The Fishermen Read online

  To leave the bed, I first crawled to its end, and then stepped down slowly, my buttocks filled with tacks of pain. When I entered the sitting room, it was still dim. Electricity had been cut since the previous night and the sitting room was lit by a kerosene lantern placed on the centre table. Boja, the last person to sit, came with a slight limp in his gait, cringing with every move. After we all settled into our seats, Father stared at us for a long time, his hands on his chin. Mother, seated facing us just a stretch away from me, untied the side of the swaddling wrappa fastened into a knot under her armpit, and lifted her brassiere. Her rounded, milk-filled breast disappeared at once into Nkem’s tiny grip. The infant greedily covered the round, dark, and stiff nipple with her mouth like an animal taking in its prey. Father seemed to have watched the nipple with interest, and when it had gone from sight, he removed his eyeglasses and placed them on the table. Whenever he removed his eyeglasses, the great resemblance Boja and I bore to him—dark skin and a bean-shaped head—often became clearer. Ikenna and Obembe were cloaked in Mother’s anthill-coloured skin.

  “Now, listen, all of you,” Father said in English. “I was hurt by what you did for many reasons. First, I told you before I left here not to give your mother any troubles. But what did you do? You gave her—and me—the mother of all troubles.” He glanced from face to face.

  “Listen, what you did was truly bad. Bad. Just how could kids receiving Western education engage in such a barbaric endeavour?” I did not know what the word “endeavour” was at the time, but because Father had shouted it, I knew it was a grim word. “And secondly, your mother and I are appalled by the dangerous risks you took. This was not the school I sent you to. Nowhere around that deadly river will you find books to read. Despite the fact that I have always told you to read your books, you no longer have eyes for your books.” Then, with a dead-serious frown on his face and his hand raised in an awe-inspiring gesture, he said, “Let me warn you my friends, I will send anyone who comes to this house with a bad school grade to the village to farm or tap palm wine—Ogbu-akwu.”

  “God forbid!” Mother retorted, snapping her fingers over her head to swat away Father’s spiritually toxic words. “None of my kids will be this.”

  Father glanced angrily at her. “Yes, God forbid,” he said, imitating Mother’s tender tone of voice. “How will God forbid when under your nose, Adaku, they went to that river for six weeks; Six. Good. Weeks.” He shook his head as he counted six weeks with his fingers. “Now listen, my friend, from now on, you must make sure they read their books. Do you hear me? And your closing time for work from now on is five, no longer seven; and no work on Saturdays. I can’t have these kids sliding into the pits under your nose.”

  “I have heard,” Mother replied in Igbo, tsking.

  “In all,” Father continued, gazing round at us in a broken semi-circle, “cut your fads from now. Try to be good children. No one enjoys whipping his kids—no one.”

  Fads, we’d come to understand from Father’s frequent usage of the word, meant useless indulgences. He was about to speak on, but was interrupted by the sudden swirl of the ceiling fan, signalling the abrupt restoration of erratic power. Mother switched on the bulb and wound down the wick of the kerosene lantern. In the lull that the occasion gave and because the bulb’s glow rested on it, my eyes fell on the year’s calendar: although it was now March, the calendar was still turned to the page of February, which had the painting of the eagle captured in flight, wings spread, legs stretched, claws curved, and the bird’s prominent sapphire eyes staring into the camera. His grandeur spread over the vista in the background as though the world were his and he was the creator of all—a god with wings and feathers. I thought then, with a certain crippling fear that something would change in a fleeting moment and disrupt that interminable stillness. I feared that the bird’s frozen wings would be suddenly thawed and begin to flutter. I feared that its bulging eyes would blink, its legs would move. I feared that when that happened—when the eagle left that space, that portion of the sky in which it’d been caught since February 2nd, when Ikenna flipped the pages of the calendar to this one—this world and everything in it would change beyond reckoning.

  “On the other hand, I want you all to know that even though what you did was wrong, it reflected once again that you have the courage to indulge in something adventurous. Such adventurous spirit is the spirit of men. So, from now onwards, I want you all to channel that spirit into something more fruitful. I want you to be a different kind of fishermen.”

