The very air had weight, texture. Fly strips of humidity, sticking to the skin. There was no reprieve. Any winds that did get through only stirred the heat, made it worse. Sweat trickled and dripped, but refused to evaporate. Even the trees seemed to be perspiring.
She retraced her steps to Nnamdi's house, defeated.
Nnamdi was up now, and he made her a cup of tea, stirring in condensed milk and extra sugar "for the baby." Gave her some of last night's fish, warning her to watch for bones. She was grateful, and she said so—
"Noao, Nnamdi.
" But she was from the Sahel, and she needed lamb, not fish. The Sahel, where the soil crumbled between your fingers, turned to sand before your eyes. The soil here was dark and oily. It clung to everything. Her feet were stained with it just from the walk. Everything was so sticky, so thick. She missed the tastes and scent of the savannah, the clarity of its air. Most of all, she missed her family, her lost kinsmen. She was Amina the Incomplete. Without clan or caste, without that larger family, who were you? Just a singular thing. Unconnected and alone.
At night, she dreamed she had given birth and was holding her child only to have the wet earth of the Delta suck it out of her arms, leaving her nothing, not even bones.
She'd lie there, too tired to weep, listening to the sigh and roll of waves, the hiss of flames. Those flames never slept, even in the depths of night. During the day, Delta homes were so gloomy: cement walls with windows sheltered by great shelves of metal roofing. It kept the rain out—but also the light. At night, however, the interior of Nnamdi's home glowed from the constant fires of the gas flares. Amina wondered if she hadn't plunged through into the Otherworld, where light and darkness, day and night, were reversed.
"She cannot stay."
"I will throw the stones, ask the
orumo."
"That? You do not need to ask the gods. You need to listen to your mother."
"I will throw stones. I will ask Papa."
"Your father is asleep in Heaven. Your mother is right here."
CHAPTER 86
"Welcome to New Jerusalem."
That was the sign that had greeted them when they first arrived on their donkey boat. Amina had thought it was the name of the village. It wasn't.
"Mr. Pentecostal, he put it up," said Nnamdi's mother, "to remind the Egbesu boys about dey one true God. Remind them of their churchly duties." The boys who painted their bodies for Egbesu on Saturday still attended church-hall revivals on Sunday.
Nnamdi's mother looked at her son, asked the only question that mattered. "Is it your child? The truth."
The truth?
This was a tanglement of a question, to be sure. Simple, on the surface, but snagged with detritus underneath.
Is the child mine?
Another way to look at it was to ask, Am I the child's?
As we move through this murky world, we all of us pass from protected to protector. Perhaps Nnamdi's walking soul had attached itself to Amina. Maybe Amina's had attached itself to him. So—was the child his?
He turned this question over, considered its many meanings.
Turned it over like a tide-polished stone in the palm of his hand, and decided, yes, it was his child. His to watch out for.
"Is it my child? Yes, it is."
"The truth?"
"The truth."
Nnamdi's mother sighed. That changed everything. "Well, dey girl can at least change her clothing. And give her some proper flip-flops. Dragging her through the muck in tattered robes like that.
Shameful."
Amina clutched at her head scarf defensively. "For me, I need have cover my head. I must to."
But Nnamdi's mother tutted away her fears. "You can still keep ya head covered up. I show you how to tie a proper
akede.
A headwrap. We'll find you a bright one. Flower patterns. Very beautiful. Maybe a matching
oshoke,
for the waist, maybe tie it over ya shoulder. You're so thin, will be lots of fabric left to work with.
Now," she said with added weight, "some women wear very big
akedes.
Very big."
This was his mother's way of broaching the subject. The biggest and most elaborate headwraps were worn by
married
women. "The new minister, Mr. Pentecostal from Portako, can perform any type of ceremony." They could stay till the baby came, but her grandchild was not coming into the world to unwed parents—not when she was so active in the church.
"Mammy," said Nnamdi. "We need a midwife, not a minister."
