Who Fears Death (8 page)

I instantly knew who he was, though I’d only seen him for a moment when I was in a disheveled state. Contrary to what Luyu told me, he’d been in Jwahir longer than the few days. He was the boy who saw me naked in the iroko tree. He’d told me to jump. It had been raining hard and he’d been holding a basket over his head but I knew it was him.

“You’re . . .”

“So are you,” he said.

“Yeah. I’ve never . . . I mean, I’ve heard of others.”

“I’ve seen others,” he said offhandedly.

“Where are you from?” we both asked at the same time.

We both said, “The West.” Then we nodded. All
Ewu
were from the West.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Eh?”

“You’re walking oddly,” he said. I felt my face grow hot. He smiled again and shook his head. “I shouldn’t be so bold.” He paused. “But trust me, they
will
always see us as evil. Even if you have yourself . . . cut.”

I frowned.

“Why would you have that done?” he asked. “You’re not from here.”

“But I
live
here,” I said, defensively.

“So?”

“Who
are
you?” I said, irritated.

“Your name is Onyesonwu Ubaid-Ogundimu. You’re the blacksmith’s daughter.”

I bit my lip, trying to remain irritated. But he’d referred to me as the blacksmith’s daughter, not stepdaughter, and I wanted to smile at this. He smirked. “And you’re the one who ends up naked in trees.”

“Who are you?” I asked again. How strange we must have looked standing there on the side of the road.

“Mwita,” he said.

“What’s your last name?”

“I have no last name,” he said, his voice growing cold.

“Oh . . . okay.” I looked at his clothing. He wore typical boy attire, faded blue pants and a green shirt. His sandals were worn but made of leather. He carried a satchel of old schoolbooks. “Well . . . where do you live?” I asked.

The coolness thawed from his voice. “Don’t worry about it.”

“How come you don’t come to school?”

“I’m in school,” he said. “A better one than yours.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. “This is for your father. I was going to your home but you can take it to him.” It was a palm fiber envelope stamped with the insignia of the Osugbo, a lizard in midstride. Each of its legs represented one of the elders.

“You live up the road past the ebony tree, right?” he asked, looking past me.

I nodded absentmindedly, still looking at the envelope.

“Okay,” he said. Then he left. I stood there watching him walk away, barely aware of the fact that the throbbing between my legs had grown worse.

AFTER THAT DAY, it seemed I saw Mwita everywhere. He often came to our house with messages. And a few times I ran into him on his way to Papa’s shop.

“How come you didn’t tell me about him before?” I asked my parents one night during dinner. Papa was shoveling spiced rice into his mouth with his right hand. He sat back, chewing, his right hand resting over his food. My mother put another piece of goat meat on his plate.

“I thought you knew,” he said at the same time that my mother said, “I didn’t want to upset you.” My parents knew so much back then. They should have also known that they couldn’t shelter me forever. What was coming would come.

Mwita and I talked whenever we saw each other. Briefly. He was always in a hurry. “Where’re you going?” I asked after he delivered yet another envelope from the elders to Papa. Papa was making a great table for the House of the Osugbo, and the engraved symbols on it had to be perfect. The envelope Mwita brought contained more drawings of the symbols.

“Somewhere else,” Mwita said, smirking.

“Why’re you always hurrying?” I said. “Come on. Just one thing?”

He turned to leave and then he turned back. “All right,” he said. We sat on the steps to the house. After a minute he said, “If you spend enough time in the desert, you will hear it speak.”

“Of course,” I said. “It speaks loudest in wind.”

“Right,” Mwita said. “Butterflies understand the desert well. That’s why they move this way and that. They’re always Holding Conversation with the land. They talk as much as they listen. It’s in the desert’s language that you call the butterflies.”

He lifted his chin, took a deep breath and breathed out. I knew the song. The desert sang it when all was well. In our nomad days, my mother and I would catch scarab beetles slowly flying by on days when the desert sang this song. Remove the hard shells and wings, dry the flesh in the sun, add spices—delicious. Mwita’s song brought three butterflies—a tiny white one and two big black and yellow ones.