  We glanced at each other with surprise, except Ikenna, who kept his eyes on the floor. He’d been hurt most of all by the whipping, especially because Father had put much of the blame on him and had whipped him the hardest without knowing that Ikenna had tried to make us stop. “What I want you to be is a group of fishermen who will be fishers of good dreams, who will not relent until they have caught the biggest catch. I want you to be juggernauts, menacing and unstoppable fishermen.”

  This surprised me deeply. I’d thought that he disdained that word. Grasping for meaning, I looked at Obembe. He was nodding his head at everything Father said, his brow tinged with the hint of a smile.

  “Good boys,” Father muttered, a wide smile smoothening the rough creases that anger and fury had strewn over the yarn of his face. “Listen, in keeping with what I have always taught you, that in every bad thing, you can always dig up some good things, I will tell you that you could be a different kind of fishermen. Not the kind that fish at a filthy swamp like the Omi-Ala, but fishermen of the mind. Go-getters. Children who will dip their hands into rivers, seas, oceans of this life and become successful: doctors, pilots, professors, lawyers. Eh?”

  He gazed round again. “Those are the kinds of fishermen I want to have as children. Now, would you be willing to recite an anthem?”

  Obembe and I nodded immediately. He glanced at the pair whose eyes were focused on the floor.

  “Boja, you?”

  “Yes,” Boja mumbled reluctantly.

  “Ike?”

  “Yes,” Ikenna said after a prolonged pause.

  “Very good, now all of you say ‘ju-gger-nauts.’ ”

  “Ju-gger-nauts,” we all repeated.

  “Me-na-cing. M-e-n-a-c-i-n-g. Me-nacing.”

  “Unstopp-able.”

  “Fishermen of good things.”

  Father laughed a deep, throaty laugh, adjusted his tie, and gazed closely at us. With his voice ascending a new crescendo and thrusting his fist aloft so that his tie flung upward, he yelled: “We are fishermen.”

  “We are fishermen!” we chorused at the top of our lungs, each one of us surprised at how suddenly—and nearly effortlessly—we’d broken into this excitement.

  “We trail behind our hooks, lines and sinkers.”

  We repeated, but he heard someone say “tail” instead of “trail,” so he made us pronounce the word in isolation before continuing. Before he did that, he bemoaned that we did not know the word because we spoke Yoruba all the time instead of English—the language of “Western education.”

  “We are unstoppable,” he continued, and we repeated after him.

  “We are menacing.”

  “We are juggernauts.”

  “We will never fail.”

  “That’s my boys,” he said, our voices settling like sediment. “Can I have the new fishermen embrace me?”

  Feeling robbed by Father’s magical overturn of what had been a deep revulsion to appreciation, we rose to our feet one after the other and placed our heads between the flaps of his unbuttoned coat. We embraced him for seconds during which he patted and kissed our heads, and the next person in line repeated the ritual. Afterwards, he took up his briefcase and brought out clean twenty-naira notes, bound by a paper tape with the stamp of the Central Bank of Nigeria. He gave Ikenna and Boja four pieces each, Obembe and me, two apiece. He gave one piece each for David, who was asleep in the room, and Nkem.

  “Don’t forget anythin
g I’ve told you.”

  We all nodded and he began to leave, but as if called back by something, he turned and walked to Ikenna. He put his hands on Ikenna’s shoulders and said, “Ike, do you know why I flogged you the most?”

  Ikenna, whose face was fixed on the floor as if there was a movie screen on it, mumbled “Yes.”

  “Why?” Father asked.

  “Because I’m the first born, their leader.”

  “Good, bear that in mind. From now on, before you take any action, look at them; they do whatever you do and go wherever you go. That’s to their credit, the way all of you follow each other. So, Ikenna, don’t lead your brothers astray.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Ikenna replied.

  “Guide them well.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Lead them well.”

  Ikenna hesitated a bit, then mumbled: “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Always remember that a coconut that falls into a cistern will need a good washing before it can be eaten. What I mean is if you do wrong, you will have to be corrected.”

