The Fishermen

Chapter 3: The Eagle

THE EAGLE

Father was an eagle:

The mighty bird that planted his nest high above the rest of his peers, hovering and watching over his young eagles, the way a king guards his throne. Our home — the three-bedroom bungalow he bought the year Ikenna was born — was his cupped eyrie; a place he ruled with a clenched fist. This is why everyone has come to believe that had he not left Akure, our home would not have become vulnerable in the first place, and that the kind of adversity that befell us would not have happened.

Father was an unusual man. When everyone was taking up the gospel of birth control, he — an only child who had grown up with his mother longing for siblings — had a dream of a house full of children, a clan from his body. This dream fetched him much ridicule in the biting economy of 1990s Nigeria, but he swatted off the insults as if they were mere mosquitoes. He sketched a pattern for our future — a map of dreams. Ikenna was to be a doctor, although later, after Ikenna showed much fascination with planes at an early age, and encouraged by the fact that there were aviation schools in Enugu, Makurdi and Onitsha where Ikenna could learn to fly, Father changed it to pilot. Boja was to be a lawyer, and Obembe the family’s medical doctor. Although I had opted to be a veterinarian, to work in a forest or to tend animals at a zoo, anything that involved animals, Father decided I would be a professor. David, our younger brother, who was barely three in the year Father moved to Yola, was to be an engineer. A career was not readily chosen for Nkem, our one-year-old sister. Father said there was no need to decide such things for women.

Although we knew from the very beginning that fishing was nowhere on Father’s list, we did not think of it at the time. It became a concern from that night when Mother threatened to tell Father about our fishing, thereby kindling the fire of fear of Father’s wrath in us. She believed that we’d been pushed into doing it by bad spirits that must be exorcised by strokes of the whip. She knew we would rather wish the sun fell down and burned the earth with us on it than receive Father’s wracking Guerdon on the flesh of our buttocks. She said we’d forgotten that our Father was not the kind of man who would dip his foot in another shoe because his own was damp; he would rather trek the earth on bare feet.

When she went to the store with David and Nkem the following day, a Saturday, we attempted to destroy every evidence of our trade. Boja hurriedly concealed his hooked fishing lines and the extra one we had under rusting roofing sheets — leftovers from when the house was built in 1974—piled against the fence at our mother’s backyard tomato garden. Ikenna destroyed his fishing lines, and threw the broken pieces into the dump behind our fence.

Father visited that Saturday, precisely five days after we were caught fishing the river. Obembe and I made an exigent prayer on the eve of his visit, after I’d suggested that God could touch Father’s heart and make him refrain from whipping us. Together we knelt on the floor and prayed: “Lord Jesus, if you say you love us — Ikenna, Boja, Ben and me,” he began. “Don’t allow Father to visit again. Let him stay in Yola, please Jesus. Please listen to me: you know how hard he would whip us? Don’t you even know? Listen, he has cowhides, kobokos he bought from the meat-roasting mallam — that one is very painful! Listen, Jesus, if you let him come back and he whips us, we won’t go to Sunday school again, and we won’t sing and clap in church ever again! Amen.”

“Amen,” I repeated after him.

When Father arrived that afternoon the way he’d often done, honking at the gate, driving into the compound amidst joyful acclaim, my brothers and I did not go out to greet him. Ikenna had suggested we remain in the room and feign sleep because we could annoy Father the more if we went out to welcome him “just like that, as if we’d done nothing wrong.” So we gathered in Ikenna’s room, listening attentively to Father’s movements, waiting for the moment Mother would begin her report, for Mother was a patient storyteller. Each time Father returned, she would sit by him on the big lounge in the sitting room and detail how the house had fared in his absence — a breakdown of home needs and how they were met, whom she had borrowed from; of our school reports; of the church. She would particularly bring to his notice acts of disobedience she found intolerable or believed were deserving of his punishment.