“Let me try,” I said, excitedly. I thought about my first home. Then I opened my mouth and sang the desert’s song of peace. I drew two hummingbirds who zipped around our heads before flying off. Mwita leaned away from me, shocked.

“You sing like . . . your voice is lovely,” he said.

I looked away, pressing my lips together. My voice was a gift from an evil man.

“Some more,” he said. “Sing some more.”

I sang him a song I’d made up when I was happy and free and five years old. My memory of those times was fuzzy, but I clearly remembered the songs I sang.

It was like that each time with Mwita. He’d teach me a bit of simple sorcery and then be shocked by the ease with which I picked it up. He was the third to see it in me (my mother and Papa being the first and second), probably because he had it in him too. I wondered where he learned what he knew. Who were his parents? Where did he live? Mwita was so mysterious . . . and very handsome.

Binta, Diti, and Luyu first met him at school. He was waiting for me in the yard, something he’d never done. He wasn’t surprised to see me come out of school with Binta, Diti, and Luyu. I’d told him much about them. Everyone was staring. I’m sure many stories were told that day about Mwita and me.

“Good afternoon,” he said, politely nodding.

Luyu was grinning too widely.

“Mwita,” I quickly said. “Meet Luyu, Diti, and Binta, my friends. Luyu, Diti, Binta, meet Mwita, my friend.”

Diti snickered at this.

“So Onyesonwu is a good enough reason to come here?” Luyu asked.

“She’s the only reason,” he said.

My face felt hot, as the eyes of all four turned to me.

“Here,” he said, giving me a book. “Thought I’d lost it but I didn’t.” It was a booklet on human anatomy. When we’d last spoken, he’d been bothered by how little I knew about the many muscles of the body.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling annoyed at my friends’ presence. I wanted to tell them again that Mwita and I were
just
friends. The only type of interaction Luyu and Diti had with boys was sexual or flirtatious.

Mwita gave me a look and I returned it with a look of agreement. After that, he only approached me when he thought I’d be alone. Most of the time he succeeded but sometimes he was forced to deal with my friends. He was fine.

 

I was always happy to see Mwita. But one day, months later, I was
ecstatic
to see him.
Relieved
. When I saw him coming up the road, an envelope in hand, I jumped up. I’d been sitting on the house steps staring into space, confused and angry, waiting for him. Something had happened.

“Mwita!” I screamed, breaking into a run. But when I got to him, all my words escaped me and I just stood there.

He took my hand. We sat down on the steps.

“I-I-I don’t know,” I babbled. I paused, a great sob welling up in my chest. “It couldn’t have happened, Mwita. Then I wondered if this was what happened before. Something’s been happening to me. Something’s after me! I need to see a healer. I . . .”

“Just tell me what happened, Onyesonwu,” he said, impatient.

“I’m
trying!
”

“Well, try harder.”

I glared at him and he glared back, motioning his hand for me to get on with it.

“I was in the back, looking at my mother’s garden,” I said. “Everything was normal and . . . then everything went red. A thousand shades of it . . .”

I stopped. I couldn’t tell him about how a giant red-eyed brown cobra slithered up to me and rose up to my face. And then how I was suddenly hit with a self-loathing so deep and profound that I started raising my hands to gouge out my own eyes! That I was then going to tear my own throat with my nails.
I am awful. I am evil. I am filth. I should not be!
The mantra was red and white in my mind as I’d stared in horror at the oval eye. I didn’t tell him how a moment later an oily black vulture flew down from the sky, screamed and then pecked at the snake until it slithered away. How I snapped out of it just in time. I skipped all this.

“There was a vulture,” I said. “Looking right at me. Close enough for me to see its eyes. I threw a rock at it and as it flew off, one of its feathers fell off. A long black one. I . . . went and picked it up. I was standing there wishing I could fly as it did. And then . . . I don’t . . .”

“You changed,” Mwita said. He was looking at me very closely.

“Yeah! I
became
the vulture. I swear to you! I’m not making this . . .”

“I believe you,” Mwita said. “Finish.”

