The loud cry from Amobi’s hut announced the same misfortune. Obiajuru, his wife, had lost another child today. The first occurred when it had not hardened to skin and bone. It trickled down her legs one brisk afternoon as she descended from the stream, her calabash of water shattering. The second, two years after the first, took the same route. But this time, it was on their piece of farmland tucked away from the village.
Others after these two decided on a much more humiliating route, gushing down under the peering eye of the bustling Nkwo Market. Rumors exchanged ears like commodities passed by hand from all corners of the market. Some said her childlessness was thanks to the river goddess. Others traced the incident to Obiajuru’s pedigree. They called her an ogbanje. But she was too deft to let it slide because, when littler, her foster parents had armed her with conciliatory advice, to accept whatever came her way for it was not in the power of an osu to reject. This led to her marriage to the free-born hunter Amobi.
Soonest, their hut was crowded with people who had come to say ndo with a loud voice but stifle their glee. Meet any villager in any nook and crook, the Amobis’ was a place where sorrow was born. Even the vultures knew of this ill consensus. In anticipation of a lifeless body to feast on, they perched on the palm trees at their backyard. And this had compelled Amobi to make himself a catapult. Once, the children who mostly played in the village square spotted him shooting at the vultures. They burst into laughter, grabbing their stomachs shining with their mothers’ oils, because they saw the ridiculousness behind it. A grasscutter hunter now reduced to a hunter of birds. A game reserved for children, and he had none.
“What is this old man doing?” the girls returning from the stream that evening had asked, pointing at him.
In the face of the mockery, he learned to gulp his anger and palm wine to stupor. As opposed to striking a hole into their calabashes, or dispensing the children with a painless slap on the back, he shuffled into his obi, his shoulders drooping like the elastic band of his catapult. A man who is desperate for a child does not know the difference between a bad or good one; all he wants is the cackle of a child running around his compound. It doesn’t matter if it were insolent.
What ate Obiajuru’s children in her womb was not a mystery when they visited the dibia from the riverine clan.
“He should have asked us to give him the entire Nkwo Market,” Amobi had murmured on their return, pacing their room. “What does he mean by one fat mkpi, half a yam barn and thirty pieces of cowries?” He snapped his fingers at the outrageousness of the dibia’s demands. The air returned the clicking sound to him in echoes.
In addition to the he-goat, he asked for a calabash of kola nuts to revoke what he called an ancestral curse. That season, Amobi hardly made enough cowries from his catch, and the market had changed—a tuber of yam was priced more than a bleeding grasscutter, whose meat had miraculously flooded the market.
“If he was able to do it for Nwoye, he can do it for us, too. Let’s just try, Ezigbo dim.”
And now, the result of that fervency lay lifeless on her mat. The dibia had done his part, Obiajuru acknowledged. But he never promised a kicking child. Still clad in her bloodied wrapper, Obiajuru hitched the wrapper down and made a knot around her fatigued waist. A private humiliation. The women who had come to her aid in the wake of her parturition wrapped the lifeless child with the mat.
She refused to cast her eyes at the child, refused even to note its gender. She heaved her shoulders once, again, and then again. Then she let out a sigh, an inane rejection of the misery that had come to sit in her life. As they left to sink the dead child, she turned her gaze to the cracked walls of her hut. She didn’t want to swear defeat to another dead child.
Outside, Amobi was no different. He sat calmly in front of his obi as sympathizers encircled him, spewing ndo on him. Although not everyone had come with a false condolence. Among them was Onyeka, the widow of his bosom friend, Uzomma. A dead friend who he often thought better than his breathing self.
Onyeka stood on the excellent vantage point to tell apart who’d truly come to console them or learn a new gossip from their misfortune. Her husband’s death was a terrible experience for her: it was not even four market days after he was laid to rest that her brothers-in-law came stripping her of her husband’s possessions. First, it was his farmlands. Then his chieftaincy attire. This was what scared Onyeka most, because their brother, her late husband, had a son with her. Her in-laws laughed, “He should first grow into a man before he can claim his birthright.” Her struggle with them was a moonlight tale.
On reaching the Amobis’, Onyeka was not surprised at their tame grief. No wailing like a child frightened by the cannon of the New Yam Festival. Yet she managed to put forward a mournful face as it would be considered inappropriate to visit the home of the bereaved and look bewildered instead of sorrowful.
She made her way into Obiajuru’s hut. And there was Obiajuru, arms folded across her chest, still in the reddened wrapper, her back bare.
“Nwunye m, my wife. Rise up. Let me wash you.” Onyeka trudged forward. “Rise up.”
At first, Obiajuru did not respond. Onyeka rubbed her shoulders gently, as if to ignite a fire in her numbness.
“How many children will I bury before I will become a mother? Tell me, Onyeka. How many?”
Onyeka said nothing, as if Obiajuru’s initial reticence had contaminated her by means of the touch.
“Is it when these breasts have shriveled?” Obiajuru asked, lifting her breasts. “Or when I am too old to nurse a child? Tell me, when?”
