Originally published as “A Clan of Trees” on “In the Sands of Time,” A collection of short stories longlisted for the Toyin Falaola prize,  2020.

I

Ibeh could not sleep. He had been a very heavy sleeper in his last life, but falling asleep had become a chore since his return. It was said he could be carried from his bed to the village square and he would not shake, not even bat an eyelid. Maybe he was trying to make up for all that sleep by staying awake through this life. He sat on the mgbidi, an edge of the small hut elevated with beaten earth so that one can sit comfortably.

He closed his eyes momentarily only to scramble off the mgbidi screaming, his eyes wide open and searching the corners of the room. It was happening again.

He bolted out, scooped water from the earthen pot and splashed it on his face. This makes the third time he had seen that tree fall. He heard movements his father must have heard him tear out of the house like a crazed man..

“Son,” the voice called. It was a deep voice much different from his father’s lighter tones. This was coming from a much deeper place and Ibeh wondered who could be calling out to him at this hour of the night.

“Who are you?” Ibeh asked.

“Does it matter? Go back to sleep, son.”

“I cannot find sleep. My nights are plagued with the same dreams, our great tree, falling and falling,” he replied, his voice agitated.

“The maidens still clean and tend to the tree, it will not fall.”

“It keeps falling, father, falling on my head. All the time. Is this how we die father?”

“Sleep son, sleep.”

He found himself on his bed now, the same voice soothing him. He shut his eyes, expecting the tree to fall as usual. But it did not. Instead, he saw the entire village march towards the tree, hefting? Machetes and axes and kitchen knives and clubs. They began to hit the tree simultaneously, hacking away at the large trunk. With each cut to the tree, the cutter bled. Ever cut they made on the tree was a cut on their own bodies blood spurting out of each of them until they all lay in a dead heap at the base of the tree, their blood forming a long pool that ran down to Iyi-Uru stream. The tree transformed into a man, bleeding and coughing  blood, then it fell heavily on Ibeh’s prostrate body. He woke up with a start, uttering an ear-piercing scream that woke the whole village.

But all these was weeks before the chaos began and the people forced Egede to wield the magic that would bring the tree down, yelling how they needed to rest, to sleep like their neighbours. It was weeks before the first man of Urunnu fell. That was the first death Urunnu would record in all her annals. People do not die here. When age catches up with the sons and daughters of Urunnu, they make their way into the tree at the eziama and would re-emerge after some days as newborns. You see, the people of Urunnu had never experienced anything like death – until now, until we cut the tree that gave us life and death walked amongst us wielding a scythe, cutting men and women down in droves.

II

When news of a first death found ears in Urunnu; it was greeted with raised eyebrows that turned to smiles the same moment. Udezuka bumped sticks with Azunonye his friend, the latter rising from his seat to dance the great atu—shoulders hunched, arms spread, feet bouncing in fanciful fashion.

The news of the first death didn’t take long to spread. Soon, everyone converged at the eziama -the village square, at thecentre of which was a large stump, the only thing left of the great tree. It was inside this tree that they go to regenerate when they grew old and feeble; it was under its shade that they held first dances and did the nnabata for sojourners that had recently experienced a rebirth. They had never gathered for a death. People milled about in twos and threes, smiling, hugging, and whispering their disbelief. Ibeh wondered what the dead body would look like, it has been ten years since his last journey, so he was only a child and did not know if they would allow him to see the body of the dead. He kept to the edge of the dense circle of feet, making sure he didn’t lose his spot. He was quiet, sitting with his feet drawn up to his jaw, his hands forming a tight clasp for his knees while he swung his shoulders from side to side.

The body was brought in on a bamboo bed borne by the shoulders of four young men of

Adike clan. Ibeh understood the choice; the Adike’s were outcasts, doomed to live at the outskirts of Urunnu. Since this occasion was a first, it was wise that the Adike men should carry the burden; no one knew what the repercussions might be, if any. As if the gods were playing a wicked trick on Urunnu, the Adike men were the best built in the entire village. Necks that reminded one of thestems of an Ukwa tree, shoulders broad enough to pass for a mat,  limbs nimble and strong, and powerful arms.. Their chests danced with each step they took, the bamboo bed balanced on their shoulders. Some of the maidens were forced to question, again, why they weren’t allowed to marry any of the Adike boys, not even Umenwa, with a skin like the sun and eyes the colour of Ohammiri River.