I remember how she once fed him, over two nights, with news of our church member who gave birth to a baby that weighed soand-so pounds. She told about the deacon who accidentally farted while on the church podium the previous Sunday, describing how the microphones had amplified the embarrassing sound. I particularly liked how she recounted an incident about a robber who was lynched in our district, how the mob knocked down the fleeing thief with a hail of stones, and how they got a car tyre and placed it around his neck. She’d emphasized the mystery behind how the mob got petrol within that fleeting moment, and how, within coughing minutes, the thief had been set ablaze. I as well as Father had listened intently as she described how the fire had engulfed the thief, the blaze prospering at the hairiest parts of the thief’s body — especially his pubic area — as it slowly consumed him. Mother described the kaleidoscope of the fire as it enveloped the thief in an aureole of flame and his jolting cry with so much vivid detail that the image of a man on fire stayed in my memory. Ikenna used to say that if Mother had been schooled, she would have made a great historian. He was right; for Mother hardly ever missed a detail of anything that happened in Father’s absence. She told him every single story.

So, they first talked about tangential matters: Father’s job; his view about the depletion of the naira under the “rotten polity that is this current administration.” Although my brothers and I had always wished we knew the kind of vocabulary Father knew, there were times when we resented it and other times when it just felt necessary, like when he discussed politics, which could not be discussed in Igbo because the words for it would be lacking. “Aministation,” as I believed it was called at the time, was one of those words. The Central Bank was heading for doom, and the subject he most dwelt on that day was the possible demise of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first president, whom Father loved and saw as a mentor. Zik, as he was called, was at a hospital in Enugu. Father was bitter. He bemoaned the poor health facilities in the country. He swore at Abacha, the dictator, and railed on about the marginalization of Igbos in Nigeria. Then he complained about the monster the British had created by forming Nigeria as a whole, until his food was ready. When he began to eat, Mother took the baton. Did he know that all of the teachers at the kindergarten where Nkem had been enrolled loved her? When he said, “Ezi okwu—Is it true?” she chronicled little Nkem’s journey so far. What about the Oba, the King of Akure? Father wanted to know, so she filled him in on the Oba’s fight with the Military Governor of the state whose capital Akure was. Mother went on and on until, just when we were not expecting it, she said: “Dim, there is something I want to tell you.”

“I’m all ears,” Father replied.

“Dim, your sons Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, and Benjamin, have done the worst, the very, unimaginable worst.”

“What have they done?” Father asked as the sound of his silverware on his plate rose sharply.

“Heh, okay, Dim. Do you know Mama Iyabo, Yusuf’s wife, the one who sells groundnuts—”

“Yes, yes I know her, go straight to what they did, my friend,” he shouted. Father often referred to anyone as “my friend” if that person annoyed him.

“Ehen, that woman was selling groundnuts to that old priest of the Celestial Church close to the Omi-Ala when the boys emerged from the path leading to the river. She recognized them at once. She called to them but they ignored her. When she told the priest she knew them, he told her the boys had been fishing the river for a long time, and that he had tried to warn them several times, but they wouldn’t listen. And what is more tragic?”—Mother clapped her hands to prepare his mind for the grim answer to the question—“Mama Iyabo recognized the boys were your sons: Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, and Benjamin.”