  Our parents often found the need to explain such expressions containing concealed meanings because we sometimes took them literally, but it was the way they learned to speak; the way our language—Igbo—was structured. For although the vocabulary for literal construction for cautionary expressions such as “be careful” was available, they said “Jiri eze gi ghuo onu gi onu—Count your teeth with your tongue.” To which, once, while scolding Obembe for a wrong act, Father had burst out laughing when he saw Obembe moving his tongue over the ridge of his mouth, his cheeks furrowed, saliva drooling down his jaws as he attempted to take a census of his dentition. It was why our parents most often reverted to English when angry, because being angry, they didn’t want to have to explain whatever they said. Yet even in English, Father often transgressed in both the use of heavy vocabularies and English idioms. For Ikenna once told us how as a child, before I was born, Father asked him in a very serious tone to “take time,” and in obedience, he’d climbed the dining table and removed the wall clock from its hook.

  “I hear, sir,” Ikenna said.

  “And you have been corrected,” Father said.

  Ikenna nodded and Father—in a moment unlike any I’d ever witnessed—asked him to promise. I could tell that even Ikenna was surprised. For Father demanded obedience to his words from his children; he did not ask for mutual agreements or promises. When Ikenna said “I promise,” Father turned and stepped out and we followed to watch his car steer down the dusty road, feeling sore that he was leaving yet again.

  THE PYTHON

  Ikenna was a python:

  A wild snake that became a monstrous serpent living on trees, on plains above other snakes. Ikenna turned into a python after the whipping. It changed him. The Ikenna I knew became a different one: a mercurial and hot-tempered person constantly on the prowl. This transformation had started much earlier, gradually, internally, long before the whipping. But it was after the punishment that the manifestations first began, causing him to do the things that we didn’t think he was capable of doing, the first of which was to harm an adult.

  About an hour after Father left for Yola that morning, Ikenna gathered Boja, Obembe and me in his room just after Mother went to church with our younger siblings, and declared that we must punish Iya Iyabo, the woman who told on us. We had not gone to church that day because we claimed we were ill from the beating, so we sat on the bed in his room to listen to him.

  “I must have my pound of flesh and you must all join me in this because you caused it,” he said. “Had you listened to me, she would not have caused Father to beat me so much. Look, just look—”

  He turned and pulled down his shorts. Although Obembe closed his eyes, I didn’t. I saw red stripes on the plump cheeks of his buttocks. They appeared as those on the back of Jesus of Nazareth—some long, some short, some crossed each other to make a red X, while some stood out from the rest like lines on the palms of an ill-fortuned individual.

  “That was what you and that idiotic woman caused me. So, you all should come up with ideas on how to punish her.” Ikenna snapped his fingers. “We must do that today. That way, she will come to know that she cannot mess with us and go scot-free.”

  While he was speaking, a goat bleated from behind the window. Mmbreeeheheeeh!

  This riled Boja. “That crazy goat again, that goat!” he cried, rising to his feet.

  “Sit down,” Ikenna yelled. “Let it alone now, and give me ideas on that woman before Mama returns from church.”

  “Okay,” Boja said, sitting back. “You know Iya Iyabo has lots of hens?” For a while Boja sat, his face turned in the direction of the window where the goat’s bleating could still be heard. Even though it was clear his mind was fixed on the bleating goat, he said: “Yes, she keeps a whole lot.”

  “Mostly roosters,” I put in, wanting to make him know that it was roosters, not hens that crowed.

  Boja cast a sneery look at me, sighed, and said, “Yes, but must you tell us the gender of the hen? I have told you many times to stop bringing this stupid animal fascination into important—”

  Ikenna chewed him out. “Ooh, Boja, when will you learn to face what is important, which is telling us what your ideas are. You are wasting time getting angry at the bleating of a foolish goat, and rebuking Ben for something as trivial as the difference between a rooster and a hen.”

  “Okay, I suggest we get one of them and kill and fry it.”

  “That is fatal!” Ikenna exclaimed, making an irritated face, as if on the cusp of vomiting. “But I don’t think it’s proper to eat that woman’s chicken. How are we even going to fry it? Mama will know we fried something here; she will smell it. She will suspect we stole it, and stealing will earn us even more severe strokes of the whip. None of us wants that.”

