The three compounds of Ezeulu and his sons were already full of relatives and friends before the bride and her people arrived. The twenty or so young maidens attending her were all fully decorated. But the bride stood out among them. It was not only that she was taller than any of them, she was altogether more striking in her looks and carriage. She wore a different coiffure befitting her imminent transition to full womanhood – a plait rather than regular patterns made with a razor.
The girls sang a song called Ifeoma. Goodly Thing had come, they said, so let everyone who had good things bring them before her as offering. They made a circle round her and she danced to their song. As she danced her husband-to-be and other members of Ezeulu’s family broke through the circle one or two at a time and stuck money on her forehead. She smiled and let the present fall at her feet from where one of the girls picked it up and put it in a bowl.
The bride’s name was Okuata. In tallness she took after her father who came of a race of giants. Her face was finely cut and some people already called her Oyilidie because she resembled her husband in comeliness. Her full breasts had a very slight upward curve which would save them from falling and sagging too soon.
Her hair was done in the new otimili fashion. There were eight closely woven ridges of hair running in perfect lines from the nape to the front of the head and ending in short upright tufts like a garland of thick bristles worn on the hair-line from ear to ear. She wore as many as fifteen strings of jigida on her waist. Most of them were blood-coloured but two or three were black, and some of the blood-coloured strings had been made up with a few black discs thrown in. Tomorrow she would tie a loincloth like a full-grown woman and henceforth her body would be concealed from the public gaze. The strings of jigida clinked as she danced. Behind they covered all her waist and the upper part of her buttocks. In front they lay string upon string from under her navel to her genitals, covering the greater part and providing a dark shade for the rest. The other girls were dressed in the same way except that most of them wore fewer strings of jigida.
The feasting which followed lasted till sunset. There were pots of yam pottage, foofoo, bitter-leaf soup and egusi soup, two boiled legs of goat, two large bowls of cooked asa fish taken out whole from the soup and kegs of sweet wine tapped from the raffia palm.
Whenever a particularly impressive item of food was set before the women their song-leader raised the old chant of thanks:
Kwo-kwo-kwo-kwo-kwo!
Kwo-o-o-oh!
We are going to eat again as we are wont to do!
Who provides?
Who is it?
Who provides?
Who is it?
Obika Ezeulu he provides
Ayo-o-o-o-o-oh!
But in the end her mother and all the protecting company from her village set out for home again leaving her behind. Okuata felt like an orphan child and tears came down her face. Her mother-in-law took her away into her hut where she would stay until the Sacrifice at the crossroads was performed.
The medicine-man and diviner who had been hired to perform the rite soon arrived and the party set out. In it were Obika, his elder half-brother, his mother and the bride. Ezeulu did not go with them because he rarely left his obi after dark. Oduche refused to go so as not to offend the Catechist who preached against sacrifices.
They made for the highway leading to Umuezeani, the village where the bride came from. It was now quite dark and there was no moon. The palm-oil lamp which Obika’s mother carried gave little light especially as she had to cup one hand round the wick to protect the flame from the wind. Even so it was blown out twice and she had to go into nearby compounds to light it again – first into Anosi’s compound and then into the hut of Membolu’s widow.
The medicine-man whose name was Aniegboka walked silently in front of the group. He was a small man but when he spoke he raised his voice as one might do in talking over the compound wall to a neighbour who was hard of hearing. Aniegboka was not one of the famous medicine-men in the clan; he was chosen because he was friendly with Ezeulu’s compound and besides the sacrifice he was going to perform did not call for exceptional skill. Children in all the neighbourhood knew him and fled on his approach because they said he could turn a person into a dog by slapping him on the buttocks. But they made fun of him when he was not there because one of his eyes was like a bad cowry. According to the story the eye was damaged by the sharpened end of a banana shaft which Aniegboka – then a little boy – was throwing up and catching again in mid-air.
As the group walked in the dark they passed a few people but only recognized them from their voice when they spoke a greeting. The weak light of the oil lamp seemed to deepen the darkness around them making it difficult for them to see others as easily as they themselves were seen.
There was a soft but constant clatter coming from the big skin bag slung on Aniegboka’s shoulder. The bride had a bowl of fired clay in one hand and a hen in the other. Now and again the hen squawked the way hens do when their pen is disturbed by an intruder at night. As she walked in the middle of the file Okuata suffered the struggle of happiness and fear in her thoughts. Obika and Edogo who led the way held their matchets. They spoke now and again but Obika’s mind was not in what they said. His ear strained to catch the gentlest clinking together of his bride’s jigida. He could even isolate her footsteps from all the others behind him. He too was anxious. When he took his wife to his hut after the sacrifice, would he find her at home – as the saying was – or would he learn with angry humiliation that another had broken in and gone off with his prize? That could not be. Everyone who knew her witnessed to her good behaviour. Obika had already chosen an enormous goat as a present for his mother-in-law should his wife prove to be a virgin. He did not know exactly what he would do if he found that he could not take it to her after all.