There was a collective gasp when the bamboo bed was placed on the brown earth. Aghadi, the dead man, looked like one enjoying a peaceful sleep, his skin, the same leathery brown as it was when he still walked upright. He was the oldest and would have gone on the journey into the old tree in a fortnight if death hadn’t come knocking. Ibeh watched the body without any reaction; it was like all the bodies of the old before they journeyed to the tree. He himself had worn such a body. Is Aghadi really dead? He wondered. The first spate of disbelief turned into a murmur of approval; the people had imagined that death only meant rest and Aghadi’s body proved that they had been right all along. Wide smiles broke out on the people’s faces and drums took up a brisk beat to which young ladies danced, forming a circle around the body, swinging their hips, moving their arms low and throwing them up in appreciation of death, which to them was a novelty. 

“Urunnu mma mma nu,” Elendu saluted. The square grew quiet, the drums grew dumb, the dancers left the centre. The voices that had formed a steady buzz with the drums petered out into dead silence. Ears did not need to be tuned up to hear Elendu; he possessed a voice so powerful that he is often chosen to speak for Urunnu whenever the need arose. He was not just a loud voice; he spoke with a deliberate slowness and the power of the great orators.  

“It is a great day indeed,” Elendu continued, “Aghadi wore a smile on his face when the end came for him. Now we know that we can go over to the other side, to our fathers, to Urunnu who I hope will accept this decision we have taken.”

His words were greeted with shouts and drumming and lots of mini dance moves coming from all over the square. His eyes caught the small figure of Ibeh, sitting on the brown earth, his hands clasping his knees tightly. The boy was shaking, and tears rolled down his face. He was the only one amongst the five thousand sons and daughters of Urunnu who wore a wet eye that day. Elendu looked away to continue his speech, his face smiling while he wondered why the boy shed tears. The old question returned again to plague him. It came that evening, after Egede had broken so many eggs and the tree began to fall.

 “What have we done?”

III

It was one of the daughters of Aghadi who raised an alarm that roused the whole village from their sleep the next morning. She screamed longer than it took a cock to crow, and a small crowd gathered at her mother’s hut. She was only fifteen; in a few years, she would follow the man who chooses her and live with him. But today, she had woken up to see something she had never seen before. Her mat had smudges of blood on it and more of it trickled out of her. 

“Go home,” Elendu said to the small throng of bodies gathered outside the hut. “Go home, she is only feeling unwell.”

Walking home, they whispered about the blood on the bed and wondered why a young child bled from her woman parts and what it meant. Some of them knew what it meant and only shook their heads.

IV

The second Urunnu death was like the first; an older man, sown into the earth with irreverent fanfare. The eyes of the very aged amongst them followed the interment the same way the eyes of a glutton follows food, with hope and relish. In their various homes, the lamp burned long into the night. The hours were spent in discussion of several irrelevancies; the goal however was to spend as much time as possible together. Tomorrow have become something different and time was not guaranteed anymore.

When death took Omenyiri, son of Ikeaka who was only about twenty years gone since his last journey, there were no drumbeats. He had gone into the forest to hunt antelopes only to be bitten by a sleeping cobra. In the past, they only had to take him home and feed him a liquid squeezed out of the leaves of the tree, but the tree was gone, and the only thing left was the useless stump. His friends watched him breathe his last, their eyes unbelieving. It was the first time anybody wailed in Urunnu since the famine, since the first father lied down and became a tree.

That night, Ibeh dreamt again; this time it wasn’t the tree the people hacked with their machetes; it was Urunnu, the patriarch from whom the village got its name. He was tall and regal, eyes and skin a dazzling sheen. He bled with each cut, as did the cutters, his eyes fixed unflinchingly on Ibeh’s.

V

“Why did you do it father?” Ibeh asked Elendu. The older man turned around in surprise. He was tending yam stalks in his farm, his eyes appraising the soft yam tendril while his hands worked mechanically. 

“Why did you do it?” Ibeh asked again, eyes fixed directly on the older man. All the younger ones in Urunnu called the older men father and the women mother. After a journey to the tree, the women cast lots to see who would take the new child in to raise until the age of twenty when they move away into their own hut. Here, a child belonged to everybody. They understood the importance of treating the children right because you end up being the child of your child when you make your next journey. The cycle kept everyone honest.

“I did not do anything my son. We all sought the peace of a long sleep”

“Father?” the younger boy’s eyes were filled with a fire that caught the older man’s attention.

“Come to the house later in the evening, I will answer all your questions then.” Elendu said, turning back to his yams.

Ibeh did not leave. He joined him in the farm, pulling up weeds from the mounds until the sun dipped in the distant horizon. They walked back in silence, wondering who will be sown into the earth like a yam tuber when the sun rose on the next day. These ones will never grow tendrils; they will rot and be forgotten forever. They slept and never woke up. Urunnu has become like all her neighbours, subject to a sleep you never return from.

