The other two men—bodyguards, it would seem—took up position on either side of the pink-faced man as they eyed the children with a bluff of disregard. The little ones had crowded in behind their leader, and they all watched as this odd creature pulled out a notebook bound with a rubber band, snapped it open, and then wrote something in with a stub of a pencil. The pink-pale man then wiped his neck with a cloth, ran a forearm over his forehead.
His hair was dripping.
Only then did the
oyibo
acknowledge the gaggle of children who had gathered. "Hallo," he said.
"You are an Englishman," said the boy, proud to have spotted it. What he wanted to ask was: Have you come to claim the bones you left behind? Have you come to take them home?
"You childrens, you are coming from the village, ya? On the other side?"
The boy nodded, and the pale man grinned. Teeth too big for his mouth. "Here." The man dug into a sagging shirt pocket, produced candies wrapped in wax paper. "Here. Go on."
To refuse it would have been rude, so the children shuffled up shyly as the pale man dropped the wrapped peppermints into their palms, one by one, as though dispensing medicine.
"Dile,
"said the boy, apologizing for the reticence of his friends.
"They think maybe you are one of the
duwoi-you.
An English ghost from the graves."
The man laughed. "Not English, no. And I sweat too much for a ghost, I think. Do you know a ghost with a face so red as mine?"
The boy laughed and the man smiled, and a strange pact was sealed.
The other children giggled as well, more from relief than understanding. The man leaned in, tapped the image of a shell sewed onto his chest pocket. "Not English," he repeated. "Dutch."
The boy asked, "Is it far? Dutch?"
"Very far. You know oil? Oil, ya? It is a curious sort of honey; it draws many kinds of flies. Afrikaners. Italians. Frenchmen. Texans.
Even some Belgians, if you can imagine!" He had ticked off the tribal names from his land as surely as the boy might have recited those from his:
Ogoni, Efik, Ibibio
,
Itsekiri, Opobo, Urhobo, Etche.
Some were friend and some foe, some kin, some adversaries; all were of the Delta.
The man looked at the trail behind the children, the one leading over the hillock and past the cannon. The lagoon beyond it was hidden from view. "Surely there were others," he said. "Chasing oil.
Am I really the first?"
The boy nodded, and the man's face broke even wider still.
More teeth emerged, an endless string of shells.
The children had seen the gas flares in the far distance, just as the fishermen in their village had seen their tributaries grow thick with sludge from upstream creeks. Everyone had known the
oyibos
were drawing closer, one gas flare at a time. The plumes of flame were now stuttered above the treetops, forming a dotted line heading straight for their village. And now, it would appear, the
oyibos
had finally come out from the shadows.
Oil.
The boy knew about oil. His mother cooked with oil: the red palm oil so much of their food was simmered in. The English had bombarded the Brass Islanders for that very oil, is what his teacher had said. It was Ijaw palm oil that the English had used to grease their machineries and run their cannon factories, to make their soap and their candles, even to feed their slaves.
But that was long ago, and it was a different sort of oil the
oyibo
was after now, the kind the boy's father wiped off his hands after working on the generator, the kind that seeped from riverbeds, the kind that was turned into the petrol that fuelled the motorboats, the kind that flared in the night. With so many
oyibo
mosquitoes needling into the flesh of the Delta, it was a wonder the entire place hadn't come down with malarial fever. That's what the boy's father said, and he was a storyteller not given to lies.
The Igbo guards were getting twitchier by the minute. They were expecting an ambush at any time it seemed, but the pale man ignored their unease, extended a hand instead. The boy clasped it, forearm to forearm, in proper Ijaw fashion.
"What is your name?" the man asked.
Everything that exists has a name. "Nnamdi," said the boy.
The Igbo exchanged glances. Nnamdi was not an Ijaw name.
It was from the mainland, it was Igbo, as they were. The boy had been named in a fit of fervour by his father to honour the memory of another Nnamdi, the First President, a Father of Nigerian Independence. "It will bring him luck," his father had insisted over his wife's objections.
"The Nnamdi of his namesake," she'd reminded him, "was brought down by military coup."
The Igbo guards had taken a mistaken comfort in the boy's name, not realizing just how far into Ijaw territory they had trespassed.
Forgive us not our trespassers,
thought Nnamdi. That was from Sunday school.
"Well, Nnamdi," said the
oyibo.
"It is very nice to be meeting you. I like your smile. And I hope any oil we find makes you very rich."
Oil was made from living paste. The boy knew this from school.
Plants, animals. Anything that lived could be made into oil. Even Englishmen. Even Dutch. In Sunday school it was called "transub-stantiation." They'd been made to write that out with chalk. Wine into blood. Or was it blood into wine? The grown-ups of his village had formed lines to drink this wine-blood when they attended church congregations, and Nnamdi wondered if the bodies of the Englishmen in the graveyard had transubstantiated into oil as well.
Perhaps it was the scent of English blood turned to wine that the Shell Man had been tracking through the forest, the way a hunter might stalk a wounded animal.
Voices on the far side of the hill, calling out.
"Someone is looking for you," said the man.
The men at the lagoon were shouting for the children, telling them to hurry before the next deluge hit. But the children were nowhere to be seen. They were in among the headstones, conversing with ghosts, and the fish were left unattended, mouths gaping, drowning in air, as the rains came down.
"We have to go," said Nnamdi, and the man nodded.
On Nnamdi's permission, the children scattered, running to gather their pails and basins. Nnamdi went as well, but he stopped at the crest of the hill and called back, on behalf of himself and the little ones,
"Noao!"
A greeting and thank you in the same breath.
The pale man waved back at him.
"Noao
!" he replied, pronouncing it funny.