On his left hand Obika held a very small pot of water by the neck. His half-brother had a bunch of tender palm frond cut from the pinnacle of the tree.
Before long they reached the junction of their highway and another leading to the bride’s village along which she had come that very day. They walked a short distance on this road and stopped. The medicine-man chose a spot in the middle of the way and asked Obika to dig a hole there.
‘Put down the lamp here,’ he told Obika’s mother. She did so and Obika crouched down and began to dig.
‘Make it wider,’ said the medicine-man. ‘Yes, like that.’
The three men were all in a crouching position; the women knelt on both knees with the trunk erect. The light of the oil lamp burnt with vigour now.
‘Do not dig any more,’ said the medicine-man. ‘It is now deep enough. Bring out all the loose soil.’
While Obika was scooping out the red earth with both hands the medicine-man began to bring out the sacrificial objects from his bag. First he brought out four small yams, then four pieces of white chalk and the flower of the wild lily.
‘Give me the omu.’ Edogo passed the tender palm leaves to him. He tore out four leaflets and put away the rest. Then he turned to Obika’s mother.
‘Let me have ego nano.’ She untied a bunch of cowries from a corner of her cloth and gave them to him. He counted them carefully on the ground as a woman would before she bought or sold in the market, in groups of six. There were four groups and he nodded his head.
He rose to his feet and positioned Okuata beside the hole so that she faced the direction of her village, kneeling on both knees. Then he took his position opposite her on the other side of the hole, with the sacrificial objects ranged on his right. The others stood a little back.
He took one of the yams and gave it to Okuata. She waved it round her head and put it inside the hole. The medicine-man put in the other three. Then he gave her one of the pieces of white chalk and she did as for the yam. Then came the palm leaves and the flower of the wild lily and last of all he gave her one group of six cowries which she closed in her palm and did as for the others. After this he pron
ounced the absolution:
‘Any evil which you might have seen with your eyes, or spoken with your mouth, or heard with your ears or trodden with your feet; whatever your father might have brought upon you or your mother brought upon you, I cover them all here.’
As he spoke the last words he took the bowl of fired clay and placed it face downwards over the objects in the hole. Then he began to put back the loose earth. Twice he eased up the bowl slightly so that when he finished its curved back showed a little above the surface of the road.
‘Where is the water?’ he asked.
Obika’s mother produced the small pot of water. The bride who had now risen to her feet bent down at the waist and tipping the water into her palm began to wash her face, her hands and arms and her feet and legs up to the knee.
‘Do not forget,’ said the diviner when she had finished, ‘that you are not to pass this way until morning even if the warriors of Abam were to strike this night and you were fleeing for your life.’
‘The great god will not let her run for her life, neither today nor tomorrow,’ said her mother-in-law.
‘We know she will not,’ said Aniegboka, ‘but we must still do things as they were laid down.’ Then turning to Obika he said: ‘I have done as you asked me to do. Your wife will bear you nine sons.’
‘We thank you,’ said Obika and Edogo together.
‘This hen will follow me home,’ he said as he slung his bag on one shoulder and picked up the hen by the legs tied together with banana rope. He must have noticed how their eyes went again and again to the fowl. ‘I alone will eat its flesh. Let none of you pay me a visit in the morning because I shall not share it.’ He laughed very loud, like a drunken man. ‘Even diviners ought to be rewarded now and again.’ He laughed once more. ‘Do we not say that the flute player must sometimes stop to wipe his nose?’
‘That is what we say,’ replied Edogo.
All the way back the medicine-man was full of loud talk. He boasted about the high regard in which, he said, he was held in distant clans. The others listened with one ear and put in a word now and again. The only person who did not open her mouth was Okuata.
When they got to Ilo Agbasioso the diviner parted with them and took a turning to the right. As soon as he was out of earshot Obika asked if it was the custom for the diviner to take the hen home.
‘I have heard that some of them do,’ said his mother. ‘But I have never seen it until today. My own hen was buried with the rest of the sacrifice.’
‘I have never heard of it,’ said Edogo. ‘It seems to me that the man does not get enough custom and is grabbing whatever he sees.’
‘Our part was to provide the hen,’ said Obika’s mother, ‘and we have done it.’
‘I wanted to put a question to him.’
‘No, my son. It is better that you did not. This is not the time to quarrel and dispute.’
Before Obika and his wife, Okuata, retired to their own compound they went first to salute Ezeulu.
‘Father, is it the custom for the diviner to take home the hen bought for the sacrifice?’ asked Obika.
‘No, my son. Did Aniegboka do so?’
‘He did. I wanted to speak to him but my mother made a sign to me not to talk.’
‘It is not the custom. You must know that there are more people with greedy, long throats in the pursuit of medicine than anywhere else.’ He noticed the look of concern on Obika’s face. ‘Take your wife home and do not allow this to trouble you. If a diviner wants to eat the entrails of sacrifice like a vulture the matter lies between him and his chi. You have done your part by providing the animal.’
