of happiness.
*
About three years ago Obika had rushed into the
obi
one night and flung himself at his father shivering with terror. It was a dark night and rain was preparing to fall. Thunder rumbled with a deep, liquid voice and flash answered flash.
‘What is it, my son?’ Ezeulu asked again and again, but Obika trembled and said nothing.
‘What is it, Obika?’ asked his mother, Matefi, who had run into the
obi
and was now shaking worse than her son.
‘Keep quiet there,’ said Ezeulu. ‘What did you see, Obika?’
When he had cooled a little Obika began to tell his father what he had seen at a flash of lightning near the ugili tree between their village, Umuachala, and Umunneora. As soon as he had mentioned the place Ezeulu had known what it was.
‘What happened when you saw It?’
‘I knew it was a spirit; my head swelled.’
‘Did he not turn into the Bush That Ruined Little Birds? On the left?’
His father’s confidence revived Obika. He nodded and Ezeulu nodded twice. The other women were now ranged round the door.
‘What did he look like?’
‘Taller than any man I know.’ He swallowed a lump. ‘His skin was very light… like… like…’
‘Was he dressed like a poor man or was it like a man of great wealth?’
‘He was dressed like a wealthy man. He had an eagle’s feather in his red cap.’
His teeth began to knock together again.
‘Hold yourself together. You are not a woman. Had he an elephant tusk?’
‘Yes. He carried a big tusk across his shoulder.’
The rain had now begun to fall, at first in big drops that sounded like pebbles on the thatch.
‘There is no cause to be afraid, my son. You have seen Eru, the Magnificent, the One that gives wealth to those who find favour with him. People sometimes see him at that place in this kind of weather. Perhaps he was returning home from a visit to Idemili or the other deities. Eru only harms those who swear falsely before his shrine.’ Ezeulu was carried away by his praise of the god of wealth. The way he spoke one would have thought he was the proud priest of Eru rather than Ulu who stood above Eru and all the other deities. ‘When he likes a man wealth flows like a river into his house; his yams grow as big as human beings, his goats produce threes and his hens hatch nines.’
Matefi’s daughter, Ojiugo, brought in a bowl of foofoo and a bowl of soup, saluted her father and set them before him. Then she turned to Nwafo and said: ‘Go to your mother’s hut; she has finished cooking.’
‘Leave the boy alone,’ said Ezeulu who knew that Matefi and her daughter resented his partiality for his other wife’s son. ‘Go and call your mother for me.’ He made no move to start eating and Ojiugo knew there was going to be trouble. She went back to her mother’s hut and called her.
‘I don’t know how many times I have said in this house that I shall not eat my supper when every other man in Umuaro is retiring to sleep,’ he said as soon as Matefi came in. ‘But you will not listen. To you whatever I say in this house is no more effective than the fart a dog breaks to put out a fire…’
‘I went all the way to Nwangene to fetch water and…’
‘If you like you may go to Nkisa. What I am saying is that if you want that madness of yours to be cured, bring my supper at this time another day…’
When Ojiugo came to collect the bowls she found Nwafo polishing off the soup. She waited for him to finish, full of anger. Then she gathered the bowls and went to tell her mother about it. This was not the first time or the second or third. It happened every day.
‘Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?’ said Matefi. ‘What do you expect a boy to do when his mother cooks soup with locust beans for fish? She saves her money to buy ivory bracelets. But Ezeulu will never see anything wrong in what she does. If it is me then he knows what to say.’
Ojiugo was looking towards the other woman’s hut which was separated from theirs by the whole length of the compound. All she could see was the yellowish glow of the palm oil lamp between the low eaves and the threshold. There was a third hut which formed a half moon with the other two. It had belonged to Ezeulu’s first wife, Okuata, who died many years ago. Ojiugo hardly knew her; she only remembered she used to give a piece of fish and some locust beans to every child who went to her hut when she was making her soup. She was the mother of Adeze, Edogo and Akueke. After her death her children lived in the hut until the girls married. Then Edogo lived there alone until he married two years ago and built a small compound of his own besides his father’s. Now Akueke had been living in the hut again since she left her husband’s house. They said the man ill-treated her. But Ojiugo’s mother said it was a lie and that Akueke was headstrong and proud, the kind of woman who carried her father’s compound into the house of her husband.
Just when Ojiugo and her mother were about to begin their meal, Obika came home singing and whistling.
‘Bring me his bowl,’ said Matefi. ‘He is early today.’
Obika stooped at the low eaves and came in hands first. He saluted his mother and she said ‘
Nno
’ without any warmth. He sat down heavily on the mud-bed. Ojiugo had brought his soup bowl of fired clay and was now bringing down his foofoo from the bamboo ledge. Matefi blew into the soup bowl to remove dust and ash and ladled soup into it. Ojiugo set it before her brother and went outside to bring water in a gourd.
After the first swallow Obika tilted the bowl of soup towards the light and inspected it critically.
‘What do you call this, soup or cocoyam porridge.’
The women ignored him and went on with their own interrupted meal. It was clear he had drunk too much palm wine again.
Obika was one of the handsomest young men in Umuaro and all the surrounding districts. His face was very finely cut and his nose stood
gem
, like the note of a gong. His skin was, like his father’s, the colour of terracotta. People said of him (as they always did when they saw great comeliness) that he was not born for these parts among the Igbo people of the forests; that in his previous life he must have sojourned among the riverain folk whom the Igbo called Olu.
But two things spoilt Obika. He drank palm wine to excess, and he was given to sudden and fiery anger. And being as strong as rock he was always inflicting injury on others. His father who preferred him to Edogo, his quiet and brooding half-brother, nevertheless said to him often: ‘It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, my son, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live. The man who has never submitted to anything will soon submit to the burial mat.’
But for all that Ezeulu would rather have a sharp boy who broke utensils in his haste than a slow and careful snail.
Not very long ago Obika had come very close indeed to committing murder. His half-sister, Akueke, often came home to say that her husband had beaten her. One early morning she came again with her face all swollen. Without waiting to hear the rest of the story Obika set out for Umuogwugwu, the village of his brother-in-law. On the way he stopped to call his friend, Ofoedu, who was never absent from the scene of a fight. As they approached Umuogwugwu Obika explained to Ofoedu that he must not help in beating Akueke’s husband.