Who Fears Death (18 page)

“I’m . . . I’m not properly dressed,” I said, yanking may arms away. I felt the tears coming back. Life was out there and death was, too. I feared both now. They pulled me from bed, unwrapped my night rapa and pulled a green dress over my head. We went outside and sat on the front steps of the house. The sun was warm on my face. There was no red haze blocking it, no sickly fuzzy mold growing on the ground, no smoke in the air, no looming death. After a while I quietly said, “Thank you.”

“You look better,” Binta said. “Sunshine heals. My mother says that you should open the curtains everyday because the sunlight kills the bacteria and such.”

“You made your father breathe,” Luyu said, her elbow on my knee.

“No,” I said, grimly. “Papa had passed. I only made his body breathe.”

“That was then,” Luyu said.

I sucked my teeth and looked away, irritated.

“Oh,” Diti said. Then she nodded. “Aro will teach her.”

“Right,” Luyu said. “She can do it already. She just doesn’t know how.”

“Eh?” Binta said, looking confused.

“Onyesonwu, do you know if you can do it?” Luyu asked.

“I don’t know,” I snapped.

“She can,” Diti said. “And I think your mother is right. That’s why she worked so hard to keep you alive. Mother’s intuition. You’re going to be famous.”

I laughed at this. I suspected that I’d be more infamous than famous. “So you think my mother would’ve allowed us both to die out there in the desert if she didn’t think I was so special?”

“Yes,” Diti said looking serious.

“Or if you’d have come out a boy,” Luyu added. “Your biological father is evil, and if you were a boy you would have been, too, I think. That’s what he wanted.”

Again we were quiet. Then Diti asked, “So will you stop going to school?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“What was it like with Mwita?” Luyu asked, smirking.

It was as if speaking his name summoned him, for there he was coming up the road. Luyu and Diti snickered. Binta patted my shoulder. He wore light tan pants and a long matching caftan. His clothes matched his skin so well that he looked more like a spirit than a person. I’d always avoided wearing this color for this very reason.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Not as good as it was for you and Onyesonwu a few nights ago, I hear,” Luyu said under her breath. Diti and Binta giggled and Mwita looked at me.

“Good afternoon, Mwita,” I said. “I-I’ve told them everything.” Mwita frowned. “You didn’t ask me.”

“Should I have?”

“You promised me secrecy.”

He was right. “Sorry,” I said.

Mwita looked at the three of them. “They can be trusted?” he asked me. “Completely,” Binta said.

“Onyesonwu is our Eleventh Rite mate, there should be no secrets between us, Mwita,” Luyu said.

“I don’t respect the Eleventh Rite,” Mwita said.

Luyu bristled. Diti gasped, “How can you . . .”

Luyu held up a hand to silence Diti. She turned to Mwita with a hard face. “Just as we keep your secrets, we expect you to respect Onyesonwu as a woman of Jwahir. I don’t care what kind of-of juju you’re capable of.”

Mwita rolled his eyes. “Done,” he said. “Onyesonwu, how much did you . . .”

“Everything,” I said. “If it weren’t for them coming today, you’d have found me in my bed losing my . . . self.”

“Okay,” Mwita said, nodding. “Then you all have to understand that you’re connected to her now. Not by some primitive rite, but by something real.” Luyu rolled her eyes, Diti glowered at him, and Binta looked at Onyesonwu with surprise.

“Mwita, stop being such a camel’s penis,” I said, annoyed.

“Women always have to have companions,” Mwita mused.

“And men always have false senses of entitlement,” I said.

Mwita gave me a dark look and I gazed back. Then he took my hand and massaged it. “Aro wants you to come by tonight,” he said. “It’s time.”

“YOU TOLD YOUR FRIENDS?” Aro asked. “Why?”

I rubbed my forehead. On the way to Aro’s hut, I’d had one of my headaches and been forced to lean myself against a tree for fifteen minutes until it passed. The headache was mostly gone.

“They helped me,
Oga.
Then they asked so I told them,” I said.

“You do understand that now they’re part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“You’ll see.”

I sighed. “I shouldn’t have told them.”