Elendu paused as they passed the square, then moved towards the tree and made to sit on the stump.

“Don’t,” Ibe warned, his eyes fiery. Elendu paused to look at the boy. He reminded him of someone, or something. In a few years, after his next journey, he would have called him father as the cycle continued but now, there is no cycle anymore. When the light in a man’s eyes go out, they stayed out. He moved towards the stool of the drummers and sat down. Ibeh sat on the earth beside him, knees pulled together, hands clasping his knees. The older man spoke:

“When Urunnu gave his life where only this stump now sits dejected, we all went home without a word. All of us were survivors of the great famine that had swept over the plains. Of the five thousand people in Urunnu now, only about a hundred people stood here when father laid down and became a tree stalk. It was Egede, the eye of the spirits who performed the rites and we saw the small stalk grow within the space of two market weeks into the giant shade you know. The oldest amongst us climbed into it, with the voice of Egede behind egging them on in a song only he could understand. They climbed into the branches of the great tree and slept for two market weeks and came out as infants. We were bewildered. Egede washed the breasts of the women with liquid squeezed from the leaves of the tree to make the women’s milk run as they nursed the infants. It was the beginning of a life without death that has kept up for years. We’ve seen wars come and go; we have watched friends from neighbouring villages grow old and die, while our numbers increased and our village expanded until we had nearly nowhere else to build new huts.”

“You could have gotten more lands from Amaihe to the east or Ikene to our west.”

“Egede warned that we must not attack our neighbours or ask them to give up their lands. Whatever we do must only be done in this space that belonged to us. So, he gave everywoman the brown seed of the tree to chew. They never had the flow that came to them every month and no one ever got pregnant after that. You heard when the daughter of Aghadi was yelling loud enough to bring the skies down the other day?

“Yes, father.”

“She was the first to see her flow return. Since that time, most of the maidens have seen theirs.”

“Is this what you wanted?”

“Our spirits have become tired. There are no familiar faces anymore in the whole of the five surrounding villages. The men with whom we began are all gone, our fathers, the ones taken by the famine, must be waiting for us. Who will tell them that we had closed the door to them?”

“Urunnnu of course, he was the last to cross over,” Ibeh almost yelled.

Elendu looked away from the boy’s eyes. Two girls were returning from the stream; he beckoned to them. The girls poured into the curved horn which the older man pulled out of his goat skin bag and he drank to his fill before handing the gourd to Ibeh, who drank and bowed in thanks.

They sat there until darkness covered the square. The mosquitoes were beginning to whine about something as they often did and Elendu slapped himself a few times trying to kill the ones that perched, but Ibeh sat still, his hands clasping knees, lost in the labyrinths of his own mind.

“It will only get worse father,” he said.

Elendu did not speak. He felt the same thing he felt the day Aghadi died, when he saw the boy crying on the brown earth of the square. He stared at him again, wondering what it was that flashed in his eye. It wasn’t really the boy’s tears; it was something else on his face.

VI

They spent longer hours at the square now, all of them. The spate of death had increased. It seemed like their bodies were expiring, little things that would not kill their neighbours had them dead within an hour. Young, old, mildly old—no one was exempt. 

The first day they gathered at the square, it was a lot of fingers pointing and blame sharing. Why did you have to cut the tree? Why? Everyone looked at the other with accusing eyes only to glimpse the same accusation in the eyes of the other. They had all agreed to cut the tree. Only the youngest and the recently returned could claim innocence. The first spate of accusation died out like a match struck in the face of the wind. People sat in groups and pairs, looking at one another, not speaking. Each took a face to memory. You do not know who will be absent from the square tomorrow. Their silence rode deep into the night before they began to trickle into their huts.

After Egede died, they came to the square with mats which they spread on the dusty earth and slept when they felt like it. Egede had been working on a solution, but he died before he could finish it. They weren’t so silent anymore, they sang dirges, the voice of Nene would take it up in a heart-breaking wail and the others would respond, bodies swaying from side to side.

There were tears in their eyes now.

“Gwa nna mu n’am na-abia.” 

“ooo, n’am na-abia.”

“Gwa nne mu n’am na-abia.”

“Ooo, n’am na-abia.”

Tell my father that I am coming.

Yes, I am coming.

Tell my mother that I am coming.

Yes, I am coming.

They would watch the stars as they sang, their bodies keeping the rhythm as the older men felt their hearts constrict. But they too sang, for some of these younger ones were their fathers and their mothers caught in the reverse cycle. It has been so long since the last child was birthed in Urunnu; no one knew anymore who birthed whom, so they sang to each other and to their dead, wondering who would not be singing with them by evening of the next day.

