Who Fears Death (2 page)

Those first few days, to make some fast money, my mother sold most of the cactus candy she had. Cactus candy was more valuable than currency in Jwahir. It was a delicious delicacy. My mother had taught herself how to cultivate it. She must always have had the intention of returning to civilization.

Over the weeks, she planted the cactus cutlets she’d kept and set up a booth. I helped out the best I could. I carried and arranged things and called over customers. In turn, she allowed me an hour of free time each day to roam. In the desert, I used to venture over a mile away from my mother on clear days. I never got lost. So the market was small to me. Nonetheless, there was much to see and the potential for trouble was around every corner.

I was a happy child. People sucked their teeth, grumbled, and shifted their eyes when I passed. But I didn’t care. There were chickens and pet foxes to chase, other children to glare back at, arguments to watch. The sand on the ground was sometimes damp with spilled camel milk; at other times it was oily and fragrant from overflowing perfumed-oil bottles mixed with incense ashes and often stuck to camel, cow, or fox dung. The sand here was so affected, whereas back in the desert the sand was untouched.

We’d been in Jwahir only a few months when I found Papa. That fateful day was hot and sunny. When I left my mother, I took a cup of water with me. My first impulse was to go to the strangest structure in Jwahir: The House of Osugbo. Something always drew me to this large square-shaped building. Decorated with odd shapes and symbols, it was Jwahir’s tallest building and the only one made entirely of stone.

“One day I’ll go in there,” I said, as I stood staring at it. “But not today.”

I ventured farther from the market into an area that I hadn’t explored. An electronics shop was selling ugly refurbished computers. They were small black and gray things with exposed motherboards and cracked cases. I wondered if they felt as ugly as they looked. I’d never touched a computer. I reached out to touch one.

“
Ta!
” the owner said from behind his counter. “Don’t touch!”

I sipped my water and moved on.

My legs eventually brought me to a cave full of fire and noise. The white adobe building was open at the front. The room inside was dark with the occasional blast of fiery light. Heat hotter than the breeze wafted out like the breath out of a monster’s open mouth. On the front of the building a large sign read:

I squinted, making out a tall muscle-bound man inside. His dark glistening skin was darkened with soot.
Like one of the heroes in the Great Book
, I thought. He wore gloves woven from fine threads of metal and black goggles strapped tightly to his face. His nostrils were wide as he pounded on fire with a great hammer. His huge arms flexed with each blow. He could have been the son of Ogun, the goddess of metal. There was such joy in his motions.
But he seems so thirsty
, I thought. I imagined his throat burning and full of ash. I still had my cup of water. It was half full. I entered his shop.

It was even hotter inside. However, I’d grown up in the desert. I was used to extreme hot and cold. I cautiously watched the sparks burst from the metal he pounded. Then as respectfully as I could, I said, “
Oga
, I have water for you.”

My voice startled him. The sight of a lanky little girl who was what people called
Ewu
standing in his shop startled him more. He pushed his goggles up. The area around his eyes where the soot had not fallen was about my mother’s dark brown complexion.
The white part of his eyes are so white for someone who stares at fire all day
, I thought.

“Child, you shouldn’t be in here,” he said. I stepped back. His voice was sonorous. Full. This man could speak in the desert and animals from miles away would hear him.

“It’s not so hot,” I said. I held up the water. “Here.” I stepped closer, very conscious of what I was. I was wearing the green dress my mother had sewn for me. The material was light but it covered every inch of me, all the way to my ankles and wrists. She’d have made me wear a veil over my face but she didn’t have the heart.

It was odd. Mostly, people shunned me because I was
Ewu
. But sometimes women crowded around me. “But her skin,” they would say to each other, never directly to me. “It’s so smooth and delicate. It looks almost like camel’s milk.”

“And her hair is oddly bushy, like a cloud of dried grass.”

“Her eyes are like a desert cat’s.”

“Ani makes strange beauty from ugliness.”

“She might be beautiful by the time she goes through her Eleventh Rite.”

