I, Nwakaego, wife of Amaechi, of Umuokwe, being of sound mind and of a body that has finally stopped arguing with me, have set down my last instructions.

Before anything is given, hear my conditions. This paper is to be read aloud, in one sitting, in my parlour by Ozioma, my daughter of the house, before my three children, those grandchildren who can sit still, and Barrister Ilechukwu. Nobody is to leave the room, and nobody is to be buried, least of all me, until the last word has been uttered.

If you are hearing this, I am lying in the cold room at Udomiri mortuary, and for the first time in seventy-one years, nobody can interrupt me.

Ikenna, my impatient first son, do not look at your watch. I saw you do it at your own father’s funeral. The dead notice everything. It is the living who are blind.

We will begin with the small things, because that is how I lived. A person who begins with the big things has usually stolen them.

The first point. To my daughter, Adaeze, I leave the Singer sewing machine in the back room. All your life you have called it a poor woman’s tool and asked me to cover it with a cloth when your friends come from the city. Hear now what it actually is. In the second year of the war, when the roads were closed and our men were in the bush or in the ground, that machine fed this family. I sewed for the soldiers who had burned our farms, measured the shoulders of men who had made us hungry, and bought Garri with their money at four times the price. You were three years old, sitting under that machine holding my ankle while I pedalled slowly so the treadle would not take your fingers. That machine is the reason there is anybody alive in this room to read this. You may cover it with a cloth now if you like.

The second point. To Ikenna, I leave my Bible, the heavy one with the cracked spine. You will open it, because you check everything you are given, and you will find the front page torn out, where this family writes its births, marriages and deaths. It has been torn out for fifty years. You never noticed, because carrying a book to church is not reading it. Until this letter has been read to completion, that torn page is my business. After, it will be yours.

The third point. Your father’s red cap, the cap of his title, has sat on my shelf since his funeral because both my sons have been waiting, politely, murderously, to see which head I would put it on. I have decided. Barrister, after the burial, carry it to St. Monica’s and give it to the catechist. I know what that title cost. By the end of this paper, you will know too, and then you may ask whether you still want it announced over your heads. A wrapper covers you. A cap announces you.

The fourth point. To Nnaemeka, I leave a debt. Do not laugh. Go to Mama Chibuzo at the second stall in Udomiri market, the crayfish and stockfish seller, and pay her what I owe, without argument, and a bag of rice every Christmas for five years. In the year your father’s business failed, that woman fed this house for six months and told the whole market I had paid her in advance. She lied for my dignity. A lie like that is a loan, and this family repays its loans.

Now, I know my sons are waiting for the land. Forty-two plots. The compound and its four buildings. The farmland running from the tamarind line down to the Adaba stream, the land people call Amaechi’s Bounty. The land that made your father a great man, put the red cap on his head, paid Ikenna’s school fees and bought Nnaemeka his first lorry. The land the two of you have circled for ten years like dogs around one bone, each coming to me separately with gifts and soft words, each telling me what the other said. I remember everything both of you whispered to me.

A person who inherits a land without knowing its history inherits dust. Your father did not buy that land. Sit down, Ikenna. He did not clear it from bush either, whatever the praise singers sang at his funeral. When we married, our portion was seven plots: the compound and the stony rise behind it, good for goats and disappointment. The rich land belonged to Dimgba, son of Okwuadigbo, whose compound stood where our western wall stands. Some of you have never heard that name. That is not an accident. Names do not disappear on their own. They are buried, by particular people, for particular reasons.

Dimgba was your father’s rival. They took title in the same year, two proud men on adjoining lands with one stream between them. You know what the elders say: the yam does not argue with the knife, but two knives in one kitchen will argue every day.

Before the war, your father said in front of witnesses that a day was coming when he would walk that land from the tamarind to the water, and no man would question him. People laughed. Then the war came, and everything your father had said was given its chance to become true.

The soldiers came at night, but they did not come blindly. Soldiers in a strange village are like water on a hillside: they go where a channel has been cut. Somebody in Umuokwe cut a channel. Somebody met them on the road and told them which compound had grain, which had money, and which was keeping army things for the resistance. It was true of no compound here, but truth is not what such conversations are for.

They passed our gate, the only gate on that side of the village they passed. They went to Dimgba’s compound. What was done there I will not set down; there are rooms in this story I will not open for children. By morning, the compound was ash. Dimgba was dead. Urenna his wife was dead. Of that household, the village counted everybody except one. The smallest daughter was never found. The village said the fire had taken her entirely, as it said many things in those months that it needed to believe.

Three weeks later, your father walked to Udomiri with a bag of salt and a bag of money, in a season when salt was worth more than anything, and came back with papers. A frightened cousin of Dimgba’s, in a starving year, signed as next of kin, took the salt and left this part of the country forever. That is Amaechi’s Bounty. A bag of salt, a frightened cousin, and a channel cut in the dark.

You want to know how I know, so let me tell you.