“I . . . I had to hop out from underneath my clothes,” I said holding my arms out. “I could hear
everything
. I could
see
. . . it looked as if the world had opened itself to me. I got scared. Then I was lying there, myself again, naked, my clothes next to me. My diamond wasn’t in my mouth. I found it a few feet away and . . .” I sighed.

“You’re an Eshu,” he said.

“A what?” The word sounded like a sneeze.

“An Eshu. You can shape-shift, among other things. I knew this the day you changed into that sparrow and flew into the tree.”

“What?” I screamed, leaning away from him.

“You know what you know, Onyesonwu,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Why didn’t you tell
me?
” I clenched my shaking fists.

“Eshus never believe what they are until they realize it on their own.”

“So what do I do? What . . . how do you know all this?”

“Same way I know all the other things,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“It’s long story,” he said. “Listen, don’t go telling your friends about this.”

“I didn’t plan to.”

“Firsts are important. Sparrows are survivors. Vultures are noble birds.”

“What’s noble about eating dead things and stealing meat from chopping blocks?”

“Everything must eat.”

“Mwita,” I said. “You have to teach me more. I have to learn to protect myself.”

“From what?”

Tears dribbled from my eyes. “I think something wants to kill me.” He paused, looked me in the eye and then said, “I’ll never let that happen.”

According to my mother, all things are fixed. To her there was a reason for everything from the massacres in the West to the love she found in the East. But the mind behind all things, I call it Fate, is harsh and cold. It’s so logical that no one could call him or herself a better person if he or she bowed down to it. Fate is fixed like brittle crystal in the dark. Still, when it came to Mwita, I bow down to Fate and say thank you.

 

We met twice a week, after school. Mwita’s lessons were exactly what I needed to hold back my fear of the red eye. I’m a fighter by nature and simply having tools to fight, no matter how inadequate, was enough to take the crippling edge off my anxiety. At least during those days.

Mwita himself was also a good distraction. He was well spoken, well dressed, and he carried himself with respect. And he didn’t have the same type of outcast reputation I had. Luyu and Diti were envious of my time with him. They took pleasure in telling me about the rumors that he liked older married girls in their late teens. Girls who’d completed school and had more to offer intellectually.

No one could figure Mwita out. Some said that he was self-taught and lived with an old woman to whom he read books in exchange for a room and spending money. Some said he owned his own house. I didn’t ask. I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Still he
was Ewu
and so every so often, I’d hear people mention his “unhealthy” skin and “foul” odor and how no matter how many books he read, he’d only amount to something bad.

I TOOK MY DIAMOND FROM MY MOUTH and handed it to Mwita, my heart beating fast. If a man touched my stone, he’d have the ability to do great harm or good to me. Though Mwita didn’t respect Jwahir’s traditions, he knew I did. So he was careful taking it.

It was a weekend morning. The sun had just come up. My parents were asleep. We were in the garden. I was exactly where I wanted to be.

“According to what I know, whatever you’ve turned into, you retain the knowledge of it forever,” he said. “Does that feel right to you?”

I nodded. When I focused on the idea, I felt the vulture and the sparrow just below my skin.

“It’s right there, under the surface,” he said, slowly. “Feel the feather with your fingers. Rub it, knead it. Shut your eyes. Remember. Draw from it. Then
be
it.”

The feather in my hand was smooth, delicate. I knew just where it would go. In the empty shaft on my wing. This time I was aware and in control. It wasn’t like melting into a pool of something shapeless and then taking another shape. I was always something. My bones softly buckled and cracked and shrunk. It didn’t hurt. My body’s tissue was undulating and shifting. My mind changed focus. I was still me, but from a different perspective. I heard soft popping and sucking sounds and I smelled that rich smell that I only noticed during moments of oddness.

I flew high. My sense of touch was less, for my flesh was protected by feathers. But I saw all. My hearing was so sharp that I could hear the land breathing. When I returned, I was exhausted and moved to tears. All my senses buzzed, even after I changed back. I didn’t care that I was naked. Mwita had to wrap me in my rapa as I cried on his shoulder. For the first time in my life, I could escape. When things felt too tight, too close, I could retreat to the sky. From up there, I could easily see the desert stretching far beyond Jwahir. I could fly so high that not even the oval eye could see me.