A moment of silence followed in which Father fixed his eyes on one object — the floor, the ceiling, curtain, anything, as if asking these things to be witnesses of the despicable thing he’d just heard. While the silence lasted, I let my eyes wander around the room. I looked from Boja’s football jersey that hung beside the door, to the wardrobe, to the single calendar on the wall. We named it M.K.O. calendar because it had four of us and M.K.O. Abiola, Nigeria’s former presidential contestant, in it. I spotted a dead cockroach — possibly killed in a rage — whose maxillae were now flattened against the worn yellow carpet. This reminded me of the effort we’d made to find the video game Father hid from us, something that would have kept us from fishing. We’d searched our parents’ room one day to find the game while Mother was out with the little ones, but it was nowhere — not in Father’s cabinet, not in any of the uncountable chests of drawers in the room. Then we brought down Father’s old metal box, the one he said our grandmother bought for him the first time he left the village for Lagos in 1966. Ikenna was sure it’d be there. We carried the iron box out, which was heavy as a casket, to Ikenna and Boja’s room. Then Boja diligently tried all the keys until, creaking, the lid snapped open. As they were carrying it, a cockroach who had crawled out from the box, scampered atop the rusting metal and flew off. When Ikenna opened it, the dark-red insects invaded the room. In the twinkling of an eye, a cockroach was on the louvres, one was creeping head-down at the door of the wardrobe, and another was crawling into Obembe’s sneaker. With a cry, my brothers and I made a stampede on the thousand cockroaches for nearly thirty minutes, trying to chase them as they scurried about. Then we carried the box out. After we swept the room clean of the cockroaches, and Obembe lay back on the bed, I saw under his feet the charred bits of cockroaches: a stray hind, a mashed flattened head with jarred eyes, and fragments of detached wings, some even in the space between his toes and a yellow paste that must have been squeezed out from the thorax of the insects. One lay whole under his left foot, flattened to the thickness of paper, its wings doubled and flared.

My mind, like a spinning coin, stilled when Father, in an unusually calm voice, said, “So, Adaku, you sit here and tell me in all truth that my boys — Ikenna, Bojanonimeokpu, Obembe, Benjamin — were the ones she saw at that river; that dangerous river under a curfew, where even adults are known to have disappeared?”

“Indeed, Dim, it was your sons she saw,” she replied in English because Father had suddenly begun speaking in English, and had emphasized the last syllable of the word “disappeared” by a high pitch.

“Gracious me!” Father cried repeatedly in quick succession so that the syllables split and the two words came out as Gra-cious-me, like the sound produced when one taps on a metal surface.

“What is he doing?” Obembe asked, teetering on the brink of tears.

“Will you shut up?” Ikenna raged in a low voice. “Didn’t I warn you to stop fishing? But you all chose to listen to Solomon. Now here’s the result.”

Father had said, “So you really mean it was my boys she saw?” while Ikenna was speaking, and now, we heard Mother say “Yes.”

“Gracious me!” Father cried even louder now.

“They are all inside,” said Mother, “just ask them, and you will see for yourself. To think they actually bought fishing equipment, hooks, lines, and sinkers with the pocket money you gave them, makes it all the more devastating.”

Mother’s emphatic knock on the phrase “with the pocket money you gave them” stung deep into Father’s flesh. He must have coiled up like a prodded worm.

“How long did they do this?” he asked. Mother, trying to shield herself from blame, hesitated at first, until Father barked, “Am I talking to a deaf and mute?”

“Three weeks,” she submitted in a voice that was defeated.

“Good gracious! Adaku. Three weeks. With you under the same roof?”

That was a lie, though. We had told Mother that it was three weeks only with hopes that that would minimize the weight of our offense. But even that inaccurate information was enough to thaw Father’s wrath.

“Ikenna!” he bellowed, “Ike-nna!”

Ikenna sprang to his feet from the floor where he’d sat when Mother began to give Father the report. At first, he made for the door, then stopped, stepped back and felt his buttocks. He’d doubled his pair of shorts to reduce the impact of what was to come, although he, like the rest of us, knew it was most likely Father would give us the blows on our bare skin. He now raised his head and cried, “Sir!”

“Come out here at once!”

With freckles scattered over his face like buboes, Ikenna moved forward again, stopped as if an invisible barrier had suddenly massed in his way, then rushed out.

“Before I count to three,” Father shouted, “all of you come out here. Now!”

We hared out of the room at once, and formed a backcloth behind Ikenna.

“I suppose you all heard what your mother told me,” Father said, a long line of veins gathered on his forehead. “Is it true?”

“It is true, sir,” Ikenna answered.

“So — it is true?” Father said, his eyes momentarily pinned to Ikenna’s sunken face.