Only after Nnamdi left did he realize that the man had never told him his own name, had chosen instead to keep it hidden, like a peppermint up a sleeve.
CHAPTER 48
There were times when Nnamdi would wonder if he and the other children had dreamed that encounter. It seemed more myth than memory: the Shell Man with the Igbo guides and the spyglass. But the real asserted itself soon enough the following spring in a crash of timber and a toppling of trees.
Nnamdi had been playing with the younger ones among the tall stands of palm oil trees at the edge of the village, and the forests had again begun to move—but more violently this time.
A rumble, a splintering crash, and the trees beyond the clearing suddenly began to sway. A crack, like the sound of a bone breaking, sent the children running into one another as they fled.
A machine pushed its way out of the forest, bulldozing a path.
It was followed by a crew of men in beige uniforms, flanked by soldiers on either side, as another machine rumbled out, chewing up the debris the first had left. More and more men boiled out of the gap like ants.
Nnamdi turned to the nearest child. "Run!" he said. "Get the adults." But the adults were already on hand. They had come running at the sound of trees falling and were gathering now in growing numbers. The first machine cut its engines, and a diesel-tinted silence came over the clearing as the village headman made his way to the front of the line, walking slowly in flip-flops with a resigned posture, as though hed been expecting this all along.
The bulldozers were operated by foreigners—Igbos, by the looks of it—and the village headman held a long conversation with the driver of the first machine, speaking in English laced with Ijaw, sweeping his hand from jungle to trail. But the men on the bulldozers had something greater than words. They had papers.
They had papers signed by the Governor Himself. Papers that came all the way from Abuja, from the national capital.
"This is not Abuja," the boy heard the headman shout, hitting every word with a punch. "This is the Delta. This is Ijaw land."
First they came with handshakes and gifts, and then they returned with bulldozers and paper.
This is how the story would be told.
The entire village seemed to have arrived by that point, and the people pushed forward in anger, carrying the headman with them. One of the soldiers slung his rifle off his shoulder and, with a practised, almost bored, sense of calm, fired a round above their heads into the sky, a sound so sharp it left a tang in the air.
Behind the bulldozers a jeep rolled in, wheels climbing and falling over the debris. In the open window of the jeep, Nnamdi could see an arm. It lay along the door and was tapping out a rhythm. It was the rhythm of waiting. An arm speckled with freckles, pale and pink at the same time.
CHAPTER 49
Laura was cataloguing memories, compiling an inventory of loss.
Her father, skating.
An indoor arena in the blah days of winter. A faint haze, low along the ice. Crisp intakes of breath, echoing voices, other families.
Laura, at age eight. Maybe nine.
He was such an elegant skater, her father. Long strides, legs crossing effortlessly over each other. She lacked that grace, was afraid of tumbling, and as her dad circled wide and then reeled himself in, coming back toward her, Lauras skates suddenly went out from under her and she landed on her bum with a mighty
oomph.
Her dad stopped on a skid of shaved ice and laughed.
Laughed without thinking. But when he realized his mistake, when he saw the tears pooling in her eyes—he fell as well. Got up, fell down. Again and again. Right on his bum too. Fell to make her feel better, fell to make her laugh, throwing himself down again and again. "You see," hed said. "Daddies fall too."
What if it wasn't about the money?
CHAPTER 50
Our Mother Who Art in Heaven.
Wonyinghi, the God above Gods, creator of everything that is and everything that shall be, sky-dwelling, removed from the mundane and the everyday, aloof, haughty even, yet always vigilant.
She sits in final judgment on the lives below.
"We have all of us made our agreement with Wonyinghi, before entering the womb. Each persons soul"—the boy's father used the word
teme
here, signifying something halfway between the spirit world and the physical—"is summoned before Her prior to conception."
Each soul, each
teme,
was assigned its fate. "Whether it will obtain wealth and joy, whether it will be poor or rich, sickly or healthy, weak or strong, whether it will be fruitful or barren. It is all of it foretold."
Your entire life, laid out like a story. Your personality as well.
Whether you would be
biye-kro,
resolute, or
toro-kro,
one who talked big but did not act; whether you would be a leader or a listener, a wrestler or a watcher, a king or coward,
olotu
or
su.
Nnamdi and his father were mending nets in a blustery, mosquito-free wind. He was old enough now to help with this, was no longer playing chasing games with the younger ones.
"Sunday school doesn't teach you everything," his father said.
"It doesn't teach you when you will die. Christ does not know this, but Wonyinghi does. She knows this because every
teme
also knows when it will pass away. This is part of the agreement. The
teme
agrees to the time of its demise, the exact moment it will leave its body. It is the body that dies, Nnamdi, not the
teme.
The
teme
moves on."
Depending on the nature of its agreement with Wonyinghi, a
teme
might enter another womb and be born anew. Or, if its sins have been many, it might limp off instead to lick its wounds in the Village of the Dead as a woeful ghost, an outcast. A
duwoi-you,
like those sad lost souls pinned down by stones in the British graveyard.
"Why does one woman bear a healthy child and another a stillborn soul? Why do one man's wounds grow septic and another's heal? Why is one child fearless, another fearful? Why does this child sulk and the next chatter away like a trilling bird? It is their agreement with Wonyinghi."
It was very difficult to alter the agreement your
teme
had made with Wonyinghi. But the boy's father explained that it could be done. Your fate could be renegotiated through the employment of diviners, women (and sometimes men) who had special access to Wonyinghi.
"Theirs is a knowledge derived from dreams. They know how to cast lots, how to read the signs. They cajole lesser gods, petition greater ones. They know which rites to perform, which to avoid.
They know which taboos have been broken, which laws of the village ancestors have been breached and how to make amends."
These diviners, the
