Yefon: The Red Necklace (19 page)

He was not a Christian so we didn’t go to church. It was a quick, humiliating burial. The day before, our heads were all shaved with a blade, and we began wearing black sackcloth. The healers then washed Pa’s body with some oils, wrapped him in a white cloth, and buried him—no fancy casket, nothing. If they weren’t fast about it, his troubled spirit would haunt us, and bring despicable bad luck to our family.

Ma, covered in soot, rolled on the floor crying and asking the gods what she had done to deserve this. I only watched, my body limp as a noodle and feeling defenseless, as tears flowed freely from my eyes. My
sha
η
g
burned fiercely on my chest.

It was an extremely dark time in my life. My family literally had to be cleansed of the impurities that hovered over us as a result of the tainted death. I sat there, watching hundreds of starry-eyed mourners and well-wishers cry for a man that some of them hadn’t even known. Some villagers were too eager to drink wine and eat food, and that was the reason why they were in attendance. The greedy nature of village folk is one of those things that one cannot describe in words.

I felt weak. I sat down and listened to several uncles make belaboring lengthy speeches about how good Pa was, even the ones whom I know were happy because they still owed him money. Like Uncle Shemlon, Pa’s distant cousin.

My sisters and I had to drop flowers on the body and I walked as if I had a pin in my buttocks.

I didn’t see Ma for the whole mourning period after the funeral. She and Pa’s other wives were summoned to Pa’s hut
where they slept on a mat and fasted, isolated from the entire community with only a few other married women allowed to visit.

The rest of us were covered in ash for about thirteen days. Swarms of visitors flocked to our compound every day. I was lost. We all were, and as I watched quietly, thousands of emotions bundled up in my chest.

There was no night vigil, only a ritual killing to the ancestors. A lamb was put on top of the grave and a fire lit on it as a sacrifice to the gods. Yenla took me away after that. Later on, I heard from Kadoh, who stuck around somehow, that guests dusted their feet off and washed their hands with aloe water to cleanse themselves.

“Cleanse themselves from what? Pa isn’t a bad spirit!” I argued.

We were once more at the meadows selling fresh water to the Bororo people who walked past us in small groups of five heading to the mosque to pray.

“No, but his spirit now belongs with the dead, and dead spirits are impure.” Kadoh said.

Not Pa. The word impure would never exist in my books where he was concerned.

Mourning the loss of a loved one is a ubiquitous human experience. I caught myself thinking about the recollections I had heard about Pa from the mourners at his funeral. Strong, brave, hardworking, a family man. People had good things to say, but no one had what I had to say—that my father inspired me to develop an interest in books, and I thank him for that, even though it would take me years to remember it.

After the funeral, we all tried our best to get back to normal but pretty soon it became clear that such a thing was impossible.

After Pa’s death, the relationship between my family and I badly deteriorated, especially with Ma. I think we secretly blamed each other for what happened to Pa that night. Yenla never even thanked me for standing up for her. I think in her mind, she couldn’t understand what I had done for her, and maybe she blamed me too.

My brothers and I were lukewarm towards one another as we had always been. They continued travelling to Yola as they had previously done, but eventually settled for the less tiresome
lifestyle of farming. They were like lost sheep without a shepherd, and it annoyed me that after all the hard work Pa had done to train them in a lucrative trade, they settled for farming. It was like a betrayal to Pa’s legacy, but none of my brothers had any kind of ambition. They were lazy and lacked motivation.

Pa’s older half-brother, Ba Yuven Labam, offered to adopt us, and Ma was considering it, but I told her I would go there over my dead body. As he expressed his interest in helping, I couldn’t help but look at his crown of graying hair that looked like a pan of boiled rice.

I hated going to his house. Not only because he had put his giant hands between my legs once, when I was asleep at his house, but also because his house had large hungry vicious bed bugs.

That same holiday when I had been visiting, I woke up every day to itchy red bumps all over my body, and I decided to see what bit me every night. Unfortunately, I fell asleep each time.