He did not wait for an answer; he went to his room in a rage. My eyes had fallen on David, who’d sat in one of the lounges gazing at us, a packet of biscuits in his hand as he braced to watch us getting whipped, when Father returned with two cowhides, one flung across his shoulder, and the other clenched in his grip. He pulled the small table, on which he’d had his meal, to the centre of the room. Mother, who had just cleared and cleaned it with a rag, fastened her wrappa around her bosom as she waited for that moment when she would feel Father had taken his punishment too far.

“Each of you will spread like a mat on this table,” Father said. “You will each receive your Guerdon on your bare flesh, the way you came into this sinful world. I sweat and suffer to send you to school to receive a Western education as civilized men, but you chose instead to be fishermen. Fish-a-men!” He shouted the word repeatedly as if it were anathema to him, and when he’d said it the umpteenth time, he ordered Ikenna to spread out on the table.

The beating was severe. Father made us number the blows as they landed. Ikenna and Boja, sprawled across the table with their shorts rolled down, counted twenty and fifteen each, while Obembe and I counted eight apiece. Mother tried to intervene, but was deterred by Father’s stern warning that if she interfered, she would receive the beating with us. And perhaps, given the weight of his anger, he may have meant it. Father had gone on, unmoved by our screams and shouts and cries and Mother’s pleas, railing about how he worked to make money and spitting the word “fishermen” with fury until he retired to his room, his cowhide slung on his shoulder, and we held the seats of our pants, wailing.

The night of the Guerdon was a cruel night. Like my brothers, I had refused to have dinner despite being hungry and lured by the aroma of fried turkey and plantains — a rarity which Mother, knowing pride would not allow us to eat and hoping to punish us the more, had made. In fact, dodo (fried plantains) had not been made in our house in a long time before then. Mother had banned it a year or so earlier after Obembe and I stole pieces from Mother’s cooler, and lied that we’d seen rats eating the dodos. I’d yearned desperately to sneak out of the room to pick one of the four plates on which Mother had dished out our portions from the kitchen, but I would not for fear I would betray what my brothers intended to be a hunger strike. This unsatisfied hunger had intensified my pain so that I had cried late into the night, until I drifted off into sleep.

Mother woke me the following morning, tapping me and saying, “Ben, wake, wake; your father wants you, Ben.”

Every node in my body seemed afire with pain. It seemed my buttocks had acquired surplus flesh. I was, however, relieved that our hunger strike, which I’d feared might extend into the next day, would not linger after all. For we always nursed grudges against our parents in the aftermath of such severe punishment and avoided them and food for a period of time to get back at them and to — at best — have them apologize and pacify us. But we could not do that this time, as Father himself had summoned us.

To leave the bed, I first crawled to its end, and then stepped down slowly, my buttocks filled with tacks of pain. When I entered the sitting room, it was still dim. Electricity had been cut since the previous night and the sitting room was lit by a kerosene lantern placed on the centre table. Boja, the last person to sit, came with a slight limp in his gait, cringing with every move. After we all settled into our seats, Father stared at us for a long time, his hands on his chin. Mother, seated facing us just a stretch away from me, untied the side of the swaddling wrappa fastened into a knot under her armpit, and lifted her brassiere. Her rounded, milk-filled breast disappeared at once into Nkem’s tiny grip. The infant greedily covered the round, dark, and stiff nipple with her mouth like an animal taking in its prey. Father seemed to have watched the nipple with interest, and when it had gone from sight, he removed his eyeglasses and placed them on the table. Whenever he removed his eyeglasses, the great resemblance Boja and I bore to him — dark skin and a bean-shaped head — often became clearer. Ikenna and Obembe were cloaked in Mother’s anthill-coloured skin.

“Now, listen, all of you,” Father said in English. “I was hurt by what you did for many reasons. First, I told you before I left here not to give your mother any troubles. But what did you do? You gave her — and me — the mother of all troubles.” He glanced from face to face.

