The Fishermen

Chapter 15: The Tadpole

THE TADPOLE

Hope was a tadpole:

The thing you caught and brought home with you in a can, but which, despite being kept in the right water, soon died. Father’s hope that we would grow up into many great people, his map of dreams, soon died despite how much he guarded it. My hope that my brothers would always be there, that we’d all give birth to children and have a clan, even though we nurtured it in the most primal of waters, also died. So did the hope of our immigration to Canada, just as it was close to being fulfilled.

That hope came with the New Year, bringing in a new spirit, and a peace that belied the sadness of the past year. It seemed that sadness would not return to our home. Father repainted his car a shiny navy blue and talked often, even incessantly, of Mr Bayo’s coming and of our potential immigration to Canada. He started to call us pet names again: Mother, Omalicha, the beautiful; David, Onye-Eze, the king; Nkem, Nnem, his mother. He prefixed Obembe’s name and mine with “fisherman.” Mother, too, recovered her weight. My brother was, however, untouched by this change. Nothing appealed to him. No news, no matter how small, pleased him. He was not moved by the idea of flying in an airplane or living in a city where we could ride through the streets on bicycles and skateboards like Mr Bayo’s children. When Father first announced the possibility of this, the news had come to me as big, the animal equivalent of a cow or an elephant, but to my brother, a mere ant. And when he and I went into our room later, he pinched the ant-sized promise of a better future between his fingers and threw it out of the window, and said, “I must avenge our brothers.”

But Father was determined. He woke us in the morning of January 5th — the same way he’d come into our room exactly a year before, to announce that he was moving to Yola — to announce that he was travelling to Lagos, filling me with a déjà vu. I’d heard someone say that the end of most things often bears a resemblance — even if faint — to their beginnings. This was true of us.

“I’m leaving for Lagos right now,” he announced. He wore his usual spectacles, his eyes hidden behind them, and was dressed in an old short-sleeved shirt on whose front pocket was a badge of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

“I am taking your photographs with me to apply for your travel passports. Bayo will have arrived in Nigeria by the time I return and then we will all go together to Lagos for your Canadian visa.”

Obembe and I had had our heads shaved two days before, and then followed Father to “our photographer,” Mr Little, as we called him, who operated Little-by-Little Photos. Mr Little had made us sit in soft-cushioned chairs over which was a large fabric awning with a shiny fluorescent bulb hanging above it. Behind the chairs was a white piece of cloth that covered a third of the wall. He’d flashed a blinding light, thumped his finger and asked my brother to take the seat.

Now, Father brought out two fifty-naira notes, and put them on the table. “Be careful,” he mouthed. Then turning, just like the morning he moved to Yola, he was gone.

After a breakfast of cornflakes and fried potatoes, while fetching water from the well to fill the drums, my brother announced it was time for “the final attempts.”

“We will go find him once Mama and the kids are gone,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“The River,” he said without turning to look at me. “To kill him like fish, with hooked fishing lines.”

I nodded.

“I have traced him two times now to the river. He seems to go there every evening.”

“He does?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said and nodded.

For the first few days of the New Year he did not talk about the mission, but brooded and stayed aloof, often sneaking out of the house especially in the evenings. He’d return and write things down in a notebook, and then make matchstick sketches of things. I did not ask him where he went at any time, and he did not tell me either.

“I have been monitoring him for some time now. He goes there every evening,” my brother said. “He goes there almost every day and bathes there, then he sits under the mango tree where we saw him. If we kill him there,” he paused as if a contradictory thought had suddenly flashed across his mind, “no one will find out.”

“When shall we go?” I mumbled, nodding.

“He goes there at sunset.”

Later, after Mother and the kids had gone and we were left alone, my brother pointed towards our bed and said: “We have the fishing lines here.”

He dragged the long staffs from under the bed. They were long barbed sticks with sickle-like hooks attached to their ends. The lines had been shortened so much that it seemed the hooks were pinned directly to the long sticks, making them unrecognizable. I knew it was my brother who had transformed this fishing equipment into a weapon. This thought froze me.

“I brought them here after I traced him to the river yesterday,” he said. “I’m now ready.”