When they left him Ezeulu felt his heart warm with pleasure as it had not done for many days. Was Obika already a changed person? It was not like him to come to his father and ask questions with so much care on his face. Akuebue had always said that once Obika had a woman to provide for he would change his ways. Perhaps it was going to be so. Another thought came to Ezeulu to confirm it: in the past Obika would have stood over the diviner and made him bury the hen. He smiled.
Chapter Twelve
Although Okuata emerged at dawn feeling awkward and bashful in her unaccustomed loincloth it was a very proud bashfulness. She could go without shame to salute her husband’s parents because she had been ‘found at home’. Her husband was even now arranging to send the goat and other presents to her mother in Umuezeani for giving him an unspoilt bride. She felt greatly relieved for although she had always known she was a virgin she had had a secret fear which sometimes whispered in her ear and made her start. It was the thought of the moonlight play when Obiora had put his penis between her thighs. True, he had only succeeded in playing at the entrance but she could not be too sure.
She had not slept very much, not as much as her husband; but she had been happy. Sometimes she tried to forget her happiness and to think how she would have felt had things turned out differently. For many years to come she would have walked like one afraid the earth might bite her. Every girl knew of Ogbanje Omenyi whose husband was said to have sent to her parents for a matchet to cut the bush on either side of the highway which she carried between her thighs.
Every child in Ezeulu’s compound wanted to go to the stream and draw water that morning because their new wife was going. Even little Obiageli who hated the stream because of the sharp stones on the way was very quick in bringing out her water pot. For once she cried when her mother told her to stay back and look after Amoge’s child.
Obika’s younger sister, Ojiugo, rushed up and down with the proprietary air of one who had a special claim on the bride because even the smallest child in a man’s compound knew its mother’s hut from the others. Ojiugo’s mother, Matefi, carried the same air but with studied restraint which made it all the more telling. Needless to say she wanted it to tell on her husband’s younger wife and to prove to her that there was greater honour in having a daughter-in-law than in buying ivory anklets and starving your children.
‘See that you come back quickly,’ she said to her daughter and her son’s wife, ‘before this spit on the floor dries up.’ She spat.
‘It is only bathing that could delay us,’ said Nwafo. ‘If we just draw water now and bathe another time…’
‘I think you are mad,’ said his mother who had so far pretended to ignore her husband’s senior wife. ‘But let me see you come back from the stream with yesterday’s body and we shall see whose madness is greater, yours or mine.’ The vehemence with which she said this seemed so much greater than the cause of her annoyance. In fact she was angry with her son not for what he had proposed but for his disloyalty in joining the excited flurry of the other hut.
‘What are you still crawling about like a millipede for?’ Matefi asked her daughter. ‘Will going to the stream be your day’s work?’
Oduche wore his loincloth of striped towelling and white singlet which he normally put on only for church or school. This made his mother even more angry than had Nwafo’s proposal, but she succeeded in remaining silent.
Soon after the water party left Obiageli came into Ezeulu’s hut carrying Amoge’s child on her back. The child was clearly too big for her; one of his legs almost trailed the ground.
‘These people are mad,’ said Ezeulu. ‘Who left a sick child in your hands? Take him back to his mother at once.’
‘I can carry him,’ said Obiageli.
‘Who is carrying the other? Take him to his mother, I say.’
‘She has gone to the stream,’ replied Obiageli bouncing up on her toes in an effort to keep the child from slipping down her back. ‘But I can carry him. See.’
‘I know you can,’ said Ezeulu, ‘but he is sick and should not be shaken about. Take him to your mother.’
Obiageli nodded and went into the inner compound, but Ezeulu knew she still carried the child (who had now begun to cry). Obiageli’s tiny voice was striving valiantly to drown the crying and sing him to sleep:
Tell the mother her child
is crying
Tell the mother her child is crying
And then prepare a stew of úzízá
And also a stew of úzìzà
Make a watery pepper-soup
So the little birds who drink it
Will all perish from the hiccup
Mother’s goat is in the barn
And the yams will not be safe
Father’s goat is in the barn
And the yams will all be eaten
Can you see that deer approaching
Look! he’s dipped one foot in water
Snake has struck him!
He withdraws!
Ja – ja . ja kulo kulo!
Traveller Hawk
You’re welcome home
Ja – ja . ja kulo kulo!
But where’s the length
Of cloth you brought
Ja – ja . ja kulo kulo!
‘Nwafo!… Nwafo!’ called Ezeulu.
‘Nwafo has gone to the stream!’ replied his mother from her hut.
‘Nwafo has what?’ Ezeulu shouted back.
Ugoye decided to go into the obi in person and explain that Nwafo had gone on his own account.
‘Nobody asked him to go,’ she said.
‘Nobody asked him to go?’ retorted Ezeulu parodying a child’s talk. ‘Did you say that nobody asked him to go? Do you not know that he sweeps my hut every morning? Or do you expect me to break kolanut or receive people in an unswept hut? Did your father break his morning kolanut over yesterday’s wood ash? The abomination all you people commit in this house will lie on your own heads. If Nwafo has become too strong to listen to you why did you not ask Oduche to come and sweep my hut?’