Ugwuja was tilling the farmland closest to his house when Udo arrived. It was Eke, Amofia’s market day when many people usually stopped by on their way from the market to learn the mind of the gods about their problems.
He sat on a mound of raised earth covered with goat skin, his feet spread apart. Udo told him that he had come to seek the mind of the gods about his wife who was pregnant with their tenth child. He gave Ugwuja a piece of kola from the lot he carried. Ugwuja said a brief prayer with it, asking the gods to give them many children and an abundant yield. He offered a piece of the kola to Udo who crunched it noisily under his teeth. Ugwuja lifted the talismans, made of a string of cowries and shells and threw them on the ground. There were four of such strings, each the length of about two middle fingers. Udo sat to his left and looked at the talismans with concentration as if trying to read what it said. Ugwuja mumbled a few words which Udo didn’t understand and then lifted the talisman again and threw them on the ground. After a few rounds of throwing and mumbling, he said
“He is a boy.”
“Oh, a boy!”
Ugwuja looked at the talisman again and turned a few cowries over on its face.
“Yes, he is. Look at him.”
He pointed at the talismans on the ground as if Udo would see the boy lying in the midst of the cowries and shells. Udo blinked and rubbed his eyes in excitement. Ugwuja rested his back slowly on the earthen wall and looked into the distance towards the long entrance to his house where the branches of two trees merged above the footpath.
“His descent stems from your mother’s clan. He comes from the great Amuke River and must be named after it.”
He took a piece of the kola and threw into his mouth and said,
“His life shall be like that of a flowing river; nobody knows from where it comes or where it’s going to. On the next Afor market day, gather little children in your neighbourhood into your compound and give them enough to eat and be happy. They will help to draw him out into the world. He wouldn’t hesitate.”
The excited Udo beamed from ear to ear “Thank you, the great seer. I’ll do as you said.”
He rose and presented his gifts: lots of kola nut, a goat, a cock, trinkets and a piece of weaved cloth. The child’s delivery would mark the tenth. And nine of them had been males. They had all happened as Ugwuja had said. Udo was indeed a fortunate man. Three big barns full of yams and another male on the way meant even more yams and more wealth. Nobody in the village was as blessed as he is. At the tenth birth, he would slaughter a cow for his wife as was the custom. Udo thought that she deserved it. She had given him more males than all the other three wives put together.
“I’ll return when everything has happened as you said,” Udo said.
Ugwuja watched him descend the sloppy walk. He thought that Udo was extremely lucky. He looked at the items Udo had brought. The fowl had started to pick at some insects that crawled on the floor space, but the goat, tied to a stump in the compound, was bleating and charging as if it wanted to break loose and follow Udo home. He wasn’t permitted to sell them. What was he to do with them? With just Nwele and himself eating in the house? The sight of the presents didn’t interest him as it would have if he had a lot of mouths begging to be fed. Instead, they seemed to remind him of his childlessness. His kinsmen had become the beneficiaries as he always gave out a goat here and a fowl there. And they had come to expect it, making him wonder how many of them still bothered that he had no child of his own. He knew that some of them could even be praying that the children would not come so that they would keep feeding from his table and eventually inherit his lands and wealth when he was gone? He sat still for a moment and angst filled his heart. What was he to do? He thought about it briefly just as he had done countless times before and sighed. Nothing! There was nothing left to be done. The gods have the answers. But sometimes he wondered if they did. Why would he be childless if they did? Or were they deliberately silent? If yes, for what purpose? Hadn’t he done all they said he should do? Well, it’s their shame not his. He rose and returned to work.
He resumed tilling the earth, pouring out his frustrations into every dig as the hollow ground behind him mounted into heaps. Some fowls trailed behind him, picking the worms and insects out of the churned earth.
Nwele walked quietly towards him. Over the years, she had grown into a sad, taciturn woman. Her bitterness and angst that morning was almost strangulating her. She needed a release.
“Medicine man who has no medicine for his own ailment,” she upbraided him, holding a hand to her knee, leaning forward. “Medicine man that can’t look after himself. Wuuuuu!” she booed.
She turned and walked away. Out of despair, she had lately resorted to throwing invectives. But Ugwuja understood. He was not angry with her. He knew the depth of despair from which those words came. Weakened by the words, he lowered the hoe he had raised above his head and sat slowly on a heap of earth, his gaze to the ground.
Nwele hadn’t actually accused him of being responsible for their childlessness. But as a woman, she had looked up to him to find a solution, just as he had looked up to the gods. He felt let down by the gods he depended so much on. And he felt incapable too! Wasn’t this really the case of awuru, the wild cat, which cures waist pain but goes with a limp because of pains in its groin that wouldn’t heal? The great diviner sought after from far and near had a challenge of his own which he has no answers to. He had no medicine for his own headache. Isn’t it ridiculous?
That’s what Nwele just told him. She had eavesdropped on his conversation with Udo, where he had told Udo the will of the gods; that his wife would deliver a boy. And she had just asked: what about me? To get angry with her was to quarrel with the truth.
Ugwuja’s life had come to signify despair. He had come far in life and had seen things which he lacked the power to change or even question. He was orphaned at a tender age. He still remembered his parents vividly. His father, a great farmer, had died of an unknown illness, and soon after, his mother. He was just a boy; ten at most, and his only brother was about fourteen.
He went to live with his mother’s kinsmen in another clan until he was a man, almost past the age that young people with stable families usually took a wife. Then, a relative died. And he was sought-after to inherit his young widow. That widow is Nwele.
