Girls at War (7 page)

Their widowed mother, Martha, was a hard-luck woman. She had had an auspicious beginning long, long ago as a pioneer pupil at St. Monica’s, then newly founded by white women-missionaries to train the future wives of native evangelists. Most of her schoolmates of those days had married young teachers and were now wives of pastors and one or two even of bishops. But Martha, encouraged by her teacher, Miss Robinson, had married a young carpenter trained by white artisan-missionaries at the Onitsha Industrial Mission, a trade school founded in the fervent belief that if the black man was to be redeemed he needed to learn the Bible alongside manual skills. (Miss Robinson was very keen on the Industrial Mission whose Principal she herself later married.) But in spite of the
bright hopes of those early evangelical days carpentry never developed very much in the way teaching and clerical jobs were to develop. So when Martha’s husband died (or as those missionary artisans who taught him long ago might have put it—when he was called to higher service in the heavenly mansions by Him who was Himself once a Carpenter on earth) he left her in complete ruins. It had been a bad-luck marriage from the start. To begin with she had had to wait twenty whole years after their marriage for her first child to be born, so that now she was virtually an old woman with little children to care for and little strength left for her task. Not that she was bitter about that. She was simply too overjoyed that God in His mercy had lifted her curse of barrenness to feel a need to grumble. What she nearly did grumble about was the disease that struck her husband and paralysed his right arm for five years before his death. It was a trial too heavy and unfair.

Soon after Vero withdrew from school Mr. Mark Emenike, the big government man of their village who lived in the capital, called on Martha. His Mercedes 220S pulled up on the side of the main road and he walked the 500 yards or so of a narrow unmotorable path to the widow’s hut. Martha was perplexed at the visit of such a great man and as she bustled about for colanut she kept wondering. Soon the great man himself in the hurried style of modern people cleared up the mystery.

“We have been looking for a girl to take care of our new baby and today someone told me to inquire about your girl …”

At first Martha was reluctant, but when the great man offered her λ5 for the girl’s services in the first
year—plus feeding and clothing and other things—she began to soften.

“Of course it is not money I am concerned about,” she said, “but whether my daughter will be well cared for.”

“You don’t have to worry about that, Ma. She will be treated just like one of our own children. My wife is a Social Welfare Officer and she knows what it means to care for children. Your daughter will be happy in our home, I can tell you that. All she will be required to do is carry the little baby and give it its milk while my wife is away at the office and the older children at school.”

“Vero and her sister Joy were also at school last term,” said Martha without knowing why she said it.

“Yes, I know. That thing the government did is bad, very bad. But my belief is that a child who will be somebody will be somebody whether he goes to school or not. It is all written here, in the palm of the hand.”

Martha gazed steadily at the floor and then spoke without raising her eyes. “When I married I said to myself: My daughters will do better than I did. I read Standard Three in those days and I said they will all go to College. Now they will not have even the little I had thirty years ago. When I think of it my heart wants to burst.”

“Ma, don’t let it trouble you too much. As I said before, what any one of us is going to be is all written here, no matter what the difficulties.”

“Yes. I pray God that what is written for these children will be better than what He wrote for me and my husband.”

“Amen!… And as for this girl if she is obedient and good in my house what stops my wife and me sending her to school when the baby is big enough to
go about on his own? Nothing. And she is still a small girl. How old is she?”

“She is ten.”

“You see? She is only a baby. There is plenty of time for her to go to school.”

He knew that the part about sending her to school was only a manner of speaking. And Martha knew too. But Vero who had been listening to everything from a dark corner of the adjoining room did not. She actually worked out in her mind the time it would take the baby to go about on his own and it came out quite short. So she went happily to live in the capital in a great man’s family and looked after a baby who would soon be big enough to go about on his own and then she would have a chance to go to school.

Vero was a good girl and very sharp. Mr. Emenike and his wife were very pleased with her. She had the sense of a girl twice her age and was amazingly quick to learn.

Mrs. Emenike, who had almost turned sour over her recent difficulty in getting good servants, was now her old self again. She could now laugh about the fiasco of free primadu. She told her friends that now she could go anywhere and stay as long as she liked without worrying about her little man. She was so happy with Vero’s work and manners that she affectionately nicknamed her “Little Madame.” The nightmare of the months following Abigail’s departure was mercifully at an end. She had sought high and low then for another baby-nurse and just couldn’t find one. One rather over-ripe young lady had presented herself and asked for seven pounds a month. But it wasn’t just the money. It was her general air—a kind of labour-exchange attitude which knew all the rights in the labour code, including presumably the right to have
abortions in your servants’ quarters and even have a go at your husband. Not that Mark was that way but the girl just wasn’t right. After her no other person had turned up until now.

Every morning as the older Emenike children—three girls and a boy—were leaving for school in their father’s Mercedes or their mother’s little noisy Fiat, Vero would bring the baby out to the steps to say bye-bye. She liked their fine dresses and shoes—she’d never worn any shoes in her life—but what she envied them most was simply the going away every morning, going away from home, from familiar things and tasks. In the first months this envy was very, very mild. It lay beneath the joy of the big going away from the village, from her mother’s drab hut, from eating palm-kernels that twisted the intestines at midday, from bitter-leaf soup without fish. That going away was something enormous. But as the months passed the hunger grew for these other little daily departures in fine dresses and shoes and sandwiches and biscuits wrapped in beautiful paper-napkins in dainty little school bags. One morning, as the Fiat took the children away and little Goddy began to cry on Vero’s back, a song sprang into her mind to quieten him:

All morning she sang her little song and was pleased with it. When Mr. Emenike dropped the other children home at one o’clock and took off again Vero taught them her new song. They all liked it and for
days it supplanted “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Simple Simon” and the other songs they brought home from school.