“Listen, what you did was truly bad. Bad. Just how could kids receiving Western education engage in such a barbaric endeavour?” I did not know what the word “endeavour” was at the time, but because Father had shouted it, I knew it was a grim word. “And secondly, your mother and I are appalled by the dangerous risks you took. This was not the school I sent you to. Nowhere around that deadly river will you find books to read. Despite the fact that I have always told you to read your books, you no longer have eyes for your books.” Then, with a dead-serious frown on his face and his hand raised in an awe-inspiring gesture, he said, “Let me warn you my friends, I will send anyone who comes to this house with a bad school grade to the village to farm or tap palm wine—Ogbu-akwu.”

“God forbid!” Mother retorted, snapping her fingers over her head to swat away Father’s spiritually toxic words. “None of my kids will be this.”

Father glanced angrily at her. “Yes, God forbid,” he said, imitating Mother’s tender tone of voice. “How will God forbid when under your nose, Adaku, they went to that river for six weeks; Six. Good. Weeks.” He shook his head as he counted six weeks with his fingers. “Now listen, my friend, from now on, you must make sure they read their books. Do you hear me? And your closing time for work from now on is five, no longer seven; and no work on Saturdays. I can’t have these kids sliding into the pits under your nose.”

“I have heard,” Mother replied in Igbo, tsking.

“In all,” Father continued, gazing round at us in a broken semi-circle, “cut your fads from now. Try to be good children. No one enjoys whipping his kids — no one.”

Fads, we’d come to understand from Father’s frequent usage of the word, meant useless indulgences. He was about to speak on, but was interrupted by the sudden swirl of the ceiling fan, signalling the abrupt restoration of erratic power. Mother switched on the bulb and wound down the wick of the kerosene lantern. In the lull that the occasion gave and because the bulb’s glow rested on it, my eyes fell on the year’s calendar: although it was now March, the calendar was still turned to the page of February, which had the painting of the eagle captured in flight, wings spread, legs stretched, claws curved, and the bird’s prominent sapphire eyes staring into the camera. His grandeur spread over the vista in the background as though the world were his and he was the creator of all — a god with wings and feathers. I thought then, with a certain crippling fear that something would change in a fleeting moment and disrupt that interminable stillness. I feared that the bird’s frozen wings would be suddenly thawed and begin to flutter. I feared that its bulging eyes would blink, its legs would move. I feared that when that happened — when the eagle left that space, that portion of the sky in which it’d been caught since February 2nd, when Ikenna flipped the pages of the calendar to this one — this world and everything in it would change beyond reckoning.

“On the other hand, I want you all to know that even though what you did was wrong, it reflected once again that you have the courage to indulge in something adventurous. Such adventurous spirit is the spirit of men. So, from now onwards, I want you all to channel that spirit into something more fruitful. I want you to be a different kind of fishermen.”

We glanced at each other with surprise, except Ikenna, who kept his eyes on the floor. He’d been hurt most of all by the whipping, especially because Father had put much of the blame on him and had whipped him the hardest without knowing that Ikenna had tried to make us stop. “What I want you to be is a group of fishermen who will be fishers of good dreams, who will not relent until they have caught the biggest catch. I want you to be juggernauts, menacing and unstoppable fishermen.”

This surprised me deeply. I’d thought that he disdained that word. Grasping for meaning, I looked at Obembe. He was nodding his head at everything Father said, his brow tinged with the hint of a smile.

“Good boys,” Father muttered, a wide smile smoothening the rough creases that anger and fury had strewn over the yarn of his face. “Listen, in keeping with what I have always taught you, that in every bad thing, you can always dig up some good things, I will tell you that you could be a different kind of fishermen. Not the kind that fish at a filthy swamp like the Omi-Ala, but fishermen of the mind. Go-getters. Children who will dip their hands into rivers, seas, oceans of this life and become successful: doctors, pilots, professors, lawyers. Eh?”

He gazed round again. “Those are the kinds of fishermen I want to have as children. Now, would you be willing to recite an anthem?”

Obembe and I nodded immediately. He glanced at the pair whose eyes were focused on the floor.

“Boja, you?”