“My wife, be calm,” Onyeka said, draping a cleaner wrapper over her shoulders. “This is not you talking. It is the bitterness inside you. Remember, dark as a moonless night may endure, it will run its course by the appearance of the morning sun. So, rise, my wife. Let Onyeka wash you.”
Outside, Amobi stared vacantly at the palm tree grove beyond his compound, at the black-blue clouds, his probing eyes seeking the moon to emerge. He remembered the days he was headstrong to put Obiajuru in the family way. When his blood was still fresh like the finest palm wine that his ebony skin gleamed like hot palm oil. He had not only disregarded his kinsmen but the seer, who had warned him that should he marry Obiajuru their home would long for the cry of a child. But that prophecy had only come a few days after Obiajuru refused to be defiled by the rogue seer.
And so, Amobi married Obiajuru. He called it love felt in the heat of the afternoon sun, with its discomfort and promise of brightness. Those early years his kinsmen propped him to bring in another wife, he stood his ground with Obiajuru. This hope of having a child of their own was adamant like that heat of the afternoon sun. At least he told himself now.
***
It was on the fortnight of the women’s meeting that Obiajuru ran outside her hut, feeling nauseous in the day, and by night, she was vomiting near the yam barn. Not a year after burying the unnamed child, yet she groped her stomach for a bump out of habit than expectancy. That same day, Amobi returned home with a deer—his greatest catch—and she compared the two incidents to a blessing. Once more, she felt her chi was awake.
Like the interconnection of water bodies, days flowed into weeks, weeks fed into months and months accumulated until the bump was becoming almost inconspicuous.
Even as she bore the thrill of birthing a child in her lips, her heart knew the same quaking fear of child loss. So, she traveled far to her father’s house to deliver the child. Amobi was the last to know of her departure—she left their hut on a moonless night to be invisible.
He grew worried as to the whereabouts of his wife. Even so, he tamped it down so as not to attract unwarranted attention to his household again.
Although the child was born before noon, Obiajuru waited for three moons later before sending words to Amobi. All at once he was suspicious. At the very instance, he stood like a tree rent by lightning, wondering how this was possible. The Obiajuru he knew was never pregnant under his roof. This was as impossible as alleging she was promiscuous, because their blood oath would wring the life out of her flesh. Besides, the Obiajuru he knew would rather have her woman pride rubbed with scented pepper and her hair shaven than defile her matrimonial vows.
And so, the following morning, before hens scuttled about at dawn, even before the morning sun dried dew from the grasses, Amobi travelled to that distant village where his wife was said to have delivered their child.
Along his track, he paused to pick a name for the child. If it was a girl, he would call her Nnoma, after his late mother, or Ogechi, for the timing of the gods was perfect. But if it was a male child, he would call him Okoroafor, for he was born on an Afor day. Or Azubuike, meaning his lineage would be formidable.
Approaching the hut where Obiajuru was nursing the child, he relieved himself of the raffia basket on his head. Inside, he made for the child, and then stripped it naked to see what was between its legs.
“Nno, welcome,” he said, cradling the sleeping child in his arms. “My son.” He made a mock attempt of throwing the boy up, but chose instead to dance to a distant drumming only he heard. Obiajuru deciphered the steps: the ogene moves.
“You still remember this dance, Dim?” She laughed.
He raised the child roofward. “My son. Your name is Azubui—”
“Ikenka,” Obiajuru interjected. “His name is Ikenka.” There was silence, then the cry of the child pierced through the silence.
“Ikenka, don’t cry,” Amobi begged the boy. “Your father is here.”
For a breathing child who looked exactly like Amobi and wore the fair complexion of Obiajuru, which would later be tanned once he started tilling his father’s farmlands, Ikenka was most suitable.
Obiajuru insisted she would return with the boy only when he had grown older and stronger than the baleful eyes of his father’s people. Though Amobi faltered to this request, he acquiesced after he remembered the previous years of child loss.
To every son of his village, he disclosed nothing about his wife or new son. He carried the joy home, laid it out on his raffia mat, and, for the first time since never, he slept like the boy would: peacefully. All this awoken in him the unbridled lilt he felt when he made Obiajuru his wife.
***
As the full moon owned the night, Obiajuru carried Ikenka outside to welcome it. His future was laid before him.
That boy in her palms would grow with grace. He would let his ebony skin speak of his meekness and bravery to life. He would be the champion of his father’s clan, and then the entire kingdom. He would become the man to end the long old custom of stripping a widow of her husband’s possessions when he would complete the task demanded by the king at the expense of his throne. He would choose a bride from the maiden dance. He would become a father to many children, yet his reign would be short. He would be one of the kings who would be dethroned by the colonial masters and taken away in slave trade. He would till the soil of a foreign land under the whips of a pale-faced man. He would eat the leftovers of the watch dogs and one day he would be fed up. He would lead a revolution against the white man in his own country. He would be imprisoned for years until the white man’s queen would denounce slave trade. He would be freed. He would be remembered all over the world except in his own village which had been razed down by the white man’s guns and bombs.
But under the silver moonlight, Obiajuru stared at her little boy’s face adorably, without thinking of his future. She saw hope from the specks of stars glinting in his round eyes. Although the words of the seer still resounded in her heart, only a bright smile from her boy reassured her that he would be different.