Four days after the fire, I washed the shirt your father wore that night, the night he said he had been at Nweke’s compound. I found ash in the seams. Not hearth ash. I was a wife of that time; I knew every kind of ash. I stood in front of him with the shirt in my hands. He looked at me a long moment and did not lie. I grant him that. He said: Nwakaego, a war passed through. Wars pass through. A wise person inherits what the war leaves and does not ask it questions.

That was the day I tore the page out of the Bible. I would not keep the record of such a bloodline on a holy page. But I did not speak. Hear this part especially, because it is the true reading of the will.

I did not speak. I ate from that soil for fifty years. I wore the wrappers it bought. I sat beside your father at St. Monica’s while the priest thanked him from the altar for the new roof, and I said nothing. Silence was the bride price of my peace, and I renewed it every morning. You think you have come to collect your father’s inheritance. You collected mine long ago. It is under Adaeze’s cloth. It is in Ikenna’s watch. It is in Nnaemeka’s soft words. That is my estate, children. The land is only where I kept it.

Now the land. Ozioma, read the next words exactly as written, and do not stop. Whatever happens in this room, do not stop.

I leave the compound, the four buildings, and every plot from the tamarind line to the Adaba stream, forty-two in all, with all standing and growing on them, to Ozioma, my daughter of the house.

Ikenna, sit down. You are saying she is only a housegirl, that the old woman lost her mind at the end. Barrister, show him the doctor’s letter certifying my mind was examined and found sound.

Adaeze, somebody give her water. You are not crying for the land. You are crying because you have understood ahead of your brothers, the way the women in this family always do.

Nnaemeka, your silence is that of a man calculating what a court would say. Save your money. Listen.

Many years ago, at that second stall, I saw a girl carrying crayfish for Mama Chibuzo. She was perhaps fifteen. She turned her head to call a customer, and my whole body stopped working. Because the turn of that head, the line of that jaw, and the one eyebrow sitting higher than the other belonged to Urenna, wife of Dimgba, ten years dead, whose smallest daughter the fire had supposedly taken.

A church in the refugee camps had raised her, Mama Chibuzo said. No family came to claim her. The camp gave her a name, the way you name a thing that arrives with none. Ozioma. Good news.

I did not tell your father. And let me be honest: I did not bring her home out of courage. I brought her the way a thief goes back to a compound to see whether the dog still remembers him. Your father barely looked at her. Why would he look. A man who cuts a channel in the dark does not study the face of the water. So, the only surviving child of Dimgba came to live on her father’s land. She swept it, cooked on it, served kola to the man who took it. And in thirty years not one of you asked a question about her, because this family does not ask where a good thing came from.

Her name is not Ozioma. Her name is Nkiruka, daughter of Dimgba, son of Okwuadigbo. Every seed, every stone, and every roof from the tamarind line to the Adaba is not my gift to her. You cannot gift a person her own inheritance. It is a return, fifty years late, with my silence added as the interest.

One more thing, and then you may bury me.

The sharp ones among you are asking how a woman whose eyes stopped working four years ago wrote this down. Ikenna, you are looking at Barrister Ilechukwu. He received this paper already written and sealed. Look instead at the hand holding it. Look at who has been reading to you.

Every word of this document I spoke, and she wrote. Evening after evening, I dictated, and Nkiruka, daughter of Dimgba, set down in her own steady hand the name of the man who ended her family. She wrote the channel cut in the dark. She wrote the ash in the seams. She wrote the bag of salt. I stopped many times. She never put down the pen. Once, only once, I heard the ink catch, a small skip, when I described the counting of the bodies. She said, in the same voice she uses to tell me the rain is coming: continue, Mama. And I continued.

Then she kept this paper in her box, under her wrappers, for two years, in a house full of people it disinherits, and let no anger into her hands. If you have been listening, you will have noticed her voice has not broken once, not even at the parts that were hers.

When it was finished, I asked whether she wanted a line added asking this family for forgiveness. She thought about it the way she always did, with her hands still. Then she said: Leave that one out, Mama. It is not a thing you can put in a will. It depends on what they do in the morning.

So, I have no forgiveness to leave you, my children. I looked for it. It was not among my possessions. I leave you this, instead. When she finishes reading, watch how she folds this paper, in halves, corners matched, and hands it to the barrister. Then she will put water on the fire, because people in a house of mourning must still eat. She will season the pot the way she has seasoned it for thirty years, with a pinch of hot pepper, just as I used to, in a house where every day she has had the right to avenge her family. Watch her do it. Learn how it is done. That is how a person carries fire for many years without burning down the house. It is the only inheritance in this room worth fighting over.

Bury me on the stony rise behind the compound, the seven plots that were honestly ours, good for goats, disappointment, and me. Put the blue George on me properly, Adaeze, high and tight, so that when I walk in, wherever the dead walk in, the wrapper says, here comes somebody.

Signed with my mark, witnessed and sealed.
Nwakaego, wife of Amaechi.

Written by the hand of Nkiruka, daughter of Dimgba.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by seymasungr from Pexels