“What’s the point of her going through it? No one will marry her.” Then laughter.

In the market, men had tried to grab me but I was always quicker and I knew how to scratch. I’d learned from the desert cats. All this confused my six-year-old mind. Now, as I stood before the blacksmith, I feared that he might find my ugly features strangely delightful, too.

I held the cup up to him. He took it and drank long and deep, pulling in every drop. I was tall for my age but he was tall for his. I had to tilt my head back to see the smile on his face. He let out a great sigh of relief and handed the cup back to me.

“Good water,” he said. He went back to his anvil. “You’re too tall and far too bold to be a water sprite.”

I smiled and said, “My name is Onyesonwu Ubaid. What’s yours,
Oga?
”

“Fadil Ogundimu,” he said. He looked at his gloved hands. “I would shake your hand, Onyesonwu, but my gloves are hot.”

“That’s okay,
Oga
,” I said. “You’re a blacksmith!”

He nodded. “As was my father and his father and his father and so on.”

“My mother and I just got here some months ago,” I blurted. I remembered that it was growing late. “Oh. I have to go,
Oga
Ogundimu!”

“Thanks for the water,” he said. “You were right. I was thirsty.”

After that, I visited him often. He became my best and only friend. If my mother had known I was hanging around a strange man, she’d have beaten me and taken away my free time for weeks. The blacksmith’s apprentice, a man named Ji, hated me and he let me know this by sneering with disgust whenever he saw me, as if I were a diseased wild animal.

“Ignore Ji,” the blacksmith said. “He’s good with metal but he lacks imagination. Forgive him. He is primitive.”

“Do
you
think I look evil?” I asked.

“You’re lovely,” he said smiling. “The way a child is conceived is not a child’s fault or burden.”

I didn’t know what
conceived
meant and I didn’t ask. He’d called me lovely and I didn’t want him to take his words back. Thankfully, Ji usually came late, during the cooler part of the day.

Soon I was telling the blacksmith about my life in the desert. I was too young to know to keep such sensitive things to myself. I didn’t understand that my past, my very existence, was sensitive. In turn, he taught me a few things about metal, like which types yielded to heat most easily and which didn’t.

“What was your wife like?” I asked one day. I was really just running my mouth. I was more interested in the small stack of bread he’d bought me.

“Njeri. She was black-skinned,” he said. He put both his big hands around one of his thighs. “And had very strong legs. She was a camel racer.”

I swallowed the bread I was chewing. “Really?” I exclaimed.

“People said that her legs were what kept her on the camels but I know better. She had some sort of gift, too.”

“Gift of what?” I asked, leaning forward. “Could she walk through walls? Fly? Eat glass? Change into a beetle?”

The blacksmith laughed. “You read a lot,” he said.

“I’ve read the Great Book twice!” I bragged.

“Impressive,” he said. “Well, my Njeri could speak to camels. Camel-talking is a man’s job, so she chose camel racing instead. And Njeri didn’t just race. She
won
races. We met when we were teenagers. We married when we were twenty.”

“What did her voice sound like?” I asked.

“Oh, her voice was aggravating and beautiful,” he said.

I frowned at this, confused.

“She was very loud,” he explained, taking a piece of my bread. “She laughed a lot when she was happy and shouted a lot when she was irritated. You see?”

I nodded.

“For a while, we were happy,” he said. He paused.

I waited for him to continue. I knew this was the bad part. When he just stared at his piece of bread, I said, “Well? What happened next? Did she do you wrong?”

He chuckled and I was glad, though I had asked the question in seriousness. “No, no,” he said. “The day she raced the fastest race of her life, something terrible happened. You should have seen it, Onyesonwu. It was the finals of the Rain Fest Races. She’d won this race before, but this day she was about to break the record for fastest half mile ever.”