“Can’t be helped now,” Aro said. “So, answers. You will understand much tonight. But first, Onyesonwu, I have talked to Mwita about this and now I talk to you, though I wonder if I’m wasting my words. I know what you two did.”

I felt my face grow hot.

“You possess both ugliness and beauty. Even to my eyes, you’re confusing. Mwita can only see your beauty. So he can’t help himself. But you can.”

“Oga,”
I said trying to hold calm. “I’m no different from Mwita. We’re both human, we should both make the effort.”

“Don’t deceive yourself.”

“I’m not d . . .”

“And don’t interrupt me.”

“Then don’t continue with these assumptions! If you’re going to teach me, I don’t want to hear any of that! I’ll stop having intercourse with Mwita. Okay. I apologize. But he and I will both make the effort to refrain. Like two humans!” I was shouting now. “Flawed, imperfect creatures! That’s what we
both
are,
Oga!
That’s what we ALL are!”

He stood up. I didn’t move, my heart pounding hard in my chest. “Okay,” Aro said with a smirk. “I will try.”

“Good.”

“However, you are never to speak to me as you just did. You’re learning from me. I am your superior.” He paused. “You may know and understand me, but if we came to blows again, I’d kill you first . . . easily and without hesitation.” He sat back down. “You and Mwita are not to have intercourse. Not only will it disrupt your learning, but if you were to become pregnant, you’d risk a lot more than your own and the child’s life.

“This happened to a woman long ago who was learning the Points. She was too early in her pregnancy for her Master be aware of it. When she attempted a simple exercise, the entire town was wiped out. Disappeared as if it never existed.” Aro seemed satisfied with my shocked look. “You are now on the road to something very powerful but unstable. Have you seen your birth father’s eye since you were initiated?”

“No,” I said.

Aro nodded. “He won’t even try to watch you now. That is how potent your path is. If you simply avoid meeting him face-to-face, you’ll be safe.” He paused. “Let’s start. Where we begin is up to you. Ask me what you wish to know.”

“I want to know the Great Mystic Points,” I said.

“Build a foundation first. You know nothing about the Points, so you aren’t even prepared to ask about them. To get the answers, you must have the right questions.”

I thought for a moment, then I had my question. “Papa’s first wife,” I said. “Why didn’t you teach her?”

“You wish me to apologize for my previous mistakes, too,” he said.

I didn’t but I said, “Yes. I do.”

“Women are difficult,” he said. “Njeri was like you. Wild and arrogant. Her mother was the same way.” He sighed. “It was for the same reason I refused you. It was a mistake to refuse to teach her at least minor jujus. She’d have failed initiation.”

I hoped Njeri heard his words. I believe she did. “Well . . . Okay. I guess, my next question is . . . Who was she?”

I wasn’t surprised that Aro understood I was referring to the woman whose death the man in black had forced me to experience. “Ask Sola,” he snapped.

“The man who initiated me?” I asked.

Aro nodded.

“Then who is Sola?”

“A sorcerer like me but older. He’s had more time to gather, absorb and give.”

“Why’s his skin so white? Is he human?”

Aro laughed loudly at this, as if remembering a joke. “Yes,” he said. “He throws the bones and reads your future. If you’re worthy, he shows you death. You have to ride through death to pass, but riding through it doesn’t mean you pass. That’s decided afterward. Almost all who pass through death pass initiation. There are a few . . . like Mwita, who are denied for some reason.”

“
Why didn’t Mwita pass?”

“I’m not sure. Neither is Sola.”

“What of you, Aro? What was it like for you? What’s your story?”

He looked at me in that way again, as if I wasn’t worthy. He didn’t know he did it. He couldn’t control it.
My mother was right,
I thought.
All men bear stupidity.
I laugh at these thoughts now. If it were only so simple for women bear it too.

“Why do you look at me that way?” I snapped before I could stop myself.

He got up and walked toward the desert, a place that now also held a bit of mystery for me. I got up and followed. We walked until his hut was barely in sight.

“I’m from Gadi, a village on the fourth of the Seven Rivers,” he said.

“That’s where that storyteller was from,” I said.

“Yes, but I’m much older than she,” he said. “I knew it before the Okeke started revolting. My parents were fishermen.” He turned to me and smiled, “Shall I call my mother a fisherwoman? Does that suit you?”