His mother sighed the way only a mother can. "Fine. A smaller headwrap, then. But this matter is not over yet."
Lessons in the proper tying of an
akede
were only the start.
Nnamdi's mother moved on to fish racks, demonstrating the correct way to weave dried stalks—under, over, twist, then turn—to create the plate-sized mats for fish to dry upon.
Fish unnerved Amina. In the outer Delta, people ate every part, served it with head still attached and the raisin-like eyes staring up at her. Could they not remove the heads first? There were fewer and fewer fish these days, and those that arrived had been netted far away in tributaries the oil companies had missed. But the weaving of fish racks was still an important skill to have. If the girl stayed.
Which she wouldn't.
"She has to go, you both do. You know that."
"She has nowhere to go."
"She cannot stay here."
Amina missed the taste of
miya yakira,
the groundnuts and beef fried together, the wild onions and spices, the
yakwa
greens.
It was all plantains and sugar cane down here, all cocoyams and cassava.
Palm oil and pepper soup. Banana leaves as pot covers, gourds used as mixing bowls. Everything was askew, even the manner in which the women cooked their yams, not pounding them with pestle and mortar, but burrowing them in coals, baking them until they became fibrous and tasteless. Having suffered this affront to yams over several meals, Amina showed Nnamdi's mother a trick. Shyly, with gestures more than words, she demonstrated how to mash the yams first and then knead in
garri
powder. A pinch of salt—three fingers and a thumb; two fingers was not enough, four was too many—a final knead and then a quick toasting, flipping it twice and eating it quickly, while it was still warm.
Nnamdi's mother chewed slowly, gave a begrudging nod of approval, but still refused to smile. Instead, she countered by showing Amina how to make a proper dumpling.
"Dip a dumpling into pepper soup and you have yourself a meal." She'd said this in Ijaw, without thinking—and then: "It's your husband's favourite."
She repeated this for Nnamdi's benefit when the three of them sat for supper. He pretended not to hear.
"The baby dance," his mother said. "She needs to learn that—
before you go."
The baby dance was used to rock a child to sleep or calm it when it was crying. "I carried Nnamdi on my back till his first tooth, making them steps. Even now, if I danced it a front of him, the boy is sleepin' soon."
Nnamdi laughed. "Better than palm wine for sleeping. You have to soothe the child's
kro."
"
Kro?"
"The power children have. It's very strong,
kro.
Children—they remember. They remember where they lived before they were born, how they died, why they were born again. When a baby cries for no reason, we say the child is remembering bad things. And sometimes, when a little one is learning to speak, it will tell us stories of its travels before it was born. Children remember these things. Growing up is a slow forgetting."
Travels before you were born.
Nnamdi smiled at Amina. "Your child has travelled very far, I think."
His mother caught this, the use of "your," not "our."
"Is why we say a woman who is with child should not walk near the forest at night," Nnamdi's mother said.
Amina's people had a similar directive. "We, too."
"It's because the
teme
from the other side recognize the baby inside," Nnamdi explained. "Might want it back."
"Just stories," Nnamdi's mother said. "Not real."
Stories, not real.
Nnamdi looked at his mother, puzzled. "Stories
are
real."
"You sound like ya father." Since his father's death, Nnamdi's mother had relied less and less on the
oru,
and more on the Bible.
"Can't you see the girl is scared?" she said. And then, to Annina, "Is only superstition."
"Superstition?" said Nnamdi.
She turned to her son. "When was the last time you been to church?"
"Every day. Papa always said, The world is a church."
"Girl," she said to Amina. "The reason you don't go walkin' in the forest is because of dey snakes. A pregnant woman, she can't run fast enough. That's why. And the baby dance works because of the swaying, not because of any such
kro."