He must have fashioned the weapons during the times he disappeared from sight without telling me. I’d become suddenly filled with fear and a pond of dark imaginations. I’d searched for him frantically all over the compound wondering, feverishly, where he was, until a stubborn thought gripped me and wouldn’t let me go. In response, I hurried to the well, breathing heavily until I prized the well’s lid open, but it fell from my hand and slammed shut as if in protest. The noise scared a bird in the tangerine tree and it leapt up with a loud call. I waited while the dust that was raised from the splintered concrete — made by the force of the closure — blew past. Then I opened the well again and peered into it. All I could see was the sun shining from behind me into the water’s top, revealing the fine sand at the bottom of it and a small plastic bucket half-buried in the clay bed beneath. I looked closely, shading my eyes until I became convinced he was not there. Then I closed the well, panting, disappointed at my own grim imagination.

The sight of the weapons made the mission real and concrete to me, as if I’d just been told about it for the first time. As my brother placed them back under the bed, I remembered all that Father had said that morning. I remembered the school we’d go to, with white people, to get the best Western education Father had always talked about as if it was a sliver of paradise which, in some way, had eluded even him. But it was abundant in Canada like leaves in a forest. I wanted to go there, and I wanted my brother to come with me. He was still talking about the river, how we were to position ourselves unseen at the banks and wait for the madman when I burst out with a cry of “No, Obe!”

He was startled.

“No, Obe, let’s not do it. Look, we are going to Canada, we are going to live there.” I continued, taking advantage of his silence, tasting the sap of my own courage. “Let us not do it. Let us go, we could grow up and become like Chuck Norris or Commando and come here and shoot him, even—”

I stopped abruptly because he’d begun to shake his head. Then, just then, I saw the fury in his tearful eyes.

“What, what is it?” I stammered.

“You are a fool!” he shouted. “You don’t know what you are saying. You want us to run away, run away to Canada? Where is Ikenna? Where, I ask you, is Boja?”

The beautiful streets of Canada were blurring out of my mind now as he spoke.

“You don’t know,” he said. “But I know. I know, too, where they are now. You may leave; I don’t need your help. I will do it all by myself.”

At once, the images of children riding on bicycles faded from my mind and a sudden desperation to please him seized me. “No, no, Obe,” I said, “I will go with you.”

“You won’t!” he cried, and then stormed out.

I sat still for a while, then, too afraid to remain in the room and fearing my dead brothers may have heard I did not want to avenge them as my brother had said they could, I went to the balcony and sat there.

My brother was away for a long time, gone to a place I would never know. After I’d stayed on the balcony for a while, I went to the backyard where one of Mother’s multi-coloured wrappas hung on the ropes on which we dried our laundry. Using a low branch, I climbed up the tangerine tree and sat there thinking of everything.

When Obembe came back later, he headed straight to our room. I climbed down from the tree and followed him in, got on my knees and began pleading that I wanted to join him.

“Don’t you want to go to Canada anymore?” he asked.

“Not without you,” I replied.

For a moment he stood still, then, walking to the other side of the room, said: “Stand up.”

I did.

“Listen, I want to go to Canada, too. That’s exactly why I want us to do this quickly and pack our things. Don’t you know that Father has gone to get the visas?”

I nodded.

“Listen, we will be unhappy if we leave Nigeria without doing it. Listen, let me tell you,” he said, drawing nearer. “I am older than you and I know much more than you do.”

I agreed with a nod.

“So, I am telling you, now listen, if we go to Canada without doing this, we will hate it there. We will not be happy. Do you want to be unhappy?”

“No.”

“Me neither,” he said.

“Let us go,” I said, sufficiently convinced. “I want to do it.”

But he hesitated. “Is that the truth?”

“The truth.”

He searched my face with his eyes. “The truth?”

“Yes, the truth,” I said, nodding again and again.

“Okay, let us go then.”

It was late in the afternoon, and shadows had appeared like dark frescoes everywhere. My brother had put the weapons outside behind the shutters, covered with an old wrappa. That way, Mother would not see them. I waited for him to go behind our window and bring the fishing lines. He handed me a torchlight he’d also brought.

“In case we have to wait till it gets dark,” he mumbled as I took it. “It is the best time now, we will surely find him there.”

We went out into the evening like the fishermen we once were, carrying hooked fishing lines concealed in old wrappas. The appearance of the horizon evoked a strong feeling of déjà vu in me. Its face was rouged, the sun a hanging orb of red. As we went towards Abulu’s truck, I noticed that the wooden pole of the street had been knocked down, the craning lamp smashed into bits, and the cables that held the bulbs in the lamp head unfurled so that the fluorescent core had snapped and now sagged low. We avoided places where we might be seen by the street people, who already knew our stories and who would gaze at us with sympathy or even with suspicion as we went by. We’d planned to lie in wait for the madman at the path between the esan bushes leading to the river.