I smiled back, “Yes, very much.”

He harrumphed. “I’m the tenth of eleven children. All of us fished. My grandfather on my father’s side was a sorcerer. He beat me the day he saw me change into a water weasel. I was ten years old. Then he taught me everything he knew. ”

“I had been changing my shape since I was nine. The first time I did it, I’d been sitting at the river, a fishing stick in my hands, and a water weasel had come up to me. It grabbed me with its eyes. I remember nothing of those moments, only coming back to myself in the middle of the river. I’d have drowned if one of my sisters hadn’t been in her boat nearby and seen me floundering.”

“I went through initiation at thirteen. My grandfather knew so much but he was still a slave, as we all were. No, not all. Eventually I refused the fate set for me by the Great Book. One day, I saw my mother beaten bloody for laughing at a Nuru man who had tripped and fallen. I ran to help her but before I could get to her, my father grabbed and beat me so badly that I lost consciousness.

“When I came to, right there, I changed myself into an eagle and I flew away. I don’t know how long I remained an eagle. Many years. When I finally decided to change back, I was no longer a boy. I became a man named Aro, who traveled and listened and watched. This is me. You see?”

I saw. But there were parts about himself that he was leaving out. Like his relationship with the Ada. “Your initiation,” I said. “What did you . . .”

“I saw death, as you did. You’ll recover, eventually, Onyesonwu. It was something you had to see. It happens to us all. We fear what we don’t know.”

“But that poor woman,” I said.

“It happens to us all. Don’t weep for her. She’s reached the wilderness. Congratulate her instead.”

“Wilderness?” I said.

“After death, the path leads there,” he said. He smirked. “Sometimes before death, too. You were forced there the first time. The clitoris or penis, when put through that kind of trauma, will take sensitive ones there. This was why I was worried about you being circumcised. You must pass into the wilderness during initiation. Being Eshu saved you, for nothing taken from an Eshu’s body is ever permanently gone until death.”

We walked for a few minutes as I mulled over these things. I wanted to be away from him, to sit and think. Aro implied that I had grown my clitoris back during initiation and removed it afterward, for I’d had to grow it again with Mwita. I wondered why I’d done that, removed it again? Jwahir’s customs were under my skin more than I realized.

“What happened to you that first day with the weasel?” I asked. “The day you almost drowned? Why does it happen like that?”

“I was visited. We all are.”

“By who?”

Aro shrugged. “Whoever must visit us to show us how to do what we can do.”

“Too much of this doesn’t make complete sense. There are holes in . . .”

“What makes you think that you should understand it all?” he asked. “That’s a lesson you have to learn, instead of being angry all the time. We’ll never know exactly why we are, what we are, and so on. All you can do is follow your path all the way to the wilderness, and then you continue along because that’s what must be.”

We followed our own footsteps back to the hut. I was glad. I’d had enough for one day. Little did I know that this was the mildest day of them all. This day was nothing.

IT ’S A DAY THAT I’VE PULLED UP MANY TIMES in the last year to remind me that life is also good. It was a Rest Day. The Rain Fest lasts four days and during those days no one works. Sprinklers made from capture stations are set up all around the market. People can huddle under umbrellas, watch singing acrobats, and buy boiled yam and stew, curry soup, and palm wine.

This memorable day was on the first festival day, when not much was going on other than people hanging around and catching up with one another. My mother was spending the afternoon with the Ada and Nana the Wise.

I made myself a cup of tea and sat on the front steps to watch people pass by. I’d slept well for once. No nightmares, no headaches. The sun felt good on my face. My tea tasted strong and delicious. This day was just before I started learning the Points. When I was still capable of relaxing.

Across the road, a young couple showed off their new baby to some friends. Nearby, two old men concentrated on a game of Warri. On the side of the road, a girl and two boys drew pictures with colored sand. The girl looked as if she’d be eleven soon . . . I shook my head. No, I wasn’t going to think about anything like that today. I looked up the road. I grinned. Mwita grinned back, his tan caftan blowing in the breeze.
Why does he insist on wearing that color?
I thought, though I kind of liked it. He sat beside me.