“Yes,” Boja mumbled reluctantly.

“Ike?”

“Yes,” Ikenna said after a prolonged pause.

“Very good, now all of you say ‘ju-gger-nauts.’ ”

“Ju-gger-nauts,” we all repeated.

“Me-na-cing. M-e-n-a-c-i-n-g. Me-nacing.”

“Unstopp-able.”

“Fishermen of good things.”

Father laughed a deep, throaty laugh, adjusted his tie, and gazed closely at us. With his voice ascending a new crescendo and thrusting his fist aloft so that his tie flung upward, he yelled: “We are fishermen.”

“We are fishermen!” we chorused at the top of our lungs, each one of us surprised at how suddenly — and nearly effortlessly — we’d broken into this excitement.

“We trail behind our hooks, lines and sinkers.”

We repeated, but he heard someone say “tail” instead of “trail,” so he made us pronounce the word in isolation before continuing. Before he did that, he bemoaned that we did not know the word because we spoke Yoruba all the time instead of English — the language of “Western education.”

“We are unstoppable,” he continued, and we repeated after him.

“We are menacing.”

“We are juggernauts.”

“We will never fail.”

“That’s my boys,” he said, our voices settling like sediment. “Can I have the new fishermen embrace me?”

Feeling robbed by Father’s magical overturn of what had been a deep revulsion to appreciation, we rose to our feet one after the other and placed our heads between the flaps of his unbuttoned coat. We embraced him for seconds during which he patted and kissed our heads, and the next person in line repeated the ritual. Afterwards, he took up his briefcase and brought out clean twenty-naira notes, bound by a paper tape with the stamp of the Central Bank of Nigeria. He gave Ikenna and Boja four pieces each, Obembe and me, two apiece. He gave one piece each for David, who was asleep in the room, and Nkem.

“Don’t forget anything I’ve told you.”

We all nodded and he began to leave, but as if called back by something, he turned and walked to Ikenna. He put his hands on Ikenna’s shoulders and said, “Ike, do you know why I flogged you the most?”

Ikenna, whose face was fixed on the floor as if there was a movie screen on it, mumbled “Yes.”

“Why?” Father asked.

“Because I’m the first born, their leader.”

“Good, bear that in mind. From now on, before you take any action, look at them; they do whatever you do and go wherever you go. That’s to their credit, the way all of you follow each other. So, Ikenna, don’t lead your brothers astray.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Ikenna replied.

“Guide them well.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Lead them well.”

Ikenna hesitated a bit, then mumbled: “Yes, Daddy.”

“Always remember that a coconut that falls into a cistern will need a good washing before it can be eaten. What I mean is if you do wrong, you will have to be corrected.”

Our parents often found the need to explain such expressions containing concealed meanings because we sometimes took them literally, but it was the way they learned to speak; the way our language — Igbo — was structured. For although the vocabulary for literal construction for cautionary expressions such as “be careful” was available, they said “Jiri eze gi ghuo onu gi onu—Count your teeth with your tongue.” To which, once, while scolding Obembe for a wrong act, Father had burst out laughing when he saw Obembe moving his tongue over the ridge of his mouth, his cheeks furrowed, saliva drooling down his jaws as he attempted to take a census of his dentition. It was why our parents most often reverted to English when angry, because being angry, they didn’t want to have to explain whatever they said. Yet even in English, Father often transgressed in both the use of heavy vocabularies and English idioms. For Ikenna once told us how as a child, before I was born, Father asked him in a very serious tone to “take time,” and in obedience, he’d climbed the dining table and removed the wall clock from its hook.

“I hear, sir,” Ikenna said.

“And you have been corrected,” Father said.

Ikenna nodded and Father — in a moment unlike any I’d ever witnessed — asked him to promise. I could tell that even Ikenna was surprised. For Father demanded obedience to his words from his children; he did not ask for mutual agreements or promises. When Ikenna said “I promise,” Father turned and stepped out and we followed to watch his car steer down the dusty road, feeling sore that he was leaving yet again.