As we waited, my brother told me how he’d found some men at the Omi-Ala before in a strange posture, as if worshipping some deity, and hoped they wouldn’t be there this time. He was still speaking when we heard Abulu’s voice approaching the river, singing happily. The madman stopped in front of a bungalow where two men, naked to the waist, sat across from each other on a wooden bench, playing Ludo. There was a glass rectangular slate with the photo of a white woman model on it. Following a marked track, the men rolled the dice around the board until they reached the prize lines. Abulu knelt across from them, vigorously babbling and shaking his head. This was dusk, the time of the day when he usually transformed into Abulu the extraordinary, and his eyes became that of a spirit and not of a man. His prayers were deep, a sort of groaning in front of the men who kept on playing their games as though they were oblivious that he was praying for them, as though one of them was not Mr Kingsley and the other, a Yoruba name ending with ke. I grasped the end of the prophecy: “… when this child of yours, Mr Kingsley, said he was ready to sacrifice his own daughter for money ritual. He will be shot to death by armed robbers, and his blood will be splashed on the window of his car. Lord of hosts, The Sower of Green Things, says he will be—”

He was still speaking when the man Abulu had called “Mr Kingsley,” jumped to his feet and dashed into the bungalow in fury. He emerged brandishing a machete, spitting murderous curses as he chased Abulu down to where a path carved itself out between the esan and stopped. The man returned to his house, warning that he would kill Abulu if he came near his house again.

We edged away from there and made towards the river after Abulu. I followed my brother like a child who was being dragged to the scaffold of corporal punishment, dreading the whip but unable to turn away. At first we walked slowly, Obembe holding the wrapped lines, and I the torch, so as not to arouse suspicion from people around, but once we entered the area where the Celestial Church blocked the street from sight, we picked up speed. A small goat lay on its belly across from their door, a map of yellow urine beside it. An old piece of newspaper, apparently ferried by wind, stuck halfway to the door of the house like a poster, while the rest of it lay open on the dirt.

“Let us wait here,” my brother said, trying to catch his breath.

We were almost at the end of the path leading to the bank. I could see that he, too, was afraid, and that, like me, the udder of courage from which we’d drunk our fill had been drained, and was now shrunken like a crone’s breast. He spat and wiped it into the earth with his canvas shoe. I saw that we were close enough now, for we could hear Abulu singing and clapping from the direction of the river.

“He is there, let us attack him now,” I said, my heartbeat quickening again.

“No,” he whispered wagging his head, “we have to wait a bit to make sure no one is coming. Then we will go and kill him.”

“But it is getting dark?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. He looked around, craning his head into the distance. “Let’s just be sure the men are not here when we do it — the two men.”

I noticed his voice was now cracked, like one who’d been crying. I imagined us turning into the ferocious matchstick men he’d drawn — those fearless ones who were capable of killing the madman, but I feared that I was not poised to be as brave as the fictitious boys who’d finished the madman with stones, knives and hooked fishing lines. I was absorbed in these thoughts when my brother unwrapped the weapons and gave me one. The sticks were very long, taller than both of us when we held them to the ground like spears of warriors of old. Then as we waited, hearing a spontaneous splash of water and the singing and clapping, my brother threw a glance at me and I heard an unsaid Ready? And every time I heard it, my heartbeat would pause, and then pick up again as I waited anxiously for my brother’s order.

“Ben, are you afraid?” he asked me after he gave me the hooked fishing line and tossed the wrappa into the thickets. “Tell me, are you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why then are you afraid? We are about to avenge our brothers, Ikenna and Boja.” He wiped his brow, dropped his line into the bed of grass and placed his hand on my shoulder.

He moved closer, and raising his hooked fishing line so that the wrappa fell off, embraced me.

“Listen, do not be afraid,” he whispered into my ear. “We are doing the right thing and God knows. We will be free.”

Too scared to tell him what I really wanted to say — that he should return and let us go back home; that I was afraid he could get hurt — I muttered the verbal smokescreen: “Let’s do it quickly.”

He looked at me, and his face lit slowly like a lantern’s light coming on. And I could tell, in that memorable moment, that the tender hands turning up the light were those of my dead brothers.

“We will!” my brother cried into the darkness.

He waited, then he rushed forward in the direction of the river, and I followed.

