This story first appeared in our last issue, Volume 15.2.
No one could go up to him because he was holy. His chastity had driven him up the hill. At five thirty, while the hill shed its cloak of night, he would taper grayly down, pause at its rim, in the string of flats, and ascend again. He spoke to no one. The men’s greetings turned to ash in his ears. He merely groaned when the women jeered at him or offered to sew his cuts or bring him salmons, when the children called him a dying man. The so-called unclean animals—pigs, vipers, foxes, frogs—that tried to join him on the hill choked midway and tumbled down, and no gossip or liar or thief tried climbing it afterward. The town learned to look away from the nuances of his life, though hints rolled into their backyards and became food for their pets or curios for their children. They no longer guessed what illness stopped his communing with them, even in the little things like toothbrushing, which no one here did alone.
Not one of these plots eased his isolation: his sons howling his name and yelling, “Fire! Fire!”; his sons waving lit branches not too far from his cottage at midnight (once, he appeared hollow-eyed in a pane); roadside cooks stirring odorous stews around the hill; doves being sent to the top with pleas tied over their breasts; virgins hedging along the hill to a smattering of applause, not dying in the appointed crevices but suffering steaming sores; toddlers pretending loudly to be wounded; wispy-voiced men feigning labor to the amusement of mothers.
Before the world lost its colors, he had yet to descend in over three days, and Vera had filled with dread, a kind of sadness snowing in her belly, for the uncle she had never met. At night, out of the pale islands that the lamps shed in the grass, the town debated what might have happened to Perowe now, and she overheard. Mainly, they thought Perowe had died on the hill.
The longer he stayed up there, the larger the crowd of believers and naysayers got. The believers trickled in from Aba and Umuahia, wearing their best clothes, to pray in the shadow of the hill. These stopovers delighted Chisom, the younger son, who charged entry fees and sold umbrellas and handkerchiefs to the pilgrims. Vera shooed at the crowd in vain. They laughed when she plodded in their midst, frothing at the mouth. They said, “We’ll leave when we’ve felt his presence in our hearts.” They said, “You can’t force us away from salvation.” They said, “Stop acting like a man and get us something to eat.” And one impervious to her warnings, jogged a few feet up the hill and flared into ashes. Then the world lost its colours, and the crowd dispersed, and the front door of the cottage swung in, and he swayed down in a sack cloth, all ribs and sunken belly, an inner storm graying his skin. Something in his gait revealed he would never go back up. She rushed to the foot of the hill and padded his fall. After he’d staggered into her embrace and scalded her with his holiness, she murmured, “I lo tago”—You’re where you’re meant to be. She turned him to his former home, which his sons now occupied.
Chisom, who ranted most about his absence and their growing up without a father, rinsed his sores, which no ointment could heal, for they were spiritual. Braided the forestial tangle of his hair and kneaded unzu in his skin. Guessed wrongly from his too-bold nose and his weak chin that he used to be a poet. All he did was sigh. Chisom clipped his fingernails and asked what he would like for supper, instead of asking where he’d been all these years and why he hadn’t attended their mother’s funeral.
The sky became an opaque puddle in July, and they circled prescient verses in the Bible and rained curses on America. In July, Vera found that his memories were sinking to ash. The ashes turned his mind into a lunar landscape and sometimes spilled from his ears on the pillows. At first light, he would call her to handle the leak, and she would scurry in, waving a dustpan, and flap his pillows. She dreaded disposing of the ashes that reeked of dried organs. She stored them in a jar on the highest shelf so neither Chisom nor Ebuka would mistake it for a spice or ground charcoal for scrubbing their teeth.
Perowe’s sons suspected he was senile not when he flagged bread vendors and paid them with moth-eaten notes Vera had to tug from their hands, pleading apologies, and replace with the currency, or when he mislaid lines of the national anthem and struggled to name any president after Gowon, or when he called Chisom his brother, but when he decided to tell them this story, after blurting one morning that he’d gone up the hill to escape the flood. Only as he told the story did they notice the pouch on his neck and his crepey eyelids.