VII

Uchendu Adike, the patriarch of the Adike clan, brought his people to the square the next night. He is not the patriarch because he birthed them all; nobody remembers who was called Osu first, but Uchendu is the oldest in the clan; he assumed the position of a father. 

They had been decimated. Of over one hundred Adikes, only twenty of them remained. In keeping with their status as outcasts, they had buried their dead alone, without the rest of Urunnu. 

“Where do you think you are going,” a loud voice bellowed.

People turned immediately to view what the commotion was about. The Adike men’s path was blocked by one of the older men of the clan.

“Even in death, Azunonye, must we remain apart?” Uchendu asked.

“Must you beat a man into the dust when you see he is down already? We are afflicted; do you want to cause us more afflictions? Take yourselves away from here!” Azunonye bellowed.

“I told you this was a mistake father,” one of the Adike boys said.

Ibeh walked up to them and stood looking at Umenwa, the most handsome Adike, for a while. 

“Will you show me how to play the Uboaka?” Ibeh asked. Umenwa nodded. The younger boy turned his eyes to Elendu who was watching the situation unfold with keen eyes.

“Let them be Azunonye, we are all dying, let us all die together,” Elendu said. 

They sat away from the rest of the group, keeping their distance as they always did. Ibeh sat with them, every night from that first night. He watched Umenwa play the ubo, a small halfmoon bowl, with strings running across it. He balanced it between his thighs and plucked the strings gently. It was usually a sombre tune, one that made drooping heads fall farther into chests. A solitary voice took up the dirge from the centre of the square; it was Nene’s. Other voices took up the dirge from the four corners, and soon the square turned a din of voices rising above petty differences to lament a shared fate. The outcasts had been dying just like the freeborn. What stops them from singing together?

VIII

Umenwa plucked at the strings of his uboaka. This was a little upbeat tune, less sad than that of last night. Ibeh sat beside him, watching the gentle movement of his fingers over the strings.

“What happens when we’ve lost all hope?” Ibeh asked.

“We die before we die,” Umenwa replied sombrely. Ibeh kept quiet for a while, listening to the music of the thumb piano. It was soothing, like incense, floating in every space before it and attaching itself to skin pores.

“Will you remember me when I die?” Ibeh asked, his large eyes boring into Umenwa.

“I will, but for how long? I might even die before you do?”

“I will remember you.” Ibeh said.

“That will be good,” he replied. Ibeh took the uboaka from his hands and balanced it on his laps and began to pluck at the strings. An old tune, one that they sang in happy times. Umenwa felt his face creasing into a smile.

“We need a party. Sitting on our hands in this humdrum way, waiting for death to sweep us into nothingness is not a way to die.”

Umenwa stared at him askance, how can one talk of a party when spirits are so low it was as if they had all already been buried. But then, if they must go, shouldn’t they do it with a relish that will confuse death itself?

IX

It gave them something else to look forward to, something other than death. They cooked, like they did on those early days when sojourners returned from the tree, each household making a large platter so that the square is filled with several rich dishes lined up for anyone to help himself to. Nothing is ever taken home. They sat out on the square until late at night, eating and drinking palm wine until the stars bore witness to their revelry.

This soon fell out of practice, with everyone preferring to pick up whatever baby fell to them by lot and walk home. No food, no palm wine, no songs, no dances, no revelry.

Tonight, they danced and recalled happier days. Elendu had tears in his eyes as he walked back to his hut that night. Somehow, they had fallen gradually into a pattern of nothingness, walking like unfeeling and unthinking people, alive but not living. Maybe this is why they sought rest.

That night, he would die, like many others. It was the highest death recorded in one night since the tree fell. But he died with a smile on his face, like Aghadi who was the first to go, as did some of the men who died that night.

X

They trickled down to the square the next evening, tired from burying their dead. No one spoke to the other; they sat and stared into space like objects without life. The sky was bereft of stars. No one sang; each person retreated into their inner self. 

“We could have been sombre enough in our huts,” Umenwa said to Nene, who had her head on his chest. There were no outcast or freeborn., All men will die. They knew that now, so they had become united in their shared fate.

“Even with the silence, we are better together,” Nene said. Then something remarkable happened. 

“Must we all die?” Umenwa asked.

“Not all of us, I am carrying your child.”

Ifesie, Ozichukwu Chimezie studied English language and Literature at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. He edited the 49th edition of The Muse, a journal of creative and critical writing of the department of English and literary studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The prestigious journal was founded by Chinụa Achebe in 1963. Ozichukwu was the runner up in Panacea’s 2019 short fiction contest, he made Lunaris Review’s 2020 Toyin Falaola Prize longlist. His works appear on Artslounge, The Muse, Lunaris Review and elsewhere.