He paused. “I was at the finish line. We all were. The ground was still slick from the heavy rain the night before. They should have given the race another day. Her camel approached, running its knock-kneed gait. It was running faster than any camel ever has.” He closed his eyes. “It took a wrong step and . . . tumbled.” His voice broke. “In the end, Njeri’s strong legs were her downfall. They held on and when the camel fell, she was crushed under its weight.”

I gasped, clapping my hands over my mouth.

“Had she tumbled off, she’d have lived. We’d only been married for three months.” He sighed. “The camel she was riding refused to leave her side. It went wherever her body went. Days after she was cremated, the camel died of grief. Camels all over were spitting and groaning for weeks.” He put his gloves back on and went back to his anvil. The conversation was over.

Months passed. I continued visiting him every few days. I knew I was pushing my luck with my mother. But I believed it was a risk worth taking. One day, he asked me how my day was going. “Okay,” I replied. “A lady was talking about you yesterday. She said that you were the greatest blacksmith ever and that someone named Osugbo pays you well. Does he own the House of Osugbo? I’ve always wanted to go in there.”

“Osugbo isn’t a man,” he replied as he examined a piece of wrought iron. “It’s the group of Jwahir elders who keep order, our government heads.”

“Oh,” I said, not knowing or caring what the word
government
meant.

“How’s your mother?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“I want to meet her.”

I held my breath, frowning. If she found out about him, I’d get the worst beating of my life and then I’d lose my only friend.
What’s he want to meet her for?
I wondered, suddenly feeling extremely possessive of my mother. But how could I stop him from meeting her? I bit my lip and very reluctantly said, “Fine.”

To my dismay, he came to our tent that very night. Still, he did look striking in his long white flowing pants and a white caftan. He wore a white veil over his head. To wear all white was to present oneself with great humbleness. Usually women did this. For a man to do it was very special. He knew to approach my mother with care.

At first, my mother was afraid and angry with him. When he told her about the friendship he had with me, she slapped my bottom so hard that I ran off and cried for hours. Still, within a month, Papa and my mother were married. The day after the wedding, my mother and I moved into his house. It should have all been perfect after that. It was good for five years. Then the weirdness started.

PAPA ANCHORED MY MOTHER AND ME TO JWAHIR. But even if he’d lived, I’d still have ended up here. I was never meant to
stay
in Jwahir. I was too volatile and there were other things driving me. I was trouble from the moment I was conceived. I was a black stain. A poison. I realized this when I was eleven years old. When something strange happened to me. The incident forced my mother to finally tell me my own ugly story.

 

It was evening and a thunderstorm was fast approaching. I was standing in the back doorway watching it come when, right before my eyes, a large eagle landed on a sparrow in my mother’s garden. The eagle slammed the sparrow to the ground and flew off with it. Three brown bloody feathers fell from the sparrow’s body. They landed between my mother’s tomatoes. Thunder rumbled as I went and picked up one of the feathers. I rubbed the blood between my fingers. I don’t know why I did this.

It was sticky. And its coppery smell was pungent in my nostrils, as if I were awash in it. I tilted my head, for some reason, listening, sensing.
Something’s happening here
, I thought. The sky darkened. The wind picked up. It brought . . . another smell. A strange smell that I have since come to recognize but will never be able to describe.

The more I inhaled that smell, the more something began to happen in my head. I considered running inside but I didn’t want to bring whatever it was into the house. Then I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. There was a humming, then pain. I shut my eyes.

There were doors in my head, doors made of steel and wood and stone. The pain was from those doors cracking open. Hot air wafted through them. My body felt odd, like every move I made would break something. I fell to my knees and retched. Every muscle in my body seized up. Then I stopped existing. I recall nothing. Not even darkness.

It was awful.

 

Next thing I knew, I was stuck high in the giant iroko tree that grew in the center of town. I was naked. It was raining. Humiliation and confusion were the staples of my childhood. Is it a wonder that anger was never far behind?

I held my breath to keep from sobbing with shock and fear. The large branch I grasped was slippery. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just spontaneously died and returned to life. But that didn’t matter at the moment. How was I going to get down?