“In the beginning,” he said, “the earth had no water. Then Chukwu, creator of the earth and the vastness beyond it, woke from his slumber and exhaled the first sea, which he called Aró. Chukwu found that he could give life to the mud figurines he made in his likeness as a hobby. Each moving figurine he called and lowered carefully to the earth. There, nwóké spent time wolfing down Chukwu’s more unusual figurines, even though Chukwu had provided nwóké with more than enough food to eat. Nwóké had no need for water. Aró was meant to cool the earth. Chukwu’s freeing nwóké meant he had given them self-control. Nwóké owned themselves on earth, although they had made the lesser figurines belong to them. Soon enraged by the gluttony and pleasure-seeking of nwóké, Chukwu cursed nwóké with thirst. Nwóké would visit Aró, in their growing numbers, to quench this thirst. When nwóké drank too much water, the earth would heat up. If nwóké sought cool weather, they would have to thirst longer.”
Perowe nudged his breakfast tray away, and a silence opened over them.
“What flood?” Ebuka asked, an edge to his voice, spite slipping through his mask of courtesy. Vera caught the subdued rage from years of his filling his old man’s shoes, shelving his childhood to be the father of the house, performing the chores from which his father had been unbound by his delirium, chores his father had grown too old to perform.
Ebuka would crouch into the grove behind the house, beat a slow path through ferns and thwacking wings, still wearing the T-shirt creased with his sleep, and disappear forever.
“The only Chukwu mama spoke of is the one in Genesis,” Chisom said. Vera would find him in a fetal huddle two days after Ebuka’s disappearance, his round glasses slid from his nose and echoed in the bathroom tiles, his unseeing eyes leveled at her.
§
The clouds drooped. The toads and cicadas were quiet for days. So quiet Vera could hear dew form on the leaves and tick in the soil. So low she could lick the coppery shine off them and pinch tufts of their warmth into her pockets. If he mourned, he went to needless lengths to hide it from her. “You won’t believe how much he eats,” she told the veiled gathering that dropped by to tell him, “Wetu obi.” Calm your mind. They did not tell him how. For her sake, she’d wished they would. His expression was unchanged, that of a traveler who has forgotten details of the land he just passed by. No matter, she thought. Grief pierces us at different angles. But his silence made her pain absurd. It came sly and questioning, unfurled like a chorus under her sobs. She mourned just Chisom because Ebuka had to be alive. It defied logic that both his sons should be lost in the same week. Such a situation would be aru, a glitch in the order of things. She blanked out paying the urchins to wander into the grove, down stalks that waved like a dream the soil was having. Chose to forget how they framed their hands to their faces and called for Ebuka, and how the leaves gave them up empty-handed, streaked with moss and stinking of the damp woods.
The next time she neared Perowe, to check that he breathed and his pulse held steady, she saw that he’d dripped tears in the ash, which overflowed on all sides and fringed his mattress. Was this the meaning of elderliness? she thought. And how could his head contain so much ash? “Try harder,” she said to his back. “If you forget all you’ve lived through, can you say they happened? And if you can’t say they happened, what will be the point of your life?”
§
The first step to remembrance landed him in Tivo, the town of his childhood, a coastal community crowded with fishermen and hunters, the pendant in a chain of domestic settlements, famous for its loam and its leaves quivering sap, nesting canaries and hummingbirds, marsupials and leering wild cats, its ponds and lakes flush with seals, crocodiles, dolphins, white sharks, and sardines that writhed on the shore when the tide sank. “Before being colonized, Tivo also had tigers,” his father would say. “The British took them. They skinned them for their rugs, shot them and posed for photos stamping on the bloodied bellies.”
At the town meeting just before the flume became a thing, and babies emerged with bulbous heads, and the fishermen started growing fins over their ears, and the traders coughed phlegm with every breath, the town’s kinsmen debated a rumor that Ikpato, the first port of the missionaries and the most educated town in the region, less than a hundred miles upland, had caught the oil frenzy and acceded to the wooing of an English mining company. There was a flurry among the women, a couple of threats to protest. Any drilling going on there, the town’s chief assured them, would bring no harm on Tivo.
The first sufferer of flume faded in days. The village gathered and watched his sweaty, howling departure, his shins and arms whittling into ash. Once his knees vanished, the disease spread giddily, biting off his head and torso. In the following months, smog that sizzled on the skin blackened the farms into tender scabs and suffocated the lemurs. Condensates slicked rainbows on the waves, and toxins bloomed underwater, strangling delicate reefs. Seals shriveled up on the riverbank and trout littered the coast. “Places are as fragile as memories,” his father would say.
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