“The girl is a genius,” said Mr. Emenike when the new song finally got to him. His wife who heard it first had nearly died from laughter. She had called Vero and said to her, “So you make fun of my car, naughty girl.” Vero was happy because she saw not anger but laughter in the woman’s eyes.

“She is a genius,” said her husband. “And she hasn’t been to school.”

“And besides she knows you ought to buy me a new car.”

“Never mind, dear. Another year and you can have that sports car.”

“Na so.”

“So you don’t believe me? Just you wait and see.”

More weeks and months passed by and little Goddy was beginning to say a few words but still no one spoke about Vero’s going to school. She decided it was Goddy’s fault, that he wasn’t growing fast enough. And he was becoming rather too fond of riding on her back even though he could walk perfectly well. In fact his favourite words were “Cayi me.” Vero made a song about that too and it showed her mounting impatience:

She sang it all morning until the other children returned from school and then she stopped. She only sang this one when she was alone with Goddy.

*   *   *

One afternoon Mrs. Emenike returned from work and noticed a redness on Vero’s lips.

“Come here,” she said, thinking of her expensive lipstick. “What is that?”

It turned out, however, not to be lipstick at all, only her husband’s red ink. She couldn’t help a smile then.

“And look at her finger-nails! And toes too! So, Little Madame, that’s what you do when we go out and leave you at home to mind the baby? You dump him somewhere and begin to paint yourself. Don’t ever let me catch you with that kind of nonsense again; do you hear?” It occurred to her to strengthen her warning somehow if only to neutralize the smile she had smiled at the beginning.

“Do you know that red ink is poisonous? You want to kill yourself? Well, little lady you have to wait till you leave my house and return to your mother.”

That did it, she thought in glowing self-satisfaction. She could see that Vero was suitably frightened. Throughout the rest of that afternoon she walked about like a shadow.

When Mr. Emenike came home she told him the story as he ate a late lunch. And she called Vero for him to see.

“Show him your finger-nails,” she said. “And your toes, Little Madame!”

“I see,” he said waving Vero away. “She is learning fast. Do you know the proverb which says that when mother cow chews giant grass her little calves watch her mouth?”

“Who is a cow? You rhinoceros!”

“It is only a proverb, my dear.”

A week or so later Mrs. Emenike just home from work noticed that the dress she had put on the baby in
the morning had been changed into something much too warm.

“What happened to the dress I put on him?”

“He fell down and soiled it. So I changed him,” said Vero. But there was something very strange in her manner. Mrs. Emenike’s first thought was that the child must have had a bad fall.

“Where did he fall?” she asked in alarm. “Where did he hit on the ground? Bring him to me! What is all this? Blood? No? What is it? My God has killed me! Go and bring me the dress. At once!”

“I washed it,” said Vero beginning to cry, a thing she had never done before. Mrs. Emenike rushed out to the line and brought down the blue dress and the white vest both heavily stained red!.

She seized Vero and beat her in a mad frenzy with both hands. Then she got a whip and broke it all on her until her face and arms ran with blood. Only then did Vero admit making the child drink a bottle of red ink. Mrs. Emenike collapsed into a chair and began to cry.

Mr. Emenike did not wait to have lunch. They bundled Vero into the Mercedes and drove her the forty miles to her mother in the village. He had wanted to go alone but his wife insisted on coming, and taking the baby too. He stopped on the main road as usual. But he didn’t go in with the girl. He just opened the door of the car, pulled her out and his wife threw her little bundle of clothes after her. And they drove away again.

Martha returned from the farm tired and grimy. Her children rushed out to meet her and to tell her that Vero was back and was crying in their bedroom. She practically dropped her basket and went to see; but she couldn’t make any sense of her story.

“You gave the baby red ink? Why? So that you can go to school? How? Come on. Let’s go to their place. Perhaps they will stay in the village overnight. Or else they will have told somebody there what happened. I don’t understand your story. Perhaps you stole something. Not so?”

“Please Mama don’t take me back there. They will kill me.”

“Come on, since you won’t tell me what you did.”

She seized her wrist and dragged her outside. Then in the open she saw all the congealed blood on whipmarks all over her head, face, neck and arms. She swallowed hard.

“Who did this?”

“My Madame.”

“And what did you say you did? You must tell me.”

“I gave the baby red ink.”

“All right, then let’s go.”

Vero began to wail louder. Martha seized her by the wrist again and they set off. She neither changed her work clothes nor even washed her face and hands. Every woman—and sometimes the men too—they passed on the way screamed on seeing Vero’s whipmarks and wanted to know who did it. Martha’s reply to all was “I don’t know yet. I am going to find out.”

She was lucky. Mr. Emenike’s big car was there, so they had not returned to the capital. She knocked at their front door and walked in. Mrs. Emenike was sitting there in the parlour giving bottled food to the baby but she ignored the visitors completely neither saying a word to them nor even looking in their direction. It was her husband who descended the stairs a little later who told the story. As soon as the meaning dawned on Martha—that the red ink was given to the baby
to drink
and that the motive was to
encompass its death—she screamed, with two fingers plugging her ears, that she wanted to hear no more. At the same time she rushed outside, tore a twig off a flowering shrub and by clamping her thumb and forefinger at one end and running them firmly along its full length stripped it of its leaves in one quick movement. Armed with the whip she rushed back to the house crying “I have heard an abomination!” Vero was now screaming and running around the room.

“Don’t touch her here in my house,” said Mrs. Emenike, cold and stern as an oracle, noticing her visitors for the first time. “Take her away from here at once. You want to show me your shock. Well I don’t want to see. Go and show your anger in your own house. Your daughter did not learn murder here in my house.”