Later, after we got to the riverbank, I could not tell exactly why we had cried loudly as we lunged at Abulu. Perhaps it was because my heart stopped beating the moment I sprang to my feet and I wanted to stir it back to life, or perhaps it was because my brother had begun to sob as we made forward like soldiers of old or because my spirit had rolled before me like a ball across a pitch of muck. Abulu was lying on his back, facing the sky, singing aloud when we reached the shore. The river stretched out behind, its waters covered in a quilt of darkness. The madman’s eyes were closed and even though we’d lunged forward with a frantic cry spilling from the deep of our souls, he did not notice we were upon him. The djinn that seemed to suddenly possess us that moment leapt to the fore of my mind and tore every bit of my senses to shreds. We jabbed the hook of our lines blindly at his chest, his face, his hand, his head, his neck and everywhere we could, crying and weeping. The madman was frantic, mad, dazed. He flung his arms aloft to shield himself, running backwards, shouting and screaming. The blows perforated his flesh, boring bleeding holes and ripping out chunks of his flesh every time we pulled out the hooks. Although my eyes were mainly closed, when I opened them in flashes, I saw pieces of flesh unbuckling from his body, blood dripping from everywhere. His helpless cries shook the core of my being. But persistently, like caged birds, we flung our anger wild at him, leaping from bar to bar of the cage, from the roof to the floor. The madman jabbered about, his voice deafening, his body in flustered panic. We kept hitting, pulling, striking, screaming, crying, and sobbing until weakened, covered in blood, and wailing like a child, Abulu fell backwards into the water in a wild splash. I’d once been told that if a man wanted something he did not have, no matter how elusive that thing was, if his feet do not restrain him from chasing it, he would eventually grab it. This was our case.

As we watched his body being ferried away spouting blood on the darkening waters, like a wounded leviathan, we heard voices behind us, speaking aloud in Hausa. We turned in frenzy and saw the silhouettes of two men running towards us, torches flashing. Before we could lift our legs, one of them was upon me, holding my trousers from behind. The smell of alcohol was heavy around him and domineering. He wrestled me to the ground, speaking a rushed, smattering language I could not understand. I saw my brother running along the trees, calling my name aloud as the other man, drunk, too, stumbled after him. The man held my left arm in a vice-like grip, and it seemed that if I pulled harder, my arm would rip out. As I struggled to wrestle myself free, I grabbed the hooked fishing line and hit the man with the hooked end with all the courage I could muster. He cried out and stamped about in searing pain. His torch fell down and showered a momentary flash on his boot. I knew at once that he was one of the soldiers we’d seen at the river the other day.

A dust devil of fear swallowed me. In frenzy, I ran away as fast as I could, between houses, bush paths, until I was close to Abulu’s decrepit truck. Then I stopped, dropped my hands to my knees and gasped for life, for air, for peace — all at once. As I stooped there on the ground, I saw the soldier, who had chased my brother, now running back towards the river. I crouched down behind Abulu’s truck to duck, my heart racing, afraid the man might have seen me while walking past. I waited, still, imagining the man would come up and drag me from behind the truck, but as I waited, I became reassured by the thought that he could not have seen me since there were no street lights around the truck, and the closest one in the distance had been broken, bent from its ballast, flies nestling around it like vultures congregating on carrion. Then, I crawled for a distance through the small patch of foliage between the truck and the escarpment behind our compound and ran home.

Because I knew Mother must have closed up and returned home, I took the backyard route, through the pig mire. A distant moon illuminated the night so the trees looked scary — like still monsters with dark, indecipherable heads. A bat flew past as I neared our compound’s fence, and I followed it with my eyes as it glided towards Igbafe’s house. I remembered his grandfather, the only person who may have seen Boja fall into the well. He’d died at a hospital outside the city in September. He was eighty-four. I was climbing the fence when I heard a whispering. There was Obembe, standing inside the compound, beside the well, waiting for me.

“Ben!” he whispered aloud, rising swiftly from the neck of the well.

“Obe,” I called out as I climbed.

“Where’s your line?” he asked, trying hard to catch his breath.

“I… left it there,” I stammered.

“Why?!”

“It stuck in the man’s hand.”

“It did?”

I nodded. “He almost caught me, the soldier. So I hit him with it.”

My brother did not seem to have understood, so as he led me to the tomato garden at the back of the compound, I told him how it had happened. We then removed our blood-stained shirts and flung them over the fence like kites into the bush behind our compound. My brother took up his hooked fishing line to hide it behind the garden. But when he flashed the torchlight, I saw a patina of Abulu’s bloodied flesh impaled to the hook. While he knocked the hook against the wall to remove it, I crouched beside the wall and retched into the dirt.

“Don’t worry,” he said, the chirping of the night crickets punctuating his speech. “It is finished.”

“It is finished,” a voice repeated in my ears. I nodded and my brother, dropping the line, inched forward and embraced me.