When a fish is pulled from the creeks with its gills still gaping, a fine filleting blade is used to slice a seam up the bottom. The fish is split open with a single motion and then left on the bottom of the boat with the others. As Nnamdi watched his mother bustle off to the kitchen with Amina in tow, he caught a glimpse of a filleting knife in his mother's hand, still wet and glittering with scales, both the blade and the hand that wielded it. It was not the fish's fault it had to die; that was just the way the river turned.
Only stories, not real.
Was that what his father had been reduced to? A story? Not real.
CHAPTER 87
The Egbesu boys had been terrorizing the raggedy people on the other side of the creek, roaring in on speedboats, drugged up and feeling immortal, firing directly into the shantytown.
"They started with bunkering, but now just bandits," Nnamdi's mother said.
So far the Egbesu boys had kept their excesses to the other side of the creek, but the fear bled across nonetheless. The screams of women. The sounds of gunfire and laughter. Of things breaking in the night.
When he heard the speedboats coming, Nnamdi would hide Amina behind his father's trunk underneath a drape of dark fabric, with no telltale mosquito netting hanging above her. The Egbesu boys often used this netting the way spiders use a web, pulling it in on their victims, entangling them and then dragging them off.
Amina heard the women screaming across the creek. She knew why they were screaming.
The Egbesu boys had been camped outside the village for a week now. "When they leave, in comes the army, pretendin' to be in pursuit." The JTF would swoop in, tear up the place. "Worse than the rebels," his mother said. The soldiers would ransack storage bins. Burn homes. Between the Egbesu boys and the oil company security forces, between soldiers and the JTF, Nnamdi's village was no longer at the isolated edge of the outer Delta—it was caught in the middle of a war zone. The world had come to them, had kicked in the door and demanded entrance.
"It's not safe," his mother said. "If she stays here, someone will find her, and they will do harm to her—and to you. And to the child."
"The army is pinned down in Portako. They only make a show of force out here. She needs a midwife."
"She has to go."
"I will ask the
orumo."
"Stories. No match for bullets."
Acidic rains had begun to gnaw through rooftops; the metal was scaling away in great corrosive scabs. Nnamdi followed the path past the health clinic, now used as a communal chicken coop, the floors inside splattered in fecal stains.
He almost couldn't find it, his father's shrine.
The forest had reclaimed most of the structure, with vines twisting through and grass sprouting in the cracks. Tin roof and a dirt floor. Nnamdi made a half-hearted attempt at clearing it, but he wondered if anyone was really watching. Silent gods. Overgrown shrines.
Every time he came home, it seemed the silence had only grown deeper.
The diviners hut was abandoned: a few shards of bone and skin still hung outside, and a few animal teeth remained loosely tied, moving on the faintest breath of wind, but otherwise—empty.
Wonyinghi hadn't chosen a new priestess in a long, long while, and even the lesser gods of the forest and the river, the
orumo
and the
owumo
, were only ever half-glimpsed and half-heard, like voices on a boat that has already departed.
Lately it seemed that only the angry voices of Egbesu and the clamorous calls of the revival-hall meetings could be heard. Both had grown louder, more strident, had shouted down the quieter voices.
Nnamdi threw stones. Gathered them up and threw them again. There was no response. Only the sound of a gas flare on the other side of the trees. He could feel its heat even here.
He moved on, crossed the trickle of sewage-fed runoff that constituted the creek on a hop and a jump, and then squeezed between the lean-tos and mud huts that were falling in on themselves.
Some of the men from the refugee camp were huddled around a car battery and a bowl of eggs, painstakingly piercing each egg with a needle and then sucking out the contents, spitting it into a pot for later. Other men would then draw battery acid out with a syringe to be injected back into the empty eggshells. Homemade puffs. They would be ready the next time the Egbesu boys stormed into their camp.
Nnamdi followed the path toward the gas flare, where the green of the forest gave way to now-familiar anemic yellows and burnt browns. He didn't recognize these for the colour of drought, though Amina would have. The guava trees nearby had died, the wild pears had fallen, and the papaya hung bloated and grey, their skins stretched tight over swollen flesh. A gift for the flies.