One day, I woke up to pee in the middle of the night, and felt an unending crawling all over me. So I turned on my oil lamp. Lo and behold, a whole generation of bed bugs crawled lazily on the thin, dry mat. The oval shaped big ones with a very dark brown pigmentation scuttled away as I put the light over them while the transparent small ones flattened to blood splats under my touch. I screamed very loud and left the next day.

An eerie crawling feeling haunted me for about a week after that and I never went back. Pa’s death wouldn’t change that.

One of Pa’s cousins, who shaved his hair round like a hat, offered to take us under his wing too, but I swore not to budge. He looked at me in an odd way, his bushy eyebrows furrowing as he processed my snappy rude refusal in his head.

“My sister is not going either. You can take our mother,” I added.

Ma started lamenting, “Labam, see what you have left me with?”

I ignored it all. I had heard several stories of how this man ran his household. The men in his household were like demigods. Kadoh told me that they slept with their newborn females as an initiation rite into whatever occultist thing they were into. Whether or not it was true, I would not be stepping foot into that house.

“Alright then, have it your way,” he said before leaving.

Only two weeks later, these “uncles” showed their real colors by taking all their property and animals, leaving us only with the house.

If I used to feel like an outsider, now I felt ten times worse. I had become a stranger among my family. The spirit of hate took me over. I was snappy to everyone and I didn’t speak much. My soul was empty, my spirit searching, only it didn’t know what it was that it wanted, or that it was even looking for something. I lost interest in everything and asked no questions. My answers to any question asked were nothing more than a simple word or two.

I spent my time alone, looking at the fire or contemplating whether to kill myself and be done with this whole mess. I often blanked out on the farm when the other girls were gossiping. I just worked like a robot, and when I would see all the boys in their clean crisp uniforms on the other side of the street going to school in the mornings, I thought nothing of it.

For months, I saw Pa in my dreams. I would jump on his neck while he carried me around the village. He would say, “Look at these farmers. They work so hard every day to provide for the village. They spend their lives impacting us, providing for us.”

And funny enough, I would see those farmers the next day on my way to the farm with my mothers and sisters. I would smile often at the deja vu and when Kadoh would ask me what was funny, I would shrug, and shut myself off from further questioning.

I longed to hear him speak those words to me, because somewhere inside my broken heart, those words resonated with me. I wanted to impact my village, I wanted to help but I didn’t know how. Sitting down at home brooding over my loss, knowing that fighting with everyone would not help, I slowly withered away with each passing day.

Kadoh was still my friend, but I mostly kept to myself. She tried hopelessly to cheer me up, and even told me the story of the ant who could scare away its enemies with its smelly farts.

I was warming myself by logs of firewood, fighting with a persistent mosquito when she joined me one night. She was holding a wooden cup of castor oil. I looked up expectantly.

“Some oil for your scars. I noticed you haven’t been taking care of them recently.”

I looked at my keloid scars. Once upon a time, I used to oil them every day and now I just didn’t care.

“No, thank you,” I responded politely

“But I insist,
freer
’
wom.”

“Thank you.”

She sat with me and we watched the fire quietly.

“How do you remain so positive?” I asked her.

“Will I kill myself too?”

I looked at her feet. She was wearing an anklet made from several beer corks bound together by string.

“Where did you get that?”

“I made it from scraps of material I found in the trash by the parish house.”

“Mad woman.
Ngaabah
”

“You are a
ngaabah’s
sister. What does that make you?” I looked at her and we burst out laughing.

“You know what I can do with this?” Kadoh asked.

I nodded and Kadoh stood up and began to dance. As she stomped her feet, the anklet provided a uniform beautiful musicality to the dance similar to that of the cha cha. It went cha-cha, chi-chi, cha-cha, chi chi

I never saw skinny Kome again, and I didn’t wish to. If he hadn’t stood up for me in the first place, my parents wouldn’t have fought, Pa wouldn’t have left, Pa wouldn’t have died. I linked every event to Pa’s death.