  Ikenna never dismissed Boja’s ideas without giving them a proper thought. They had a mutual respect for each other. I hardly ever saw them argue, unlike the way they would answer my questions with an outright “no” or “wrong” or “incorrect.” Boja agreed that it was true, nodding repeatedly. Next, Obembe suggested we throw stones into the woman’s compound and pray they hit either her or one of her sons, and then take to our heels before anyone comes out of the compound.

  “Wrong idea,” Boja said. “What if those sons of hers, those big hungry boys who always dress in tattered clothing with biceps like Arnold Schwarzenegger, catch and beat us?” He demonstrated the bulge of their brawny biceps.

  “They will beat us even worse than Father,” Ikenna noted.

  “Yes,” said Boja, “we can only imagine it.”

  Ikenna nodded in agreement. I was now the only one who hadn’t made a suggestion.

  “Ben, what do you have to say?” Boja said.

  I gulped, my heart beating faster. My confidence often wilted when my older brothers urged me to make a decision rather than make one for me. I was still thinking when my voice, as if autonomous of the rest of me, said: “I have an idea.”

  “Then say it!” Ikenna ordered.

  “Okay, Ike, okay, I suggest we get hold of one of the roosters and,” I fastened my eyes to his face, “and—”

  “Yes?” Ikenna said. Their eyes were all fixed on me as if I’d just become a wonder.

  “Behead it,” I concluded.

  I had barely said those words when Ikenna cried, “That is really fatal!” and Boja, suddenly wild-eyed, started clapping.

  My brothers gave me credit for an idea whose source was a folktale my Yoruba language teacher had told my class at the beginning of the term, about a vicious boy who goes on a rampage decapitating all the cocks and hens in the land. We hurried out of our compound with a covert path to the woman’s house in our minds, passing small bushes and a carpenter’s shop, where we had to close our ears with our hands to shield them against the deafening sound of the filling machines as they sawed wood. The woman, Iya Iyabo, lived in a small bungalow whose exterior was identical to ou
rs: a small balcony, two windows with louvres and nettings, an electric meter box clamped to the wall, and a storm door, except that her fence was not made of bricks and cement but of mud and clay. The fence was cracked in places from long exposure to the sun, and was littered with spots and smears. An overhead electric cable reached through the branches of one of the trees and stretched out of the compound to connect to a high power pole.

  We listened at first for sounds of life, but Ikenna and Boja soon concluded the compound was empty. At Ikenna’s command, Obembe climbed over the fence, using Ikenna’s shoulder as a ledge. Boja joined him while I stayed with Ikenna to keep watch. Just after the two of them climbed in, the sound of a rooster squawking and frantically flapping its wings came ever closer, as did the sounds of my brothers’ feet chasing the cock. It happened repeatedly until we heard Boja say “Hold it still, hold it still, and don’t let it go” the way we used to speak when our hooks angled a fish when we were still fishing the Omi-Ala.

  At the shout, Ikenna tried to climb the fence quickly to see if they’d caught it, but stopped short of that. From behind the wall, he echoed Boja’s words. “Don’t let it go, don’t let it go.” His buttocks slipped up above the waistline of his pants as he planted his foot in a hole on the fence. Old coatings rained down below him like dust. With one foot secured, he pulled himself upwards, holding on to the top of the wall. From behind his hand, a skink rose and journeyed away in agitation, its multi-coloured body smooth and shiny. Half of him stretched into the compound, and half outside, Ikenna took the rooster from Boja, crying, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!”

  We returned to our own compound and went straight to the garden in the backyard, the size of a quarter of a football field. It was fenced around with cement bricks on all three corners, two of them marking off the boundaries with our neighbours—Igbafe’s family on one side, and the Agbatis on the other. The third, which faced our bungalow directly, marked off a boundary with the landfill where a colony of swine lived. A pawpaw tree stretched out of the landfill, just over the fence, while a tangerine tree—usually extremely leafy in the rainy season—stood agelessly between the fence and the well in the compound. This tree sat just about fifty metres further inside the compound from the well—a big hole in the ground, with a neck made of concrete around it. Attached to the concrete was a metal lid that Father locked with a padlock in dry seasons when wells dried up in Akure and people stole into our compound to fetch water. On the other side of the backyard, patched to a corner of the fence bordering Igbafe’s family’s compound was the small garden in which Mother planted tomatoes, corn and okra.