They had lived through twenty-one years, troubled and agonized with the absence of a child. His lack of options had pushed him to look for solutions elsewhere. A friend had recommended a famous witchdoctor by the name of Eze Amosu, the king of witches. Everyone went to him from far and near because he seemingly had solutions to all problems. After all. he dined with the spirits. It had taken Ugwuja four days to go and return. During his visit, Eze Amosu had looked into the ball of fire he had in his hand and told Ugwuja to relocate from his abode. He said that in the distant past where Ugwuja lived was a killing field. A bitter war was fought there in which many young men fell. Their unsettled spirits hovered around the area and that prevented a new life from springing forth. Ugwuja moved as he was advised but Nwele didn’t conceive.
His problem now seemed like a dense cloud over his head which he couldn’t punch through to see what was beyond. He has spent his whole life hitting at this cloud to get through to the other side where the solution to his problems lay.
He had served the gods faithfully, and he was sure he hadn’t committed sacrilege against the earth. People had lived worse! Yet, they had homes overflowing with children. What wrong had he done?
That night, he didn’t eat his food. Nwele, concerned that her tantrums had thrown him into gloom, hovered around him. She pleaded with him to cheer up, soothing him with her words but Ugwuja wouldn’t be pacified. He had come to the edge of things. He was angry with himself, angry with his chi, and angry at the whole world.
“What haven’t l done?” he lamented. The clay lamp lit the hut and imprinted two bold images of them on the other side of the wall. “Where did l go wrong? I didn’t take anybody’s wife or land.”
“You didn’t do wrong,” Nwele consoled, trying to sound confident. The sorrow in Ugwuja’s voice rend her heart to pieces. “It’ll be just fine.” But she did not know how.
Ugwuja’s head rested on her bosom and she coddled him like a mother would coddle her infant. “l started out in life just like my mates, even worked harder than most of them who had all the support of family. I‘ve laboured, yet, what do l have; what do l have to show for it?”
“You have me.”
He looked into her face and sighed.
“Yes, I have you. But the world’s laughing at me, they’re laughing at us.” His body shook as he cried.
“Ozugo, it’s enough. You’re making me cry too.”
“It’s better we cry, isn’t it? Yes, it’s better. Perhaps the gods will be merciful. Perhaps my chi will hear and know how grieved I’m in my spirit.”
“It’s enough,” she shook him.
“I’ve to cry. If the gods don’t like my tears, let them do something!”
Nwele had constantly lived with the fear that Ugwuja would one day become impatient with her. His kinsmen had advised him to take another wife. But Ugwuja had remained committed to her. She felt personally guilty for not giving him a child.
She married her first husband at a tender age. The marriage had been her father’s arrangement. He had simply pointed to the man with grey beards and told her
“That’s your husband.” She hadn’t said a thing. Of course she wasn’t expected to. Marriage was discussed by men. Women only got to learn what had been decided. She had followed him to his house as a fifth wife. She was as young as the man’s younger children from his last wife. She hadn’t even learnt to bath properly and look after herself. The man died a year after he married her. She didn’t bear him a child. She married Ugwuja, the man’s closest relation. Ugwuja had since been both a husband and father to her. She loved his virile frame and deep voice, laced with masculine strength. With him, she had all she desired except a child to love and coddle.
Now Ugwuja, with all that strength, lay beaten in her arms, crying like a baby. She couldn’t bear the sight anymore. Her snivels soon turned to sobs and her body shook. Her tears, packed with all her life’s grief turned to torrents. Ugwuja in turn tried to console her, but she wouldn’t be consoled once she got started. He gave up the effort and they both sobbed themselves to sleep.
Ugwuja walked on the stony bank of Obayi Lake. The lake sat beside the hill owned by the clan’s deity, Obayi. The deity had been there from the beginning of things. He was a protector and god of fertility. The clan relied on him to fight its many wars in which they were always victorious. The latest of such wars was between Amofia and Orope. Amofia won the war with the help of the deity, and its fame as a guardian and protector of the clan traveled farther. The people paid him homage and sacrificed foods, cowries, pieces of cloth and animals, some of which they left to roam on its bank. The lake was shielded from the stony path by a line of grasses and shrubs. African Jacana roamed the lakeside, punching its long, straight legs through the water in search of food.
Ugwuja had gone to see a friend who lived close to the edge of the clan and was returning home along the stony bank. A voice called out to him from the middle of the lake
“That man, look!”
It was a solitary path. The chirping and singing of birds couldn’t drown the voice and the urgency of its message. Ugwuja turned to the lake and saw a man standing at its middle. He was dressed as a chief, with strings of beads on his neck. Ugwuja paused and looked at the strange sight, amazed. He wondered how a man could be that tall and huge. The man stooped, dipped his hands into the water and lifted them above his head, holding out two infants.
Ugwuja looked at the babies and wondered what it all meant. The man asked him,
“If you’re to choose of these babies, which one will you choose?”
Ugwuja looked at the two babies closely. The one in the man’s left hand was light-skinned but the one in his right hand was dark-skinned with a protruded navel.
In the clan, children with big navel were cherished and thought to bring good fortune.
“l want the one in your right hand,” Ugwuja said.
The man returned the infants into the water and Ugwuja woke up, thinking of the dream and what it meant.
In a few weeks, his wife became pregnant. When she gave birth, the boy had a protruded navel, just as he was shown in the dream. He was overjoyed, knowing the child had come from Obayi, the god he had often sacrificed to for a child. He named the boy, Obayi, saying “he is a piece of the gods.”
Chukwuka Jude Eneje is a creative writer who writes from the heart of his head. He likes to document man’s efforts and struggles to find his place in the world amidst some seeming limitations which fate and destiny seem to place on his path. He is a student of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria Nsukka.