Pa wasn’t the only one who was dead. The rest of us were pretty much gone as well. Ma was drinking a lot and Ndze was practically useless, getting girls pregnant all over the place. There was a new one every month it seemed. As aforementioned, some of our uncles forcefully inherited our property leaving us in abject poverty. I had no money for new linen, so I went back to being a primitive villager, walking around barefoot, showing off my breasts to the whole world, and saving my old scraps of cloth for more important events.

My face was also peeling. I had been unfortunate to be peed on by a reddish skinny ant called
krichi
which had acidic pee.

Things were different and I didn’t care. The cost of keeping our compound became onerous, and only a month after the funeral, Kpulajey left our compound. So did Ya Buri and her troublesome brood. Ya Buri was married off to another man,
chosen for her by the Fai. Nothing could have made me happier because now Sola was out of my life. Her new father was rich though. That made me jealous.

He paid some money to help revive the house, but Ma suggested that we return to her mother’s compound instead since the one we had was hard to maintain. After intervention from the Fai, we accepted the help and stayed in the compound. I was grateful because Pa’s grave was there, and it made me feel closer to him.

Life appeared simpler after the crowd reduced. I found that I was able to find the coolness in my head to weave
nka
and
nkems
for sale. I visited Pa’s grave every morning on my way to the farm. It was right at the back of our compound.

His oldest sons, my brothers, lived in his
taav
. The place was now a whorehouse. It was dirty and always filled with lose women. It wasn’t uncommon to hear the screams of pleasure from women on one’s way back from the farm at night, and I knew that Ma had spoken to them about it because it seemed to die down, but not completely.

I lay in bed thinking about many things. The earth ceiling was as cracked as my heart, and I wondered why the gods created death? Was it really a better place like some of our relatives said? Or were they only trying to comfort our empty hearts?

My baskets were fetching me a few extra pence here and there and I could buy myself a little more linen for my waist. I shared my good fortune with no one else but Kadoh who was now learning the trade of sewing, the newest “it” thing in town. She still wore flowers in her hair and even made a flower crown for me, but I didn’t wear it. It was a bit much for my liking.

Ma and I still didn’t speak much. I had overheard Yenla telling her about her intentions to learn sewing and Ma said Yenla was a born farmer, not a tailor. Yenla never brought it up again, and by the end of the year, sewing was harder and more competitive, and Yenla was still a farmer.

After Pa’s death, my life seemed to become an unpleasant monotonous routine. We were either at the market selling with Ma or on the farm planting millet, and the lack of adventure in my life was driving me nuts!

I often collected rainwater in buckets when it rained to avoid going to the stream so that I could buy myself a little time
alone when everyone had gone to fetch water at the stream. My mind would drift away to other lands. I wondered what my life would be if I was a beg bug in my uncle’s house? I would suck his blood till he died.

At the stream, I would wait for all the girls to be done washing before I joined. I couldn’t stand those stories about marriage and wicked mothers-in-law.

When I walked Yenla to the medicine house to get her medicine, it was a long silent walk and I no longer cared about the greetings of the maidens or about the abandoned houses. She eventually told me she was old enough to go on her own, and I didn’t argue. I used that time to hunt for birds in the forest.

I was miserable even during story time. Something I had enjoyed so much in the past was now a laborious task that I did not look forward to. Ya Ayeni’s
bvey
eye blinked as she told us the story of
Naa’
for the umpteenth time.

“
Hebbei Naa’, hebbei
,” she would call out.

“
Rimtii
,” we would respond dryly.

I looked around sourly as she sung. Once upon a time, Pa was here with us, dancing and clapping. As I looked at the empty spot that he once occupied I began to cry.

“
Aie loh! A tong kah len
?” Ma chided me for spoiling the mood with tears that I couldn’t explain. She sent me to the room alone since I could not be social. I was sad! Very sad! And very empty!

I would wander off to shoot game and watch families. Some children were roasting
tu’ngam
, or spider potatoes, with their father and I watched with heaviness in my throat as their Pa told them stories.